Transcript:
Greetings beloved in Christ. I hope that you are well on this day and I hope that you are experiencing the gifts of these 50 days of Eastertide. These 50 days remind us that you and I are called to live resurrection lives.
I want to share with you some words from a great book that I picked up a couple of years ago. It's called Living the Resurrection by Eugene Peterson. It is one of Peterson's last works before his death. And in it, he reminds us that our job as Christians is to live resurrection life, not just in and around Easter, but all the time. To that end, I want to share a little bit from this book with you in my video today.
"We witness to life in the presence of death. This is what I want to insist upon in our Christian identity and in our Christian growth and formation as Christ is being formed within us. Our life, our formation by resurrection is bound up with maintaining the fundamental connection between God and life, the land of the living. We are here to give witness to where life comes from, to how it develops, to how we enter it. And when we notice that language or perceptions about life are being disconnected from the living God, degenerating or disintegrating into the dead language of God talk, we protest.
Our lives as followers of Christ are rooted in the truth, that what God wants for us is to be fully human. What God wants for us is to experience life and to have life and to live life, real life, abundant life. And we do that amidst the death centeredness and the crucifying realities of a broken world. And while we may not do it perfectly, our call is to daily live into this truth, that God wants us all to have life, that our lives, the life of the world we inhabit, the life of our planet is connected to God's life. God is our source.
And God's life flows through God's love that we have known in Christ Jesus. When times are hard, when hope is hard to find, it is for us to remind ourselves that being resurrection people means that we recognize the truth of crucifixion. We recognize the truth of oppression, of horror, and of death. And yet, and yet, we witness to the power of life, the life that God gives us, the life that God wants for us, the life that you and I, by God's grace, will live." Blessings.