An Easter Letter from Bishop Adams

​“Alleluia. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.
Therefore let us keep the feast. Alleluia.”
 
Dear Friends of The Episcopal Church in South Carolina,
 
Holy Week and Easter greetings to all of you. The sacred time and space of the Triduum of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter is a unified proclamation of the central event of Christian faith and life. It is a grand opportunity to make the good news of Christ known and experienced through story and song with all the senses engaged.
 
I know many of you have been working hard to prepare and I trust you will enter into this most holy time with the utmost seriousness it deserves as well as with the joy-filled privilege it presents. This week especially I hold all of the liturgical participants in prayer, clergy and lay leaders, for faithful preaching and faithful planning. For the Feast of the Resurrection I will be at Grace Church Cathedral for the Easter Vigil as celebrant and preacher, and then on Easter morning at the Church of the Messiah, Myrtle Beach. Even as I will be present in those particular places, all of you will be on my mind and heart.
 
The verse above is known as the Pascha Nostrum. It offers us a vision for how we might participate in the Easter event. Keeping the feast is a response, the “therefore,” to the passion event of Jesus’ death and resurrection. One way to keep the feast is Eucharist. There is also, however, the feast of our life to which God calls us in faithful discipleship.
 
So the “therefore” continues as we are sent out to continue the feast through our own humanity and as we engage one another. How does your life become more clearly a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, to use St. Paul’s words? Do you seek the possibility that all you do may be a proclamation of God’s good news of being set free? Is your life a response to grace as you become a window to the Easter promise of a transformed humanity and world? Can your life become a means of invitation to the feast of God’s mission of justice for the entire creation?
 
Feast well dear friends as Christ bids you to the table – the table of the altar and the table of the world.
 
Blessings in the Risen One,
 
Bishop Skip