We are Easter People

We are Easter people! St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, wrote a great truth, almost 16 centuries ago, “We are Easter people and hallelujah is our song!”

We live our lives not burdened by the period, the full stop of death, but joyfully with the exclamation point of the resurrection!

A professor friend of mine once said that "We live in a Good Friday world." That I understood. A Good Friday world is a world full of suffering, questioning, unfairness, trouble, mistakes, hurts, losses and grief. Good Friday in the Christian faith is the day Christians commemorate Christ's suffering and death on the cross. So that certainly made sense to me, for we often have tough times in our lives. We are often affected by the brokenness of our world, and the pain of being humans in it. The pain breaks into our lives, and the dysfunctions of life assault us.

"But remember," the professor continued, "We are Easter people." Those words lifted me up! The idea of being "Easter people" gave me hope. And it can give others encouragement that there is light beyond the darkness, and healing after the pain.

What strikes me is that this believing in "Easter" in the midst of "Good Friday" is faith wrapped in joy, a transformational act. Christians are a people who believe in possibility. When our hearts are shattered, we are sometimes shocked to discover that there is joy as well as pain inside. There is hope in the midst of difficulties. Out of the ashes of our mistakes, from our defeats and even our despair, we rise again in better lives.

Yes, being an Easter people means that resurrection is part of our life experience, part of who we are, part of what it means to be us. Easter celebrates how Jesus dies and rises in each of us, in our personal lives, in family, church, and community. It celebrates how Jesus is present in our daily work, in our home life, in our relationships, in the joys and sorrows of the world. Our faith is founded in Bible truth and it is honed in experience - the experience of light following dark, of joy following pain, of hope out of defeat, of warmth beyond cold, of life out of death.

We have a story to tell and a song to sing - the story of our risen Lord and a jubilant song of hallelujah that should ring in our church and community's ears! Let us sing it together, holding each other up in the winds of life. We may not have the breath ourselves, but others can fill in our gaps until we can sing, too!

In a world where so many people die in hopelessness, where people are poisoned by cynicism and defeated by disillusionment we have to tell our story, we have to sing our song. We are Easter people and that song is Hallelujah!