Dear friends,
Happy Easter! Here we are celebrating the Mystery of Easter, and I’ll remind anyone who says they “missed Easter” by being out of town on April 1st that Easter is a season, not a day, and that it lasts all the way until Pentecost, mid-May. So there will be plenty of opportunities to celebrate together, even if you didn’t hear the jazz band or find the eggs. We celebrate not just the story of Easter but what it means to live in a resurrection kind of world — what it means to come more fully to new life, and what it means to be liberated from the ways of sin and death.
In just a little over a week we will be taking the youth to Tahoe for a retreat on relationships, consent, and healthy sexuality. This may seem like a completely different topic, but I think it meshes well with Easter. I think Eastertide in general is a great time to talk about relationships and sexuality. Stay with me here. Whatever it was that actually happened at Easter, we know that the resurrection stories, as they were passed down through the early church, created for people a celebration of the victory of life over death, light over darkness, hope over despair. And so the resurrection stories speak deeply to us whenever we feel stuck in the ways of darkness and despair… and what better place could there be to shine some life-giving light than on our sexual lives, with all the secrecy and shame we internalize from society, and with the dark shadows cast by all the objectification, exploitation, and inappropriate behaviors we see in the world around us. My hope for next weekend at Tahoe, as the advisors and youth and I seek to teach and learn the skills of building healthy and intimate relationships, is that we would be empowered by the freedom of Easter. In resurrection we find the promise that nothing – not even death – can separate us from Love. And this promise gives us the existential security we need to do risky things like loving other human beings.
And I want to share some of this exploration with the rest of the congregation as well… even with those who might feel settled, as if we didn’t need to ask big questions any more about ourselves as sexual beings. That’s a pleasant privilege one might have at times in one’s life, but there are those who can’t afford not to think, reflect, and talk about sexuality — teenagers come to mind, as the questions are thrust on them daily by their peers or by their own bodies. Those who struggle to find acceptance and self-acceptance come to mind too, especially those whose gender expression, sexual orientation, or relationships don’t easily fit in the boxes made by society. Similar to the ways in which white people need to talk about race and cisgendered men need to talk about gender, we all — whether we have “skin in the game” for personal reasons or not — need to discern how we can be liberated from the dark, restrictive, and death-dealing ways of our society, and live in the light of God’s love and freedom. In the gospel of John, Jesus says “I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly.” I wonder what new life might mean for us — in all aspects of our lives — this Easter.
Every Blessing,
Talitha