Alleluia!

Rejoice!

Here at the ARUSA blog, we’ve done a series or two on waiting, because our two seasons of waiting – Lent and Advent – are important parts of the Christian year. They call us inward, to reflect on the processes of the earth and our role within them.

However, we haven’t yet done a series on the aftermath of these seasons. These two important holidays, especially Easter, draw us back out into the world with new eyes and hearts. And they beg the question: what now?

This Easter, we have assembled a group of writers to reflect on that “what now?” question. For the next seven weeks of the Easter season, we will be leaning into the implications of resurrection for creation care and the ways we honor and interact with the world around us. We hope that it spurs your own Easter-inspired labors of love, and that you will join the conversation. What is inspiring your Easter creation care?

 

By Bethany Winz

In Lent, we walk through the desert on our way to the cross. We may take up a new discipline to help us focus our vision. We enter into sorrow and struggle and self-denial. We run our fingers along the jagged edges of our world and our lives, feeling the broken places.

We hear news that the last male northern white rhino has passed, signing the death certificate for yet another species. The plastic levels in our oceans keep increasing—just last month, a study found that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is now more than 600,000 square miles (twice the size of Texas). Globally, pollinator health is declining as these important insects face habitat loss and heavy pesticide use.

We move through the season, and we grieve all that is not what it should be. We wonder what hope and joy could look like here.

And then it is the first day of Easter.

For seven weeks, we greet each other each Sunday with a reminder:

Alleluia! Christ is risen.

The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Resurrection tells us that the darkness is not the end of the story. We read the news. We feel the sorrow. We wonder where the hope is.

And yet.

And yet, out of death, there is life.

Out of God himself present with humanity, the kingdom begins to break through.

In the midst of all that is not as it should be and all that is not as it will be, we lean into the hope of a Savior who has overcome death, hell, and the grave. The one who is coming back to make all things—even the rhinos and the oceans and the pollinators—new.

Alleluia indeed.

Bethany Winz is the Program Coordinator for Nashville A Rocha & A Rocha USA. She is a graduate of Trevecca Nazarene University’s Social & Environmental Justice program. A lover of good tea, good books, and small things, she dreams of building her own tiny house one day.