Yesterday I reflected on the resurrection and on life beyond this life. I have to acknowledge there is a legitimate critique of Christianity in this regard — that we sometimes reduce our faith to simply getting into heaven when we die, as if it were a magic ticket to somewhere else.

But the gospel was never just about our souls escaping to another world while this one suffers. I've heard this distortion called "evacuation theology." You may have seen the bumper sticker: "In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned!" The unspoken message underneath it is troubling: my religion could kill you, and I won't be around to help.

For the first Christians, the resurrection meant something different — hope for this world. The good news carried with it an invitation to an entirely new way of life. We read about how they lived with a transformed outlook, sharing their possessions, caring for the poor, welcoming the stranger. For them, Easter was the radical claim that darkness, disappointment, suffering, injustice, and even death would not have the last word. And so they began to live exactly as though that were true.

Yesterday I shared reflections from my friend Herb Meza. I've thought often about how he embraced life — fearlessly, especially when it came to standing up for civil rights in the South, at a time when doing so was genuinely dangerous. I believe he was able to live that way, at least in part, because he knew he was part of something much larger than himself. His life had significance beyond what could be seen. He lived with resurrection hope — not just facing his own death, but in the way he lived every ordinary day.

I saw the same thing in Patricia Robertson, a member of my last church who died a few years back. She was extraordinarily generous — serving in food pantries and soup kitchens, spending years helping refugees resettle in the Atlanta area. Near the end, she told me she was ready to go. She wasn't afraid. She firmly believed death would not have the last word.

I don't think those two things were unrelated. She knew she was part of something bigger. She had a resurrection hope.

I don't know exactly what heaven is like. I don't know whether there's surfing, or whether I'll get an audience with Jesus to ask my most pressing theological questions. I don't know if any of that will even matter to me when I get there. But I do trust this: the love I have given, and the love I have received — the love I have known here on earth — I will know there as well. And I trust that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is still at work in you, in the church, and in the world.

Prayer: Eternal God, grant us this day an Easter faith. We trust that you are the God who brings light out of darkness, hope out of despair, and even life out of death. Amen.

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