Funny things happen on Easter...
Church attendance goes up noticeably.
The number of hats and ties also increases significantly.
Bunnies lay eggs.
Funny things happen on Easter...
On Easter people find it easier to love the unlovable.
On Easter people find light and hope in their hearts where before there had been only darkness.
Funny things happen on Easter...
On Easter people find it easier to be generous.
People find it easier to look beyond themselves and celebrate the joys of others.
On Easter people find a “goodness” within themselves beyond their normal reckoning. On Easter the measure of our personal goodness goes up.
I think most of us have a pretty accurate sense of how good we are. If we take our own measure when no one else is around… no one else to beat us down… no one else whom we think we need to impress. Within ourselves when no one else is around, we take a pretty true measure of how good we are. Measure again today—Easter. You’ll find you’re “gooder” today. You have more good within you today than your normal reckoning.
Hang on to that extra goodness. It’s real. And it is more important than anything else in your life. It’s grace. Real. Pure. Grace.
There’s a wonderful scene near the beginning of Charles’ Dickens story A Christmas Carol. Scrooge has gone to bed on that night that will turn out to be so eventful for him. As he tries to sleep, Marley’s ghost appears to him. The ghost of his former partner, Jacob Marley.
Scrooge is skeptical about the whole experience and extremely skeptical of the reality of the ghost. To his skepticism, the ghost says:
"Why do you doubt your senses?"
"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"
Scrooge denies the reality of the ghost, labeling it as a figment of his imagination brought on by indigestion.
Some people might question the reality of Easter grace. How do we know that this extra goodness within us today is not just a surfeit of sugar or the optimism of spring?
You can wait for proof, whatever would serve as proof for you, that this goodness is God’s grace. Or you can choose to act as though God had actually infused your life with grace, even if you’re not sure, and see what happens. You can simply decide to live, to act, more gracefully. Be generous. Act in love towards those who are difficult to love. Love is just as much about action as it is about feeling. Do something to nurture hope and new life in the world around you.
I recently read an interview with a women who is known within her Carmelite community as Sister Rachel. She has written several books on prayer under the name of Ruth Burrows. I don’t know much about her, except that the picture accompanying the interview showed her to be a woman who had lived many years, most of them, I think as a Carmelite nun. The Carmelites have a particular calling for the interior spiritual life and prayer and spend much of their time in silence.
In the interview she spoke of faith. “Faith is a profound mystery that we can never adequately explain. It is an interplay between divine grace and the human mind and will. Faith is never a mere intellectual assent but always involves commitment. It is always in action, more a verb than a noun. Many people think they have no faith because they feel they haven’t. The do not realize that they must make a choice to believe, take the risk of believing, of committing themselves and setting themselves to live out the commitment.” The alternative may be waiting for a lifetime “under the cover of authenticity… for the kind of certainty we cannot have” (The Christian Century, April 4, 2012). A lifetime of empty waiting.
You can wait for proof, or you can choose to believe. Choose to believe that this Easter’s goodness is grace. And you can choose to act upon that grace.
Easter grace. Today, Easter, is of course a unique holy day. And it is Easter that brings this extra goodness, this grace, to us. But not because God works harder on Easter day. We receive extra grace today because our defenses are down. Our immune system is compromised on this day. The acquired immunity to grace that we have carefully built up throughout our lives is suppressed on Easter. Our acquired immunity to grace is suppressed today... so more grace gets in.
God pours grace upon us all of the time. And the thing is, the more we choose to act upon that grace, the more our immunity will crumble. The more often we decide to believe God’s grace is with us, the more receptive we will become to receiving that grace. The more we claim the grace we have been given, the more we will be open and able to receive God's grace.
Reckon up your own goodness today and see if there isn’t just a little extra. See if you don’t find within yourself a little more than your usual goodness today. Or maybe you’ll find a lot more than usual.
In the first chapter of John (1:16), the evangelist writes: From Christ’s fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.
Look for your extra Easter grace upon grace and choose to use it to live gracefully.
And today living gracefully mostly means celebrating. Speak or sing alleluia! Dance! Feast! Do something celebratory. Celebrate the wondrous gift of Easter grace in your life.
