Easter Monday

What do you do on Easter Monday, the day after you peer into the tomb only to find that the world doesn't work the way you always thought?  What do you do the day after everything changes- when old plausibility structures give way to new possibilities and God's surprise unsettles your life?

Today, I walked into the sanctuary at Spring Creek to sit and pray.  It was dark and silent.  Most of the Easter Lillies had been taken home, and those that remained looked far removed from yesterday's grandeur.  No children were running around the sanctuary in suits and dresses they hardly wanted to wear.  The hallelujahs were no longer echoing off the walls, and the trumpets no longer blasted through the air.  No preacher was diving in over his head, trying to explore an event that continues to astound and stupify.  The stillness of the sanctuary felt a world away from yesterday's celebration.  There was only silence.

And yet, the silence was a strange silence.  It wasn't an empty kind of silence, as if there is nothing to say. It was a full silence, saturated with meaning, as if no one had to say anything.  It wasn't the dreaded silence of God-forsakenness but the sacred silence of God's presence.  Somehow, there was peace in the silence.  There are times in life when you stand in the shadows of some transcendent mystery and the only proper response is silence.  For a preacher, who is expected to say the right thing at the right time, the necessity of silence can feel more like a curse than a gift.  Nevertheless, today I sat in silence because resurrection is something God, and God alone, has done.  It does not depend on my imagination or articulation.  It defies my expectation and theological categories.  It resists my attempts to tame it and explain it.

So today, I crossed a few things off the calendar, caught up on some work I postponed during holy week, and helped coach a T-ball team.  But right in the middle of the day, I sat in the sanctuary in silence.  It just felt like the right thing to do on Easter Monday.

What do you do on Easter Monday?