The Season of Easter Has Just Begun.

I’m writing this post a few days after Easter Sunday. The pure joy and wonder we shared in our resurrection celebrations are still with me. 

Easter at Immanuel 2025

Community worship at Wright City’s Easter Sunrise Service and breakfast at Wesley Smith Chapel was a beautiful beginning to Easter morning. I am a big fan of anything that brings our city together!

After sunrise service our Immanuel family gathered on our campus for the Coffee Cafe’s brunch and we flowered the sanctuary cross with fresh colors. In worship, voices raised with highest energy to singing hosannas and hallelujahs. Barb’s piano playing was electric, the Word of God fed us through the reading of scriptures, preaching, and in the Holy Communion. Prayers were raised to the heavens and a generous offering mobilized heaven on earth for our city. Finally, heavy rains couldn’t deter our children who scampered around the fellowship hall egg hunting in pure glee!    

Flowering the Cross on Easter morning.

Easter’s resurrection celebrations are a crescendo to our journey through the Lenten season of fasting, prayer, and generosity. Rather than viewing Easter as a holy day ending the Lenten season, it is actually the beginning of a whole new season. Another chapter of hope and possibilities literally rise after facing Good Friday’s horror of the cross. Easter is a season that lasts seven weeks, or forty days, ending on Pentecost Sunday, June 8th, of this year. 

Immanuel's irises are showing off.

During the seven week Season of Easter my preaching series will be in the last book of the Bible. The book of Revelation. Revelation is a written account of John the revelator, who had a wild vision of the end of all things when Christ physically returns among us. As a child I dreaded sermons in Revelation because the cryptic visions of angels covered in eyeballs, seraphim with multiple pairs of wings, multi-headed beasts, and the lake of fire struck fear in me and weirded me out. It was all so difficult to understand. Although I’m grown-up I am still not a fan of the strange creatures and the lake of fire. I don’t claim to have it all figured out either. What I have come to understand about Revelation’s message is that God longs to be with us and is for us. Over and over again God’s love and grace is extended to humanity, even to the very end. 

Well, I don’t want to give everything away about Revelation. But there is one thing I can tell you: our magnificent Easter celebration is just a taste of what is to come!