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It’s Easter morning, dark as night outside, but soon enough, I’m sure, the dawn will come. Yesterday we were blown around by incessant prairie winds, but relatively warm temps made the backyard so becoming that I simply couldn't stay in the basement, even though the inside work is nearly suffocating.
I snipped some of last year's growth off some bushes, caught my finger something awful--blood all over; then, well-patched, moved on to the perennial bed where I'd left a heavy quilt of leaves over everything last fall. It's been so dry that I didn't even have to rake all that detritus; I simply blew off the dirty cover and there, just beneath, stood, armed for life, a battalion of pointy-headed green nubbins already reaching for the sun.
I don't think anyone knows for sure when the original Easter Sunday morning happened, when Jesus Christ stood up in that cave, brushed off the refuse, and nudged away a stone, and stepped out, much the surprise of those Roman soldiers, much to the surprise of everyone, for that matter.
I’m not sure if anyone knows that exact calendar date, so our annual celebration of the resurrection has far more to do with the moon than it does with ancient Middle East history. Easter, the holiday, moves all over the calendar as if shoved around by our yesterday's wind.
No matter. It just seemed right, yesterday, to uncover all those green shoots standing tall amid the mess. The word Easter itself has pagan roots in a some ebullient Anglo-Saxon rite of spring, I think. And I’ve always thought it kind of strange that Christianity's most holy day is somehow married to the some pagan's wish for a holiday to celebrate the glorious passage of seasons. But yesterday, uncovering those sturdy new buds, bright green from the darkness of the earth, and feeling the warm relief from the worst winter in my memory, I really didn’t mind.
This morning we’ll go to church and hear the old story, how a couple of women went off to the graveyard for some day-later funeral rites and found the grave empty as old barn, just a few wraps lying there where not that long before, they’d laid him, Jesus Christ.
The story of Easter is the story of new life, all right—not just His because he was always God--but ours. The glorious story of Easter is that through him we rise, like those nubbins of new growth from ground that was covered for two long with three feet or more of crusted snow and and a slowly rotting blanket of wet, dead leaves.
Yesterday, I uncovered a little battalion of new growth, little green men and women given new life once again--me and you and those who know his name, whom he calls from the dusty earth of our own sin and death itself.
He calls us to life and then, energized with a species of love we can barely imagine, simply gives it away.
That’s the whole blessed story this blessed Easter morning. Could it be anything else? Easter is my morning thanks. Even the birds are singing the Hallelujah Chorus.
I snipped some of last year's growth off some bushes, caught my finger something awful--blood all over; then, well-patched, moved on to the perennial bed where I'd left a heavy quilt of leaves over everything last fall. It's been so dry that I didn't even have to rake all that detritus; I simply blew off the dirty cover and there, just beneath, stood, armed for life, a battalion of pointy-headed green nubbins already reaching for the sun.
I don't think anyone knows for sure when the original Easter Sunday morning happened, when Jesus Christ stood up in that cave, brushed off the refuse, and nudged away a stone, and stepped out, much the surprise of those Roman soldiers, much to the surprise of everyone, for that matter.
I’m not sure if anyone knows that exact calendar date, so our annual celebration of the resurrection has far more to do with the moon than it does with ancient Middle East history. Easter, the holiday, moves all over the calendar as if shoved around by our yesterday's wind.
No matter. It just seemed right, yesterday, to uncover all those green shoots standing tall amid the mess. The word Easter itself has pagan roots in a some ebullient Anglo-Saxon rite of spring, I think. And I’ve always thought it kind of strange that Christianity's most holy day is somehow married to the some pagan's wish for a holiday to celebrate the glorious passage of seasons. But yesterday, uncovering those sturdy new buds, bright green from the darkness of the earth, and feeling the warm relief from the worst winter in my memory, I really didn’t mind.
This morning we’ll go to church and hear the old story, how a couple of women went off to the graveyard for some day-later funeral rites and found the grave empty as old barn, just a few wraps lying there where not that long before, they’d laid him, Jesus Christ.
The story of Easter is the story of new life, all right—not just His because he was always God--but ours. The glorious story of Easter is that through him we rise, like those nubbins of new growth from ground that was covered for two long with three feet or more of crusted snow and and a slowly rotting blanket of wet, dead leaves.
Yesterday, I uncovered a little battalion of new growth, little green men and women given new life once again--me and you and those who know his name, whom he calls from the dusty earth of our own sin and death itself.
He calls us to life and then, energized with a species of love we can barely imagine, simply gives it away.
That’s the whole blessed story this blessed Easter morning. Could it be anything else? Easter is my morning thanks. Even the birds are singing the Hallelujah Chorus.
1 comment:
The beautiful sunrise chased away the darkness of night at the Horseshoe of Ft. Wingate, NM.
"Iam the light of the world"
It's interesting how hardy of a plant tulips are.
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