Dear Friends of Second Church,

I don’t know if you’re aware of the Hallmark Channel, the people who make those Christmas movies where the tough-as-nails-executive-on-her-way-up gets dispatched to some small Vermont town in order to buy out the last local Christmas tree farm, only to fall in love with the farmer and his dog, ditch her stilettos, get a warm hat with a pom pom, save the tree farm, and live a small town life, instead. 

Well, good news.  

They’ve discovered Easter. 

One of their new offerings is called “Easter Under Wraps” — and it’s really pushing the envelope.  

It’s about a woman who goes undercover to figure out what’s hurting sales at her family’s chocolate conglomerate…only to fall in love with the Head Chocolatier of a smaller rival company.  

You can look this up. 

I don’t know if I’ll be getting to it this year, myself — if you do, I’d love a review.  (And it’s ok to like it. I bet I will when I see it.) 

However, I will say that it misses something important about Easter, and by that, I don’t just mean the whole part about Jesus and the resurrection.  (Although I’m getting to that.) 

More basically, it shoehorns Easter into yet another performance of the same old rom-com plot—it’s just like Christmas, except it’s spring, with the holidays providing a generic sort of setting rather than much by way of a theme.  

In that, it misses just how disruptive the story of Easter is and always has been.  

Easter is not just a happy ending — it’s like a low-budget Halloween movie that suddenly becomes an epic…or even a musical.   

It is puzzling and glorious and determined to show us the world in an entirely new light — the light of the one at its center — and also to invite us to join the story rather than just passively take it in.  

There’s nothing “same old” about it, or about any life that seeks to put Easter at the center.   

It means that simple explanations and cozy plots will never quite do, anymore.   Life is just too interesting and precious for shallow treatment — and so are our neighbors, our enemies, and while we’re at it, Creation.  

As we gather to tell the story once again, may it shake us up, shake us awake, and shake the foundations of a world so hungry for truth and so desperate for healing.  

Happy Easter.  

See you in church….