April, 2025: Second Advent and Traditional Easter Observed
Easter 2025 was unusual in that Second Advent Easter and Traditional Easter were close together. Second Advent Easter was on the 18th of April, and Traditional Easter was on the 20th. We had a Divine Sunrise Service on both days, followed by breakfast at the End Times Parsonage. An Easter Egg Hunt was held for the children after breakfast.
Second Advent Easter (April 18)
On Friday April 18, 2025, a concelebrated Sunrise Divine Service was performed at the Cathedral Church of the Americas. A light breakfast was served at the End Times Parsonage following the service.
April 18 is celebrated as True Easter in the Second Advent Church in a twofold manner: first, we commemorate the spiritual resurrection of Jesus on this date in keeping with the solar calendar, which, unlike the lunar calendar used by First Dispensation churches, is fixed; second, we remember the Revelations received in Sanctuary on this date in 1982, an event that served to confirm the importance of this date in the Sacred Calendar of the Church. Revelations received on this date are recorded in The Book of God’s Revelation.
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On April 18, 1982, The Church received a revelation confirming the Second Appearance of God when the Angel of the Lord in the form of Jesus manifested in visible form at the Sanctuary of Revelation and entrusted The Church with the keys to open the Seals of the Book of Revelation. The date of Second Advent Easter was established as part of the Sacred Calendar following the series of Revelations that The Man received on that day as he climbed the Seven Mountains of Metal.
It is recorded in The Book of God’s Revelation that, while on the fifth mountain, the Mountain of Bronze, The Man was exhorted to instruct the Righteous and the Ordained Ministers in the Sacred Calendar of God’s Word, to let them be knowledgeable in the Days of His Appearances and Blessings, and to let them gather together at the prescribed times so their spirits might be anointed by God’s Comfort and strengthened by His Consolation. Thus Second Advent Easter has a unique and sacred significance to members of the Second Advent Church.
On that day in 1982, while The Man stood on the summit of the Mountain of Iron in the Sanctuary of Revelation, an Angel of the Lord appeared to The Man out of the midst of the Four Luminaries, identified Himself as Jesus and spoke:
All prophecies having been fulfilled, Judgement is now upon the world of the living. The Heavens declare the glory of God in His Final Appearance. He has established His Tabernacle in The Sun whose rays enlighten the Soul of the Righteous, putting them on The Way of holiness.
The blind are made to see His Image. The deaf are made to hear His Word. The dead are made to rise at His Coming. Every Spirit is judged before The Creator. Freedom to err is abolished. The wicked find no sanctuary in Darkness, for it is lit and evil is exposed.
As foretold by The Father in Heaven who revealed understanding of future events to His prophets in visions, the fruit of the vine is abundant. All may drink anew the dew for a blessing as drops from the honeycomb. God pours out His Holy Spirit as from a fountain flowing from a rock over desolate wastes. By the perfection of His Light, God breathes His Word a final time. His utterings bring forth a New Creation. He reveals the Image of His Countenance.
God has opened the gates of the Heavenly Temple. The altar is of Light fashioned by the luster of His Presence on the Throne of His Glory. The tabernacle is lit by the sun, and the Bread of Life is placed thereupon. The Heavens are rolled up like a scroll inscribed with His Statutes and Judgements. His Law is written on the Tablets of Light borne by the Ark of His New Covenant as a rainbow.
I ministered to Israel, to a generation unworthy of redemption, and I was scourged by faithless men. I, a man of sorrows who bore the grief of the people turned to their own ways, did intercede for the transgressors, sacrificing myself not to God but to my people out of my love for them. But Israel understood not my preordained presence, which was my destiny from birth as God’s Appointed One. . . .
Moses and the prophets of the remnant of True Israel spoke of my coming to redeem the people. With the rejection of me, the Light went out from the land. But the precious remnant, shortlived, awaited the Advent of God and the brightness of His Second Coming.
