An #EasterSunday thread: Easter, not only this year, but every year isn’t just about a victory won. It isn’t a good guys vs bad guys, winner take all, we’ve triumphed and we’re number 1. This triumphalist language strikes me as a decidedly US American phenomenon 1/

a holdover from Cold War sentiments when the US emerged as the world power—democracy, freedom, capitalism, the good and the brave destroyed communism! USA! USA! It goes without saying that American triumphalism is an extension of American exceptionalism 2/

epitomized in the MAGA slogan but the emphasis is on how it justifies the imperial projects of global capitalism and a militaristic by-any-means-necessary approach to upholding the dominant position in the world. 3/

The way we talk about resurrection sometimes takes up this triumphalism, Jesus, the super-human ( @BrianMerritt), conquered and destroyed death, and because he did, we are able to as well. But we know that death, not life, not even victory over life, is inevitable. 4/

And what this Easter moment, here in 2020 reminds me again, as a follower of Jesus, is that life and death are entangled, and even more people today have intimate knowledge about this very fact. The hope is not found just in the platitudes of “we will rise again” 5/

but the reminder that it is Jesus who shows up in numerous ways, whether as loved ones, as strangers, as medical workers, as teachers, and even in those we least expect doing what looks like the most marginal work--workers who are considered essential...6/

like cashiers, custodial staff, and gardeners. God raised Jesus from the dead not as an exercise of power because God’s power does not replicate empire through military or economic might but it is found in those who plant, who heal, who journey with, who teach. 7/

So perhaps in this Easter season, as we edge slowly towards a post-pandemic time towards a different normal, may we be rooted in, grounded in the inevitability of our precarity, our fragility, even our indeterminacy. 8/

As we continue forward led by Jesus who goes ahead of us—carrying guarded hallelujahs ( @LouNyiri) and weeping in the dark, may we recognize what and who is essential to our lives and find hope in the beauty, empathy and creativity of the Spirit we’ve witnessed so far. 9/9