An Easter Pastoral Message

The tomb is empty.

I want to start there, because everything I have to say depends on it. As a fact that the first witnesses couldn't quite believe themselves — they ran to see, and even then stood there confused, struggling to take it in.

We are in our sixth week of war. As you read these words, an American service member is missing somewhere over Iran, families on multiple continents are waiting for news that may not come, and the Strait of Hormuz — a narrow channel of blue water most of us have never seen — is shaping the price of groceries, the cost of heating our homes, the anxiety that hums in the background of daily life. Here at home, we are stretched thin by division, by uncertainty, by the feeling that the ground has shifted and won't tell us where it's going.

I am not going to tell you it's going to be fine. I don't know that it is.

The Resurrection was proclaimed into a world that looked a lot like ours. Occupied territory. Political violence. People sorting themselves into factions, calculating who was with them and who was against them. Fear behind locked doors. The disciples weren't huddled in that upper room because things were going well. They were there because the world had just done its worst to the person they loved most, and they were terrified it would come for them next.

And into that room — through the locked doors, John tells us, not around them — came the Risen Christ. Not with answers to every political question. Not with a battle plan. With wounds still visible in his hands and his side. With breath. With the word peace.

The Resurrection does not ask us to look away from the suffering in Iran, in Lebanon, in the streets of our own country. It does not hand us a permission slip to stop caring about the missing, the grieving, the displaced. The risen Christ kept his wounds.

The Resurrection refuses to let death have the last word.

In a season like this one, that is everything. The powers of this world — fear and violence and the hunger to dominate — believe that death is the final argument. That if you threaten it, or deliver it, you win. Easter is the universe's answer to that claim. Easter says: you are wrong.

So we hold on. We hold on to each other. We hold on to the one who came through locked doors and breathed peace into terrified people and sent them out — not because the world was safe, but because they were not alone.

And we are still here. Still gathering. Still breaking bread and saying each other's names and showing up for the people the world would rather forget. That is not a small thing. In the face of everything trying to grind us down, it is an act of defiance. It is Easter lived out loud.

The tomb is empty. They couldn't stop it then. They cannot stop it now.

A Blessed and Holy Eastertide to you and to all you love —

Fr. Lee+