My parents were Christian. I grew up attending church every Sunday. I went to church camp every summer. I met my wife at church camp and we were married in a church. I graduated from a church-related college. I graduated from a Christian theological seminary. i was ordained and served for 42 years as a Christian minister. After a little more than a year of retirement, I was called to serve as an Interim Minister of Faith Formation in a Christian Church. I have lived my life inside he Christian church.

Easter remains a mystery to me. I don’t fully understand it. There are, however, some things that I have learned over the course of my life that have led me to an emerging sense of the many meanings of this holiday.

I was joking with our grandchildren about Easter last night, trying to get them to give me a sense of their understanding of the holiday. “Let me see,” I said, “Easter is when a big rabbit rides in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer that lands on your roof and the rabbit comes down your chimney with presents to put under your Easter tree.” “No!” our kindergartener shouted. “That’s Christmas and Santa Claus.” “Oh,” I continued, “I know. Easter is when you lose a tooth and a Rabbit comes and puts money under your pillow.” I was declared wrong again. “That’s the tooth fairy.” I tried silly expressions for Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Birthdays, the 4th of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Kwanza. “Easter is when the Easter Bunny brings you a basket with eggs and presents and candy!”

The twelve-year-old, who had been sitting in the recliner reading a collection of Calvin and Hobbes Cartoons chimed in. “I can’t remember the whole story, but isn’t Easter about Jesus dying and all?” I gave a quick summary of Holy Week to the children, but I suspect that not much of the story sunk in. It may be that it takes a lifetime of faith and practice to begin to grasp the deepest meanings of Easter. It is that sense of the challenge of understanding resurrection that has taught me to encourage my Christian friends to recognize Easter as a season and not just a single day. In the traditions of the Christian church, Easter is 50 days long - the longest season of the Christian year except Pentecost or Ordinary Time. I regularly tell people because our understanding takes time.

Even when we look past all of the Easter egg hunts, rabbit costumes, baby chicks and other symbols of the holiday, there are a lot of Christians who would describe Easter as “the day when Jesus was resurrected from the dead.” Some will go on to say, “He appeared to his disciples before ascending to heaven where he is seated at the right hand of God ruling over the world until he comes again in glory.” All of that is based on reading and studying the Christian gospel, but in many ways it falls short of the full meaning of Easter. Far too many Christians imagine the Easter story as being about what happens after a person dies and visions of gilded heavily glory when it is much more about Christ being alive in our lives calling us to continue his work of love, compassion, and justice. The resurrection isn’t just some ancient historic event preserved for theologians to discuss and use as an example of the impermanence of death.

Resurrection is about experiencing the resurrected Christ in the way we live our lives every day.

It is a challenging concept and it is not easily learned in a single day.

We know that the full meaning of the resurrection was slow to develop in the experiences and minds of the first disciples just by reading the small number of stories of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances that are told in the gospels. Jesus closest friends do not recognize him at first. They try to return to their former vocations as fishers. Their awareness of the resurrected Christ comes slowly. Like a lot of other stories in the Bible, it takes a disciplined practice of reading the stories over and over again to discern the depth of their meaning. We are like those early disciples. We experience joy in the recognition of the presence of the living Christ, but we don’t always understand the full meaning of the holy presence. Resurrection is a concept that reveals itself slowly. It is an experience that takes a lifetime to understand and even then we don’t fully understand.

After all of these years, I am still wrestling with my Easter faith. Each year I try to submit to meaningful disciplines through the season of Lent, stretching my understanding and my faith, challenging myself to new ways of expression. Each year I anticipate the coming of Easter, but try to dwell with the experiences of grief and loss that are in Holy Week before I dive into Easter Celebrations. Each year I find myself continuing to discern how I should respond long after the chocolate rabbits and candy eggs have been consumed.

After church today, we’ll gather for a family dinner. We’ve planned a celebration menu that includes a special cake that the children will help to decorate. Family dinners are among the highest forms of celebration in my life. I absolutely love it when we gather around the table, hold hands, and repeat the blessing prayer that I learned as a very young child. I absolutely love it when old and young recite the memorized prayer together. Even the baby joins by holding hands. I wouldn’t trade the food on the floor around the high chair, the fairly common spilled glass, the multi-topic discussions, the sudden outbursts of song, and the sense of love and belonging for anything.

Like so many things that I deeply love, I don’t always understand. I can’t come up with a formula for a family celebration. I just know that when we gather around the table, I am deeply aware of the presence of so many who are no longer alive, but who are present in our celebrations. As the letter to the Hebrews states, we are “surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.”

I’m willing to give understanding time to emerge.