When Hope Feels Distant
There's something about late March / early April in Longmont that perfectly captures the tension between seasons. One day, you're enjoying sunshine and the first blossoms of spring; the next, you're scraping ice off your windshield during a surprise snowstorm. Spring seems to arrive in fits and starts, with winter reluctant to release its grip completely.
Our lives often follow similar patterns. Hope and despair live as neighbors, not neatly separated chapters. We experience moments of beauty and promise interrupted by unexpected losses, disappointments, or simply the grinding weight of everyday struggles. Many of us know what it's like when relationships fracture, when grief arrives uninvited, or when dreams we've held close suddenly seem impossible. These moments reshape our landscape, leaving us wondering if spring will ever truly come.
In these moments, when hope feels like a distant memory rather than a present reality, ancient celebrations like Easter can seem disconnected from our lived experience. The promises of new life and resurrection might sound like merely pleasant religious metaphors rather than something relevant to the brokenness we're navigating.
Yet it's precisely in these tension-filled spaces—between winter and spring, between brokenness and beauty, between what is and what could be—that Easter's message has always made its home. The question isn't whether Easter can eliminate all our struggles, but whether it might offer us a different way to inhabit them.
What if Easter isn't about escaping our brokenness but transforming how we experience it? What if the resurrection story speaks directly to those moments when hope feels furthest away?
The Disappointment of Easter
If we're honest with ourselves, Easter can be profoundly disappointing.
Not just the commercialized version with its pastel eggs and chocolate bunnies, but the deeper promise at its core. We hear about transformation, new life, and victory over death—yet we still live in a world where brokenness seems to have the upper hand. Bodies still fail us. Dreams still die. Even in our beautiful Longmont community, pain and loss remain stubbornly present despite Easter's annual arrival.
This gap between promise and reality isn't new. It was woven into the very first Easter. Before there was celebration, there was crushing disappointment. The earliest followers of Jesus had invested everything in him—their hopes, dreams, and futures. They anticipated a dramatic victory, a triumphant revolution. Instead, they watched him die a humiliating death, their hopes buried alongside him.
The gospel accounts don't sanitize this disappointment. They show us disciples hiding behind locked doors, women weeping at a tomb, travelers on the Emmaus road lamenting, "We had hoped he was the one." Their disappointment wasn't a failure of faith—it was an honest response to broken dreams.
Perhaps we've experienced something similar. Maybe we've prayed for healing that never came, waited for reconciliation that remains elusive, or simply wondered why our faith hasn't transformed our lives as dramatically as we once expected. These disappointments aren't peripheral to the Easter story—they're central to it.
What makes Easter distinctive isn't the absence of disappointment but its refusal to let disappointment have the final word. The Easter narrative suggests that God works not by circumventing our disappointments but by entering into them, transforming them from within. Before resurrection comes death; before celebration comes grief; before joy comes profound disappointment.
Easter whispers that our disappointments, however real and lasting, might be holding space for something new—something we couldn't have imagined while trapped in cycles of anticipation and letdown. Perhaps our disappointments aren't detours from the path toward hope but the very soil where a different kind of hope takes root.
Can Death Lead to Joy?
It's a strange question to ask. Death and joy seem like opposing forces, incompatible realities. We instinctively protect ourselves and those we love from death. We mourn when it arrives. We resist its finality. The thought that death might somehow lead to joy feels almost offensive—a minimizing of profound loss.
Yet the natural world tells a different story. Each autumn, leaves flame brilliantly before dying and falling. Seeds disappear into dark soil before emerging as new growth. The snow that blankets our trails must melt away before wildflowers can bloom. These cycles suggest that endings and beginnings are mysteriously intertwined, each making way for the other.
What makes Easter revolutionary isn't simply that it observes these natural patterns but that it claims something far more stunning: death itself was reversed. When Jesus' followers discovered his tomb empty and later encountered him alive, their grief shattered into astonished joy. These weren't people predisposed to believe in resurrection; they were people who had abandoned hope, hiding behind locked doors, certain that death had won. Their transformation from despair to overwhelming joy wasn't based on a comforting metaphor but on an encounter that changed everything.
This event suggested something profound: a power greater than death had entered our world. While everything in our experience points toward entropy and ending, resurrection points toward renewal and beginning. Jesus' followers discovered that the God they followed wasn't merely offering comfort about death but demonstrating authority over it—bringing life precisely where it seemed impossible.
The resurrection invites us to see our world differently—to recognize that deterioration and death, while real, aren't the most fundamental realities. There exists a more powerful, generative force capable of bringing unimaginable joy to places of loss and brokenness, places we might otherwise give up on.
A Better Beauty
What if Easter offers more than just another spin around the same wheel of fortune and misfortune? What if it promises not just continuation but transformation?
Many spiritual traditions offer some concept of renewal. Reincarnation suggests we return to life in new forms, continuing our journey toward enlightenment. Secular perspectives might emphasize how we live on through our influence or in others' memories. These views provide comfort by suggesting that endings aren't permanent—life, in some form, continues.
But Easter presents something radically different. Jesus' resurrection wasn't just a return to the same life he had before. His followers encountered him transformed—recognizable yet different, bearing the wounds of crucifixion yet somehow beyond death's reach. This wasn't reincarnation into another fragile existence, but transformation into something altogether new.
This distinction matters profoundly. Systems of eternal return ultimately trap us in the same world of suffering, offering new chances but within the same broken patterns. Even in the most optimistic views, we're caught in cycles where beauty remains vulnerable to destruction, where joy always carries a shadow of future loss.
The resurrection of Jesus points toward a different endpoint—not endless cycles of birth and death, but a world fully restored and transformed. Early Christians didn't simply celebrate Jesus' individual victory over death; they saw it as the first fruits of a cosmic renewal. His resurrection was the down payment, the initial evidence of a coming reality where all creation would be liberated from decay.
This hope isn't abstract escapism. It speaks to our deepest longings—for relationships healed beyond just temporary re-connection, for justice that truly rights wrongs rather than merely punishing them, for beauty that isn't constantly threatened by destruction. It acknowledges that while we can find profound meaning and joy in this life, our experience remains haunted by a sense that things aren't as they should be.
Easter suggests that this haunting isn't mere wishful thinking but recognition of our true destiny. The beauty we cultivate now—in our relationships, our creative work, our communities—isn't just temporary resistance against inevitable decay. It's participation in something that will ultimately be fulfilled beyond our imagination.
This is the better beauty that Easter reveals: not just moments of wonder within a world of sorrow, but a coming restoration where, as one ancient prophet wrote, "God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore."
Our present experience of beauty—whether in Colorado's spring sunshine, in moments of reconciliation, or in creative endeavors—offers small tastes of the feast that Easter promises.
A Table Where Everyone Belongs
The cosmic hope of resurrection becomes wonderfully ordinary around a table. When early Christians gathered to celebrate what they'd witnessed, they didn't create philosophical discussion groups—they shared meals.
Their tables welcomed people into communities where doubts, fears, and griefs found space alongside the profound resurrection hope and newfound joy. What united them wasn't perfect understanding but a shared encounter with resurrection that was gradually transforming how they experienced their struggles.
This tradition continues at Redeemer Longmont, where our parishes each host Easter feasts as tangible celebrations of resurrection. These gatherings aren't for those who have completely figured out hope, but for all of us learning to hold our brokenness in light of Christ's resurrection promise. And even though we bring our fragile and broken selves to the meal, we do so as a proclamation that sadness doesn't get the final word.
There's something profoundly defiant about celebration in a world still marked by suffering. Every shared meal, every moment of laughter, every act of welcome becomes a declaration that evil has not and will not win. When death itself has been defeated, our response can only be extravagant celebration—feasting with wild abandon, laughing with unreserved joy, loving with courageous hope. These celebrations aren't excessive; they're only striving to be proportional to the victory they acknowledge!
This extravagant feasting isn't denying the reality of brokenness but responding to it with determined hope. It's refusing to let disappointment define us. It's embodying—in small yet meaningful ways—the joy that Easter guarantees.
Our Easter tables are spaces where the future breaks into the present—where those carrying burdens find moments of unexpected lightness, where our deepest aches are greeted by even even deeper comfort, where the beauty of belonging offers a taste of the greater beauty to come.
You're welcome at this table. Not because you have it all figured out or because you're free from doubt, but because Easter has always been for people in the midst of their doubt, their brokenness, their hope.
Your (Unfinished) Resurrection
We all live in the middle of our stories—our lives remain works in progress. Moments of resurrection break through, yet brokenness persists. Glimpses of a better beauty appear, but we still navigate disappointment. We experience healing in some areas while carrying wounds in others.
This is the honest reality of living between Easter and its complete fulfillment. Resurrection has begun but isn't yet finished. We're participating in a story larger than ourselves, one that's still unfolding.
Your story—with its particular disappointments, deaths, and hopes—matters deeply in this larger narrative. The brokenness you carry isn't separate from Easter's message but central to it. The questions you hold aren't obstacles to faith but invitations deeper into it. The hope you're struggling to maintain isn't foolish optimism but recognition of a reality that sometimes feels hidden but remains more true than all that contradicts it.
Easter invites us to live as people who know the end of the story while still experiencing its difficult middle chapters. It offers not escape from our complexities but a different way to inhabit them—with stubborn hope that sees beauty emerging from brokenness, with courageous love that welcomes others in their incompleteness, with quiet joy that celebrates even small resurrections while awaiting larger ones.
This Easter, you're welcome to join our community as we navigate this tension together. Whether at our Easter service or around our parish feast tables, you'll find people asking similar questions, carrying similar burdens, and discovering similar hope. Not because we have all the answers, but because we're learning—sometimes stumbling, sometimes celebrating—what it means to live as resurrection people in an unfinished world.
Your resurrection story is still being written. It includes chapters of disappointment and chapters of unexpected joy. It acknowledges death's reality while refusing to give it the final word. And it invites you to discover how the resurrection of Jesus might transform even your most difficult chapters into stories of beauty you couldn't have imagined.
