Defying expectations

This was it, my first Holy Week in a pastoral role. Right as things were picking up, a campus shooting at FSU rocked my beloved Tallahassee community. They say two things can be true, and I find myself in a place of feeling shocked and not shocked by it. America, after all, is a gun. And so I preached about our expectations and the resurrectional power in defying them. Here is the end of today’s sermon:

I look at the world and fully expect there to be more shootings by radicalized white supremacists with access to guns. I expect there to be more war, more domestic violence, more mass incarceration, more deportations, more poverty, more executions, more plundering of Creation.

I am so tired of living this way. I am so tired of these evidence-based expectations about the world.

But the resurrection proclaims that these forces of death, however mighty they seem, do not have the last word. That it does not have to be this way.

Hear that Good News today.

We are invited to change the narrative. We are offered possibilities that defy the current world order of violence and imperial domination. The resurrection asks us to look beyond what we have grown used to and come to expect, to instead see God’s newness at work around us and in us. It calls on us to join in the work of that newness.

So if you want to really believe in the resurrection, in those times when it feels hard, practice it. Don’t bog yourself down in questions of belief or disbelief; go and do, and I trust the belief will follow. Easter people, believe the Good News by being the Good News. Show the world that Christ is risen today. Practice resurrection.