Someone recently asked me how the date of Easter is determined. As I listened to myself answering the person by saying, “It’s based on a full moon date,” I realized that felt a bit unexciting. Thinking about it later in the day, I remembered the reference to Easter as a “moveable feast.”
The first full moon to follow the Spring Equinox, called the “Paschal Moon,” determines Easter’s date, as it is the first Sunday after the Paschal Moon. March 21 is the Spring Equinox this year and March 25 is the Paschal Moon marking this Easter Sunday’s date March 31.
That might be more than you wanted to hear about Easter, but the idea of a “moveable feast” has been sitting heavily in my heart as I think about it during the season of Lent. What is a moveable feast? It’s a date that moves but what is a moveable feast in your heart? Does Easter move with you? Do you experience Easter moments throughout your life?
Something I have been asking myself is, “What does it mean to LIVE the resurrection?” Am I a resurrection person? Does my life reflect a belief in the resurrection daily not just on the one Sunday after the Paschal Moon?
These are questions that I’d like to invite you to sit with as we finish these last weeks of Lent and prepare to proclaim our faith in a Risen Messiah. What does the resurrection mean to us in how we live and move or in our state of being as individuals and together?
Where is the resurrection happening in your life? Where is it happening in our community? Where is it happening in our congregation? Does this moveable feast move with you? A professor in seminary used to say, with some frequency, “Resurrection is the realization that something has to die for something new to be born, for something new to rise.”
Theologian and preacher, Eugene Peterson wrote, “It is not easy to convey a sense of wonder, let alone resurrection wonder, to another. It’s the very nature of wonder to catch us off guard, to circumvent expectations and assumptions. Wonder can’t be packaged, and it can’t be worked up. It requires some sense of being there and some sense of engagement.”
What do you think it means to convey the wonder of the resurrection? Do we allow ourselves to get lost in it, to simply dwell in it? To engage it, we must live it together. We must let this moveable feast move us, move with us, and move in us.
My prayer for us this Easter season is to engage in resurrection wonder, to get lost in it, to savor it, and to allow the proclamation of a Risen Lord to change our daily lives, not just on one Sunday.
Easter is coming! Easter is also here. You and I are Easter people! May our lives show that Jesus is alive and at work always.
Grace and Peace,
Leigh
