Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in the Risen Christ,

Today, we mark, with all the pomp and circumstance we can muster, the Resurrection of Christ.

It has been done simply and furtively in years, decades, and millennia past.

It has been done lavishly and baroquely in other ages.

It has been done with trembling hands, sinful hands, proud hands, saintly hands, hands cracked with work, hands slow with age, hands clumsy with inexperience.

It has been celebrated with voices that soared like angels, those that broke with nerves, those hoarse from yelling Alleluia and those barely able to make a sound.

We have celebrated it alongside children, parents, grandparents, and friends. We have marked first Easters and last ones too with those we love.

Some have dressed in seersucker and linen while others have worn the same prison uniform they did the day before. In cathedrals, prison camps, caves, castles, churches, and chapels and in despair, elation, joy, heartbreak, and the deepest longing for the Good News it has been marked.

We gather today as so many saints, sinners, and all those in between have from one millennia to the next. As it has been marked for two thousand and more Easter Days we come together to do one thing – to give our thanks with all that we have.

Here, as a community, we will pour out song and poetry. We do it with the gifts of art, architecture, and needlework too. We do it with movement as choreographed as a dance and with a joy that celebrates the humanity that makes mistakes too. We pour out, like Mary Magdalene’s precious oil, all that we have at the feet of Jesus today.

That is how we will celebrate it today, as a community, as so many communities of Christ followers have in ages past.

I suppose the harder question is this – how will we mark it in our hearts and homes? How will we pour out all that we have and are and dream of being in thanks for all that God has done?

What is our precious oil that we will pour out today?

Yours in Resurrection Joy,

Fr Robert