Keeping it fresh for Easter

Down through the centuries, the Easter story remains unchanged: the miraculous resurrection of Jesus Christ after his suffering and death on the cross.

In churches everywhere this Sunday, many of the world's 2 billion Christians will celebrate the day they believe Jesus was resurrected.

It is one of the two times of year — the other is Christmas — when churches are most full.

For pastors and priests, the Easter story is the foundation of the faith and an enduring source of inspiration. But Easter sermons and homilies can present a more down-to-earth challenge: how to keep their talks fresh each year while relaying the essential, unchanged message.

For the Rev. Allen Hilton, senior minister at Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Seattle, ideas can come from both the "inspiring but also despair-producing things we see in the news."

"Even if the news is deadening, the fact of the resurrection, the Easter message that life beats death ultimately, puts a different lens in place to view that deadening news," he said.

Hilton's sermon this Sunday is inspired by a passage in Isaiah 65 that describes a peaceful kingdom.

"It sets the imagination going on what if resurrection broke out in the world ... instances of places both in justice terms and personal terms, where life seems to be coming where death was expected," he said.

So Hilton will offer examples of life and renewal in personal lives, in the local community and in the world.

And he'll ask his congregants to imagine a better future and challenge them to act on it.

"Having imagined this glorious vision, the challenge is to enter it," he said.

The Rev. Linda Skinner, associate pastor at the nondenominational evangelical Washington Cathedral in Redmond, acknowledges it's challenging to look at the same message from a new perspective each year.

She finds inspiration through her teaching in the church's women's ministry and her counseling with some of the women, sometimes basing her Easter message on what the women say they are struggling with.

At this year's sunrise service, Skinner will use a passage in 2 Corinthians about being inwardly renewed and the importance of focusing not on material things but on the eternal things that are unseen.

"It's the unseen that really defines who we are in our faith and what we do," Skinner said. "Not the tangible evidence like what kind of car you drive or the job you have. ... Really, it's the unseen things, such as our character, our love for one another."

The Rev. Vincent Pastro, pastor at Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Kent, brings up a preacher who once equated Easter sermons with jazz improvisations.

"Of course the theme is the same," Pastro said. "But you go at it a different way."

Pastro's Easter homily, which is on the theme of service, takes inspiration primarily from the Gospel of Luke, in which the women come to Jesus' tomb with oil and spices to anoint his body.

"That is pure service," Pastro said. "When we're servants, one to another, we are really fostering life in abundance. ... And that all comes from God's grace."

The Rev. Ron Moe-Lobeda, pastor at University Lutheran Church in Seattle, says because the Lutheran Church has three-year lesson cycles, congregations focus on a different Gospel telling of the Easter story each of those years.

This year, Moe-Lobeda will take a story from Luke's account, in which several women reported Jesus' resurrection to the apostles and the apostles thought it was an idle tale.

"I'll be raising questions of how the resurrection story is often being perceived by others in society as an idle story, and challenging our folks to consider what it means for their life," he said.

Moe-Lobeda plans to talk about the resurrection symbolizing God's affirmation of Jesus' work toward justice and peace.

"We can, if we look for it, experience ourselves or bear witness to a resurrection every day," he said, whether it means recovering from long-term illness, or hearing the stories of women helped by University Lutheran's transitional housing program.

For some, there's no need to come up with a fresh Easter homily.

For more than 1,500 years, the Orthodox Church has used an Easter homily from St. John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople, said the Rev. John Strickland of St. Katherine Orthodox Mission in Kirkland.

That homily "became so widely loved by Orthodox Christians" that it became the only homily read during Easter services, Strickland said.

Janet I. Tu: 206-464-2272 or jtu@seattletimes.com