The Oasis - April 15, 2020
Author: Pastor Dan Hollis
April 15, 2020
The Oasis
April 15, 2020
A Note from Pastor Dan: If you don’t receive the United Church of Christ’s Daily Devotional, you will have missed out on this meaningful message on Monday written by Molly Baskette. I include it below as a moment of spiritual grounding for you all, and if you are interested in reading or signing up to receive more of the UCC Daily Devotionals, check out: https://www.ucc.org/daily_devotional
This is Not the End
April 13, 2020
Written by Molly Baskette
“So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Mark 16:8
“Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, there they will see me.” Matthew 28:10
Mark ended his masterpiece of a gospel on a cliffhanger – a resurrection with question marks. Luke, Matthew and John, writing later, embellished the story, adding multiple appearances and new miracles by the risen Jesus. Maybe they had better intel than Mark. Maybe they created fiction for a people craving hope. Or maybe they had a lived experience of a Christ who kept showing up, shaping and saving their lives.
A double-thousand years later, we pick up these four stories and find our own resurrections in them, every year. The original Easter story has still never ended. It goes on, in endless song, above earth’s lamentations.
When the humans I love are facing hard times, which seems to be all the time these days, I am fond of lifting up the modern proverb: “Everything turns out alright in the end. If it’s not all right, it’s not the end.”
We will not all survive the current apocalypse. We will not all be raised from our sickbeds or our tombs. Some of us will lose jobs or businesses we have spent a lifetime building. Marriages that might have made it otherwise, absurdly pressured by quarantine, will end in divorce.
But after all of these endings, there will be new beginnings – some of them visible, tellable; others beyond the veil of earthly death.
Easter is not a history lesson with a tidy ending, but an invitation to look past death in all its disguises. After every death, new things get born. You may sometimes have a year of Good Fridays, but Easter will always arrive. It is as inevitable as sunrise after the long night.
Prayer: God, your servants didn’t write four resurrection stories, but eight billion. We are all little gospels, still being told. Thank you for telling us. Amen.
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