I have heard talk on social media about postponing our Holy Week and Easter celebrations until sometime after the pandemic has passed and it is safe for us to gather in crowds again. This is from congregational leaders and friends I know, love and respect.

The thought is that Holy Week and Easter just wouldn’t be right online. That they are so important and precious to the Church that we should wait to celebrate until we can gather again safely and do it right.

Postpone Easter?

Hmmm…

Look, I get it. So, there’s no judgement or criticism here for such a decision. But there is another take to consider before making that decision.

Remember what Easter actually is.

Easter is not a great end to a great story worthy of an annual celebration.

Easter might seem like a great end to a great story because it is positioned toward the end of each of the four gospels. But Easter is not the end of the story. It is the end of the beginning of the story. It is a launch. It is a starter’s gun. It is the grand physical evidence that sin and death have been definitively removed so that we are now completely free to get up off our… pews and get on with the living and loving and redemption and restoration that the world so desperately needs.

Combine Good Friday, Easter and our baptism and we become the body of Christ… not metaphorically but materially. Jesus literally took our sin away from us on the cross and put His Spirit back into us through baptism. That means we are now literally the way through which the resurrected Jesus becomes real, physical, tangible and active to the people around us that need Him so badly.

So…

Easter is not about a party for us but a lifestyle for the good of others.

We honor Jesus not by waiting to celebrate Easter till it’s safe but learning to celebrate Easter every day when it’s not.

It’s said all the time: “Every Sunday is Easter” (even in Lent). What if we meant that? What if we used every Sunday as an Easter launch to remind each other of what is already in play? That we are freed up from sin and death for a reason! That we get to be refilled, reminded, refreshed and restored so that we can be recommissioned and head out for another week of adventuring with the Living One for the good of others!

Postpone Easter? Are you kidding? Now is the time to kick it up a notch. Not by adding more brass to the Easter music, or by adding more dramatic effects to the PowerPoint.

No, instead, whatever you choose to do online for worship over the next couple weeks, whatever you choose to call it, whether you postpone your “Easter Sunday” celebration until a future time or not - when we gather online for worship next, remind each other that Easter is already happening. It’s not a date on the calendar but a new reality unleashed. Remind each other that Jesus is already out of the tomb. That Jesus has already sounded the starter’s gun. That Jesus is already on the loose in the community. And that He’s still inviting us to join Him for the good of our neighbors. Woohoo and alleluia!

It may look like today is an ordinary Monday towards the end of Lent. But are you kidding me? It’s still Easter! It’s been Easter every day for 2000 years. Every morning, we get to once again rise up with Jesus and look for ways to help others experience His love, life, hope, truth and grace. From Him, to us, through us, to the people around us that need Him so badly. Woohoo and alleluia!

I found the following story in the Houston Chronicle yesterday (Sunday, March 29, 2020). Even though the article is not about Easter, it powerfully illustrates what Easter looks like when lived out for the good of others. It illustrates what it looks like when someone has a complete confidence in the resurrected, eternal life he/she has already received from Jesus. It looks like self-sacrificial love for others. It looks like Jesus. Wohoo and alleluia!

Leonard Pitts wrote the following for the Miami Herald. I have edited his words for brevity:

“A few words on the quiet death of an Italian priest.

“His name was Father Giuseppe Berardelli, and he served in Casnigo, a small village not far from Milan. He was 72 and died in a hospital of the novel coronavirus.

“This was on March 15, though reports are just now filtering out. Again, it was a quiet death. As such, it was easily lost in the cacophony of our times.

“You see, Father Berardelli died after he gave away his respirator. He insisted it go instead to a younger patient who was struggling to breathe, a person the priest did not know.

“The biblical maxim leaps to mind: John 15:13, ‘Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’”

Postpone Easter? Are you kidding me? You can’t. It’s already happening. And our neighbors need us to live it.

Woohoo and alleluia!