Hey everybody this is Steven, and Christ is Risen!
Those are definitely the most exciting and joyous words ever spoken!
Christ was down in the tomb, but He's Risen!
He was dead and He's alive!
We normally think for everyday existence as life
Eating
Breathing
Stuff like that
But God has promised us so much more!
We call it everyday existence living,
But a better word is probably surviving.
We eat and then we get hungry again.
We take a breath, and then we have to take another.
These are the things we do to postpone death
and death is the inevitable end of what we call life.
We call it life, but it isn't really
True-life is everlasting.
True life is a blessing that has a beginning
and no end.
And that's a gift we can only receive from God
because it's a gift that only God has to give.
It's a gift God gives us in the Church.
It begins when we're baptized.
When we descend into the water, we descend with Christ into the tomb.
And of course the tomb isn't the end of the story.
When Christ emerges victorious from the tomb,
victorious over death,
He pulls all humanity out with Him.
And when we emerge from the waters at baptism,
we emerge with Him in His Resurrection.
We emerge with Christ
because we're part of Christ; because we're branches connected to the vine,
receiving life from the source.
Because, we're the Church, the Body of Christ.
And that's incredible thing about our relationship with Christ.
You see, Christ doesn't simply give us stuff
Yes He gives us all the blessings in our lives, all of creation
but He gives us something worth more than all of that put together
He gives us Himself
Christ, the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity
took on all the brokenness that is ours.
All the pain and suffering and sin and death, and He did that by becoming one of us;
By becoming fully human.
And in return He invites us to become part of Him;
members of His Body, so we can have everything that's His!
Joy and peace and life eternal.
When we happily cry out that Christ is Risen
it's not just Christ.
That invitation exists for all of us.
We're all made in the image of Christ
and that image is perfected when we become one with the original.
with Christ Himself.
This is true life! This is our salvation!
God the Father loves us so much
that He gave us His only begotten Son
so we could become His sons and daughters.
Death closes our eyes and buries us in darkness.
But God has opened our eyes, so we can see His eternal light.
Let's make sure that we stop surviving
and start really living,
So that when people look into our eyes they don't just see the broken version of ourselves;
the broken self that's doomed to end up in the tomb.
Instead let's make sure that they see who we really are, who God created us to be!
So that when they look into our eyes they see that
it's no longer the broken versions of ourselves who live,
but its Christ who lives!
Truly lives in us!
What else can we say?
Christ is Risen,
and so are we!