Today we celebrate the dawning of a new day.
Forty-two years ago, when Shannon and I headed off to seminary at VST,
we made a move from our sunny prairie home to Vancouver, where sunshine is a much
rarer commodity, especially in the winter. When we moved back to BC in the fall
of 2024, the possibility of bleak winters was well known to us, though this
winter of 2025-2026 was quite the oddball.
Growing up in a generally sunny place, I had no idea how important the
sun was to me because it was always there, and then I lived in a place where it
was a less frequent companion and realized how much my personal energy gets
recharged by solar power. I was raised
where it would get to 40 below in the winter but at least it was sunny –“and it’s
a dry cold, don’t ‘cha know” – but when we got to Vancouver we started carrying
umbrellas everywhere we went, and shivered all the time, in the relatively
balmy winter temperatures of minus-five to plus-five.
Then: springtime came. In 1985, I learned that springtime in British
Columbia is the most startlingly beautiful season I have ever lived in,
anywhere. The sun returned and the people rejoiced! And when we looked around us, there were cherry
and apple blossoms, magnolias and rhododendrons and dogwood, crocuses and
daffodils and hyacinths, and here in the south Okanagan, the list includes the
blossoming out of apricot and peach and nectarine and plum and pear, as well as
cherry and apple. As a flatlander still
trying to find his place in 1985 and, to an extent, even now, not only was this
a feast to my eyes, it restored my soul.
The funeral pall of drizzling gloom that had suppressed and spirit
throughout the long dreary days of winter was lifted, and replaced by
brightness and beauty and optimism, a divine-infused hope of better days to
come.
The emotions that I just described are very much akin to the emotions of
Easter Sunday: the dawning of a new day after the indescribable gloom of
crucifixion, the dormancy of winter replaced by the headstrong, colourful
insistence of spring, and God’s own promise of even better days to come. The
clouds part, the sun shines, the stone is rolled away, and life has
unimaginable hope once more.
People around the world – particularly in northern climes, where the
cycles of seedtime and harvest may be brief and precarious – celebrate the
coming of spring with a variety of religious and cultural festivals, many of
which have themes of lessening darkness and growing light, or the death of a
seed in the earth followed by the resurrection of new growth and harvest. The Venerable Bede, writing in the 8th
century, noted that the resurrection festival, Easter, draws its name from the
Saxon goddess of the dawn, Eoster. That connection sits fine with me, for it
makes perfect sense that the cycles of nature established by Creator God, which
we count on year-round, would so dramatically align with another holy cycle,
the dying and rising of the Christ, which we count on as we consider the new
life proclaimed by Jesus for a world more just, and the eternal hope he sets in
our souls.
As finite humans striving to make sense of an infinite God, we yearn to
make sense of things far beyond our understanding. The trustworthy return of seasons, the
predictability of germination and growth, our lifelong wondering about what
happens when we die, hard questions about love and hatred and the lives of the
just and the unjust, have been questions for millennia. We seek the divine in ways that fit our
setting, and God meets us in those desires.
The varieties of culture and language and religions, taken together,
form a profoundly exciting diversity, expressing a cross-cultural human desire
to seek God, in ways that we will find God and will be found by God.
And so today, I notice what God’s creative energy is doing in creation,
what God’s everlasting commitment to life has meant to people around the world,
and what God’s restorative energy has done in Christ, and as these truths
co-exist I am filled with awe and wonder.
I will never truly understand the process of germination and growth, yet
my very existence and the presence of every foodstuff that nourishes my body relies
on that process. Our son, who worked at
farms and fisheries for years, helped me learn more about this but still I am
happily baffled by the details and sequences of it all. I am thankful for the innate inclination
toward life, a divine urge which God has given to the earth and the seas and to
all living beings. As mentioned at our candle-lighting, I am thankful for
Indigenous peoples around the world who keep reminding us how life is infused
into everything around us, and for our neighbours of many faiths who have such
varied ways to express wonder and gratitude for the trustworthy agricultural
cycles of life, death and rebirth. In all processes of growth, in the emergence
of new life, I am awash in the glory of God.
I see those same processes at work in the life, death and resurrection
of Christ Jesus. Throughout the season
of Lent we had six small candles at the front of the Church, lighting one more
each Sunday, signifying the way that Christ’s ministry was becoming bigger and deeper
and more influential as he travelled through Galilee. That ministry of local
impact grew into the words and traditions that still speak to us today. We see in the story of Jesus, God’s own
intention for our lives and for all life: a desire to open our eyes, open our
hearts, open our homes and our tables, open our lives to an expansiveness of
love that we can barely even imagine.
We also see in the story of Jesus, the sharp resistance of those who were
threatened by him, and that is an unfortunate and inescapable reality even
today. As the light of Christ was
growing, illuminating a wider swath, those who sought to deny life attempted to
extinguish his light altogether. In our
world of 2026, words like compassion, inclusion, empathy and fairness, which I
always assumed were positive attributes that everyone would strive for because
they are so closely connected with the ministry of Jesus, are now dismissed and
denounced, by powers and principalities who claim Jesus as Lord yet serve very
different purposes than he served. When
threatened, empire responds with force, then…and now.
On this day when we celebrate the durability and strength of Easter
love, we know that in our lives and in the life of the world, there are times
when the clouds gather, when the sun is hidden, when death is all too real, and
life itself seems like a cruel joke.
Much as I would like to say that the story of Jesus was a straight
upward incline that just kept getting better and better, there was a moment
when it all fell apart, when the brutality of crucifixion appeared to have the
last word. At Easter, meeting these
challenges face-on, we proclaim our trust in the life-giving power of God, who
will not let death have the final say.
The same God who bursts open seeds by the tender determination of shoots
does not leave us in despair. The same God who tends to our woundedness helps
us find the resilience to start again.
The same God who brings low-hanging winter clouds to our valley for
weeks at a time, rewards our perseverance with blossoms and beauty.
When he was a young parent, Christian singer/songwriter Steven Curtis
Chapman suffered a sudden and unimaginably tragic death in his family. His song, Spring is Coming, attempts to
embrace God’s healing love in the midst of sorrow, and it goes like so:
We planted the seed while the
tears of our grief soaked the ground
The sky lost its sun and the
world lost its green to lifeless brown
Now the chill in the wind has
turned the Earth hard as stone
And silent the seed lies
beneath ice and snow
And my heart's heavy now but
I'm not letting go
Of this hope I have that tells
me Spring is coming, Spring is coming….
Hear the birds start to sing Feel
the life in the breeze
Watch the ice melt away The
kids are coming out to play
Feel the sun on your skin Growing
strong and warm again
Watch the ground: there's
something moving
Something is breaking through New
life is breaking through
Spring is coming…
all we've been hoping and longing for soon will appear
Spring is coming…it won't be
long now, it's just about here.
References cited:
Chapman, Steven Curtis. “Spring
is Coming” - Sparrow Records © 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj3DMk3NB-8
Living in Canada blog. “Sunshine hours for Canadian Cities”, https://www.livingin-canada.com/sunshine-hours-canada.html
Turner, Allie. https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/lifestyle/9-vancouver-blooms-that-arent-cherry-blossoms-to-watch-out-for-this-spring-5259094
Wikipedia, “Names of Easter”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Easter
© 2026, Rev Greg Wooley, Osoyoos-Oliver United Church Pastoral Charge.
