>All around the world Christians celebrate Easter with a sunrise service of light, calling us back to the beginning of creation.
This first day, the day of light, we have come to call Sunday, the day of the sun. In the words of a song, “Morning has broken, like the first morning…born of the one light Eden saw play…God’s recreation of the new day.” As God created heaven and earth on the first day, the first day has come to symbolize God’s recreation of the new day – the restoration, the taking back of the world from darkness and evil, where we can once again experience the meaning of the words, “and God saw that it was good.”
Easter, the celebration of Jesus’ rising from death to new life, points us to the truth that we are co-creators of this new day. Just as the earth spins around the sun cooperating with God’s grace, we must turn from evil to good, from despair to hope, from war to peace, from inequity to justice and from injustice to forgiveness and mercy.
The word Easter, from east, meaning “the dawn,” further points to the ongoing, daily struggle required to recreate the new day. What rises again with every dawn, because it is the dawn? The sun. The sun sustains itself through an ongoing process of nuclear fusion, fusion being the conjoining of two or more things to form a single entity. Like the sun, to sustain ourselves in a world of peace and justice, truth, goodness, beauty and love, we require ongoing fusion, joining with God, becoming one with God.
Only through a sustained, willful effort can we fuse our many, varied and often competing goals and desires into a unity of purpose to rebuild, reshape, remold and renew the face of the Earth and ourselves. Then, as each new morning breaks, it will be like the first morning – God’s recreation of the new day. And God will bless it and say it is good.
Genesis 1:1-5
1:1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,
1:2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
1:3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
1:4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
1:5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
