Dear Sisters and Brothers, 

in 1911, on the eve of the First World War, the German doctor and theologian Albert Schweitzer, a missionary in Lambaréné, Africa, wrote about the Old Testament prophets: 

"They were people who lived in difficult times. And their time is like ours. I do not need to describe it to you. They experienced, as we do, the nations turning on each other like snarling lions, ready at any moment to pounce on each other for nothing. They saw, like us, how the world around them became more and more flattened, and how people, in order to escape from external and internal worries, became more and more intent on distraction, and were confronted, like us, with the terrible seriousness of life and the desire to forget at all costs. 

It was in such times that they lived as the hopeful ones. The prophets were optimists, the most powerful optimists there ever were. It was not the shallow optimism that still finds the good in everything and lives by telling itself things that are not and looking through half-closed eyes, but the powerful optimism that looks at everything with an unrelenting gaze, but at the same time has a will that hopes against everything it sees, against everything that seems." 

Albert Schweitzer describes the difficult times in which he lives and compares them to the time of the prophets. In this way he aptly describes the task of Christians after Easter . 

We are supposed to be optimists: People who hope against all that they see and against all that seems. Because we have every reason to hope: "Christ is risen. He is truly risen!" Our task is to carry this hope forward. If we want to shape the future, we need courage – especially in uncertain times. According to Albert Schweitzer, Christian hope does not try to make reality look good. It sees the world as it is and works to make it the way God wants it to be. This makes us prophets of hope against the "terrible seriousness of life". 

The Württemberg pastor Christoph Blumhardt once said: “Christians are protesters against death.”  Because our God is the God of the living, not the dead. And because we believe that the "last enemy" has been defeated by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  

The message of Easter makes us people of hope, optimists, prophets of the living God: 

Christ is risen! He is truly risen!

I wish you a blessed Easter.