For me Easter is all about the music. It always has been. For years in the old Van Orsdel Methodist Church I thought I had died and gone to heaven when Pearl Ann Houtz sang “Jerusalem” each Easter.
That is until just a few years ago I heard Tom Bede sing that same song and he all but knocked the walls off the sanctuary.
At Easter I play Handel’s Messiah on the boom box each chance I get and it is wonderful. On my computer I have one of those trick scenes where a food court is all eating food until almost one at a time they break into song, singing parts of “The Messiah”. It is glorious and grand and wonderful and makes me feel so very good.
But not as good as on Easter Sunday morning when it is every Methodist’s obligation to knock the walls out by singing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” by one of the founders of the Methodist Church, Charles Wesley.
Now reason tells me that Easter Sunday is about much more than the music. It is about the fact that the grave cannot hold us, that with grace we are saved and that a resurrection in the spring is a wonderful thing.
But somehow no preacher or priest I have ever known can tell the story as well as the music tells it.
At Van Orsdel in Havre, when the pipe organ shakes the very timbers of the sanctuary, and you can almost feel the air moving from those glorious pipes while making those sounds, well, that says all we need to know.
From me and mine to you and yours, Happy Easter!
Christ the Lord is risen today, Allelulia!
Earth and heaven in chorus say, Allelulia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Allelulia!
Sing ye heavens and earth reply, Allelulia!
One stanza of that wonderful hymn says it all. “Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Allelulia”
