Champagne for Breakfast
A devotion written and given in 2016 to the Mothers of Preschoolers group of First Presbyterian Church of Granada Hills—edited for Easter 2021.
Oh goodness, I need Easter. This past week has been one of those weeks for me. Even though it’s spring our family has still been battling sick kids--first the 4 year old, and now the 1 year old--which we all know means little sleep for mama as we listen to coughing, refill humidifiers, check fevers, administer tylenol at 3 am and hold and soothe and rock at all hours of the night. This past Friday would have been my Grandma’s 86th birthday, her first since she passed away in August and over the weekend my dad and some of his siblings were at her home in Colorado beginning to sort through all their belongings. I kept getting texts asking me to think of specific things I wanted from her home--things no one else would also want to avoid family drama. It’s amazing how quickly grief comes back to take hold of us again isn't it? Today is my Papa’s 86th birthday--his first to celebrate without her in his new assisted living home. Yesterday was our 7th wedding anniversary but given the sick kid issue we haven’t had milk in the house for three days let alone anniversary cards or time to get away to celebrate. I woke this morning to the news of terrorist attacks in Belgium and also to discover that not only are we out of milk we were also officially out of coffee. Yes friends, I need Easter. And perhaps a trip to the grocery store.
When I used to teach the 4 year old Sunday school class, we taught them the Easter litany of Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed! And we explained that Easter was so amazing, what happened with the resurrection of Jesus was so huge and so world-changing that we couldn’t celebrate it all in just one week, it took the church 7 weeks to fully celebrate and experience Easter. These 7 weeks are to be a season of feasting, of joyfully announcing that He is Risen! After the 40 days of Lent where the word “hallelujah” is traditionally left out of Christian worship services, the Easter season is a season of proclaiming hallelujah “let us praise him!” to one another.
But for many of us, and I’m putting myself in this camp, Easter is a tough one to wrap our minds around. For many of us who have grown up in the church we’ve heard this story so often that the incredible amazement of the women at the tomb, of the disciples in the upper room, of the men walking the road to Emmaus when Christ appeared among them, that amazement and wonder is lost a bit. Yes, it is good news, but for many of us, it’s old news.
The closest I have come to the astonishment of the disciples when they heard the good news of Jesus’ resurrection happened years ago. It was Easter Sunday while I was in college and I was standing in the fellowship hall at my church in Seattle chatting with our associate pastor, and dear friends who had their two year old son with them. His little toddler Sunday school class had been given balloons to help celebrate the day and this little guy proudly held onto the string of his red balloon. A few minutes into our conversation there is a piercing wail from him as the red balloon floated out of his hands and to the top of the fellowship hall 12 feet above our heads. He began to sob. His mom picked him up and said “oh sweetie, I’m so sorry, that is so sad!” Our associate pastor said “hey no problem pal, don’t worry! I’ll go get a ladder, we’ll get your balloon back.” The mom called after our pastor and said “please don’t! We believe in letting him experience the consequences of his actions, it’s okay he’ll get over it!” And our pastor turns around, looks at her and says “it’s Easter, my friend. There are no consequences.”
There are no consequences. The reality of Easter--Christ risen, death defeated, sins forgiven, the evil we see all around us overcome, no consequences—is so incredible, in the original sense of the word, that it’s beyond believable. This is why I need more than just Easter Day. If Easter were only a single day, I would never have time to let its incredible reality settle over me, sink deep into me.
I would trudge through my life with a disconnect between what I say I believe about resurrection and how I live (or fail to live) my life in light of it. I’ve alluded to the fact here before that I’m one who likes to try & earn God’s favor. I am the oldest child who never rebelled, unless you count going to seminary as a woman in my very traditional Lutheran family as rebellion. I am a rule follower, I struggle mightily with the concept of grace given, not earned. I hate asking for help and if someone does help me I immediately want to know what I can do to pay them back. I am one of those strange people who has always liked Lent. In some ways I think deep down I am tempted to believe that if I practice some new spiritual discipline each year, or if I give up something particularly challenging for me to let go of for the 40 days of Lent that God might be impressed with my commitment to him. Cognitively I know that’s not true, but every year I get a sense of excitement about what I might give up that year or how I might observe Lent. The Easter season? That’s a lot tougher for me. A season specifically devoted to feasting and celebrating and letting go of burdens and recognizing that living a life of faith is an invitation to a life of radical freedom and abundance--albeit not necessarily in the way the world defines those terms. Thanks be to God, our church fathers and mothers had people like me in mind when they decided that we simply cannot celebrate Easter in a single day, or even a single week. No, they decided, we need 50 days, seven Sundays, between Easter and the day of Pentecost when we celebrate the birth of the Church, to even begin to plumb the depths of this event. They knew that the riches of this most important event in all of history cannot be experienced in a single day.
Consider these words, from N.T. Wright:
“Easter week…ought to be an eight-day festival, with champagne served after morning prayer or even before, with lots of alleluias and extra hymns and spectacular anthems. Is it any wonder people find it hard to believe in the resurrection of Jesus if we don’t throw our hats in the air? Is it any wonder we find it hard to live the resurrection if we don’t do it exuberantly in our liturgies? Is it any wonder the world doesn’t take much notice if Easter is celebrated as simply the one-day happy ending tacked on to forty days of fasting and gloom?
…we should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways: in art, literature, children’s games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts, anything that comes to mind. This is our greatest festival. Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don’t have a New Testament; you don’t have a Christianity; as Paul says, you are still in your sins…
…if Lent is a time to give things up, Easter ought to be a time to take things up. Champagne for breakfast again—well, of course! Christian holiness was never meant to be merely negative…. The fifty days of the Easter season, until the ascension, ought to be a time to balance out Lent by taking something up, some new task or venture, something wholesome and fruitful and outgoing and self-giving. You may be able to do it only for six weeks, just as you may be able to go without beer or tobacco only for the six weeks of Lent. But if you really make a start on it, it might give you a sniff of new possibilities, new hopes, new ventures you never dreamed of. It might bring something of Easter into your innermost life. It might help you wake up in a whole new way. And that’s what Easter is all about.”
One of our church fathers, John Chrysostom called this season the great “feast of faith.” So friends, as we continue living this great feast of faith may you take up something full of joy simply for the pleasure of it. May you pour a glass of champagne at breakfast, toss your hat into the air and remember, Christ is risen, He is risen indeed!
