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Pastor’s Pondering for April 2025

“Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” Luke 23:34

“We Are Easter People!” St. Augustine of Hippo in 400 AD

The term “Easter People” refers to believers who live out their faith emphasizing the centrality of the resurrection to Christianity.  My parents were such and never failed to lift up what that meant to them. When they were interned in a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines during WWII, my father and a good friend of his were accused of preaching cheap grace. They looked at him and said, “Cheap?  Cheap?  It’s not cheap! IT’S FREE!” Grace for us has been given freely and with Jesus words, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” they underline it and these were not just words for Jesus put them into practice. But do we? Is what we do that which God calls us to in the Resurrection and New Life we are given and in the teachings of Jesus?  For Jesus did not teach us to be selfish, hate filled or vengeful.  Rather he taught us about love, compassion and forgiveness. To live a Grace filled life! And the Resurrection is about a new life in following “the Way” as it was originally called, the Way who is Jesus the Christ.  Jesus words teach us how to live in a world filled with fear:  fear of others, fear of the world, fear of death.  But we do not live in these fears but rather we live in in the knowledge and promise of new life in the Resurrection that we have just witnessed once more passing thru Easter that which gives us not fear but peace. As St. Paul writes in Romans 6:5 “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his.” So let us proclaim it to all that We Are Easter People and what it means in living out this gift of Jesus death and resurrection in our own lives. Let us live daily in the resurrection, let us live daily in the promise and let us live daily into the life that Jesus calls each of us to live, share and invite others to know the free Grace that is for everyone! Alleluia!

 

 

A quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “We pay more attention to dying than to death.  We’re more concerned to get over the act of dying than to overcome death.  Socrates mastered the art of dying; Christ overcame death as the last enemy.   There is a real difference between the two things; and the one is within the scope of human possibilities, the other means resurrection. It's not from ars morieni, the art of dying, but from the resurrection of Christ, that a new and purifying wind can blow through our present world. Here is the answer to Archimedes challenge: ‘give me somewhere to stand, and I will move the earth.’ If only a few people really believe that and acted on it in their daily lives, a great deal be changed. To live in the light of resurrection that is what Easter means." Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter; The Plough Publishing House, 2003