Easter has a way of bringing out my childhood faith full of eggs and bunnies and family photos after church in that new Easter outfit. Back in those good old days in
order to continue to hoodwink you, your parents would buy special eggs made of sugar and filled with the risen Jesus. You must remember them: in one end you could peer into a peephole and see the graveyard and Jesus with a raised hand and the sun glowing behind him. It was such a neat way to bring all of it together: eggs, rabbits and resurrections that would warm the cockles of your childhood heart and make the whole episode believable and edible. Once adults felt sure that you were convinced that Jesus was alive, you could eat the egg!
order to continue to hoodwink you, your parents would buy special eggs made of sugar and filled with the risen Jesus. You must remember them: in one end you could peer into a peephole and see the graveyard and Jesus with a raised hand and the sun glowing behind him. It was such a neat way to bring all of it together: eggs, rabbits and resurrections that would warm the cockles of your childhood heart and make the whole episode believable and edible. Once adults felt sure that you were convinced that Jesus was alive, you could eat the egg!
With Easter surrounded with such delectable delights, I never was haunted by the notion that a dead man rose from the grave. When I was a child, I remember seeing Easter in an egg. When I became an adult, I began to realize that it was difficult to allow that egg to hatch into the gospel truth that on the third day he rose again from the dead. The notion of a resurrection was quite a contrast to “here comes Peter Cotton Tail, hopping down the bunny trail…hippity, hoppity Easter’s on its way…”
When I became a teenager, the church started treating me differently and made me memorize all those scriptures and catechisms and taught me truths that must be believed in order to save my very soul from hell. When I became a young man, I went to seminary still trying to figure out how Jesus escaped from that Easter egg of mine. When I became an old codger like the one writing this stuff, I am bewitched, bothered and bewildered by the way the church has either lost the risen Lord or kept him frozen in time like that peep show egg of my childhood. We want to keep Christ in Easter and Christmas simultaneously.
Think about all the ways that we try to keep resurrection from happening so that we can stay in control of Jesus and use his name to command others: arguing endlessly about doctrine and scriptural interpretation while we fail to care for Christ among the least of our sisters and brothers, constricting our imaginings of Christ to images that leave us comfortable and undisturbed. We keep Christ buried by denying his commands to love our enemies and caring for those who don’t even think like us. We spend the church’s energy wrangling about those who seem unworthy of God’s love.
One year, in the church of my childhood, we put Easter in a shoe box. It was a Sunday school project like unto that sugar egg with the resurrection inside. We each brought an empty shoe box, created Jesus cutouts, and used the green stuff in which bunny rabbits used to lay their jellybeans. We recreated the first Easter inside the box with the lid off, then cut a hole in one end of the box through which to peer at the miracle we had reproduced. But there was a problem…when you put on the top, it was all dark inside and you couldn’t see a blooming thing, especially not the risen Lord.