Easter

"Easter is God's most radical, most extreme, most decisive answer to prayer. The resurrection of Jesus is the most determined maneuver God makes to intervene among those who seek help in their need and desperation."

--Walter Brueggemann

“[The resurrection] is the ultimate act of prophetic energizing in which a new history is initiated. It is a new history open to all but peculiarly received by the marginal victims of the old order.”

--Walter Brueggemann

"The resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate sign that our salvation comes only when we cease trying to interpret Jesus' story in the light of our history, and instead we interpret ourselves in the light of his."

--Stanley Hauerwas

But we are here today, on Sunday, the resurrection day, to celebrate and proclaim to the world the fact that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. We live by this truth and we shall die by this truth. We comfort each other by this truth and we are stirred to love and devotion and service by this truth. Let us therefore settle it in our minds and hearts that we will allow the truth of the resurrection to propel us to be true revolutionaries. Not the cheap and easy kind of revolutionary, those who want to use violence to overthrow the present order and simply turn it upside down and replace it with one of their own. No, we’ve had plenty of those and it doesn’t work. No, we are like Jesus and, in his love and power to be double revolutionaries, celebrating his victory over death and sin, and finding through prayer and politics and Bible study and campaigning and love and fellowship and celebration and truth — finding the way to bring that victory to birth, both in the dark corners of our own private and personal lives and in the dark corners of God’s suffering world.

May God give you grace and joy in his service and in believing and living the gospel of the resurrection and to his name be the praise and the glory. Amen.

--N.T. Wright, from a sermon given at The Falls Church