I've worked a lot this month. For some reason, the entire world decided to work from home. All at once. Using Microsoft Teams and Skype (and yes, even Zoom and Slack). To an absurd extent.
When I've been able to log off for a few minutes, I've gotten to see the best of humanity - medical school students taking their oaths early to be deployed into COVID-19 wards, Broadway and opera and classical music made accessible to the entire world, sportscasters narrating people crossing the street, celebrities making childrens' dreams come true, cafeteria workers coming to work to box lunches for underprivileged school children, dear friends leading worship services and prayer nights.
And yes, undoubtedly the world is broken right now. We're now all collectively living the same story of weakness and mortality, rather than our individual ones, which somehow seems bigger and scarier. We long to go back to "normal". But as my pastor said, "The world has always been broken". "Normal" has always included sadness and anxiety and loneliness, cancer and divorce and death. We have always all been weak and worn and wandering.
We know all of this isn't right, that somehow this isn't the way it's "supposed" to be. Because this isn't the world we were made for. God grieves for the brokenness of this world along with us because it isn't yet the one he's making.
And that's the moral of the Easter story. The story is not our collective story of brokenness and anxiety and grief and a longing for "normal". The story is God making brokenness right, weakness strong, anxiety security. It's God bringing generosity and relationships and beauty and joy and peace to a world he's renewing and restoring and remaking. And in the grandest of ironies, he has done it through the weakness and brokenness and death of His son, Jesus Christ.
By far the most touching thing I've seen in all of this is the nightly vigils of clapping for front-line health workers and first responders around the world. It's a moving tribute to the most needed and most generous, some of whom will pay the ultimate price for their selflessness. It's a reminder that even in the darkness, there is hope. In every part of God's story, there is hope.
On this Easter Sunday, I hope you can find that hope in your lives. I hope you can be one to be generous, sing and shout in the night, dance in the midst of darkness. We have the answer to our weariness, a fix for our brokenness, a Savior who has undone death - a risen King who has overcome the world!
Christ is risen! Jesus is alive!
Happy Easter, Parker