Rev. Dr. Devin Strong

Spirit of Peace Lutheran Church

Sometimes Easter comes all at once.

Occasionally, God breaks into someone’s life and helps them take radical turns toward grace and servanthood. Christians in general, and preachers in particular, love these stories, stories like this one.

Mary Clarke was once a Beverly Hills beauty, comfortable with luxury and a weekend beach home. Then a divorce caused her to toss out her middle-aged American life and start again — in the late 1970s, she crossed the border into Tijuana. According to The Washington Post, she traded her sparkling gowns for the black habit of a Catholic nun, her English for Spanish, and her Los Angeles home for a Mexican prison cell. For the next three decades, this woman was known as “Sister Antonia.” She was the Prison Angel of Tijuana, a tiny woman who ministered to the miserable. Her mission was practical, focused on providing aspirin, eyeglasses, false teeth and bail to petty thieves and impoverished convicts. She washed and prepared for burial the mutilated bodies left in gutters by drug gangs. She sang in the prison chapel to lift the spirits of the depressed. She counseled rapists and drug dealers, as well as prison guards.

She brought Good News to the poor, in surprising ways, just as her Messiah did before her.

We need these stories to remind us that our risen Lord is still capable of big, dramatic transformations in people’s lives.

That’s because most of us don’t get to see that firsthand. Most of us are not addicts living on the street or Beverly Hills living beauties, living lives of the rich and shameless. Neither are we dramatically transformed sinners now accomplishing saintly miracles for some of the world’s most downtrodden people. Most of us are ordinary sinners doing our best to live out our Easter lives in ordinary ways.

For many, Easter comes slowly, little by little over time, making it much harder to see and to celebrate. Some of us even wonder if our powerful, extravagant God is working in our lives at all. If you resemble this description, then the resurrection account found in Mark 16:1-8 is for you.

In this account, there is no sighting of the risen Lord, no weeping Mary who gets to touch Jesus, and no exuberant followers running from the tomb to tell the Easter story with joy. There is just a “messenger” (angel or mortal?) who tells three women that Jesus has been raised. They, in turn, run from the tomb in fear and don’t say anything to anybody. In Mark, Easter takes time.

Fortunately for us, we have that time.

Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists all celebrate Easter—not just as a single day, but as a whole season, lasting for 50 days from Resurrection Sunday to Pentecost.

We need the Easter season and more because the Almighty rarely works on your schedule or mine.

Here’s your Easter challenge: keep your eyes open for God at work in you and around you in small ways. You don’t have to double your church offering or quit your job to run a homeless shelter. Transformation is not all your doing, anyway, but let Jesus’ resurrection do some business with you. Let its hope and healing seep into some of the cracks in your life.

Let the Lord’s death-shattering love for you touch your spirit. You might just be surprised at when and how Easter comes.