Christos anesti!

"Xpistos anesti!" is the greeting for this morning, "Christ (is) risen!"

"alethos anesti!" the response, "truly risen!"

Linda's specialty in younger and middle years was flowers, flowers and imagination, she's a floral artist, studied and practiced in workshops summers when we lived in Pennsylvania and Apalachicola, and brought the exquisite art into her life, our life, to do magnificent and subtle and moving and fun floral arrangements at home and at church, churches we served. She says it's the last Time, quite exhausting at this age, but she did the flower arrangement on the outside wooden cross at church yesterday, people will see it this morning. With rain warnings for today, we brought the cross inside, but it can go back out. Can and may.

She also made a whimsical arrangement for a spot at church, but it was already "taken" so we're happily keeping the Easter bunnies on the dining room table here at 7H. Kristen and Malinda are coming for Easter dinner, and it's perfect.

Predawn, up just after three o'clock with a bothering dream fresh in mind, a quick step outside to find out why it's so light: the moon in the clouds, "the moon was a ghostly galleon," it went, "tossed upon cloudy seas" and sure enough, I live there now.

Back to Happy Easter, our own opening faith acclamation this morning is "Alleluia! Christ it risen!" and "The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!" Easter is Christianity's central observance, the foundation of it all, that as early as the Sunday morning after Jesus' crucifixion people began to say they had experienced him alive, incredibly not just a ghost, they said, but alive, risen from the dead, and apparently the message began immediately to spread; in Time even to Saul the Persecutor having the experience and taking up the cause.

Paul, who wrote first, in the generation before even Mark's gospel, although stories were spreading and perhaps even being written down (see the tentative Times at https://www.earlychristianwritings.com). Paul knows nothing about an empty tomb or other details that appear later in the gospels; only what he has been told, and his own conversion experience that John Bunyan (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners) so longed for but never experienced. Paul himself is clear though (Acts, Paul on the Damascus Road is Luke's story, not Paul's) that Jesus appeared to him, why should I doubt Paul when I've had, and admitted many times over the years, my own experience - -

We love the gospels' stories about early Easter morning, and we'll hear at least one today, most likely Mary Magdalene in the Garden, upset about the empty tomb, the "gardener" speaks a word to her, calls her name, Mary! and she knows him. Of the four canonical gospels, it's the most deeply personal and moving of the Easter morning stories. Years ago we had a much loved radio show, "You Are There", and this story takes the highest prize and praise. Not almost, you can actually smell the spring flowers.

Paul, an ordinary man with human experiences of life, almost frantically spread his gospel among the Gentiles because he believed the End of Days was at hand and the only way to be saved into the new creation was to have been under, believed in, the God of Jesus Christ. What Paul believed seems to have evolved, or perhaps refined, between his writing 1 Thessalonians and then 1 Corinthians and Romans. But Paul was not correct about the End Time, which he seems to have been realizing by his end; and Paul is wrong in his earnest argument at 1 Corinthians 15 when he says the gospel is no good if it is for this life only; because it's a gospel of love, not only for salvation into heaven it that is one's concern, but as the Way of the Cross for us in this life. My father again, and I have no idea whether he was taught it or if was his own teaching, "we don't have a religion to die by, we have a religion to live by," a theology that has informed and saved my own faith.

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

This is the Resurrection Gospel. All the rest is Easter lilies.