There is a moment in the liturgy each Sunday when we kneel or stand together and confess that we have not loved God with our whole heart, and we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.

But the confession assumes something underneath it. We could not have failed to love God with our whole heart unless we were the kind of creatures who were made to.

What does it actually mean that we were made in the image of God?

The God of Israel forbade images, and then made one anyway. Out of dust.

Eastertide does not move gently from resurrection to triumph. It leads us instead to Stephen, the first martyr, who looked into the violence around him and saw heaven opened.

Sometimes the clearest witness to the resurrection appears where we least expect it.

The phone is the first voice of the morning. Before the light, before the coffee, before anything else, a small rectangle of glass tells us what to be worried about today.

Psalm 23 is one of the most familiar passages in the English language. We know it from funerals, from needlepoints, from music. Most of us could say the first lines from memory. Its familiarity may be the reason we have stopped hearing it.

Not: is the Lord my shepherd? The Psalm takes that as given.

The question is: what else has been?

Ask most people when Easter is and they will tell you the Sunday. Sit inside the liturgy for a year and you learn something different: fifty days, through Pentecost.

On the afternoon of the first Easter, two disciples were walking away from Jerusalem. They told the risen Christ about the resurrection, and did not recognize him.

We are not different. We walk the wrong way. We miss what is already here.