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 . . .