Friends, Happy Easter! For those of you who’ve read philosophers and spiritual writers – what all those figures have in common is a kind of calm, musing detachment as they talk about high ideas. Well, there’s all of that – and there’s the Gospel, the “Good News.” Yes, the Gospels have inspired philosophers and spiritual teachers, but at their heart, they’re not abstract philosophical musing; they’re the urgent conveying of news. They tell you: ‘Something Happened! And I want you to know about it!’

The theme of ‘witnesses’ – people who’ve experienced something – speaks to something that is really distinctive to the Christian faith. Christianity is not a philosophy – though it can incorporate philosophy; it’s not primarily a mysticism – though it can incorporate mysticism; it’s not a religion that comes welling up out of natural experience – though it can accommodate that. Christianity is about something that happened; and there were witnesses of it. Without that, Christianity falls apart.