Dear CCOV Family,

Prayers for a blessed, faith-enriching Holy Week. I look forward to seeing you all Easter Sunday when the sanctuary will be fragrant with Easter flowers and filled with the beautiful music of John Good and our own Larry Loeber! This Sunday’s sermon title is The Miracle of Resurrection, and the scripture readings are John 20:1-18 and 1 Corinthians 15:12-22. The resurrection is the culmination of Jesus’ seven miracles (or signs) in John’s Gospel that I have been preaching through for our Lenten theme. All of the other miracles have been pointing to and leading up to this one. On Sunday you will hear all about how the resurrection is cosmic in its scope, the centerpiece of Christianity, and the focus of our hope in both this life and beyond.

As is our recent tradition at CCOV, the Sunday after Easter, April 23, is Holy Humor Sunday, so please get your (clean) jokes ready to share during worship. We enjoy this thanks to a 1988 a group called the “Fellowship of Merry Christians,” who resurrected an ancient custom of celebrating the Sunday after Easter with joy, laughter, parties, picnics, singing, dancing, and playing jokes upon one another. They engaged in such joking because they thought God had played a practical joke on the devil by raising Jesus from the dead: For this very reason, early church theologians like Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom called the resurrection “Risus paschalis” or “Easter laugh.” We typically have some very good laughs together on Holy Humor Sunday!

See you in Church!
Grace and Peace,
Rev. Sandi