Good morning church family,

Springtime seems to provide a ready illustration for the message of the Easter season. Bulbs long buried in frozen earth miraculously come to life as the ground thaws under a warming sun. Barren tree branches which rattled like dry bones in winter’s withering wind, are now budding with the promise of greens; pastel and verdant. The sun, which for months seemed unwilling to rise much above the horizon, is now soaring overhead with a light sufficient to lengthen the day. And so on and so on. I think you get the idea.

But despite all the easy associations made between springtime and salvation, the change in seasons is actually ill-suited to illustrate the redemption of mankind and can actually harm the presentation of the gospel. Think of it – that garden plot in your backyard never wanted to stop producing last fall. Whose fault was it that its offerings moldered and yellowed in the dim light and dampening coolness of autumn? The plot certainly wasn’t to blame, for its soil was every bit as rich frozen as it was warm. Nor can you blame the seed, the spade, or the gardener; for they all remained willing and able. No, perform an autopsy on your garden and you’ll soon determine that the cause of death was entirely environmental. The sun simply lost its strength, the wind turned bitter, and the mercury dropped. Ice soon came to officiate at the funeral; burying the bereaved garden under a blanket of snow. There was simply nothing your garden could do about it. It just lay there all winter, dead and gone.

But then comes spring and that plot, which was presumed dead, miraculously returns to life. What happened? Did the garden confess its sin and find repentance? Did it purpose in its heart to no longer give life to the weeds that had been allowed to grow along its rows? Did it pledge to support the growing of all good things; welcoming fruitful roots into the heart of the plot? Or was there just a change in seasons? Isn’t the springtime salvation of our gardens an entirely environmental phenomenon? Wasn’t the garden a passive participant in both its death and its resurrection?

It’s the world that wants to take the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and reduce it to a tulip’s rise out of the muddy earth. It’s the world that wants to ignore the problem of sin and the threat of hell to focus instead on the promise of a universal newness of life. The world can’t conceive of a Savior who would beg forgiveness for those endeavoring to murder Him. Pagans don’t find strength in a Savior’s surrender to death nor do they understand the existence of a love powerful enough to upend the grave. They hardly even see the need for such a Savior. No, the world is much more comfortable imagining salvation to be an entirely benign and natural process.

Heinrich Heine, the famous nineteenth century poet and essayist, declared on his deathbed what an alarming number of people believe throughout their lives; that, “God will forgive me. It’s His job.” I’ve ministered to hundreds of grieving families who find a drunken comfort in this kind of thinking as they gather to lay their loved one to rest. I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve waved off my offer of the Gospel in those moments; deciding instead to cling to some saccharine pap written in flowery italics on the back of the parlor’s memorial card. “Just as winter can’t last forever because the sun is sure to shine;” they say in not so many words, “I know my loved one will be in Heaven. I just know it.”

What a deadly assumption. I know that none of you would allow someone to jump from a burning plane with only an umbrella to unfold. “Hold on,” you’d surely say, “you don’t think that umbrella will carry you safely to the ground, do you? I don’t care what you may have seen Mary Poppins do – trust me, that parasol’s a death sentence. Here,” you’d say with earnest desperation in your eyes, “take this parachute instead. Please!”

We should have a similar response whenever we hear anyone going on about how, in the end, life will surely overcome death as springtime invariably overcomes winter. We should arrest anyone striking out onto that broad way which doesn’t lead to life but instead to eternal destruction. “Hold on,” we must say in those moments, “you don’t think there’s salvation down that wide and yawning way, do you? Here,” we must offer in genuine earnestness, “take Jesus Christ instead. Please!”

It will be so good to gather together tomorrow morning – for the gloominess of Friday night will be gone and the sad longing of Saturday will have passed; with hope and joy rising to take their place! We’ve run to the tomb to see the good news for ourselves and now we run from there to tell it to the world. He lives! May the Lord, mighty God, bless and continue to keep us!

• Pastor Tate

Good morning church family,

The closer Kelly got to school, the more aware she became that something wasn’t right. The long ribbon of sidewalk she traveled every day to Evermonde High was usually filled with other kids like her. On any normal school day, scores of teenagers could be seen trudging to class; bent over under bulging backpacks, walled up behind ear buds, and chewing breakfast bars with sleepy, bovine expressions on their faces. But today, Kelly walked the sidewalk all alone.

As she rounded the corner of Lyons and Lafayette, Kelly caught her first glimpse of the high school that lay a couple-hundred yards down the street. The broad and sloping concrete stairway that led up to a large covered portico near the school’s entrance was absent its usual flood of climbing students. Looking at the pedestals sitting beneath the school’s large and stately columns, Kelly saw no one sitting down to scribble out his homework assignment or to scroll on her phone. Most striking of all, the line of school buses that usually stretched down Lafayette like a locomotive idling in the depot yard, was nowhere to be found. The proud school building looked almost sad and hollow. “What’s going on?” Kelly wondered to herself; standing still now and trying to process the sight. “Am I way late? Way early?”

