10 Simple Ways for Making Easter a Season

Now what? We’ve done Easter morning. Hidden and found all the Easter eggs. Gorged ourselves on all the chocolate rabbits. Taken the pastel family portraits and flooded our Facebook and Instagram feeds with them. We do 40 days of Lent, fasting from meat or coffee or social media, all for a Sunday spectacle and family ham dinner, and then wake up Monday morning to business as usual?

Nope. Not even close. Easter changes the world. And it’s better than a single day. In the Christian calendar, it’s more than one single Sunday. It’s a season of 50 days leading up to Pentecost. The Easter feast outlasts the Lenten fast. The feast is better.

What if our Christian communities celebrated Easter as a whole season, more than one single Sunday? What if we crafted some habits or practices in our households that carried us through the whole season? Easter changes the world. We might imagine the journeys of Lent and Easter like a “V” shape. In Lent, we go down. We descend. In Easter, we rise. In Lent, we enter the pain and hurt of a sin-soaked world. In Easter, we relish the abundance of God’s good, reborn world.

This is resurrection we’re talking about. If we spent the season of Lent depriving ourselves, what if we spent the season of Easter engaging the world in some out-of-the-ordinary way? Easter is for all those things that make life worth living. What are the most joyous things you can do for the next 50 days?

Here are a couple of ideas:

1. Pray

Maybe that sounds a little too obvious, a little too solemn, a little too interior. But I mean none of the above. It might be helpful to go to God first, asking, “How can I (or my household, or my community) best celebrate new creation this season?”

Maybe it’s by listening through a new prayer practice like the daily office or setting aside 20 minutes each day for centering prayer. Maybe it’s regular walks around the neighborhood in conversation with God about everything you see. Maybe it’s crafting a new space in your home or church for dedicating generous attention to God. Easter is for making ourselves available and generous towards God.

2. Throw parties

You can go nuts with balloons and streamers and hats. You can go real simple with soup and salad. Whatever you do, extend your table. Open up space and invite a neighbor. If you have kids, consider ritualizing one of your dinners each week. You can use Ephesians 5:14 as a call and response together. Easter is about celebrating joyously.

3. Meet your neighbors

In their book The Art of Neighboring, pastors Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon offer a practice of drawing a tic-tac-toe grid with your house as the middle square. The other squares represent your neighbors across the street, behind you, and next door. Then you fill in each square with their name, a fact you can observe about them, and a detail you can only learn from a conversation with them. Easter is about making ourselves generous to one another.

4. Learn about the hurts in your community

Open your eyes and ears. What do you notice in your neighborhood? Schedule a meeting with a local school principal and listen. Ask questions of your neighbors. Go to a local protest and listen. Read the local newspaper with an attentive ear to how God might be at work. Instead of absorbing yourself in the latest social media outrage, become an expert in your local place. Easter is about being a healing presence in hurting places.

5. Volunteer

Put your hands to use. Engage your heart. Find a non-profit in your area or the closest school or food bank. Get out of yourself. Serve. Whatever you may learn about the hurts of your community, now put one foot in front of the other and do something about them. Ask where God is at work around you and then go there and get your hands dirty. Easter is about putting God’s good world back together again.

6. Mentor a child

See how you might be present with young people and children around you. Whether in your local church or nearest school, who might need help with their homework? Or tutoring in geometry? Or proofreading a resume? Or an ice cream cone and a listening ear?

Who around you simply needs some adult attention that’s not their parent? What parent needs a break from their toddler or infant? Jesus says, “Anyone who welcomes a little child like this on my behalf is welcoming me.” Easter is for encountering the presence of the risen Christ in young people.

7. Plan a vacation

Take out your calendar and start making plans for a getaway. Not a “stay-cation”—a real, joyful, memory-making vacation. In Easter, we live life to the fullest. Jesus says, “My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life.”

God has said the definitive word about sin and death and injustice in the world. In Lent, the struggle is real. In Easter, the party is real. So kick your feet up and relax. Easter is for the rest and relaxation that come in celebration.

8. Learn a new skill

What talents and skills have you yet to discover? Take up dance lessons. Or start tinkering on the piano. Learn how to draw or paint or sculpt. Try woodworking. Exercise creativity muscles that you’ve long forgotten you have. Easter is about new creation, which means we’re most like God when we’re making stuff.

9. Plant a garden

Buy some seeds or plants and get your hands in the dirt. Few things richly teach us the ways of God like a small garden. Tend it. Water it. Weed it. Slow down and pay attention to it. Easter is about exchanging our rhythms for God’s.

10. Read a book

Make some space to feed your mind. If repentance is about changing our mind in such a way that changes our behavior, we could stand to change the way we think about Easter. Two that have profoundly shaped how I think about Easter include Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright and Practice Resurrection by Eugene Peterson. There are many options, though. Easter is about re-orienting our whole worldview around God’s new world.

Wright says, “The forty days of the Easter season, until the ascension, ought to be a time to balance out Lent by taking something up, some new task or venture, something wholesome and fruitful and outgoing and self-giving…. It might give you a sniff of new possibilities, new hopes, new ventures you never dreamed of. It might bring something of Easter into your innermost life. It might help you wake up in a whole new way. And that’s what Easter is all about.”

And one of my very favorite Wendell Berry poems includes these lines:

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
…
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
…
Practice resurrection.