Easter Endurance

Rachel Held Evans died last week.  She was 37, married, mother of two.  She was first known for taking the Bible seriously enough to try to live by its rules -- mostly Old Testament -- especially those governing the behavior and role of women.  Here's a link from her webpage,   https://rachelheldevans.com/biblical-womanhood. 

She shared her experience and developed a voice from her insight that was courageous and filled with grace.  I'm going to miss her commentary.  I will mourn her passing and cry for her husband and children again and again. 

But more than anything I will share her work and I hope in so doing to exhibit a kind of Easter endurance.  I want to live day to day, minute by minute in gratitude for how death and resurrection is the way God shows divine love to and for us. 

Too easily Easter is co-opted by society and reduced to a day with much about its observance that can't be traced to biblical sources.  I'll stop at bunnies.

Our practice is to give our Easter observance 50 days to happen, making it the longest season in the Christian year.  We take the time of the season to rehearse through our worship and devotion a way of living that is all about God first raising Jesus from the dead. 

There is a larger intention than the observances themselves.  We expect to learn and train ourselves and to become habituated to death and resurrection.  We want that understanding to replace all its competitors; all those other ways of describing God, our relationship to God and our expectations about heaven, etc.

Here's how Rachel said it:

Baptism reminds us that there's no ladder to holiness to climb, no self-improvement plan to follow.  It's just death and resurrection, over and over again, day after day, as God reaches down into our deepest graves and with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead wrests us from our pride, our apathy, our fear, our prejudice, our anger, our hurt, and our despair.

May she rest in peace and be raised in glory!