The Easter lilies and tulips may have lost their perkiness by now, but the Easter hymns of glory continue to be sung with great gusto in my Lutheran church by the sea. Alleluia! Christ is risen!! It is such joyful music, meant to be belted out. “Thine is the glory, risen, conqu’ring Son!” And this year, with such a late Easter, we’ll be singing those hymns right through Memorial Day weekend, and that’s just fine with me! I can’t get enough of it.But there’s another tune that surfaced late one Sunday night, just one week after Easter. The media can’t seem to get enough of it: Bin Laden is dead. Like the munchkins on parade in the Wizard of Oz, singing “Ding, dong, the witch is dead” the media munchkins are doing their best to get us to chime in, and it can be hard not to. The wicked witch, the Boogeyman, the Monster under the Bed, the one who disrupted our sense of American invincibility is dead. Many of us breathed a sigh of relief. Many others pulled out their Memorial Day flags a few weeks early and began waving them deliriously – at least initially. By now, some have confessed to feeling confusion, even guilt about openly celebrating the death of another human being.
Our ELCA Bishop, Mark S. Hanson, wrote: “Most of all, in these 50 days of celebrating Christ’s resurrection, joy finds its fullest and deepest expression not over a human death but in God’s promise to unite all things in heaven and earth, to reconcile the human family and to bring God’s reign of peace.” He had a lot more to say (Ref 1), but this one sentence led me back to celebrating the 50 days of Easter and feeling the fullness of Easter’s joy and promise once again