What a celebration! On Easter Sunday Grace Sacramento hosted 119 people at our first ever Easter service in our own facility. Friends, family and visitors from the neighborhood worshiped with us as we welcomed four individuals and families as new church members and celebrated being “Easter people in a Good Friday world!”

Afterwards we hosted hundreds (we don’t know exactly how many) at an Easter picnic in Tahoe Park. There is so much to be thankful for and so many people to thank. A significant group spent Saturday morning cleaning and setting up the facility after a wonderful Good Friday Table and Tenebrae service the night before. We had the help of carpenters, seamstresses, artists, florists and designers who helped beautify the building and the worship space in preparation for hospitality and Easter reverence. There was an incredible set-up team early Sunday morning in Tahoe Park, a wonderful music ensemble that lead our praises, and a tech team piloting a new and improved A/V system. All of this and more was an incredible display of Christ’s body working together

Every year for the past four years we have advertised and passed out fliers inviting people to join us in the park on Easter. Each of the past 3 years we have seen a pleasant number of visitors from the neighborhood (12 or 20). This year I received a text while I was still at the church after the service: “Community has shown up out here...HELP!!! Possibly my proudest moment as a pastor at Grace Sacramento was witnessing how the people of Grace Sacramento responded when we realized that there were hundreds of visitors at Tahoe Park waiting for an Easter Egg hunt and free picnic lunch. People went to work. They served. They shopped for more food. They supervised egg hunts. They painted kids faces and did kids crafts and manned bounce-houses and waited and waited and waited to eat until everyone else had gone through the line.

At one point I stood between the serving tables and prayed out loud as people passed through: “Lord please take these five loaves and two fish and multiply them so that everyone will have something to eat.” And everyone did. And there were multiple conversations that started like this: “Where are you guys from?” “What kind of church is this?” “When do you worship?” “Thank you!”

To the people of Grace Sacramento: Thank you. Thank you for your servants’ hearts and patient love. Thank you for giving away your Easter celebration for others to enjoy. J.R.R. Tolkien coined the term: eucatastrophe. A eucatastrophe refers to a thankful catastrophe, a disaster that produces wonderful results. The perfect example is the death of our savior that resulted in new resurrection life. I feel confident in saying that our Easter in the park was a eucatastrophic success! Thank you to each of you who served like Jesus that day. We have some work to do before next year to be full of faith and prepared for what God might do, to be intentional and clear about what we hope will happen and to make sure we have enough hot dogs for everyone. Christ is risen my friends and we are an Easter people in a Good Friday world!

Christ is Risen!