Rising Life in 2017
By Rev. Dr. Ed Hird
As a teenager, I golfed and skied religiously on Sunday
mornings. But I would never skip Easter
Sunday. For some reason, I always had a
soft spot towards Easter. Perhaps it was
all that delicious chocolate. Maybe it
was because my father would attend at Easter, giving up his golfing for one
Sunday. I will never forget when my then
agnostic father switched from golfing every Sunday to golfing every other
Sunday in order to attend church. Since
taking the Alpha Course four times, my dad has developed a strong personal
faith.
My teenage memories of Easter Sunday are connected with a
sense of joy. Unlike my atheist best
friend, I never doubted the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. But I
was emotionally disconnected from its reality.
It was almost as if I did not believe in Easter. As a teenager, I became convinced that there
was no life after death, and that nothing awaited me but extinction and
returning to dust. I began to fear the
power of death and the meaninglessness and emptiness of life. I even began to secretly wonder if life
itself was worth living. When I came to
personal faith at age 17, it was almost as if I had never heard of Jesus’
resurrection. I remember being astounded
over the realization that by faith in Christ, I would live forever. I started wearing a button ‘Have a nice
eternity’, something that would have made no sense to me just a few months
earlier.
At the recent Greater
Vancouver Festival of Hope, almost 2,000 people gave their lives to Christ
after hearing a clear message of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Easter is at the very core of what it means
to be a Christian, even more than Christmas, our other favorite festival. Even in our very complicated Canadian
culture, Easter and Christmas are still deeply rooted in our self-identity and
history as Canadians. I will never
forget a Capilano University Philosophy professor who, though an atheist,
invited me to speak in his class about evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. While initially skeptical, he became appalled
by the religious and historical ignorance of some of his students. He commented that without reading the bible
and literature like Paradise Lost, you could not really understand Canadian
culture. The Easter story is deeply
woven into our 150 years of Canadian history, something that we will be
celebrating with Voices Together at
the Pacific Coliseum on Canada Day.
In the past almost 37 years of ordained ministry, I have
been privileged to take many funerals, now often called celebrations of life. Many people nowadays don’t have any services
when they die. I find that rather sad,
as it leaves people with limited ways to grieve. Others no longer use clergy as in the past. At most funerals that I take, there are many
people sharing their memories of the deceased.
No matter how well I know the deceased, I always learn much at the
service and wish that I knew them better.
My main contribution at funerals is to remind people of how Jesus
conquered death and offered us rising life that would go on forever. I am totally convinced that life and love are
stronger than death, and that Easter is more than just chocolate. God has given us in Jesus rising faith, hope,
love and Life.
Rev. Dr. Ed Hird, Rector
St. Simon’s Church
North Vancouver, Anglican Mission in Canada
-author of Restoring
Health: body, mind and spirit
-previously published in the April 2017 Light Magazine and the April 2017 Deep Cove Crier
