Easter Sunday, April 24, 2011: Acts 10:34-43; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-18

I was in Nashville with colleagues, and a few of us had made our way to the Bluebird Cafe, which might be called the mother church for country music songwriters. A quartet of men and women sang and played guitar for about 80 people from 9 p.m. to around 11. The music was beautiful, and I wandered out of the café with the honest testimonies of human nature and destiny stirring within me. Later I reflected on the recurring themes in the songs: missed opportunities, love taken for granted, the grind and monotony of work, failed relationships, the destruction of substance abuse, broken hearts.

The themes in the best of our indigenous music—blues, country, jazz—have a way of flowing from Saturday night into Sunday morning, as the Saturday night crowd brings its stories into the Sunday congregation. The hope is for a word that transcends all of the pain, confusion and boredom, or at least makes some sense of it. The Christian story offers that hope as it carries us along this same continuum, from Saturday night to Sunday morning, from the descent into hell to an empty tomb and a risen Lord.

"So if you have been raised with Christ," Paul writes to the Colossians and to us, "seek the things that are above." The church reads this passage at Easter for at least two reasons: it seems to be rooted in baptismal instruction, which was embedded in the vigil of the ancient church, and it is filled with the imagery of resurrection. In a concise way it connects the reality of the first Easter with the necessity of a present Easter. The past flows into the present moment, and all of this is located in the word above.