For if we think of it as Word, or story, or history, it is too easy for us to stand outside of it. We read it to find out what happened to other people in another time. We are intrigued and informed. But the Bible was given to us to transform us. If we can see it as a place, then the challenge in all Bible reading and study is to stand in that place, to see what we would have seen, to hear what we would have heard, to feel what we would have felt, and to ask our own questions. It is just a turn of the lens but it helps us experience what the writers experienced, and then it is easier to recognize the stories as our very own story. This means that we need to give ourselves permission to unlock our imaginations and our creativity, our hearts as well as our minds, and meet the written word half way.

The season of Easter has just begun. What a wonderful time to enter the Scripture—on Easter morning! So, if you will, for a few minutes, why don't you relax, let your imaginations go free, and walk with me into Easter:

Imagine a garden wet with dew in the early morning.
See the women carrying cloths and spices, their arms full.
See the deep lines on their faces, see their sorrow and their tears.
Walk with them through the garden toward the burial caves.
Notice the tomb dug into the hillside with a large wheel of stone standing on edge, rolled away from the entrance.
Look at the open mouth of the tomb, see the light coming from inside it.
We watch as the light gets brighter and brighter until it almost blinds us, we cover our eyes.
Our hearts are pounding with fear and excitement as we face the unknown.

Hear a voice speaking to us: Do not be afraid. Jesus is not here He has risen. Remember how he told you when you were in Galilee that he must suffer many things, die, and on the third day rise again?

And then, we remember! We remember that and so much more!

We remember:
How much he loved us, and how we loved him in return.
We remember how good he was,
His kindness and the compassion he had for us, and for all kinds of people.
The wise things he said about God and how we should live.
His healing hands touching the leper, and on the eyes of the man born blind.

We remember, too, only three days ago when we ate that last meal with him, how he said we would see him again, that we should not grieve, nor fear, nor be troubled, because he would never leave us, he would be with us always.

How quickly we had forgotten! How afraid we have been! How overcome with sorrow and despair!

And suddenly, we know—we don't know how we know—but we know that death is not the end, that Jesus is alive and very near us.

We know that God is here with us, that even the death of the One we loved could not separate us from the God who loves us and showed God's own face to us in Jesus.

Our hearts are pounding within us, but now it is not with fear, it is with an incredible joy!
We drop the spices, we run from the garden, and we tell the news to all the others.

What has happened to us is real, it is the most real thing we have ever experienced! We can't explain it at all. But we have to tell our story, we have to tell what God has done for us.

We know we are not the same people we were before. We have been changed! Somehow, the fear of death has been transformed in us, transformed into the gift of new life, a resurrected life!

We lift our voices in praise to God. We sing our alleluias as we go. And all the people say: Amen.

What a culmination of the Gospels Easter is! Each Gospel ends with its own version of the miracle of the resurrection. But in a very real sense, Easter is not the end of the gospel story—it is just the beginning. It was a new beginning for them and it is for us!

The resurrection is less an event that happened nearly 2000 years ago in a land far away, than it is a miracle of new life that can happen each day to every one of us. Every morning has the potential to be a resurrection morning! Our lives are full of deaths and resurrections, aren't they? The old dies out and the new is born, sometimes gradually, often suddenly, even catastrophically.

Yet in all of it, God has not left us. God's Presence is always with us, closer than our own breathing. Nothing can separate us from the love of God nor the compassion of Jesus—and sometimes we have to go all the way to an empty tomb in a dewy garden to remember! It is a trip we can make as often as we need to!

But God's constant presence with us has a purpose beside our own well-being. New life is given so that God can use us to do God's work in the world. How can we, with our partial understanding and our sometimes faith, ever do that?

We can begin to try, only because this is not our work. It is work that God does through us. In the upper room, when Jesus gave the followers and us the job of showing God to the world, as he had done, he reminded us that the job was impossible for us to do, but that God wanted to do it through us, if we were willing. Master teacher that he is, Jesus did that by painting a picture—a word picture. It was a image of something lovely and common, something we see often in our everyday life. It is the image of a vine, with branches, bearing fruit.

