Well, here we are on Easter Monday. Lent is over, Holy Week is in the past and the alleluias of Easter still rings in my ears. I have admitted in this space that Lent and I weren’t in sync this year, blaming it on how early Easter was, how close it came to Christmas. That early part I ended up being very happy about in the end. I was happy because even people on the street-literally a news guy was out on the street asking people-had the opportunity to learn how the date of Easter is derived, a date that is based on so much more than any particular theology or doctrine. In case you didn’t get the word…..first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.

My inability to connect with Lent this year could have been partially about the early date. But mostly I think it was because I was being a kind of spiritual brat. You see, I struggle with many of the atonement messages of Lent and Easter. The message doesn’t fit my experience, my own personal theology, my world view. And for what ever reason I always dig my heals in during Lent until by the time we get to Holy Week I have pretty much worked myself into a tizzy about it all. I was happy to read Garrison Keillor’s editorial in yesterday’s Star Tribune:"Oh, ye of faltering faith:It’s Easter" in which he expressed some similar sentiments.

But several things happened to me on the way to Easter this year that opened my eyes…actually my heart. On Maundy Thursday we followed the reading from the gospel of John in which Jesus washes the feet of the disciples as a way to explain to the disciples how it is they are to live their lives. At our service we offered people the option of having their hands or feet washed. As I washed hands gnarled by arthritis, beautifully manicured, smooth and soft, rough and hard, I came face to face with the scriptures."God bless you. And may you love yourself and others as God has loved you." Looking into the eyes of those I have known well and those who were strangers, the doctrines I want to argue with fell away and melted into the puddle of ‘not important’. In that moment, the presence of the Holy overwhelmed my stubbornness.

Then on Good Friday evening we were led in worship by our youth telling the story of Jesus on his final day. As these young people and some of their parents read the scriptures and slowly extinguished candle after candle, the darkness grew around us until all that was left was one candle representing the presence of Christ in our midst. That candle was carried out as we sat in the  lightless place listening to the thirty-three chimes representing the year’s of Jesus life. Slowly, in total silence the Christ candle was carried back into the sanctuary lighting the sweet, beautiful face of a young girl, her face glowing with the amber candlelight and the promise of her life.

That’s when it struck me. It takes all of us to tell this life drama, this story of hope, of promise, of mystery, of unimaginable love. It takes those who are skeptical, those who are certain. It takes those who hang their faith on the literal interpretations and those who live their questions with great passion and pain. It takes the simple faith and the intellectual curiosity, those well read and those uneducated. It takes each of us to keep this story alive and living. That’s what it means to be the church.

On Easter morning it was my role to carry the Christ candle in the Easter procession. While my face is not as young or beautiful as Audrey’s was on Friday night, I was blessed to do my part, to carry the light, to keep the story alive.

Christ is risen! Christ is risen in-deed!