Easter has always been one of my  favorite times of the year. One of my favorite parts of preparing for Easter was dyeing Easter Eggs. My mother would gather us in the kitchen and we four kids would tussle over dyeing eggs in a rainbow of colors.

My favorite church part of Easter growing up was going to Sunrise Services. Some years we lived in places where the snow was still on the ground, other years we stood barefoot in the sand and watched the sun rise over the ocean as we cried out “The Lord is risen! The Lord is risen indeed!”

I miss those days of being a little kid standing with my mother and father, watching the sunrise, singing “Jesus Christ is Risen Today!” I knew right down to my toes this day was a very special day. I knew Easter made a difference to my mom and my dad and it felt special for me as well.

If someone had asked me for a specific answer of what that difference was, I am not sure I could have given a theologically correct one – nor do I think it would have mattered. All that mattered to me was that I was in a special place – surrounded by people I loved and people I knew loved me – there before God in the early morning all because God loved us. My childhood sense of family and being loved being bound together with Easter has never left me.

There’s a good reason for that. Relationship and love are the very heart of the Easter Message. God so loved the world. God’s love for creation is so wide and so deep that it overcame the worst that humanity could dish out. Not even death could contain God’s love. And out of God’s love there is rebirth and life; new life for Jesus and, through baptism, a  new resurrected life for each of us.

One thing we need to realize is that Easter, this central celebration of our faith is relational. It is not just about Jesus. If it were, we would be saying, “Good for you Jesus, but what about us?” Easter, resurrection and rebirth is about life, all of life, every life, yours and mine included.

What Easter proclaims is simple: Life goes on. It goes on because God’s love wills life to go on. Not even death can stop life after Easter. That is the reason we can say at every funeral, “All we go down to the dust yet even at the grave we make our song alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!” (BCP p. 482).  Because of what God does on Easter - Life goes on. All of life. Every life. Yours and mine included.

That’s why as a child I instinctively connected Easter to my family and God. Easter is about life, about feelings, Easter surges through us, around us and beyond us, Easter is about letting us know how to live life fully, it is also an affirmation of the value of life.

Easter repeats the judgment on life that God made in the creation story. You remember how Genesis tells us that God made a bit of the universe and then said, “That is good!” Then God made a little more and said, “That is good.” When God had made the whole thing God said, “That is very good!” We are part of that goodness. Life is so good that God finds it worth dying for. That is part of what the cross means.

And part of what it means to you and me is that we are carrying in our bodies, our minds, hearts and souls something marvelously precious, wonderfully made and endlessly good. We make incredible messes of life, but that does not change the God’s loving judgment.

As parents and children, friends and neighbors and all the other people with whom we share life, we stand already having been judged loved by God. We are some of God’s best work and it is good—very good. Because of Easter we have somehow been found worthy of God’s grace and love. Because of Easter we have been given the gift of a life that goes on and is capable of triumphing over every form of death and diminishment.

Take a deep breath—there it is—life itself, given you by God. And it is good! Easter is about a miracle—the miracle of God and new life triumphing over every form of death. We don’t have to believe in new life, we each have one. We don’t have to question the power of God’s love; every one of us is running on it. We don’t have to wonder about miracles because we are each miracles.

Easter is more, of course, much more. Some of the meaning of Easter we can only dimly comprehend, most of it is well beyond our understanding. But in the center, near the heart of God there is a simple song: Life goes on. Live God’s gift fully because it is good, very, very good indeed.

Fr. Dewey +