You Want This in Your Easter Basket

Can I start calling you my Little Marshmallow Peeps yet!?

MAY WE HAVE A MOMENT OF PRIMAL SCREAMING, DARLINGS? Because it’s Palm Sunday this coming weekend!!!!!!! How did that happen? How is it that every year, PeaceBang is increasingly shocked by how fast Easter comes along… and it’s late this year! Really late! Like, so late that there might not even be snow on the ground in New England!

I should mention as an aside that my congregation is doing a family Passover Seder this year and that your family-friendly haggadahs are most welcome in my in-box, as I am working on that this week.

SO. Auntie PeaceBang wants to remind you to Take Care of Yourselves in the next two weeks. Start today. Clean out the fridge and pack it with nourishing goodies. Take the dry cleaning in. Get the housecleaners in or enlist Significant Others and children to help. Clean off your desk. Tackle Mount E-Mail so that you can spend a half an hour a day in silent prayer or reading and preside over the Holy Week with your awe and faith wrapped around you like a cloak. Put a fresh vase of daffodils on your desk.

Do you deeply believe in the Resurrection? Do you have no doubt whatsoever that God can do a new thing with us? Do you know that the Risen Christ is with us until the end of time? Are you faithful to the promise that he will not leave us alone, that he has sent a Comforter?

Sweet people, I beg you to make time to refresh this faith in your heart, mind, body and soul in the coming days so that you can effectively and energetically lead your people through the depths of all that we must encounter during Holy Week and come out radically rejoicing on Easter morning.

I have been reading Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination (second edition) and RILLY RILLY want to recommend it with stars and balloons and confetti. Get it now so that by Easter week you can be reading passages like this, from the final chapter:

“Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet, and more than a prophet, I argue, practiced in most radical form the main element of prophetic ministry and imagination. On the one hand, he practiced criticism of the deathly world around him. The dismantling was fully wrought in his crucifixion, in which he himself embodied the thing dismantled. On the other hand, he practiced the energizing of the new future given by God. This energizing was fully manifested in his resurrection, in which he embodied the new future given by God.”

Okay, so there’s our charge, kitty cats: Embody the new future given by God.