I'll Be Wearing My Easter Boots

I broke my liturgical tradition. Four years ago I got Easter boots. They are pink and shiny. They have flowers. I have worn them every easter since I bought them to go under a white robe that cost more than my wedding dress. This year I wore them on Palm Sunday.

I love these boots. I get compliments every time I wear them. I like to tell people it is what you wear when you are kicking death in the face. That is, after all, what we do on Easter. We remind ourselves that the worst thing is not the last thing, death does not win, God’s love does in fact overcome everything. Most years, I would not rush to the ending. I would talk about how Easter does not make Good Friday any less excrutiating. But this is not most years. This year I needed to know, at the beginning of Holy week that we have a chance of kicking death in the face. This year, I was not sure we were going to get to Easter. I just needed to know there was a chance.

There is just a lot of death and dying right now. A lot of people with a lot of power doing a lot of things I am not okay with. There are too many false prophets I want to shout down, too many tables I wish someone would flip over, too many things to protest, too many organizations and congress people who are not bearing fruit and I need them to bear fruit and I am ready to cuss them all the way out.

I started this post 10 days ago and the paragraph of atrocities that I knew about 10 days ago I had to delete because there were simply too many updates of bad things. The language about Autistic people is vile, the president having to follow the rulings of the supreme court should not be up for debate, everyone deserves a trial before they are shipped off to a foreign gulag. That list is also woefully incomplete.

I needed to wear my boots at the beginning of Holy Week because I need to remember that there is a chance that resurrection will happen. Lately I am having to wear my Easter boots early and often. Sometimes it’s a metaphor, more often it is not. I need my pink floral sparkly boots to remind me that right now my faith looks like finding resurrection. The flowers on my way to work when a few weeks ago the whole tree looked dead, the article I read about how having gophers run around a volcanic lava patch for one hour made a huge difference in plant growth even forty years from the day the gophers dug through the dirt. The man who spent a few years sleeping on the steps of the church who isn’t there anymore, because he has an apartment.

It can feel very stupid, naive maybe, to be a person who is proclaiming resurrection. It is easier to declare something dead and then find out you are wrong. You’ve got a lot more skin in the game when you declare you think this thing can live. You’ve got even more skin in the game if you stick around and ACT like its gonna come back to life. Practicing resurrection is a bold move, in a world so full of death.

I was wearing my Easter boots this past Sunday when I started weeping. I had just brought 37 kids back from their lesson to have communion with the whole body of believers. I stood at the door waiting for stragglers to come in and I looked around astonished. Our pews were full, only seats left in the balcony.

Two years ago I was sure that this church wasn’t going to make it. I wanted it to, but things didn’t look good. We laid off everyone but the head pastor. We took every money saving move we could think of. Lots and lots of people left, declaring us dead, but some stayed. It felt….foolish….sticking it out. Why watch a place you love take its last breath when you could cut ties early and save yourself some pain? Why shout about how things COULD be different when so often they are not different. Too many times you’ve been burned by the same old ways of the world. Why think this time might be good? But enough of us did stay, and enough of us whispered that we believed the community could be resurrected, and enough of us took turns holding that hope even when it was heavy and that hope became something that turned into new life. It was good for me to remember that sometimes God does show up; that resurrection really is the promise that what we do in love matters.

I know it is hard. I know it is really really hard, to show up in a way that invites new life. I know it is hard to yell into what feels like the void that we can do things differently, we can resist, we can work together, we can protect each other. I also think its worth it. I think it is faithful to show up in our Easter boots, even when it feels foolish. Maybe, especially then. I need to wear my easter boots. I need to remind myself that goodness and new life at least has a chance.