easter's interruption is just beginning

Wow, I had a crazy Holy Week and a crazier start to the Easter festival season. In addition to the typical Holy Week frenzy of extra services and Easter Sunday preparation, I helped two folks get ready for and helped send them off on trips abroad, I welcomed my mom into town for a visit, and I signed some of the many papers required in buying my first house! As I went through this process, I kept thinking, "Easter Sunday will come and we'll celebrate the miracle of the risen Christ and then I can take a break!" What a thought! Easter isn't a moment or a day or even the great fifty days that we set aside for it in the church. Easter is the heart of our faith, and the great feast that reminds us of its centrality has just begun. Easter didn't come and go on Sunday; it just started.

However, this past week the craziness of preparing for Easter was supplanted only by an even greater craziness when Easter Sunday finally came. I hosted a church-wide Easter Egg Hunt at the parsonage, led services at church, came home, and my mother became ill and was taken by ambulance to the hospital. She's spent most of this week hospitalized. (She's on the mend, no worries - I hope.) All of this interruption, though, in the routine that is my life has raised a number of questions about the interruption of Easter and what that interruption should be in our lives.

Easter isn't a crazy day of family, church, sugar, and holy music. It isn't even just the Great Fifty Days. It is an interruption in how we live life. It interrupts our routines, our expectations, and our assumptions. Some of the interruptions in my life this week have been welcomed and planned; others scary and chaotic, but they all remind me that Easter interrupts the fabric of this world and it intentionally unsettles all that I take for granted. I'm glad that Easter isn't just a day, even though I'm kinda glad that the craziness of Easter Sunday has passed. I wonder how we might be in the world if we participated in daily Holy Communion during Easter - living God's great interruption each time we place the bread and wine in our bodies. I wonder if the church might be more of an interruption in the world if we let ourselves live inside of God's great mystery each day this festival season. I'm glad that Easter's interruption is just beginning. Happy Easter.