Easter Sunday 2024
It is said that every generation has a defining moment. For my generation, it was likely the Cuban missile crisis and its threat of starting a global thermonuclear war. A close second was the decade of the 1960’s and the massive social changes which that decade encompassed. Those defining moments changed us. Shaped us. Molded us. And in doing that, they impacted how we changed, shaped, and molded the next generation.
There are also defining moments in our lives that seem to be anchors around which our personal future changes. A few come easily to mind. Having children, for example. It has been said that the mystery of life is not that adults make children, but that children make adults. Becoming a parent draws out of us gifts and talents and depths of character that we never knew existed. Talents and insights that lay hidden, dormant, within – until they were drawn out of us.
These personal defining moments shape us as an individual. These generational defining moments shape us as a people.
I think it can also be said that every encounter with Divinity has a defining moment as well. One that changes, shapes, and molds the awareness of God of all who follow.
The Resurrection was just such a moment.
It seems to me that at a certain point in our spiritual evolution, we were prepared and able to experience the insight to see God more clearly as the creative force behind all of existence. And after revealing Godself in the form of a human, in the life and the death, of Jesus – God blows away our small and petty understandings about God, and about life itself, in the resurrection.
There can be no clearer sign of God’s revelation of love, and of the transcendent nature of creation, than in the miracle of this moment. It is why you and I are believers. It is why we are Christians. It is why we are Catholic. And it is why Easter, the celebration of the resurrection event, is such an important event that we celebrate it. Every. Single. Sunday.
The resurrection event transformed the world in all it’s dimensions.
Rippling backward in time, we see how our increasing spiritual awareness pointed to God’s self-revelation through the Messiah, the Christ. Rippling forward in time, you and I, and countless generations before us, have experienced more profoundly the closeness of God in our lives, and the very real presence of God’s Holy Spirit.
But even more important than this is our awareness of the spiritual domain within which you and I exist. For once we see and recognize the breaking forth of the spiritual realm into humanity, once we become aware that the spiritual domain is not only real, but is indeed our destiny, then there is no more thinking about life, and our life, in the same old way. There is no going back to old ways of being.
Once we experience the outpouring of love that our God shows in the resurrection, there is no going back to old ways of loving. Once we recognize the tender compassion that our creator has for us, then there is no way to be for us other than to be as tender and compassionate to others as our God is to them. Once we have been touched by the heart and hand of God, then there is no going forward without being a channel of Gods love and peace to others.
My brothers and sisters, You and I stand at a rebirth moment. A resurrection moment. For when we see that in our lives on earth we are surrounded by, immersed in God’s creative Spirit … For when we see that our lives are destined to be eternal, then we stand on the verge of being transformed into the people we want to be, the people we hoped to be, the people we were created to be. We stand on the verge of becoming a people, resurrected.