by Mindy Misener
To say I was excited to go to church on Easter would be an understatement. By eight in the morning I’d laid out clothes for both me and my daughter (my husband was spared my outfit services). Typically, we're part of the crowd that slips in moments before—or, gulp, after—the opening bell, but this time we actually got ready early enough that we had time to take family photos before we headed to the church. Despite masks and the altered seating arrangement, the whole service felt startlingly—and delightfully—familiar.
How fitting that Easter would be the first day in over a year that Pilgrim offered an in-person service. How fitting to be able to spend the day meditating on hope and renewal. Even the weather obliged, with its unseasonable warmth and bright sun.
Yet all last week, as I anticipated Sunday’s service, and afterward as I went home, my thoughts strayed from the traditional themes of hope and renewal and landed, over and over again, on the role of the witness. After all, the Easter story is not only a story of resurrection. It’s also a story of regular people who went looking for the one they loved. Of regular people who did not find him where they expected him to be. Of regular people who went around for days, then weeks, murmuring in corners, and huddling at the sides of roads. Can you believe it? But how? What does this mean?
The Easter story as we know it depends on these regular people and on their shared bewilderment. The resurrection could have gone any way God wanted it to. It could have been a quiet, low-key thing, like a black-tie dinner with light piano tinkling in the background. Or it could have come with all the glitz and noise of a Super Bowl halftime. But instead, the resurrection rollout was a chaotic affair. Actually, from a marketing perspective, it was kind of a disaster. Few knew what was going on. Fewer still believed what they heard, at first.
It’s absurd, isn’t it, that God would leave those regular people, with all their hang-ups and confusions and conflicted feelings, to each other? That God would entrust those regular people with the mystery of the cross, and the meaning of resurrection?
I believe that the story of the resurrection is not a puzzle that was solved all those centuries ago. Rather, it’s an ongoing mystery, one we bear both individually and in community. The mystery of the resurrection calls on us to continue witnessing—not so we can convince others to confess x, y, and z, but so that we can learn from the humbling bewilderment of the cross and the empty grave. So we can gather and ask, Can you believe it? But how? What does this mean?
— Mindy Misener teaches creative writing at Montana State University
and serves as Pilgrim's 2021 stewardship chair