Razzle Dazzle is Too Short-Lived

It was Easter Sunday, March 26, 1989. I was five months sober, only four months out of inpatient treatment. Back in the month in the treatment center a fellow clergy who was in recovery at the time stopped to see me. As he was preparing to leave he got this smile on his face and simply said, "Just wait until Easter. You won't believe it."

Needless to say I had no idea what that would mean. I understood as another pastor that he meant resurrection- and probably even my feeling of resurrection. But there was no way I could have any inkling of what that would feel like. I thought of that a couple of times in those intervening 4 months but the preparations for Lent, Holy Week and Easter slipped them beyond consciousness.

Being a good Moravian church we went to the cemetery for our Easter Dawn service. We actually held the whole service there led by our brass, reciting our powerful creedal liturgy. Only there in the cemetery could we make that truly radical statement that death- the seeming victor- was forever defeated.

I remember a sunrise that year. That doesn't mean it was there. It might have been cloudy, but I don't think so. But as it stays in my memory nearly 20 years later, the sun began to peek above the farmland to the east as the band stopped playing its prelude hymns.

The Lord is risen
The Lord is risen indeed.

And it sent (and still sends) a chill up and down the spine and deep within my slowly blooming soul I knew it was true. True beyond words or explanation or doubt.