Revival

It’s Holy Week and I have this whole thing cooked up in my brain about how THIS Easter in THIS year is going to be the one that brings Revival.

Hear me out.

On the macro, Jesus came here to save us by becoming our sin on the Cross and defeating death.

But also, you know my great belief, influenced by Father Richard Rohr, that the Passion, Death and Resurrection of the Christ are also a roadmap for walking the traumas and dramas of our own lives.

In a nutshell, the bad stuff cannot be avoided because it is impossible to live a trouble-free life. Bad things happen. And also we suck at handling bad things as a people in general, because we don’t like pain or accountability or sacrifice or shame or guilt or sickness or death. So we duck and dodge the bad stuff in our lives, or we set up shop there and never leave, and neither of those options makes for happy healthy humans.

The micro of the passion death and resurrection of Jesus is a road map of how to walk bad stuff: straight through, sisters, eyes and ears open. What has to be done, has to be done. The divorce. The job loss. The cancer. The grieving. The aging. The sobering up. The truth-telling. Have to shoulder the cross and walk it. Have to hang there and suffer. Have to die to what came before. Have to. Otherwise there is no resurrection.

When was the last time the world suffered together? World War 2? Long enough that we forgot the lessons. Long enough that we fought it every step of the way and what did we learn? We’re still here, laying in the tomb, waiting on Sunday.

This week, we want to talk about the Resurrection–the one that saved the world and the one we’re going to experience in the coming months. We didn’t live through COVID to go back to the way things were. We died to that life in March of 2020. If we try for that life again, we’re just coming out of the tomb and climbing back onto the cross.

Think of all the things the Resurrection did for us–how it saved us, freed us, changed everything. Two thousand years later, we are an Easter people.

Now ask yourself–how will you be coming out of COVID saved, freed, changed? How will Easter live in your life?