EASTER IN EAST GERMANY

A Holiday Defined By Prayerful Protesters

Instead Of Chocolate Bunnies

Easter Sunday will come in this month of April, the twenty-fourth. That’s almost the latest Easter can be (the latest is April 25).

In case you didn’t know or have forgotten, the First Council of Nicea (325 A.D.) set the date of Easter by the lunar calendar: It falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the northern hemisphere’s vernal equinox, the first day of Spring.

One April day, while standing in line at the grocery store, I overheard a man ask his wife, “Does Easter fall on a Sunday this year?”

If that was your husband, give him a copy of this article!

I’ll spend this month of April thinking once again about the meaning of this Easter celebration. I’ll try to get past the chocolate bunnies, the baby chicks and the accoutrements of the season, once again to plumb the deeper meaning of the day. I’ll try to take in the most audacious claim of my faith — that God has broken one of the most immutable of divine laws, and brought life out of death.

One of the greatest moments of the 20th century has to be the fall of the Berlin Wall. A case can be made that what brought down the wall was the power of Easter. It all began in the Kikolai Protestant Church in Leipzig, East Germany, when the pastor of that church, Kristian Fuehrer, decided that it was time the Christian church stopped — in his words — “diluting its message.” So his church started holding prayer meetings on Monday evenings, meetings that began by expressing the Easter theme that “all things are possible” with God.

Within a short time, the pastor said that the people who were praying encountered “in our services and meetings, the miraculous experience of feeling the effect of the Word.” God’s presence “was with us. It was with ... all of us,” and soon the number of pray-ers swelled to more than 200,000 people, 90 percent of whom were non-Christians but were drawn by this Easter energy. Those pray-ers poured out of the meeting one fateful Monday evening to protest in the streets, shouting, “We are the

People!” and in doing so created the movement that toppled the Berlin Wall.

When Pastor Fuehrer was asked why the people hadn’t felt God’s presence that strongly before, he theorized that it was because the church had been seduced by what he called “the [middle class] image of Jesus as one who doesn’t disturb, who is only passive,” the Jesus whose only goal was to make people vaguely happy. But through prayer and study, he said that the members of those prayer meetings found a different kind of Jesus — a “Jesus who spoke the truth directly to the people” rather than a Jesus who diluted the truth. They found in the resurrected Jesus the power to dream new dreams for their city and their nation. section is a regular feature underwritten by Advocate Publishing and the churches listed on these pages. For information about helping support the Worship section, call 214.560.4202.

And through that resurrection power, our world was changed forever.

As I reflect this year on Easter Day, I’ll ask myself once again how its message might change the world — again.