It is that time of year to share one of my favorite quotes about Easter. This is from Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright:
Easter is about the wild delight of God’s creative power…we ought to shout Alleluias instead of murmuring them; we should light every candle in the building instead of only some; we should give every man, woman, child, cat, dog, and mouse in the place a candle to hold; we should have a real bonfire; and we should splash water about as we renew our baptismal vows. Every step back from that is a step toward an ethereal or esoteric Easter experience, and the thing about Easter is that it is neither ethereal nor esoteric. It’s about the real Jesus coming out of the real tomb and getting God’s real new creation under way….
Easter week itself ought not to be the time when all the clergy sigh with relief and go on holiday. It ought to be an eight-day festival, with champagne served after morning prayer or even before, with lots of alleluias and extra hymns and spectacular anthems. Is it any wonder people find it hard to believe in the resurrection of Jesus if we don’t throw our hats in the air? Is it any wonder we find it hard to live the resurrection if we don’t do it exuberantly in our liturgies? Is it any wonder the world doesn’t take much notice if Easter is celebrated as simply the one-day happy ending tacked on to forty days of fasting and gloom?…..
…{I}f Lent is a time to give things up, Easter ought to be a time to take things up. Champagne for breakfast again—well, of course. Christian holiness was never meant to be merely negative…. The forty days of the Easter season, until the ascension, ought to be a time to balance out Lent by taking something up, some new task or venture, something wholesome and fruitful and outgoing and self-giving. You may be able to do it only for six weeks, just as you may be able to go without beer or tobacco only for the six weeks of Lent. But if you really make a start on it, it might give you a sniff of new possibilities, new hopes, new ventures you never dreamed of. It might bring something of Easter into your innermost life. It might help you wake up in a whole new way. And that’s what Easter is all about.
This is not a shot to how our church or your church celebrates Easter (the Episcopal Triduum at our church was fantastic) . I adore the idea that Easter is about the wild delight of God’s creative power. It is the technicolor shot of hope that animates all that the Christian faith is to be about. It is not a period on a season or even an exclamation mark, it is the beginning of a brand new story full of kinetic energy and transformed worlds.
The end of that quote, where Wright talks about how pulling a reverse Lent (taking on something new and wholesome and life-giving) can possibly help us wake up resonates with a quirk in my Holy Week listening habits this year. For reasons that I am not quite sure about, I decided listen to Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans. It had been a long time since I had given the album a spin. Seven Swans is a beautiful indie/folk album and it is filled to the brim with reflections on faith. The music continually called to me as we moved from Maundy Thursday to Good Friday to Easter Sunday.
The song that has captured the dawn of this hopeful season is “He Woke Me Up Again.” It is an account of spiritual awakening in which the singer is roused from sleep to a new way of life:
He came, he came to my bedroom
But I was asleep
He woke me up again to say:
Halle, Halle, Hallelujah
Holy, holy is the sound
And I hope, I hope you are tired out
And I know, I know there is joy endowed
But I was asleep
And he woke me up again
And he woke me up again to say:
Hold on, hold on to your old ways
Or put off, put off every old face
And I know, I know you are changed now
I hope, I hope you’re arranged out
One of the many things that I love about the rhythm of the church is that every year we come to this point of resurrection. We sing “Hallelujah,” remember God’s great love for us, and hear the stories of grace embodied in flesh. Easter gives us the chance to wake up again. To live out the dreams of what resurrection looks like in this world.
May this day not be the end of a season, but the beginning of participating in the wild delight of God’s creative power. Halle, halle, hallelujah; holy is the sound.