Season of Easter
Happy Easter! Wait, you might be thinking, Easter happened a couple Sundays ago. Let’s recall, Easter is a season, not just a day when we have the second-best attended service of the year, an egg hunt for the kids and an amazing potluck. During this Easter Season we do our best to remember and live in the Resurrection, for fifty days.
A couple of other days of remembrance and action happen during the season of Easter, one secular and the other from our Anglican tradition. Earth Day was observed on April 22, and we have a little-observed (let’s be honest, rarely if ever observed) three-day event on our Episcopal calendar, Rogation Days, the three days prior to Ascension Day, May 30.
Rogation days were observed the past in a ceremony of “beating of the bounds”. The people would process around the boundary of the parish and pray for its protection in the coming year. Where are the boundaries of St. John’s Parish? Is it our block in downtown Jackson? Teton County? The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem? Maybe the Earth?
And how do this season of Easter, Earth Day, and Rogation Days converge for you? Henry Karlson wrote a thought provoking piece in Patheos.com entitled Earth Day and the Resurrection.
Earth Day, in the shadow of the resurrection, serves as a great way to remember Christ’s work to bring all creation together as one and elevate it into eternal glory. Earth Day allows us not only to give thanksgiving and praise to God for the glory of his creation, but also to reflect upon what we, as Christians, are expected to do for the earth itself in the light of the resurrection. The earth, and the whole of creation, has groaned for the revealing of the children of God, of those who take their vocation of being caretakers of the earth seriously. In Christ, in the restoration of humanity, we not only can take up that vocation again, we are expected to do so. For it is in this way we will reveal we are truly children of God.
As Jackson Hole warms and greens, and we take to the mountains and rivers to enjoy God’s creation, let’s find new ways to care for this amazing and beautiful place that is God’s gift to us. This Earth, our island home.
Peace, Brian
