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Anyone can throw a party. It's easy to jump up and down and shout loud "alleluias." Pay the DJ, set out the drinks and the buffet table, and that's about it. At first, it's a blast! Whirling bodies and pulsing rhythms fill the night. Laughter and clinking glasses seem like an endless and joyful dialogue. But, by midnight it all starts to get a little old. People get tired of shouting and dancing and head home because they have to work the next day. The DJ was only hired for a few hours and he, perhaps, has another gig at an after-hours club across town. The food is mostly gone, and there is a ghastly mess to clean up by the few people who weren't smart enough to leave earlier.

Yes. The party is easy. It's the next day that's hard.

The thrill of the resurrection and the empty tomb spill and disperse through another week at work only to find the faithful with the second part of this psalm. One can hear the stifled yawn and the whispered assertion, "Wasn't Easter last week?" "This sounds awfully familiar."

In truth, the Easter "reality," though thrilling at the start, is no easy thing to maintain. Thrust back into the sullen world as the people are, this Easter notion of new life and new beginnings; even of a new reality are kind of hard to hang onto when one's sales quota has been raised. If it's any comfort, it wasn't easy for the disciples, either.

There is, in this post-Easter haze, what poet and prophet, Daniel Berrigan, has referred to as a "smog of disbelief," even among the most passionate of believers. It is indeed difficult to keep celebrating the "day that the Lord has made," when the people live, work, and breathe in a world that the Lord has had little to do with -- indeed a world the people are called to shun.

It is at this point that the incredible gift of community takes hold. Yes, each person who shouts, "Alleluia," on Easter Sunday has to step back into a Good Friday world. Yes, each person who claims the new reality in Jesus Christ must return to the reality of time clocks and quotas. But praise God! There is a Christian community that remembers the alleluias. Praise God there is a community where this new reality not only survives but thrives. Here, in the sanctuary of community the party continues. Perhaps the songs are different. Maybe the dance steps change, but the table is spread, the feast is always ready as people shout once more, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!"