No, I haven’t gotten my days mixed up.

I want to wish you Happy Eastertide (“Easter time”) that started on Sunday, April 21, 2019 and ends on Sunday, June 9, 2019.

We may be done with Easter Sunday services and our Easter egg hunt. We may have put away our chic Easter clothes and meaningful decorations. But Easter isn’t over, at least not for millions of Christians throughout history and throughout the world today.

As a child, I always thought of Easter as a one-day affair. Dressing up in new clothes for church, singing joyful songs in worship, celebrating Easter dinner with extended family-are all traditions I looked forward to every year. But, I must confess, as a kid Easter didn’t hold a candle to Christmas. After all, the winter holiday meant lights and decorations, Christmas carols, the acting out of the nativity story, and, most of all, presents under the tree.

Easter was fine . . . but Christmas was the ultimate holiday.

Yes, both holidays happened on a single day but Christmas celebrations lasted for weeks with all the festivities leading up to it, including annual trips to La Salette Shrine.

It wasn’t until I was in seminary that I learned that some people – including many Baptists, consider Easter to be, not a day, but a season of the year, a seven-week season at that.

Easter Sunday, from this perspective, begins a season in the church year that ends with Pentecost Sunday, the day Christians remember the great outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the earliest believers of Christ.

And, for the early Christians, gathering on Sunday was itself a weekly remembrance of the

resurrection.

May we continue to think deeply and broadly about what the resurrection of Jesus means for us, and share the hope of the resurrection with those in our world.

Gracefully yours,