Dear Edwards Church Community,

Christ died on the cross and rose as the church. – Rev. Carl Scovel

Since the first Easter, faithful followers of Jesus have gathered to offer each other comfort and assurance, to share how they understood what they were going through, and what sense they could make of their current situation in light of what their traditions led then to expect. In his daily meditation at www.unfoldinglight.net this April 1, the morning after Easter Sunday, Rev. Steve Garnaas-Holmes offered this understanding of Easter:

Yes, Easter is the bedrock
(rolled away) of our faith,
but before we settle into that exultant groove,
pause and give a moment
simply to be startled, and maybe offended,
as if God has made death into an April Fools’ prank—
or to be afraid, even,
that God upends everything we thought we knew,
that neither we nor our beliefs are in control,
that God will act and we will be dumbfounded.
Even our glib Easter faith will be blown away.
Faith is not certainty, but astonishment.

Make no mistake, Easter most certainly means that life is stronger than death and will keep coming back in the face of it. Love triumphs over hate, after two nights in the grave. Christ IS risen, indeed! The same power, the same vitality and push to  create new expressions of the life and love Jesus came to share will always find new ways to rise from whatever grave the forces of death and indifference try to bury it in.

But that does not mean that the back and forth struggle between life and death is over. Easter does not mean that the Good Fridays in our lives can be avoided, but it does mean that they do not get the last word. We still need to face hard times and persist through them to arrive at Easter morning, searching for and finding the risen Christ in   different settings. Like Mary Magdalene, we may struggle to recognize him. We may   mistake him for a more ordinary character we expect to find in our current setting, until he speaks our name (as he does to Mary in John’s gospel), or an angel, a messenger form God, tells us where to find him (as in the other gospels).

New attempts are made in every generation to deny the truth of God’s love for all of creation. It is resisted, arrested, even executed, but it rises again and again, as often as it must. Likewise, the community of the church searches in every age to recognize and then proclaim the risen Christ, in whatever form he takes at the time. People of faith share the  story from generation to generation, so that each new age will know to look for the Risen One, who will keep rising and finding ways to make himself known.

There is much concern about the future of the church and especially about how we can attract and retain more young people.  Last fall, Rev. Shannon Farrand-Bernardin gave a presentation at The First Congregational Church of Hatfield titled “Young Adults: What Brings Them to Church and Why They Stay”.  Although the focus is young adults, the drift of her recommendations has, I think, pretty clear implications for what any church needs to do to keep cultivating new life among younger people.  To listen to her presentation, go to this link and scroll almost all the way to the bottom: https://www.hatfieldchurch.org/pews-news/category/events-activities

What Shannon is proposing is what the United Church of Christ has been claiming to practice since it was formed in 1957. Referring to our animating spirit as followers of Jesus, the UCC Constitution declares: “[Our denomination] affirms the responsibility of the Church in each generation to make this faith its own in reality of worship, in honesty of thought and expression, and in purity of heart before God.” However it might challenge some of our cherished ways of holding and understanding our faith, Perhaps having honest conversations with younger adults and teens would show them that we mean it when we say we are welcoming, and that we want them to be the next generation to nurture and grow the church as they make it their own. Then they can pass it on.

As Rev. Steve put it in his April 1 devotional:

that neither we nor our beliefs are in control,
that God will act and we will be dumbfounded.

… Faith is not certainty, but astonishment.

May we be open to seeing the risen Christ in new incarnations, and may we welcome the ways in which younger people astonish us.

In faith, with hope, for love,

Michael

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