Have you ever heard of an “Easter Egg”? Not the ones that you dye or the plastic ones that children hunt on Easter morning, but movie “Easter Eggs?” Movie “Easter Eggs” are where you see something in a movie that is a nod to something else, like pop culture or another movie, or an acknowledgement of a plot twist that is just too good. For example, in the movie “Back to the Future,” Marty is so bad at flying the DeLorean time machine that he takes out one of the pine trees at “Twin Pines Mall.” When he returns from going back in time, the mall is named “Lone Pines Mall...” Or the way that the alphanumeric sequence A113 is found in a lot of Pixar movies – like the license plate for the mom in Toy Story or the underwater camera model number in Finding Nemo or the train number in Cars or Sully’s classroom in Monster’s University. What is A113? It’s the number of the animation classroom at the California Institute of the Arts where many Pixar animators learned their trade...
There are “Easter Eggs” all around that point towards pop culture – but have you ever noticed the “Easter Eggs” all around us that point us towards God? This time of year, for me, reminders that God is near are all around. In the crocuses and daffodils and forsythia that are beginning to bloom, in the lengthening warmer days and shorter nights, in spring showers and return of the squirrels that bedevil our dog Stella Jo. Yesterday, the “Egg” that caught my eye was a hawk as it flew over our porch. The majesty as he soared above, his sheer size and beauty, it took my breath away. Of course, God is not just visible in nature, but also in the eyes of our fellow person. God is visible, an “Easter Egg” in plain sight, in the people of Poland who have taken in more than two million refugees from Ukraine, most of them women and children, in less than a month and a half. God is in the successes that have been made in creating vaccines, making it possible for us to gather with or without masking in person without worrying about becoming infected with Covid. There is also a Divine “Easter Egg” in your faces on Sunday morning as you greet one another and in the new technology that is now up and running, ensuring that worship will be available to folks who can’t make it in and to people who may just find us on the web for many years to come.
God is all around if you know where to look. Let us be alert for the “Easter Eggs” in our lives – the places where God makes God’s presence known in the here and now. You may be amazed at how many are hidden in plain sight.