Easter Hope - A Pastoral Letter

“There is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! All this is from God, who reconciled us to Godself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to Godself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.”
​2 Corinthians 5:17-19

Dear siblings in Christ,
          Here we are at the start of the Easter season now that it is finally starting to consistently feel like spring while we can find ourselves getting wrapped up in the excitement and shininess that is this glorious season full of the promise of resurrection, new life, and renewal. And since growing up, Easter was always one of my most favorite holiday’s and the only day I would willingly and happily get up before the sun to be able to participate in the sunrise service at my home church because there is something that just feels so magical in the way the sun starts to light up a space as it continues to rise in the early morning. And when it comes to Easter in recent years, I still often feel this excitement we I see signs and glimpses of this promised resurrection life full of new life and renewal that we can see all around us if we just take time to notice it blooming all around us. But this year, at least for me, seems to hit a bit different. It feels a bit heavier, and I feel the need to look for and find those glimpses of the promised new life and renewal for the sake of our world just a bit more intentionally. There’s just so much pain and suffering that disproportionally effects the poorest and most vulnerable amongst our fellow children of God caused as side effects by the powers that be and the policies, wars, and actions they take. Perhaps that’s not that different of a reality to the way the world was during that first Easter so long ago, when so many were hoping for a messiah to save them from the terror of oppression that the Roman Empire ruled over them with.
          And so as we take time this season to proclaim the Easter greeting, “Alleluia! Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia!” we are reminded that we proclaim it a world that is still very much trembling with violence, terror, and grief. The joy of resurrection meets us not apart from the suffering of the world, but right in the midst of it. Even as we celebrate new life, we are keenly aware of the ways our neighbors are suffering hear in our own country and throughout the world. Like how here in this country both our trans siblings and any of our neighbor suspected to not be citizens are having their human rights and dignity denied through legislative policies being put forward as well as the ways in which people, including countless young children, are being inhumanly rounded up and detained in sub-humane conditions. Or how throughout the world, certain powers (especially that of our own leaders) continue to support or instigate the destruction of so many innocent civilians (again many of whom are children) as well as so many beautiful, historical, and or holy spaces for so many people through the continued bombings throughout the world and the various blockades put in place to keep the much needed aid and assistance from getting to those most in need of it. These places where wars, conflicts, and violent polices show up in the world continue to devastate communities across the whole world, these are places where fear has not yet given way to peace, and where innocent civilians continue to bear the unbearable weight of destruction caused by the earthly powers that be.
          And here’s the thing, Easter does not ask us to ignore this reality that there is still so much pain and destruction to just focus on the joy and the spirit and the far off promise of our eventual resurrection, but instead Easter draws us more deeply into it. The risen Christ still bears the wounds of the cross. Resurrection does not erase suffering, it transforms it. When we look upon a world so full of war and violence, we are not seeing something beyond God’s concern, but we see precisely where Christ is present, among the wounded, the grieving, the displaced, and the terrified. Every person caught in violence, every child living in fear, every family torn apart is held in God’s loving gaze. Those impacted by the choices of the powers at be are not merely collateral damage, they are beloved in God’s eyes, and their suffering is never justified by God, when God was the one to send Jesus and teach us to care for our neighbors no matter who they are.
          This Easter season, in a time when there are many people who say they are Christians and claim that the destruction, terror, and war being waged on our neighbors both near and far is justified or ordained by God, we must continue to resist and speak out against these horrendous narratives because God so loved the whole world. And we must continue to speak up against the belief that certain wars and global conflicts are necessary and should be seen as signs of the end times coming near or that they are all a part of a divine plan that is all tied up in an extreme misread and misinterpretation of Revelation bound up with the ideas of the rapture which are not even biblical. This whole idea of rapture and divine violence is not what the hope of Easter is all about. The resurrection of Christ is not about the fulfillment of destruction, but the defeat of it. The book of Revelation is not a prophecy predicting the great cataclysmic destruction of the world, but instead it was a vision and deep and profound hope given to a community of oppressed people with the promise that one day the powers of empire and violence will no longer prevail but instead that God’s justice and peace will finally be true for all of creation (I recommend checking out Barbara Rossing’s book The Rapture Exposed for further reading on this topic). To suggest that war must happen and should be a welcomed sign for God’s power and love in the world is a contradiction to the risen Christ who appears to his disciples saying, ‘Peace be with you.’ To believe that violence, destruction, and war are required is to turn from the very heart and meaning of the gospel Jesus came and shared with the world so long ago.
          Easter proclaims something far more radical than hatred, violence, and war, it proclaims that life is stronger than death, that love is stronger than hatred, and that God’s future is not built on the suffering of the innocent, but on the restoration and renewal of all creation, which includes all of us humans being restored into right relationship with each other. So we can be left asking ourselves in today’s world, how exactly are we being called to live as the resurrected Easter people that we are? Perhaps some of the ways in which we are called to live are to be witnesses to life in a world that so often chooses death, to continue pray for the peace of God to finally and fully be known, while we pray for the Spirit’s guiding to work towards making God’s peace on earth a reality while we advocate for justice and protection of the most vulnerable while refusing to accept violence as an inevitable, while we work to give as generously as we can in ways that support those whose lives have been upended by war, terror, and violence in their communities, embodying Christ’s compassion and love in tangible ways to all our neighbors. And I pray that we each are able to practice seeing, truly seeing the belovedness of every single human being no matter who they are, where they were born, or what religion they practice as fellow beloved children of God, even while the earthly powers that be continue to try to divide us into categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Easter teaches us that there is no ‘them’ in God’s eyes. There are only beloved children, each one named, claimed, and precious to God. The empty tomb of Easter is not a sign that suffering is necessary but instead it is a declaration that suffering and death do not have the final word and that God’s way is by far different than the ways of earthly powers.
God’s Peace,
​Pastor Tamara Siburg