This morning, the members of the community who live together in our parsonage and who are responsible for worship, sang together Charles Wesley's hymn, "Christ the Lord id Risen Today." We sang it in an empty sanctuary, with the pitiful accompaniment I could manage on the piano.

As we began, with the words "Christ the Lord is ris'n today, Alleluia...Raise your Joy's and triumphs high, Alleluia," I confess that I thought how limp and hollow we sounded, and felt, celebrating Easter in the midst of..."all this."

But as we moved into the 2nd verse, "Where, O death, is now thy sting, Alleluia...Where thy victory, O grave, Alleluia," I thought of the death toll, rising daily, and of the mass graves being dug in NYC, and our feeble voices took on the character of the most audacious defiance.

To stand in the midst of "all this," and to stare down death and the grave and *mock* them, to throw our absurd confession of Christ's resurrection in their face, this seems to me most especially appropriate for Easter Sunday.

How better to join with Mary and the women who first proclaimed the resurrection to unbelieving disciples than to defy the overbearing power of death and insist that because Christ is rise , so also will be all creation?

""Made like him, like him we rise, Alleluia, Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia."