On this afternoon in San Diego, it may seem as if everything is normal. The sky is blue. The sun is warm. The birds are chirping. I smell honeysuckle. But the roads. They are hardly more than peppered with cars, and they should be crowded with commuter traffic.
The schools and churches and businesses are empty. The parks and trails and beaches are closed. Parking lots are vacant.
Grocery stores have long lines outside wrapped their buildings, allowing only a certain number of people inside and with designated times for older customers. The hospitals do all they can to prepare, and the healthcare professionals work long hours knowing that they do not know when it will end.
This is life during a pandemic. The quiet, sunny afternoon is deceptive. It tempts us to pretend everything is normal. But we know it isn’t. And we ache for personal connection with others. Children participate in playtime with their friends through computer screens. No physical contact. As a parent, this is the part that is hardest for me — to see my 4-year-old unable to play in person with friends.
Preachers turn on their computers to speak with their colleagues and congregations remotely, aware that being physically apart is the painful path love must take. Isolation fatigue sets in. And then, Easter approaches. What then?
What do preachers preach on resurrection Sunday during a pandemic when death tolls increase by the day? On Easter, we preachers are already expected to preach a mystery that is beyond our reckoning. And now, we are somehow called to preach such a mystery that erupts with life while we walk through the valley of the shadow.
Václav Havel, the Czech writer and dissident, asserted that hope is an orientation of spirit. In this case, people of hope need not pretend to have all the answers — or any answers.
Confidence but not naiveté. Truth but not certainty. Hope but not false promises. This is to be our posture on any other Easter and should be on this Easter as well.
The lawyer and social justice activist, Bryan Stevenson, claimed: “The kind of hope that creates a willingness to position oneself in a hopeless place and be a witness, that allows one to believe in a better future, even in the face of abusive power. That kind of hope makes one strong.”
This Easter, we preachers would do well to be willing to position ourselves as witnesses rather than knowledgeable experts.
The apostle Paul exclaimed provocatively, “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Put differently, if we are not people of resurrection today, if we are not people of hope today, then what were we a few months ago? Were we simply pretending when pretending was easier?
Resurrection is not flimsy, pie-in-the-sky hope. Resurrection surprises with life amidst the thin grey hue at the end of the night when anxiety and despair have wearied our bodies.
When we are living in the night, if we are resurrection people, then we will persist anyway, then we will love anyway, then we will hope anyway, even as it is too dark to see the hands in front of our faces, even as the time of the dawn is unknown. Resurrection is the future calling out to us even as we live through the seemingly endless night.
Preachers bear humble witness to this mystery, to the future calling out to us in the dead of night.
