Sunday Worship Service ~ 10 a.m. ~

Sunday School ~ 10 a.m.

(children come to church with family)

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It is my pleasure to welcome you to our Cross of Christ Lutheran Church website.

God’s Blessings to you as we celebrate the Easter Season.

Rev. Joanne Bond, Pastor

RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD, EASTER DAY  A Happy Beginning

            There’s a way of talking about Easter that makes it sound a bit like a surprise happy ending that brings a scary and suspenseful storyline to its resolution. On one level that’s true: Easter is a day of joy! Death is defeated! It is the feast of victory of our God.

            But if we think of Easter only as the final chapter in God’s story of salvation, we may leave Easter Sunday worship the same way we leave a movie theater after a satisfying film: we take a deep breath, we let out a sigh perhaps, we say, “Well, that was great,” and then we go back to our everyday lives. We go back to our grief. We go back to our fear about the future. We go back to a world where evil still seems to win.

            Easter is something different entirely. Easter is not a momentary interruption in the general order of things, a temporary reprieve from the heaviness of death. Far from wrapping things up or simply undoing the pain of Good Friday, the resurrection of Jesus Christ opens up a whole new way of living. It is not a “sigh” but an earthquake!

            “But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them,” Luke writes (24:11). It takes time for the full magnitude of the empty tomb to settle in. Like the apostles upon hearing the women’s news, we can scarcely imagine what it means for us that God’s love is stronger than death, and that every aspect of our life together—indeed, the entire cosmos!—is changed by this good news. That’s why the church gives us fifty days to unpack this mystery, not just a single morning.*

            But one thing is for sure: Easter is not a happy ending so much as it is a new beginning. We who are baptized into Jesus Christ are free to live with death in the rearview mirror, no longer afraid of its power. 

*The 2024 Easter Season is the period of fifty days spanning from Easter Sunday (March 31) to Pentecost Sunday (May 19).  Each Sunday of the season is celebrated as a Sunday of Easter.