News and Views

Beloved of God,

I had the privilege the preaching the 7th and final word of Christ during the historic 7 Sisters of the Spirit service held at St. Mark United Methodist Church on Good Friday. During that service, even as the other words were being offered, the spirit spoke to me and revealed that our best efforts will be beneath the miraculous power of God unless we commend everything we have and ever hope to be to God. I was inspired to understand that Easter does not simply proclaim that Christ is risen. It reveals how resurrection comes to be.

Before there was an empty tomb, there was a surrendered life. Before resurrection, power was made visible; there was radical trust embodied in Jesus’ final words: “Into your hands, I commend my spirit.” Christ does not arrive at resurrection by accident. He arrives at this death-shattering revelation because he entrusted himself fully into the baptism, call, will and way of God.

This is not only his testimony. It is a road map for faithful living. It is our Christ-centered model.

Christ trusted God to the end and God demonstrated that every promise, every principle, every covenant, every commitment and every Word written, spoken and mediated is true. God is faithful! That faithfulness should inspire us to release everything to God.

As we stand in this moment of discernment and possibility across the Baltimore-Washington and Peninsula-Delaware Area, we find ourselves immersed in missional engagement. We are planning. We are studying. We are deploying. We are strategically wrestling with the realities before us. We are faithfully working through our hubs to deepen our relationships, increase our collegial and communal trust, and embrace the transformation possible through our Missional Action Plan. These are necessary acts of prudent stewardship.

But Easter presses us beyond competence into conviction.

If our future depends solely on our analysis, our structures, or our ability to predict and control outcomes, then we are not living into the fullness of resurrection power. We are, instead, relying on ourselves while invoking the name of God. And our fruit will be limited. The witness of Jesus calls us to something more demanding, more radical and more abundant.

We are called to entrust everything we are working toward into the hands of a loving God. To commend not only our ministries, but our uncertainties. To release not only what is comfortable, but what we have worked hardest to build. To place into God’s hands not only our hopes, but also our fears about what may be lost, changed, or transformed. We have to be willing to walk into places we have never gone before, both literally and metaphorically. This is not passive resignation. It is active, courageous surrender.

The same God who was faithful to Abraham and Sarah in the face of impossibility, who guided Moses and Miriam through uncertainty into liberation, who ignited a movement through John and Charles Wesley grounded in grace, love and transformation, is the same God who now calls us forward. Forward to a future we cannot create nor control, but a future that is full of Holy Ghost power.

And that call is not safe. But we did not fast for safety. We fasted to be drawn closer to God. And God is calling us to surrender.

It is a call to risk everything we possess, not recklessly, but faithfully, trusting that what is placed in God’s hands is never diminished, never lost, never forsaken, only redeemed. Christ surrendered his very spirit, the essence of his being to God. If Christ can trust God with his spirit, we can surely trust God with our traditions, our buildings, our practices, our programs and our preconceived notions.

Easter assures us that when we entrust ourselves fully to God, even what feels like an ending can become the very place where new life begins. God is the beginning without a beginning and the end without an end. Therefore nothing is lost in God. Everything that we have been, are and ever hope to be is because of God.

So this is both our invitation and our challenge: Let us be a people who do more than celebrate resurrection. Let us be a people who practice resurrection by trusting God completely without equivocation. By trusting God with every dream, every hope and every plan for our congregational and connectional future.

With Christ let us say, “God, into your hands we commend our lives. Into your hands, we commend our shared mission and ministry. Into your hands, we commend our all.”

And let us move forward with confidence into a future filled with hope, not because we know what tomorrow holds, but because we know who holds tomorrow. Beloved, He is risen. He is risen, indeed. And through him, we will rise also.

Blessings and peace,
Bishop LaTrelle Miller Easterling