Daily Reading for March 29 • Saturday in Easter Week
No season of the Christian year speaks to the soul as does the Easter Tide. It is the beautiful season of the year, when the winter is ended and all things bud forth; the graves and sleeping-places of the dust are broken up and the beauty of the floral kingdom comes back to us in the fresh glory of living green and painted leaves and with the perfume of the incense-breathing gardens of spring. Now best may the gospel of immortality be preached, when ten thousand times ten thousand witnesses confirm the word; when bud and leaf and flower, when every little branch that swells with new life of the spring, and every brook that frees itself of ice and resumes the song of the past, and every gentle bird and beast, and tiny creatures of the dust, and all that have life and health, seem to rejoice in the morning of their returning day; now comes to us the gospel of immortality, attested by a great cloud of witnesses in earth, sea, and sky, and vouched for by the deeper tones of years that are past; by the testimony of all ages since Christ was here; by the voice of those who have lived and died believing that, to God, there are no dead, that “for to him all are alive.” This is the thing which has been most surely believed among us; the event from which all else is reckoned backwards and forwards; the stay of those on their journey, the inspiration of genius, the melody of music, the strength of manners and morals, the support and consolation of the mourning heart. From the natural and the moral world, the world of history and art, the worlds of mind, of matter, and of religion, come voices announcing that Christ is risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that sleep.
From the sermon “The Morning of Eternity” by Morgan Dix, , quoted in A Time to Turn: Anglican Readings for Lent and Easter Week by Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2004. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com