He is Risen! I want to thank the worship committee and the choir for a glorious Easter Celebration this year. The flowers and the music were beautiful and festive. I wish we had to put those extra chairs down the aisle every week! We did worship indoors at 6:30 am—it was just too cold for any of us to be sitting outside— but the rising sun made a rather sudden and impressive appearance through our east windows at just the right moment. Barbara managed to get all the confetti cleaned up--eventually. We were truly amazed that the debris made it all the way up to the balcony and down the hallway to the nursery. It was in my hair for a week. The celebration just couldn’t be confined to the sanctuary.

Easter is not just that one Sunday, the Easter season goes on for 50 days. I’ll be wishing you a Happy Easter all through the month of May. We’ll be holding on to those lilies as long as we possibly can, and that Easter banner will be hanging in the chancel until Pentecost on May 27. The Easter attitude, however, is not so easy to hold on to. Our enthusiasm wanes, and we get a little bored singing those Easter hymns over and over again. Every year we get impatient and ready to return to Ordinary Time.

At some point in the very first Easter season, even the disciples were ready to go back to their regular lives—to ordinary time. They went home to Galilee and went fishing. That’s what they did before Jesus came into their lives, and they must have thought it was time to get back to the ordinary. But, the story says they fished all night and had no success. I wonder if their skills were rusty; or, if maybe their hearts just weren’t quite in it? However it was, someone called out from the shore to offer some unsolicited advice about how to fish. At some point, they discover it was Jesus calling to them; Jesus, alive and cooking! Jesus, waiting to welcome them with a warm fire and breakfast ready for them—even before they brought in the huge catch of fish. Jesus, feeding them and giving them instructions. Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep. Follow me. There is so much to be done. You just can’t go back to fishing like you did before.

Nothing goes back to the ordinary after the amazing experience of Easter. When something that monumental happens in our lives, nothing can ever be the same. We cannot go on living as if it never happened. We cannot go back to ordinary time, because “ordinary” for us has changed so radically, that it can never be the same. We may go back to fishing, or back to classes, but it won’t be the same, because we aren’t the same. It can’t be ordinary, because, for us, ordinary is not the same. The authorities complained that the message that Paul and Silas were preaching was “turning the world upside down!” (Acts 17:7). If our experience mattered at all, it has to make a difference in how we live.

Help me to celebrate every moment of the Easter season; and, as we move back into Ordinary Time, may we all be so changed that the world around us will take notice—and be amazed at how far the good news of Easter has spread out into the world. He is Risen, Indeed!

                                                       - Diane

Leesburg Presbyterian Church
207 W. Market Street;  Leesburg, VA  20176
office 703-777-4163 | fax 703-777-4666

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