It is Easter Eve and all through the world pastors are hoping.
Pastors are hoping to wake up tomorrow feeling healthy and joyful and refreshed and ready for a long stretch of a morning. (Woe to pastors’ kids or spouses who keep them up too late tonight.)
Pastors are hoping to be overwhelmed today by imaginative ideas to preach a familiar story. (Or, if they are a J on the Myers Briggs like me, their sermons are finished and printed and quietly waiting on their desks for a final round of editing tomorrow morning.)
Pastors are hoping for safe gatherings in church buildings, or where such gatherings are not possible, they hope the disappointment felt in the congregation can somehow be lifted by this familiar story.
Pastors carry an abundance of hopes today in the middle of The Great Three days. Yesterday we remembered Jesus’ death on the cross. Tomorrow we remember the stone was rolled away. But today, if we live into this story there is nothing to see here but a regular cave tomb that a wealthy person let the Jesus followers borrow. There was so much worry among the powers of the day that a Jesus follower would steal his body and claim he had been resurrected, that they somehow set an unfathomably large rock in front of the entrance to the tomb.
I searched for a photo for this post of a tomb sealed by a rock, but I could only find pictures of a tomb where the rock had been rolled away. We move so quickly to Easter Sunday that we cannot even picture the tomb with the rock still in place. It is not hard to hope in what we know will happen at the tomb. It is freaking hard to hope in the everyday.
Do we dare hope to find the perfect marriage partner? Or hope the marriage partner we chose will be the one we can stick with? Do we dare hope our kids will not get into mounds of trouble? Can we hope the career we chose will work out? Or to retire while we are healthy enough to travel? Or that we will have enough money to retire? Do we dare hope the world isn’t falling apart? (This is a question asked every day there has ever been a world.)
What is a hope you have that you find freaking hard to hope?
A pastor’s job is to be preposterously hopeful. We have this great big hope that in the end, after marriages break or don’t, after kids disappoint and don’t, after jobs disappoint or don’t, after retirement or not, after the world actually doesn’t fall apart, it will all work out. The story that matters has been written. The enclosed tomb we look at today rolls open tomorrow. Allelu…. oops. Too soon.
Everyday hope is indeed hard. That I do know. I also know tomorrow morning we will proclaim with hope together in Christian churches around the earth and who knows where else the one hope we know. The stone moved. There is new life for you now and in the end, as long as you don’t try to move the stone all on your own. Then you can only hope for a backache.
Lisa Lewton 