 Pastor’s
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Well, as we approach Easter, every company
in town that sells chocolate is pushing its products. Although I haven’t
been in Enstrom’s yet, I’m guessing they have towers of exquisite chocolate
eggs, bunnies, and who knows what else, along with their annual Giant
Chocolate Rabbit Drawing, in which you can win an enormous rabbit that
weighs about 40 pounds of pure, luscious chocolate.
Given the
popularity of chocolate as an Easter gift, and the tension that can raise
with those folks committed to healthy eating, I thought I would share some
important dietary information. Chocolate is good for you. The chocolate part
is made from cocoa beans – they come from a plant, and are therefore a
vegetable. Similarly, the sugar that makes it sweet comes either from
sugar-beets, or from sugar-cane, also both plants, making it a vegetable as
well. And the milk part is a dairy product, which everyone knows helps build
strong bones and teeth. So, you’re not only getting two vegetable and one
dairy serving each time you eat a suitable portion of chocolate, you’re
getting a whole bunch of antioxidants (especially in dark chocolate) on top
of that – clearly, chocolate is good for you!
And so, my friends,
is Easter. Not just because of the whole chocolate thing – but because of
the whole theological thing. The date for Easter (or at least the method for
determining the date) was selected very deliberately by the early church to
coincide both with their best estimates of when Jesus was actually
crucified, and with the new season of spring. It’s a time when the world
around us – trees, flowers, bushes, grasses – are pushing out new buds, and
ecstatically breaking into new life. It’s a time when the cows are calving,
horses are foaling, goats are kidding, chickens are laying their eggs, and
there are new babies everywhere! Those early church-people knew how spring
itself renews our faith in life, its on-going cycles and promises, and in
our ever-renewing, living God.
As Christians, on
Easter we celebrate the central event of the Christian faith: Jesus rising
from the dead. It is an event and an action that we take to understand
offers us, too, the promise of everlasting life after we die. But, as the
earliest Christians well-understood, this “Easter event” – this promise of
new life – wasn’t something that happened just one day a year, but was to be
celebrated throughout the year, at the very least on each and every Sunday.
I invite you, in
this approaching Easter season, to reflect on what kind of new life you are
being invited to in this time and place. Is it time for you to take on some
kind of new learning experience, or hobby? Or to give one up, in order to
nurture other kinds of life for yourself? Is it time for you to make a
change in a relationship that’s important to you? Or to try something new
that will deepen your relationship with God? Are you being called
spiritually to a new kind of service? Or to change from one form of service
you’ve been doing to another? What is God calling to being born in you and
your life?
May the God who
loves us all bless every one of us as we grow into new creations in this
burgeoning season of new life –
Easter Blessings, Pastor Sharyl |