The Day of The Lord is near. He appears out of the Darkness to enlighten the whole Creation with His Image and to judge it with His Word. It is meet that He manifest His Image before His full coming and prepare the Creation with His Word. For I declare unto you that when He comes to restore the creation and reveals Himself, nothing shall live save His Light and those Souls reborn of that Light. . . .
Further Revelations received by The Man on April 18, 1986, are recorded with commentary in The Book of God’s Revelation.
In the Second Advent Church, Easter is a fixed date in the Sacred Calendar. The Church celebrates true Easter each year on April 18. On this day The Church honors both the day of Jesus’ Resurrection and the day of Jesus’ Revelations and Appearance at the Sanctuary.
It is known that the Eastern Church had celebrated Easter every year on April 16, the 14th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, also known as Passover. The day of the crucifixion, a Friday, and the 14th day of Nisan, was recognized as the beginning of the 15th of Nisan. Jesus was resurrected on the following day, Sunday the 16th.
The Church, holding to the solar calendar of the Essaei, maintains that the date of Easter cannot be movable in present-day time reckoning, as it is under the lunar calendar (determined as the first Sunday after the first full moon of Spring). The fixed Sacred Calendar of the Second Advent ministry recognizes that an annual alignment of the earth and sun, planets, stars, and the cosmos in general, makes this day cosmically important.
Because the manifestation in Sanctuary took place on April 18, 1982, The Church considers this day to be the day in alignment with the original date of the Resurrection. For these reasons The Church keeps this day sacred.
The Gospel message records Jesus as saying, “For the son of man shall come in the glory of the Father with His Angels; and then He shall regard every person according to his works.” It was written by prophets of former times that God would send His messenger to prepare the way of God’s Second Coming, as promised to Adam and Eve, and come as a fire to refine the world. The Old Testament presents the prophecy of Malachi: “For behold the day cometh that shall burn as an oven and all that do wickedly shall be stubble, but unto you that love me, shall the Sun of Righteousness appear with healing in its rays, and ye that do righteously shall grow up as a new people of God. And I shall spare them as a man spareth his own son that serveth him.”
With God’s manifestation in the Sun of Righteousness on February 2, 1962, and the Appearance of Jesus on April 18, 1982, the Second Advent of God and the manifestation of Jesus and the Angelic Host have transpired and are presently at work for the salvation of the righteous.
Traditional Easter Message by The Right Reverend Father Gene Savoy, Jr.
On April 20th, hundreds of millions of Christians around the world – Catholic, Protestant and others – observed the most important time in the Christian calendar and one of its oldest beliefs: the pain, sorrow and suffering of Jesus Christ, as well as his physical resurrection. Next month, millions of Orthodox Christians will do the same.
We of this Community, however, observe Easter each year on a fixed date – April 18th – according to the solar, not the lunar, calendar. And, we do so in an entirely different way and with an entirely unique message. Most importantly, we do not recognize or teach the resurrection of the physical body, only the resurrection of the reborn spiritual Light Body.
And although the Pauline churches erroneously connect Easter to the Jewish Passover, we know that the Last Supper was indeed a sacred Essene pannuches meal centered around the 50-day pentacontad cycle during which Jesus declared himself to be the Messiah of Aaron and Israel. (Details of this event can be found in The Essaei Document, as well as in other material of our Community.)
Needless to say, this important distinction alone separates us from the rest of Christianity, in addition to the fact that the Essenes, of which Jesus was a part, functioned under distinct traditions, rites and rituals from their counterparts at the Temple in Jerusalem who had misinterpreted the Law of Moses to include the practice of daily sacrifice of animals and the shedding of blood as an atonement for the sins of the people.
However, I digress. Because most of the Western traditions, cultures and languages connect Easter to the Passover, the word used for this time of the year is common, except in English. For example, in Greek, the Paschal feast is called Pascha; in Hebrew, it is Pasach; in Spanish, Pascua, and so on. But in English we have the word Easter, which comes from the Old English Eostre.
We can trace Eostre to a goddess – an important goddess – called Hausos. The goddess comes from the proto-Indo European religion. And she was known as the Goddess of the Dawn. Her name was reconstructed as Ausos. In India, she is referred to as Usas; in Greek Eos; and in Latin Aurora.
