For this Holy Week, we have no questions for you or your church board. No agenda. No “let us go and do.” Instead, just a joyful reminder of the source – and the enduring hope – of the work we all share, from Frederick Buechner’s 1966 sermon collection The Magnificent Defeat (reshared recently by Plough):
Anxiety and fear are what we know best in this fantastic century of ours. Wars and rumors of wars. From civilization itself to what seemed the most unalterable values of the past, everything is threatened or already in ruins. We have heard so much tragic news that when the news is good we cannot hear it. But the proclamation of Easter Day is that all is well. And as a Christian, I say this not with the easy optimism of one who has never known a time when all was not well but as one who has faced the cross in all its obscenity as well as in all its glory, who has known one way or another what it is like to live separated from God. In the end, God’s will, not ours, is done. Love is the victor. Death is not the end. The end is life. God’s life and our lives through God, in God. Existence has greater depths of beauty, mystery, and benediction than the wildest visionary has ever dared to dream. Christ our Lord has risen.
We wish you all the blessings and hope of Easter in your important work of ministry.
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