Easter Sunday comes, but we are all still in Good Friday or Holy Saturday—and, by the look of things, will be for quite sometime. Friday and Saturday of Holy Week (which is a mapping of the main movements in this journey of our lives) remind us of the reality of pain, suffering, death, and grief. Saturday symbolizes those long periods of our lives when we grope through the shadows searching for direction, a new beginning, anything to give us hope. Saturday characterizes our lives when we can’t see into the future.

At best, the COVID19 crisis has us in Saturday. More likely, we’re still in Friday—the day of death, grief, and loss.

Into our experience of all this, Easter comes.

We face Easter differently this year. Less naive. More realistic about the other two days that, for most of society, Christianity included, are too often overlooked. We like to go straight to Easter, so enamored are we by the light, the joy, and sense of excitement.

This sermon is sober. But it’s not sedate. In it, there’s a real sense of the Force of life that not only changes us, but “threatens” (in all the right ways, IMO) to change everything. COVID19 will change us. And there’s something else at work in the dark of this season, in this Friday/Saturday of our existence. Sunday is pulling us into a future that could make us a more benevolent presence on this planet.

Below, I explore the nature of Easter, the nature of the cosmic Christ, and the nature of our humanity—not dogmatically, but poetically and socially. History shows us that when crisis hits, it’s the poets and other artists who see the way forward before the politicians do . . .

Unlike the other three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Gospel of John begins more scientifically than it does historically. The first line of the Gospel reads: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” That may not sound like science to us today, but it was a form of science two thousand years ago when it was written. It was science and philosophy and theology all rolled into one. Back then, a university would never have relegated these disciplines to separate departments, different faculty. And, I believe, neither will we some day in the future.

“All things came into being through the Word,” the Gospel says, “and without the Word, not one thing came into being. What has come into being in the Word was life and that life was the light of all people.”

It’s an ancient text that’s trying to make sense of reality—science and philosophy and theology overlapping. The author’s glimpsed something as big, as revolutionary, as epic as what Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein saw, something that changes everything.

Trouble is, as with other breakthroughs, the vision would be met with enormous skepticism, hostility, and rejection . . .

Everything Changes | an online Easter sermon for a socially distanced people

Leap for Christ’s Sake: A Meditation on Physics, Cosmology, and Human Life