Back in the early days of the pandemic lockdown, when we kept at least a fifty foot radius between us and any other humans we might meet, my husband started taking walks. Long walks. Make sure you put your sunscreen on because you’d regret it if you don’t walks.
He did this especially if he had something he wanted to think about and needed space to turn it over in his head for a while. Because our kids woke up and began to talk and there was noise in the house for the next 13 hours until their bedtime.
One day on said walk, sunscreen liberally applied, he was working on his Easter sermon. (We are both lead pastors of our church.)
What were we going to do as a church community to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection on tiny Zoom screens from our individual living rooms for Easter 2020? How is Jesus’ life good news when the headlines are filled with stories of death?
He’d gotten about half a block from our house, when this big shaggy dog came bounding past him. No one was around, so he kept walking. But this dog just kept trotting along, and Curtis kept trying to think about Easter, but the dog kept following. He found himself more and more thinking about the dog and where it lived, and what he should do about it, and less and less thinking about Easter.
Eventually he stopped and looked at the dog’s tag, which fortunately had an address on it of a house that was a couple blocks back and around the corner. He turned around, took the dog back, and as he walked up the driveway, a woman and boy popped their heads out. They said thanks and he went on his way, glad that he could finally think about Easter now!
But then Curtis started wondering, why did that just happen? Like, it’s not everyday that a stray dog comes following him on a walk. In fact, that hadn’t ever really happened before. That’s interesting.
Maybe it was just due to the fact that he’d been reading a lot of Jeremiah at the time, a prophet who does things like find deep theological meaning in a tilted pot of soup, but Curtis started wondering whether there might be more there than met the eye. And as he reflected on the whole experience through that lens – what might this have to say to us about Easter? – he kept coming back to the specific words the woman had said when he brought the dog back up the driveway, “He just keeps getting out, and I don’t know how he does it!”
“He just keeps getting out, and I don’t know how he does it!”
That pandemic Easter our church talked about this:
the Bible is the story of how God just keeps getting out.
The forces of death, evil, despair, oppression, sickness, chaos, destruction, over and over think they’ve won, they’ve forced God in, God can’t possibly escape, and then life springs forth again.
That’s the story of our history as the people of God, and it continues to be. Over and over, even in the darkest of days, God leaves the forces of darkness to grind their teeth and say:
“Life just keeps getting out, and we don’t know how it does it!”
That’s the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection that we’re exploring in this final newsletter of this Easter series. (Next up: reader submitted ?’s—ask yours via the link at the bottom of the newsletter!)
Life just keeps getting out. And as a way of approaching this most important of Easter truths, let’s remember six key stories, and then connect it to the kids in our lives.
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