Early this morning, I watched a squirrel jump from a low-hanging hackberry branch on to the gutter of my roof, all through the reflection in our neighbors’ kitchen window. Maybe 15 feet separates their Victorian from our Craftsman bungalow. We often wave at them from our wash-guest-office-laundry room whenever we see them through the panes. Our neighbors humor us, and wave back when we make fools of ourselves in this way.

There is fresh green on the trees, too early to be robust or provide ample shade to anything below, but the mere sight of new life on the boughs makes something inside us rise up the way daffodils come towering above the soil ruining, at long last, winter. Rise up, go, and sin no more, said Jesus to the woman caught in the act of adultery. His words – more than just words – offered rising hope and freedom to this woman who surely walked away changed in more than a temporal way. Where death, legally and religiously, should have occurred, life rose in her, she went, and she sinned no more. And we do the same.

We wave at the nearness of folly and embrace it in so neighborly a fashion as if peering through one another’s windows. Thanks be to God for his indescribable Gift on this day, a day soaked in all the richest meaning of rising, both metaphorically, and, somehow, someway, physically.

Happy Easter.