Happy St. Patrick’s day everyone! It’s a day to wear green, eat corned beef, and celebrate all things Irish. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, had an amazing story that makes remembering him right before Easter a great idea.
When Patrick was a young man, he was kidnapped and taken to Ireland and made a slave to the Celtic people. After six years he escaped home to England, where he would become a cleric in the Catholic Church. Patrick would later return to Ireland as a missionary. When Patrick returned to share the Gospel (good news) of Christ with the people of Ireland, he went about it in a way that was very different from the church in the rest of the world. In most of the world at that time, the church worked to convert people to Christianity, then invited them into the community of the church. But Patrick flipped that process around. He created open communities where people who had doubts, questions, and skepticism toward Christianity could freely interact with Patrick and those who worked with him. In Patrick’s model, community came before and led to conversion. You were free to show up with all of your doubts and questions and invited to belong before they had all been answered.
Easter is an event that a lot of people have questions about. Some have serious doubts—did Jesus’s resurrection actional happen? The story of someone dying and then coming back to life is hard to reconcile with what we know about death and its finality. But it is also the key event in the church. Without it, the rest of Christianity doesn’t mean anything.
The good news for all of us is that God is not afraid of our doubts and questions. They don’t have to be a barrier to us looking closely at the claims of Christ. This Easter season, don’t let your doubts keep you from taking a look into the empty tomb. We’re going to talk about Jesus and our doubts this Easter at Journey Church and we’d love to have you join us. Before then, if you’d like to learn more about the history and meaning of Easter, you can check out this past blog post here.
Your doubts and questions are welcome with us, and we would love to search for the answers with you.