The name was derived from the root “To Shine,” thus, translating to “The Shining One.” The English word “East” is derived from this word, also the Latin “Aurum” meaning gold. The dawn goddess was also the Goddess of Spring. In the Anglo-Saxon world, and also in the Germanic world, this time – this Easter or Eostre – was called Eosturmonath, or Easter Month, which was celebrated for the entire month of April. This Goddess of Spring was involved in the mythology of the Indo-European new year where the Dawn Goddess was liberated by God from imprisonment. She is known in the Rigveda as Indra and in ancient Greek mythology as Dionysus. So we see that it has always been a very important time of the year.
So how do we in the Second Advent/Cosolargy Community reconcile ourselves with this ancient observance? How do we – who do not accept the physical resurrection of the body – harmonize ourselves with this “holy week” which emphasizes the agony, misery and torment of the man, Jesus? How do we – who do not teach that he was the sacrificial Passover lamb, an offering acceptable to God whose blood is shed daily on the altars of churches around the world everywhere and that the shedding of his blood, however ritualistically, is an atonement for the sins of the world? How do we come to terms with those many, many millions of people who do? And, how do we – who reject that Christ’s crucifixion was “good” or that it was the Will of God, holding instead that it was the murder of a Son of Light by the civil and religious authorities of the day – how do we bring that in to accord with our own teaching and theology?
We do so by emphasizing what we know to be Christ’s true message: First, that we are all endowed by the Creator of our spiritual Beings with an eternal and immortal Soul, if we but cause that Divine Generative Force – Christ or The Word – to penetrate into that spiritual Womb. Second, that once we consent to the Word of God – the Logos – being allowed to impregnate our Spirit, that Spirit becomes animated by the Thought and Will of God the Father and becomes a living, breathing, conscious Soul, able to reason on heavenly things. Third, that once imbued with Christ Consciousness, the Soul, released from the cycle of generated existence, recalls and remembers its history and origin and consciously participates in the Worlds of Light, continually partaking of a Divine Communion.
This was the message of Christ Jesus. And this is what was symbolized by the Last Supper – the act of the reborn, conscious Soul partaking of the True Communion, feeding off the Word of God – the Bread from Heaven – and drinking from the Cup filled with God’s Living Waters – which is Divine Light. And this is also the message of the Messianic Church of the Second Advent. The beauty of it all is that it can be done in the here and now – that our spiritual immortality and divinity can be realized while we exist and live in this world. And if that is accomplished, one has received the gift of the resurrection – not as something abstract to wonder about after death, but something one can experience and participate in while one lives in this world.
We know that Jesus – the Christ – not only received the Word of God, but that the Logos incarnated within his Spirit. He became the Living Word of God manifest in man. Yes, he was the Messiah of Aaron and of Israel, but he, like so many others of his Christ Brothers, received the mantle of the Office of Christ on Earth. But we also know that Jesus prophesied a future time – a time when Christ, the celestial and mediating force between God and Man, would appear not in human form but out of the heavens in great power and glory. And this prophesy echoed the older prophecies of Isaiah and Malachi.
1 See the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. 2 But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its in rays. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. 3 And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the Lord of hosts. [Malachi 4]
Malachi is prophesying about the End of Times, when God would come again at the Second Advent, when the Sun of Righteousness would appear out of the heavens in great splendor and with a Light which had never been bestowed on Earth before. And this Light would feed and nurture the Spirit at the great and final Messianic Banquet served from the true Temple of God. Thus, the message of Jesus is clear. The need for men and women to partake of the supersubstantial Food that nourishes the Soul is found in the transubstantiated Sun – the sun of matter which is transfigured into Spirit.
Therefore, in commemorating the traditional Easter Season, we do so in anticipation of True Easter, which we celebrate in the Second Advent Church on April 18th each year, according to the solar calendar. We participate in the glorious communion of the Angels of Light, joining with Jesus and the Essaei and all those of other religions who have been reborn into the Community of Light, which is the Resurrection of the Spirit that comes about only through participation in the glorious and Messianic Communion with the Celestial Christ.
