Most people think of Easter as a day. It’s a day of church and family. A day with an Easter Egg hunt or Easter baskets for the kids. It’s a day of church and pancake breakfasts and perhaps later a meal with ham, or a meal out, or in my family, the one time a year that my mother would make leg of lamb. So if you are reading this article when the newsletter came out, you may think you only have a day or two before Easter is over and gone. And if you, like many, are busy with preparations and have set your newsletter aside, you may be reading this after Easter Sunday and think that Easter is already over.

But in the church, Easter lasts a little longer. Easter begins on Easter Sunday, this year March 31st and extends for 50 days until Pentecost (Sunday, May 19th this year). The paraments (the cloths on the alter and on the pulpit) will stay white for seven Sundays signifying that we are still in the season of Easter. Long after the Easter candy has been eaten, and the plastic eggs have been marked on clearance in the stores, Easter remains.

And I would contend that for those of us who follow Christ, Easter extends beyond even that. For us, Easter isn’t a holiday or a church season, but a way of life. For we are called to live lives that testify to a risen Lord. We are called to step out of the locked rooms of our fear and to see Christ in this world, in each other and in all for whom Christ has died. We are called not only to believe in Christ’s love and grace, but to be that love and to offer that grace to everyone we meet. We are called to roll away the rocks that wall us off from each other, to bury bitterness and greed, apathy and self-centeredness and to allow God to resurrect a new love, a new life, a new way of being in us and in our world. Easter has come but it is not over. For Christ has risen! Christ has risen indeed! Alleluia!

~Pastor Rebecca