It doesn’t quite feel like Easter to me.  But that doesn’t matter. Here is my diary entry from earlier this morning:  

Easter Day today.  Some places it is arriving with great festivity:  choirs, timpani drums, trumpets, botanical extravaganza—hyacinths and lilies.  There are new hats and dresses.  Families gather for banquets, at home or at Easter buffets in a local restaurant.  Ham sales are up.  Liturgical churches are pulling out all the stops. Children feel the excitement and rejoice at finding hidden eggs, they thrill at the chocolate bunnies and other treats in their Easter baskets.  

The day evokes nostalgia.  In the first half of my ministry, I’d be exhausted after a week of Holy Week activities and plan for a retreat as soon as the last worship service was concluded on Easter Day.  I’d get in the car after lunch and start driving to eastern Pennsylvania, to the Kirkridge Retreat Center, where pastors were invited to come and recover, find renewal, and experience a sort of resurrection themselves.  That annual exodus was as sweet as anything in Holy Week.  It was all of one piece for me:  Palm Sunday processions, Maundy Thursday communion, Good Friday prayers for the world, Saturday night Easter Vigil and banquet, Sunday morning’s spectacular gala—then the cross-country trip to Pennsylvania. 

Easter ( the ramp toward it) was always my favorite time of the year.  Starting six weeks before the grand day itself, there was Ash Wednesday, when I felt graciously ushered into the deepest and darkest truths about life.  In the liturgy of Ash Wednesday, I be constantly surprised that I had the courage to see things about myself I didn’t want to notice—as though God was holding me by the hand and getting me through it.  There was the extra discipline of Lent, weeks of practicing saying “no” to myself, as if my life depended on it.  And then came Holy Week.  While Christmas always charmed me, Easter and its Lenten prelude grabbed me.

For some folks today, Easter arrives loudly and uses up all the oxygen in the air.  But in the lives of others, Easter may arrive totally unnoticed.  Or it may be noticed, but turn out to seem like nothing much.  It rolls in unnoticed and unheralded for many.  

I’m not preaching today, for the first time in 50 years I haven’t preached on Easter.  I’m not going anywhere this afternoon.  Maybe I’ll take a nap.  And so this Easter rolls rather silently into my life.  I’ll be on the bench (or pew) instead of the pulpit.  

But then I am reminded that he first Easter wasn’t much noticed either.  And where it was noticed, it just confused people. I’m glad to go to church today, but it doesn’t have the thrill or trigger the adrenaline that was there in Easters’ past.  

This year, I am reminded that what God is doing, usually in the dark, is never dependent on my being there to greet it, or even notice it.  God is constantly rearranging things, even when I’m not paying attention, or sensing it.  After all, God’s accomplishment on the first Easter was entirely unexpected, and nearly unnoticed.  And where it was noticed on that first day, it confused and disoriented folks.  But even though it snuck up on people, nearly unheralded, it changed everyone’s life profoundly.  

I may not feel the buzz today, as I have in the past.  But I still have deep trust in the Easter story.  That story, recorded in all four gospels, appears inconsistent and sometimes even contradictory.  But no matter.  The Easter stories have always been told with some sloppiness, leaving out many details, and getting other factoids wrong.  But still God uses these stories to stir the world…and me anew.  

It's fine if this is a quiet day, compared to past Easters.  But I pray that it will be as powerful as ever, as in the days ahead, my world, my church, my family, my friends…and myself experience the surprises and goodness of God’s mysteries once again.