The flowers are wilting. The ham is gone. And it's still Easter. The resurrection doesn't answer all the questions — it raises new ones. Easter Monday is when resurrection becomes a practice instead of a feeling. The tomb is still empty. That doesn't change. Go live like it.

Holy Saturday is the day nobody knows what to do with. The disciples are hiding. The tomb is sealed. Everything is over. We skip this day because we've read ahead. But a lot of us are living in Holy Saturday right now. And the word for today is: stay.

The first response to the resurrection was fear. Not joy. Not lilies and trumpets. Fear — because something happened that nobody had a category for. The resurrection isn't a reversal of Friday. It's a verdict on it. Empire was wrong. Domination lost. He is risen — and that changes everything.

The cross was not a religious symbol first. It was an execution method for political dissidents. Jesus was crucified as a threat to empire. Good Friday isn't the day to look away from that. It's the day to name it clearly: empire kills. And he kept going anyway.

The night before his arrest, Jesus washed feet. He didn't build a monument. He didn't hand anyone a sword. He got on his knees. You cannot get from the upper room to Christian Nationalism without ignoring almost everything that happened in it.

The Gospels go quiet on Wednesday of Holy Week. Jesus rested before the hardest days of his life. Resistance without rest becomes resentment. You are allowed to breathe — even when the stakes are high. Especially then.

They tried to trap Jesus with a question about authority. He refused to answer on their terms. That's not evasion — that's resistance. Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is refuse to justify yourself within a frame that's already rigged.

Jesus didn't flip the tables because he was having a bad day. He did it because the institution built to connect people to God had become a barrier instead. That's not a tantrum. That's prophecy. And it's still relevant.

They wanted a war horse. He rode in on a donkey. The Palm Sunday crowd had Jesus completely figured out — and completely wrong. Christian Nationalism isn't new. It's just the latest version of that crowd: sincere, loud, and pointed in the wrong direction. Holy Week begins here.

When the Church Pretends It’s Not Involved Every year on November 20, we read the names of trans people murdered in the last twelve months. We call it Trans Day of Remembrance. We talk about “violence,” as if it just appears out of nowhere, like bad weather. We talk about “hate,” as if it lives…

For years my default map of faith ran like this: believe → behave → belong. Get the ideas right, get your act together, and then you’re in. Over time—through scripture, pastoring, and a lot of table-time with neighbors—I shifted to belong → believe: make room at the table first and let faith grow in the soil of relationship.

Lately, one more turn has become clear for me and, I think, for our church: belonging is both the road and the destination. We don’t just start with belonging; we travel by belonging. We practice it, fail at it, return to it, and discover that the end of the journey is the same as the means: being held in Love together.