Meditation for Fellowship Potluck: January 23, 2005 Mark 16:1-8 Scott Hoezee

Recently I put away my 2004 calendar and replaced it with the new 2005 version. We use calendars to lend order and structure to our lives. All our thinking gets shaped by the regularity of seven-day weeks and four-week months. The church calendar is mostly like that, too. Soon it will be the Lenten Season again, and we know that Lent always has six Sundays in it: never more, never less. Last month we celebrated Advent, which is also predictable: it is always four weeks long and it always concludes on that very set date of December 25, Christmas Day. We always know when Christmas will be.

In the New Testament, there is no question which event in the life of Jesus is more important: Christmas or Easter. Easter wins hands down. Tonight we read the conclusion of Mark's gospel, but as most of us know, Mark never wrote one single syllable about Jesus' birth. The Gospel of John skipped it, too. Apparently you can have a gospel without Christmas but you cannot have a gospel without Easter. Yet for that very reason I find it ironic that we've never fixed a single date for Easter.

Every year when I make the Winter & Spring preaching schedule, I need to dig out a liturgical guidebook to see when Easter will fall. It can come almost anywhere within a four-week span of time. Easter can be as early as March 22 and as late as April 27. You never know just when Easter will fall because it is determined by the lunar cycle. Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon that follows the March 21 equinox. So this year it will come quite early when we celebrate our Lord's resurrection on Sunday, March 27. This is an echo of how the date of the Passover was always determined, but it remains a source of wonder to me that this is how we set the date for the most important celebration the church holds each year!

How odd that we long ago settled on just one date for Christmas (an event that half of the gospels skip) but we have let Easter float with the moon. That becomes doubly-ironic when you realize that we really have no idea precisely what time of the year Jesus was born but we have a very good idea of the time when he was raised again from the dead. Yet we let the date change every year.

But why am I talking about Easter on this cold January evening? Because right now we are in the one season in the Christian year that does not cover a set number of Sundays: Epiphany. As I said, Advent is always four weeks long, Lent is always six weeks. But Epiphany is more elastic. Epiphany can have four, five, six, or seven Sundays in it. It varies according to where Easter falls. Last year we had seven Sundays in Epiphany, this year five.

Now let's just admit that spiritually speaking, we wouldn't lose anything if some day a big ecumenical council decreed that all Christians everywhere would henceforth celebrate Easter on the first Sunday in April. Nothing would change about the gospel were we to once and for all end the current way we find a date for Easter. But I want ever-so-briefly to suggest that having Easter ricochet around the calendar year-to-year is not only not all bad, maybe there is something nicely symbolic about this.

Here's what I mean: as I said a moment ago, unless I do some checking in my liturgical guidebook each year, I never know when Easter will occur. But isn't that just the nature of Easter, of the sudden bursting forth of eternal life in the midst of a world of death: you never know when it will occur. So many people in history have testified that when they least expected it, at the lowest point of their lives when all hope seemed lost, all of a sudden the light of Christ eastered into their hearts and all things were made new on the landscape of their minds. You never know when it will hit you because God's Spirit cannot be pinned down. The Holy Spirit is restless, is incessantly on the move, brooding over the darkness of humanity, looking for any opportunity to burst in with the light of Jesus' victory.

Years ago, when the scourge of Communism seemed so deeply entrenched that it would never go away, a friend of mine was at an Easter Vigil service at a Russian Orthodox church right in Moscow, right in the heart of Communist darkness. A huge crowd of people was gathered outside the church that Saturday night before Easter. Right at midnight, the priest flung open the cathedral's front door and cried out, "Christ Is Risen!" And with one, thunderous voice, the great throng replied, "Risen Indeed!" And my friend told me that it was in that moment that he knew, with a clarity that he had never before experienced, that it is true: Jesus is risen! He is alive! My friend was far from home and in the middle of a totalitarian state that denied God's very existence, and yet it was right then and there that he experienced the power of Jesus' resurrection in a way more stirring than anything he had ever experienced on all those Easter Sundays he had spent in his home church back in the good old USA. You never know when Easter will come.

Today was just the third Sunday in Epiphany, and we're almost to Lent already. The Season of Epiphany expands and contracts year-to-year because Easter never hits the same week two years in a row. It's a moveable feast in the church year. But then, maybe that is only apropos: because the truth of what we celebrate in Jesus' resurrection is not a static event that you can tie down to just one place or time. Even now, on this bleak midwinter's night, the Spirit of God is bringing Easter to some despairing person somewhere in the world. Who knows, maybe the Spirit is stirring in your heart right now in a way you've not felt before. It can happen. It does happen. January 23 can be Easter just as well as March 27 or April 13 or any other day.

You see, when you get right down to it, the only reason we are Christians is because every day is the right day to see one another and to say, "Happy Easter." Christ is risen, he is risen indeed. And the celebration of that will never stop, not in time, and not even for all eternity. Amen.