Dear friends, as I write this reflection, it’s Maundy Thursday, and I’m still reflecting on the launch of the Artemis II NASA mission that our family watched on TV yesterday. Within eight short yet remarkable minutes, the spacecraft carrying four astronauts on a mission around the moon had reached a speed of 17,000 mph and an orbit into outer space. The television broadcast alternated showing scenes from the launch site in Florida, the control room in Houston, and, of course, the perspective from the spacecraft itself. There’s always been a part of me that wonders what it would be like to take in that perspective of our earth. Of course, we’ve seen photos and TV coverage, but it must be something else to witness, first-hand, the image of our tiny, blue-green marble Earth floating in space.

I will never know exactly what that would be like (Ten days with four other people in a space the size of a minivan? No, thank you!), but I can imagine the sight stripping me of my breath. On the other hand, I can also imagine a sense of frustration at seeing our beautiful earth, while also knowing that it contains so much suffering and conflict. I think I’d want to shake it up and knock some sense into it.

I’ve been thinking this week about the prevalence of knock-some-sense-into-it earthquakes in Scripture, particularly in the passion story. When Jesus rides into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, for example, the city is said to have been in turmoil; the word for “turmoil” is also the word used for an earthquake. Then there’s another earthquake that happens right after Jesus takes his last breath, as if the earth itself were sobbing and shaking in grief, all out of sorts from the confusion of what has just happened. And, finally, as that first day of the week is drawing near, there’s another great earthquake.

This one feels different, though, because it comes with a message from the angel, “Do not be afraid,” as if the angel knew he (she?) would be encountering a trauma response. And things are happening quickly and simultaneously. At about the same time the earthquake occurs, the angel is descending, and the stone gets rolled away so the angel can sit on it, as if this earthquake were not shaking things up as much as shaking things back into place and providing a platform for the angel to share some good news.

Holy Week is like that, isn’t it? It shakes things up, uprooting us from our comforts and then, when perhaps we can’t take it anymore, it shakes things back into place, reminding us of the way God would have the world function: with peace, justice, hope, mercy, and love. In one of his most well-known poems, Manifesto, the great poet and earth-lover Wendell Berry exhorts his readers to “practice resurrection.” Maybe this is what he meant–to be a part of shaking things back into place and bringing our reality here and now a bit closer to that reign that we hope and pray will one day come “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Happy Easter, NC Synod.