Afterglow

     What do you do after the party is over?  What is the time after Easter for, really?

    Like, what did the disciples do with Jesus for six weeks after the Big Morning?  Read Torah
in the dark while he was standing there?  Get him to microwave their fish?

    Most years I’ve been around church since I can’t remember, the weeks after Easter were the
starting gun for the great summer “WHOOSH!”  Folks start disappearing to the ranch, the beach,
the mountains and the prairies or just anywhere that’s not here.  Preachers and diehard noncom
Sunday School teachers expect to be frustrated and just put up with it.  On the whole, I see the
wisdom of “fallow time” in the summer to let folks rest up and be ready for a lot more activity
the rest of the school year. But hey, this year they put Easter up there around St. Paddy’s day!  
What’s up with that?  Who needs a six month fallow time?  Folks are going to starve in a hard
season if we don’t keep farming the farm more than that!

    Lord knows, it is a hard enough season.  If politics, primaries and juicy scandals don’t test
your faith, watching the “Is-it-a-recession-or-something-worse?” roller coaster will sure do the
trick.  Don’t even ask about church headlines….  If the best we can do for people facing the
daily news and the grind of life is tell ’em to take an aspirin and call us in the fall, we may as well
shut down for good.

    But that is emphatically not the Message.  We are in the business of learning to fall in love
with life again forever.  We have met the Author of Life, and he turns out to be bigger than all
the things that drag us down, even and especially Death itself.

    So the Disciples spent those latter days with the Master upon the earth stoking their fires and
preparing to change the whole world.  If we got the word about Easter morning, we are too.  If
we didn’t get the word, it is N-E-V-E-R too late.  Easter season is about turning disciples into
apostles, learners into teachers, students into public professors.  Basking in the afterglow of a
great victory is only the beginning of an even more glorious campaign.  

    Your mission and mine is to make old St. Mark’s into a place that glows with the Risen
Christ.  That starts with each of us, putting away old hurts and old fears, and admitting once and
for all that Jesus at Easter blows all that away.  No fear, no hesitation: Christ is still risen!  And
so are we.

                                                                                    In Christ,
                                                                                    Frank  Fuller+
Rectitudes~~~
  Thoughts for April, 2008