Where Has Life Won This Year? -- Newspaper Column

 “The strife is o’er, the battle done; the victory of life is won,” Those are the opening words to an Easter hymn first written in Latin in the 17^th century. Whatever other meanings one may find in th Easter story I think they all tie back to this sentiment. When God raises Christ from death God breaks the power of death. As Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

I sit to write this on Easter Monday. Yesterday morning I, and millions of other Christians around the globe, joined our hearts and souls and voices to celebrate the great mystery of an empty tomb and a Risen Christ. We gathered to proclaim the wonderful news that life has won. Even after the powers of Rome had done all they could to try and squelch the rabble-rouser from Galilee, even after they had executed him as a threat to the Pax Romana, they had still lost. God had played the final trump card, God had, as the saying goes, the last laugh. Life proved to be more powerful than death, hope more powerful than despair, peace more powerful than violence, and love more powerful than fear.

Can we believe that? To be honest there are days when I look at the last sentence of that paragraph and I have to wonder if those things are really true. After all a quick recap of the news headlines at any time in my life might easily suggest that death, despair, violence, and fear are more powerful and more prevalent than love, peace, hope, and life. As we celebrate Easter and the victory of life over death where do we see signs of that victory?

I think part of the problem in answering that question is that so much of the time we aren’t directed to look for the signs that life is winning. I know that I spend too much time looking for the problems in the world. We look for threats to our sense of well-being. I know that in the name of self-protection I often try to figure out all the things that could possibly go wrong. Too often the end result of that is that I can be led to despair and fear instead of love and hope. That is the path toward the victory of death.

In Luke’s Gospel the messengers from God speak to the women who were brave enough to go to the tomb and ask “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”. Where we look and what we look for matters – it largely determines what we will find. In a world full of reasons to believe in the power of death and despair, fear and violence let us commit ourselves to look for signs that peace and love, hope and life are truly more powerful. If we look for signs of life that wins we will find it. If we don’t look it may get washed away in the flood of other stuff.

So when we read or watch stories about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, let’s also look for stories about weddings in the midst of the war or other signs of hope in the midst of the disaster. Read another story about high inflation, then read two stories about people pooling resources to help those most vulnerable to higher prices. Watch a video about the opioid crisis then watch a video about harm reduction and addiction treatment programs where people are helping others make it through. Let’s look for and retell and highlight the stories that bring us hope and remind us that life is breaking forth all around us.

Then let us live into that promise of new life. As Easter people we need to embody the victory of life and hope, peace and love in the world. What are the ways you can bring more hope, more love, more peace, more life into the world around you? What are the ways you, hopefully unintentionally or unknowingly, take those things away from the world around you? Jesus proclaimed that the Reign of God was real and alive in our midst. Jesus challenges us to live by different rules than the empires of power. In raising Jesus from the dead God shows us that the way of Jesus, the way of the Reign of God, is the way of LIFE. If we believe in the resurrection we have no choice, we have to strive to live by the rules, to follow The Way Jesus laid out.

When we do that we continue to proclaim that life, hope, peace and love will win in the end. Christ is Risen! Hallelujah!