Jesus said: I am the true vine, my Father is the vine grower ... Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing .... As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love ... This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

Jesus had drawn for us an image of a circle, a circle of love—and told us that we are an essential part of it! The love of God we see in Jesus; the love of God poured out on the cross; the love of God raising Jesus from the dead—that same love circulates through you and me. It is a new life in us and it is a new life for the world. Remember, it is not our love. It is God's love. And God can make us open channels through whom that love can do God's work in this weary world.

What a need there is today for love and compassion in a world torn apart by violence and hate! What a hunger there is for purpose and meaning in life beyond the possession of material goods! What cries go out from so many corners of our world and our own communities: for justice, for relief from oppression, for a fair chance to learn, for a roof overhead, for medical care when it is needed, for a meaningful way to support a family. All these and many others are the work God would do in our world. The cries seem overwhelming, but God can make a start through each one of us is we are willing to be used by God as channels of God's love. We do not have to succeed. We only have to abide.

That is our job: to abide! To remain attached to the vine, to grow in our knowledge and experience of God; to become aware of the Presence of God in more and more moments of our lives; to pray and to worship. To enter the Bible as a place and meditate on the Scripture. To be open channels for God's love. To remember that death has been transformed into new life and allow God to live a resurrected life through us. To share the joy of the resurrection with all the world.

In the New Jerusalem Bible, the world abide is translated this way: "to make a home in." We are invited to make our home in God and Jesus has promised that he and God will make their home in us.

In this way, Easter brings the gift of new life, day by day. Every morning holds the promise of resurrection morning and the Presence of God becomes real in our world. Truly, we all share in the resurrection. Thanks be to God!

Lydia Talbot: Hazelyn, you just shared with us the great joy and sense of gratification giving the message as a laywoman that you've wanted to give all your life.

Hazelyn McComas: Well, you know when you're a layperson and you go to church all the time and you remember as many Easters as I remember, there is often something in your heart that you want to say at Easter and I am really grateful for this opportunity to say it.

Talbot: And your compelling message, Hazelyn, centering on your perception of the Bible as a place, that turn of the lens as you put it, the Bible as word or story or history. Where did you learn that?

McComas: I read it in a book and I can't even tell you what book it was but it is so many years ago now and for me it transformed the way I looked at scripture. From that moment on, scripture opened up to me in a wholly different way.

Talbot: And, of course, you are a child of the church. Your father was a minister in the Presbyterian church.

McComas: My grandfather was a Dutch Reformed Minister on my mother's side.

Talbot: And your mother, a student of mission.

McComas: True.

Talbot: Let me ask you your concept of the resurrection. So many believers get stuck at the cross in kind of a sympathy with the crucified Christ or their own crosses. How do people actually move beyond the cross into a loyalty to the resurrected Christ?

McComas: Well, for me the greatest news of Easter from the scriptural stories has always been the fact that death is not the end, that it is not the last word, that God's intention is life, even life coming out of death and so Jesus, witness to God's love and God's intent, seems to me to take us into living rather than dying.

Talbot: And the image that you gave to us of Christ as the vine and we as the branches, doesn't that say something to us about getting outside ourselves in service to others?

McComas: It really does. The interesting thing about that image of the circle of love, which I have used and loved for many, many years now, is that a group of Christian friends coming together, is not the circle of love. The circle of love begins in God, flows through Jesus through the disciples and the followers out to the world, so that the world can love God and be transformed too.

Talbot:  And so that all that goodness stretched out on the cross takes on a different meaning.

McComas: That's right. The love of God on the cross is transformed into life from death.

Talbot: Hazelyn, you are about transformation. You teach the Old and New Testaments at the wonderful Academies for Spiritual Formation. Can you talk about that and what that means in your own life?

McComas: I think that there is such a hunger in our time on the part of people who think they are religious, and people who don't think they're religious, for meaning, for depth, for spirituality. I call that "longing for God," but you don't have to call it that. You can call it searching for meaning or identity or whatever you want to. But here and there I think that the Academy for Spiritual Formation grows up where people can come together intentionally to grow spiritually and to find what sorts of things help them do that because it can be learned. I mean giving time to God, being open to scripture, unlocking our minds from the ways we have always heard it and trying to be in the place and see if it doesn't look different to us. All of those things allow God to use scripture or the world or experiences to transform us.

Talbot: To be in the place and that is what you've given us today, Hazelyn McComas, a way of looking at the Bible as place. Thank you so much.