A Beautiful Mess

In case you missed it (ICYMI), here is Jimmy's reflection for the Easter season...

I started a piece a few minutes ago using the metaphor of the Easter Brunch dining room table, and it was pretentious and smacked of privilege. Not that it wasn’t resonating for me because I’m a little pretentious, and I’m most certainly privileged. But as I read it over, I realized that it softened the chaos of our current time. It was syrupy and adorable, and Easter is most certainly neither of those things, though we have added that veneer, for sure.

So, let me just tell it like it is. We find ourselves in a turbulent era. We have been on the receiving end of a devastating global pandemic for over two years. Many of us have lost our lives to COVID-19. Some of us have struggled to recover. Others of us have dealt with enormously challenging feelings of isolation, in hopes of remaining healthy. Our domestic political scene is a complete disaster any way you slice it, from whatever aisle you reach across to begin the slicing. Extremism is influencing American culture, the likes I’ve certainly never witnessed. And, over the course of the last two months, one of the world’s remaining superpowers, Russia, has launched an all-out war on its neighbor, our friend, Ukraine wreaking massive destruction, committing serious war crime amidst rumors of genocide. We’re a mess, y’all. We’re a mess.

Easter, too, is a mess. A beautiful, gorgeous mess—infusing and identifying chaos ever present in creation since the near beginning. Easter fails and collapses and disconnects humanity from God and God from humanity with such epic force on Friday that children’s bibles illustrate a distant cross with shadowy figures in order to shield these little ones from a story that plays out around them every day. In creation, and here we are in it, there is chaos so dark that it can take our breath away.

And, then, with the break of the morning, hope emerges amidst the chaos. To be sure, hope doesn’t cancel the chaos. I LOVE that Mark’s Gospel ends in fear and confusion because fear and confusion is still there, still here to be reckoned with alongside the indescribable, unfathomable GLORY of love come again in the Risen Jesus.

We’re a mess, y’all. We’re a mess covered in, marinated in, infused with GRACE, with LOVE, who we know to be God.

It is a HAPPY EASTER. It always is.

Love,

Jimmy