The Easter Season is a time of spiritual renewal, reflection and rebirth. Communion with God begins here on Earth, for God’s Plan for the renewal and restoration of the Creation cannot be fulfilled without the unified Community and those disciplined who teach, preserve and live the revealed and sacred Teachings of Light – a teaching which has been practiced and handed down throughout the centuries and restored in our modern times for a special and appointed few. Those who are the Servants of God and Light will receive the Gift of God, which is a blessing He bestows on those who assist Him in His Divine Plan. God reveals Himself to those in Light, and those who are resurrected to Light by means of Light during this life will dwell with Him forever.
Let me close this message with these beautiful lines from the Gnostic Gospel of Phillip. I love these words because I believe they describe the resurrection so well and embody the spiritual message not only of this time of year but of what this Community teaches.
“We are born through the Holy Spirit, but we are born again through the Christ. In both we are anointed through the Spirit…No one can see himself in water or in a mirror without light. Nor again will you be able to see in light without water or a mirror. On account of this, it is fitting to baptize in both light and the water. But the light is the Anointing.
“There were three buildings for offering-places in Jerusalem. One was open to the west; they called it “the holy.” Another was open to the south; the called it “the holy of the holy.” The third was open to the east; they called it “the holy of the holies.” It was the place into which the high priest came alone. The Baptism is the holy house…the holy of the holy. The holy of the holies is the bridal chamber.
“Those who say they will die first and rise again are in error. If they do not first receive the resurrection while they live, when they die they will receive nothing. So also they speak about Baptism, saying that Baptism is a great thing because if people receive it, they will live….The Anointing is greater than Baptism. For by the Anointing we are called Christians, not because of Baptism. And they call Christ so because of the Anointing….He who has been anointed has the All; he has the resurrection, the Light, the Cross, and the Holy Spirit. The Father gave him these things in the bridal chamber….
“The Cup of Prayer holds wine, it holds water. It serves as a type of the blood by which they give thanks. And it is full of the Holy Spirit and it belongs to the completely perfect Man. When we drink this, we will take to ourselves the perfect Man. The living water is a body. It is fitting that we clothe ourselves with the living Man. Therefore, when he comes to go down to the water, he disrobes in order that he may put this one on. A horse begets a horse; a man begets a man; a god begets a god. It is thus with the bridegroom and the bride. The holy man is all holy, including his body. For, if he holds the bread, he will make it holy, or the cup, or anything else which he holds, he will make it pure….Everyone who will go into the bridal chamber will be born of light. For they are not conceived from the marriage which is consecrated in the night…But the mysteries of marriage are fulfilled in the day and light. That day or its light does not set. If anyone becomes a child of the bridal chamber, he will receive light. If anyone does not receive it while he is in these places, the world, he will not be able to receive it in the other place. The one who has received light cannot be seen nor can he be held, and no one can torment him, even if he lives in the world. And also, if he should go out of the world, already he has received the truth in images….
“…Blessed is the one who exists before he comes into being. For he who exists, he was and will be.”
These inspired and enlightened words express the message of Jesus and the essence of his teaching. Therefore, let us be resolved to go forth – our fellowship renewed and strengthened, and our love and joy for one another regenerated. What a symbolically beautiful time of year for this: Springtime, when all things are made new. And let us give thanks for the promise of the Second Advent, as prophesied by Jesus Christ, which has been fulfilled in our special age. What a blessing it is! For how many countless men and women over these past many centuries have longed for and awaited the Second Coming of God – this powerful and profound spiritual Consciousness that is manifesting in the world and permeating all things with an energy never before felt and experienced by the human Spirit? And we are privileged to be a part of it – to assist God in a new way as servants and workers in the New Covenant, which is destined to bring about a new Heaven and a new Earth.
In 1965, upon arriving at Gran Pajatén, Savoy discovered sculptures depicting condors and figures adorned with halos. (El País)