The signs are all around us. A change of seasons. The grass has greened and grown. Flowers and trees have exploded with blossoms of color. The cheerful singing of birds greets the dawn, serenades the day, and draws the curtain on the light as night approaches. Hibernating plants send shoots like spies into the warming air. Spring. An outrageous celebration of life!
We have been entrusted with an incredible gift, have we not? Life. And life on a planet designed for life. A planet both bold and mysterious in its myriad expressions of life. Under water and in midair, creatures magnificent and microscopic, beings bald and covered with hair, life bursts all around us and teems within us in more ways than we will ever know. And it is all in our hands. The care and preservation of it. Not only the teeny, tiny speck we personally represent, but the whole kit and kaboodle of it. We humans are guardians of the globe, stewards of the soil, watchers of the world. We are summoned to be pros at life.
There is much that makes for death in our culture. Abuse, addiction, apathy would only start off a long list. Consumption, inequality, narcissism, obsession, suicide, violence could be included too. In many ways, it is actually counterculture to be pros at life, to nurture life, promote life, support life, work for life in the midst of so much death-dealing. But when we recognize the incredible value of the gift of it, it can't be ignored. We choose to be life-giving rather than life-denying.
The date of Easter changes every year because it is linked to nature. It is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. It follows the signs of a changing season. It affirms indications that out of darkness comes light and beyond the cold of winter there is the warmth of spring. And it boldly proclaims that over against the death-dealing ways around us that deny life there is the promise of the Creator's resounding YES to life. As Eugene Peterson has expressed it, "God's unmanageable but irrepressible life is ever present and hidden within and around us. Unpredictably but most surely it breaks forth into our awareness from time to time. Holy, Holy, Holy. But don't expect to see it reported on the evening news." Let us resolve today to be pros at life, making life-giving choices, being an Easter people.
Comments