Kelly had been out sick the day before. “I had a high fever,” she suggested with furrowed brow, “but I wouldn’t have lost complete track of…”

Just then she noticed Mr. Saunders, Evermonde’s principal, coming down the school steps. Kelly quickly continued her procession, hoping to get within earshot of the administrator before he was out of sight. “Mr. Saunders,” Kelly called out as her principal hit the bottom step. He didn’t hear her but it didn’t matter. He’d turned and was walking toward her.

“Good morning,” the principal said once their paths eventually crossed. He had looked up from a folder full of paperwork he was studying and saw Kelly walking toward him as though she was headed to class. The principal couldn’t hide the quizzical expression on his face.

“Good morning, Mr. Saunders,” Kelly said somewhat sheepishly. It didn’t appear that Mr. Saunders had recognized her. “What’s going on today? Where is everybody?”

“Oh – there’s no school today,” the principal said; a bit too eagerly. “Today’s a holiday – it’s Good Friday.”

“Oh yeah, of course,” Kelly replied; lying. She had no idea what a “Good Friday” was. Since moving from Chicago to Louisiana the previous fall, she’d been initiated in all kinds of odd and curious things. “Well, thank you Mr. Saunders,” Kelly said, looking down and pulling her phone out of her back pocket. “I guess I’ll just head on back home then.”

“Okay, sorry about that,” Mr. Saunders said, smiling and picking back up his gait. “See you on Monday!”

Kelly suddenly felt conspicuous standing there with her backpack on and dressed in school clothes. She now noticed all the squinting glances she was receiving from drivers of cars passing by. Eager to get off the main road, Kelly took a side street she was fairly sure would wind around through neighborhoods and dump her out closer to home on Lyons. The sun was coming up now and the mid-April morning in the Bayou was quickly turning warm. Feeling hot, Kelly spied a concrete picnic table sitting under a large magnolia tree near the entrance to a cemetery. Feeling hungry all of a sudden, she decided to sit for a spell and have her lunch for breakfast.

The late-morning air was still cool under the shade of the magnolia and the light breeze clapping the leaves overhead felt refreshing on Kelly’s neck. She sat on the table’s top and let her feet rest on the bench below. Looking out over the cemetery, she breathed out a long sigh and let her shoulders drop. Her heart was turning light as she began to glory in the unexpected holiday. As she ate her turkey and cheese sandwich and sipped on her iced coffee, a meditative mood settled on her head. The quiet stillness of the cemetery park was proving peculiar food for her soul. But the faint hum of the morning traffic back on Lafayette, had her desiring to press further into the park in search of a sanctity she couldn’t articulate but knew she needed.

Leaving her backpack on the picnic table, Kelly ventured off to walk among the gravestones. As she nibbled on a granola bar and listened to the ice clink in her cup, she took note of some of the dates on the markers. This was evidently one of the older cemeteries in Houma. Most of the lifespans reported on the stones had been lived out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With few exceptions, the granite, marble, and limestone markers leaned at funny angles; their crooked stances made more pronounced by the straight trunks of the pine, oak, and elm that flanked the ends of every row. Black mildew and flowering fungus covered the tops of the stones and were spreading down their fronts and backs. Kelly noted some of the olden-sounding names. There was a Hortense married to a Clarence, a Millicent wed to an Everett, and an Adelaide joined in conjugal bliss to a Jarvis.

But more than the funny names, curious symbols, and interesting histories untold between the hyphenated dates; what most caught Kelly’s attention were the oddly written epitaphs carved neatly into the stone on the front of the graves. Most of the inscriptions appeared to be religious in nature; seeming to Kelly to be medieval in their language and forms. She mostly just read over them as novelties; not really reading for comprehension. But when she came across the grave marker belonging to Marguerite Cormier, something that had been carved in the stone instantly captured her attention. Marguerite, who had died when she was only seventeen, had the following epitaph written under her name and above the symbol of a cross:

On Good Friday

He proved His love for me

On Good Saturday

My debt was paid in full

On Good Sunday

His resurrection secured an eternity for me

Kelly stared at the stone for a long time; reading and rereading its message. Looking around at all the graves within sight, she saw lots of crosses, crucifixes, and crowns of thorns. Over and over, Kelly saw the name of Christ carved out on the stones. Did Good Friday have something to do with Jesus? Kelly had a sense that it did. “If Jesus is the ‘He’ in Marguerite’s message,” Kelly wondered in her heart, “how did Jesus prove His love for her on Good Friday? And how did what happened on Saturday and Sunday give Marguerite the hope she seemed to have?”

Sitting carefully on the top of Marguerite’s gravestone, Kelly stuffed the granola bar wrapper in her front pocket and pulled out her phone. Into the search field on her Google app, Kelly typed: “what is good friday”.

We’re looking forward to gathering together tomorrow morning to hail the King who conquered death on our behalf. Praise Him!!! May the Lord, mighty God, bless and continue to keep us!

• Pastor Tate