“Celebration is at the heart of the way of Christ. He entered the world on a high note of jubilation… (Luke 2:10)….He left the world bequeathing his joy to the disciples…(John 15:11).” –Richard Foster

He is risen! Alleluia!

As the Easter season keeps rolling, let’s look a bit more at purposeful, chosen celebration. Richard Foster, in his classic book Celebration of Discipline, states that celebration is a spiritual discipline that can and should be practiced, and, in fact, “…gives us the strength to live in all the other Disciplines.” Back in my pre-Lutheran days, I heard (and sang!) these Scriptures a lot: “Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say: Rejoice!” (Philippians 4:3-5), and “…the joy of the LORD is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10b).

I think the context of the Nehemiah passage can speak to us today. The people had recently returned to the land of Israel after years in exile and had gathered together to have Book of the Law of Moses read to them, with the Levites explaining what it meant as they read. Then it says this: “Then all the people went away to eat and drink, to send portions of food [to those who had nothing prepared] and to celebrate with great joy, because they now understood the words that had been made known to them.”

Friends, we are living in Easter. We are living in the light of resurrection! Christ defeated death, and by God’s grace we are in Christ. The resurrected Christ is the lens through which we now see and know everything, and that lens casts the most astonishing color and light and clarity and life and joy across the entirety of our existence. Therefore we, too, can celebrate with great joy, because, in the jaw-dropping love and mercy of God, the resurrected Word has been made known to us!

Of course, I don’t want to minimize times of grief. I do, though, want to emphasize that seasons such as Easter give us permission, even in the midst of struggle, to practice celebration from a reservoir of deep joy that no grief can extinguish. Even deeply painful circumstances cannot undo Christ’s resurrection. Knowing that the resurrected Jesus is perpetually filling us with himself opens us to receive the joy that strengthens us through those times. Practicing celebration in the depths of those kinds of struggles is what makes it worship, what makes it holy, what makes it glorifying to God.

What are some ways you can celebrate the resurrection of Jesus this week? I’d love to know! Email me at lori@flccs.net, and maybe we could get a coffee and celebrate your celebrations! Let’s walk together.