Soaking in Joy

Beloved in Christ,

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

As disciples of Jesus, our faith is an embodied faith, and our hope is a bodily hope. In these past two years, we have been reminded of how we experience the brokenness and suffering in the world not only in our hearts and minds, but in and through our very bodies. Not only are we living through a pandemic that damages our bodies, but we have seen wave after wave after wave of how the world's sinfulness often manifests in violence against Black, brown, and Indigenous bodies. I was particularly moved by this reflection from Good Friday by Esau MacCaulley on what Good Friday and Easter mean to him as a Black man. 

The vision of both scripture and the Christian tradition has always been that God intends to ultimately create a new heavens and a new earth, fully restored to what God originally intended. The resurrection of Jesus at Easter is the sign, the first fruits, of God's intention for each of us, and indeed, for the whole cosmos. And for me, beloved, that's what is truly good about the good news. For the salvation God won in the resurrection of Jesus to mean anything at all, it must include the salvation and redemption of our physical bodies, as well as the wounded creation, which are the source of so much of the injustice and suffering Jesus' death was intended to address. 

It's a truly crazy and unimaginable claim to make. But if we really hold onto that hope, that God intends to create a new heavens and a new earth, and the Jesus' bodily resurrection is the sure and certain sign of that promise, that changes everything. Death is not the final triumph it appears to be. The power of God's love cannot be limited by the small confines of our imagination, or even by how we understand the natural world to work. If God can really raise Jesus in a new and glorified body, and if God intends the same for us, then truly, there is nothing that is not possible with God's power and love. 

Easter is meant to be celebrated not just as one day, but as a full fifty-day season. After all the grief we have endured, after all the injustices we have witnessed or felt in our own bodies, I hope you'll take time, every day this Easter, to soak up the irrational, unbelievable, crazy good news of what God has done for us, and of what God promises to us. I hope you'll allow yourself to feel the freedom of joy even in the face of all the suffering that remains. I hope that all of us, together, having soaked for a season in that joy, may be renewed to join Jesus out in our world, joining him in making all things new, shouting our defiant alleluia in the face of death, clinging to nothing but the power of God's love. 

Grace and peace,

The Right Reverend Craig Loya
X Bishop
Episcopal Church in Minnesota