He is risen! Alleluia!

As we look more into Easter being a fifty-day season, I’m doing something different: I’m re-posting most of someone else’s article. I’m not very familiar with Derek Penwell’s writing, and I’m quite sure I don’t agree with everything he says. However, this article really resonated with me concerning our idea of keeping the Easter feast as a practice, especially since he frames doing so in the midst of a troubled world. (It’s a public post that he gives permission to share; I’ve edited it for space and content. And I respect his honesty in what he named his website, Heretic Adjacent; it shows me his willingness to wrestle with hard things.)

“We got it backwards. We treat Easter in our culture like a one-day event: sunrise service, too much chocolate, ham, maybe a new outfit, and then back to Ordinary Time. We act like resurrection is a finish line rather than the starting line…. The church knew better, which is why the liturgical year keeps time differently from the rest of the world. Eastertide runs fifty days, from Resurrection Sunday to Pentecost. Fifty days of living inside the claim that death doesn’t get the last word. Fifty days of practicing what it looks like to be people who refuse to be governed by fear, because we’ve staked our lives on the conviction that the worst thing that can happen isn’t actually the last thing that can happen. …

“[W]hen Easter collapses into a single morning, resurrection becomes sentimental…. It shrinks to become the kind of faith that feels good on a Sunday but offers nothing useful by Monday when the news is already terrible again, and the cruelty seems freshly organized…. But Easter as a season? That’s a story we can live inside of. That’s something that can hold us.

“The earliest followers of Jesus didn’t walk away from the empty tomb with their problems solved and a spring in their step. They walked away confused, frightened, and facing the same empire that’d just lynched their teacher [and friend]. … What changed after Easter wasn’t their circumstances so much as their orientation to those circumstances. Resurrection didn’t remove the Roman boot from their necks. It told them the Roman boot wasn’t the truest thing about the world….

“[After resurrection] … there’s no normal to go back to. There’s only the long, stubborn, fifty-day Eastertide insistence that love is more durable than anything Caesar can throw at us. After all, what sustains us isn’t optimism. It’s the story of Jesus’ resurrection and the promise that even the systems of domination and cruelty wielded by Caesar don’t get the last word.”

Alleluia! Let’s keep the feast together.