IT’S EASTER and school vacation week. This means many of our fellow parishioners are away around the country. Some are in the South where it’s unseasonably cold, but the flowers are up and the hint of spring is in the air. I know one of our families is on Amelia Island, in Florida. Never been there, but it sounds great. Then there’s us, celebrating Easter here in Central New York. What are we, nuts? It’s snowing outside!

You know, here in Central New York we don’t get to live off the fumes of springtime for our Easter faith. If we depended on Easter lilies or bright sunshiny mornings to get us closer to God, we would indeed go nuts! It just isn’t going to happen here in Central New York. But that’s okay. We’re all big boys and girls here. When we sing “Welcome happy morning” we have to mean it from the heart because Mother Nature isn’t going to help us. Snow on April 8 in Central New York – we’re happy, but it ain’t easy!

During Holy Week I walked into the parish office before the Good Friday service and met a young friend. He’s four years old. His mom is our new parish secretary and he was in the library. I said hello and he said, “Can you make my pirates come to life?” First the weather, and then “Can you give life to my toy figures?” from a four-year old. You need to know that this is the same kid who stood by the baptismal font several days ago, and said, “This is where God baptized my brother and me!”

I’m telling you. It’s Good Friday, and I’m getting down into the gloom of things, and that’s okay. We’re supposed to get down on Good Friday, but then there’s this kid who thinks I’m God heaping the resurrection of his pirates on me! It’s bad enough when adults amuse themselves by pointing out that clergy not God, as if that actually needs saying, but here’s this kid desperately wanting me to be God. And he wasn’t asking “Can I bring his toys to life?” He was asking “Will I bring his toys to life?” The weather, the questions, the expectations, the disappointments, the surprises, this is Easter, Central New York-style! It ain't easy.

What would you have said to my young friend? I looked right at him and said gruffly, without hesitation, “No, I can’t bring your pirates to life! That’s your job!” The truly bewildered look on his face was precious, and I knew I was over my head.

“But I can’t bring my pirates to life!” he pleaded.

This is where the story became our Easter homily. His brother who was also in the library, looked up at this point, and smiled the all-knowing smile of a six-year old, big brother. He pointed at his head and said, “Yes, you can. You can use your imagination!” I felt like I was inside the Guinness Stout commercial, you know, the one where two characters say and do crazy things and then exclaim, “Brilliant!”

My two young friends and I had brilliantly come to the end of a wild conversation and out of it came an understanding of how we can practice resurrection in our own lives. Jesus had it right when he said, “A little child shall lead them.” Kids at play imagine a great many things that you and I as adults have long since forgotten. Kids don’t have the doors of fear and anxiety and doubt closing them in yet, not as we do. They’re still wide open to the visible and invisible, the outward and visible and the inward and spiritual. For them the veil is still gossamer thin. They still live in the thin places of the Spirit, while we’ve become thick to the conversation.

Our job today is to recommit ourselves to practicing resurrection in our lives again. We need to use our heads in this life, yes, but we’ve also got to rediscover the imagination in our hearts, not in the prideful way that characterizes so much of life today, but in a way of humility that leaves room for the Spirit to come and bless us with new life. The point isn’t that Jesus is raised from the dead, although this is true and central to our remembrance. The point is that because Jesus is raised from the dead, we now can think and act and behave differently. We’ve got a whole new reference point, no longer the grave but now the Empty Tomb.

Easter morning is all about running to the place where the stone has been rolled away, letting go of our selves and letting God come back into our lives with new hope and new glory, especially through strange and fearsome changes. It’s easy to get old and think that because the sun refuses to shine over our region this day, there is no sun to shine at all when in truth the sun is shining all the day, whether it’s dark and gloomy or bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Whatever the circumstances of our day or night, God, our God is there overcoming evil and death.

Easter 2007 is a call to practice resurrection as our Presiding Bishop encourages us to do in her Lenten book, “On a Wing and a Prayer,” and to be joyful about it. Stop looking for things to be just the way they have always been or only how you want them to be, and start allowing again the possibility that you can do something great and wonderful, even if it’s only a little bit of playfulness in the parish library on Good Friday. Bring the awe and wonder, the glory and majesty, the beauty and the blessing back into play. Happy Easter!