The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
June 5, 2011
Vol. 14 no. 23
No one identifies it this way yet, but today is the Last Sunday of Easter. Pentecost or Whitsunday overwhelms us next time we worship with its explosion of tongues and Spirit, and we remain “in the Spirit” for nearly half the year. Can we really be leaving behind Easter and Resurrection after only seven weeks?
That’s what we do. The Resurrection of Easter morning is the defining event of our faith, but in a skeptical and supposedly rational world Easter is the most perplexing of our Christian facts. Christmas is easy to buy with the Baby, Lent is a stretch of discipline we always say we need, Pentecost comes in with a bang and whimpers out by December.
Easter is how we live as Christians, never the same old business as usual, but as individuals and the Church it is our call to be a renewed, revived, and resurrected people. It seems we have become stubbornly lost in the debates over the physical nature of what happened that morning, so that parades and bunnies are all that Easter brings to mind.
We know that that we can be really new, no longer something we used to be. The old person has died to cite Paul, and who wants to keep living in the deadly past? Instead, it’s all around you if you look – we are alive again in ways we haven’t lived before. When resurrected with Christ, we are endowed with an imagination we couldn’t have imagined and there emerges out of our deadness a creativity of some things truly new, and a joy we just have to share. We can’t really be a church unless we keep being resurrected – there are no statutory limits on the number of times.
This can’t be the Last Week!
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan