As a clergy of a multi-point parish with five congregations, after the busy forty days of Lent and the lead up to Holy Week and Easter with all the preparation and planning needed for the extra services, energy is usually starting to wane, by the time you get to Holy Week anyway.   To add to this, this year on the saturday before Palm sunday, I injured my foot and had to have surgery.  An uncomfortable and painful situation all around. I wasn’t able to do the Palm sunday services was disappointing enough and then perhaps to have to hand of the Holy Week service’s to another clergy or the Lay ministry team was going to be disappointing.  I had put a lot of work into these services and wanted to be able to do them.

Not sure if I was going to be able to manage it, I started to look at things, and decided I could cut a few of the liturgies a little shorter, and make changes so I wouldn’t have to move around and put any strain on my foot, during the services. I would enlist some extra help with getting things organized, ask for more help from the lay ministry team and make it work. That is what I did, but what surprised me about it all was not only the extra offers of help I received to get the work done, but the care and concern.  Folks were willing to do what ever they could to help out, there were so many offers that I had to turn down some of them, and almost felt bad about doing it because I knew they were really genuine with their offers.  People called to see how I was doing, they came to the door with food, care packages, and from Maundy Thursday up to the Tuesday after Easter Sunday, we didn’t have to prepare a meal.  Someone delivered a meal to our home each day, even a home-cooked hot turkey supper with all the fixins for Easter. What otherwise would have been a very uncomfortable and stressful situation was made so much easier.  As I reflected on all this over the last while, even though these people are normally very generous people, it was to be on the receiving end of all that when I really needed it, that made all the difference.

The Holy Week and Easter Services went great.  Resurrection was truly there, not only in the liturgies, the Word, the bread and wine of the Eucharist as we celebrated the risen Lord, but in the giving and receiving, in the joy, and in the people who came.  On Easter morning as I stood in the pulpit to proclaim the word, the rising morning sun beamed its light so brilliantly throughout the Sanctuary that there was no mistaking it for anything less then God’s Glory.  One woman commenting on it after the service said, “it took her breath away, it was as if God himself had lit up the sanctuary”. And Maybe he had, there was good reason to, we were celebrating Resurrection, New life.  And New life was the order of the day.

An elderly woman who was there with her family, only a week earlier so sick that it was thought she might not survive this time, she had fought the battle with cancer for over forty years, but this morning she arrived early for the service, and made her way to the communion rail without any assistance to receive the sacrament.  There was resurrection.  Later in the day at another service, an elderly gentlemen who the dr’s had told his next breath might be his last, he had so many heart problems, walked into the church assisted by his family, hardly seeming able to make it to the pew.  During the services he took part in the prayers, sang along with the hymns and during the passing of the peace, got out of his pew and walked back to pass the peace to his neighbour’s unassisted.  After the service he said “it was the first time he had been in the church and received the sacrament for over forty years, but today “he just had to come.”  Resurrection,  new life, made possible through Christ Jesus.

On Easter sunday we celebrated the Resurrection of Jesus, and it is through him that we too are given new life, new hope, new possibilities when we believe.  Resurrection turns sorrow into joy, good overcome evil, Love wins over hatred, and death is transformed into new life.  As Mary Magdelene saw and believed on that first Easter Morning, saying “I have seen the Lord”, after Jesus had appeared to her at the tomb. We too have seen and believe. We may not have the empty tomb that we can go to to check it out, or be able to see the Linen wrappings as the first witnesses to the Resurrection, or as Mary Magdalene who saw Jesus, and wanted to hold onto him;  but we see it in the lives of the people, and know it in our own lives, and that is enough.  And so we too can say, “I have seen the Lord,”  because it is our story too, we give witness to the Resurrection and live it out in our own lives .  Alleluia, Christ is Risen, the Lord is Risen indeed!