Easter Sunday
April 5, 2026
Good morning, Seekers. Christ has risen! Happy Easter everyone. I don’t think I’m exaggerating: the Feast of the Resurrection is the climax of the Christian calendar. It’s a wonderful day for the church because it gives us much hope for our lives and for the world.
But to really get into the experience of the resurrection, we have to get into the meaning of the cross. Indeed, the cross is the most prominent feature in our sanctuary here at Seekers.
We can’t spiritually bypass the crucifixion because it was and still is the ultimate expression of God’s love for us.
Among the many selections in the lectionary for Easter, we find these divine messages: “I have loved you with an everlasting love…” God says to us in the book of the prophet Jeremiah; “God’s steadfast love endures forever….” proclaims the Psalmist in the 118th Psalm.
In the cross, in the crucifixion, we see divine vulnerability, the death of God, an event that still resounds through human history, from 2,000 years ago. Not just a quiet peaceful death, but a horrific killing we hope to never witness in real life. And let’s be clear: the crucifixion of Jesus was a legal, state execution carried out by the Roman empire. Jesus never wanted to die such a brutal ghastly death. It was a violent death that followed the agony in the garden, the scourging with the whips, the crowning with the crown of thorns, the carrying of the cross. In the tradition in which I grew up, we observed the stations of the cross. During his journey to the cross, the only people whom Jesus addressed were the women of Jerusalem.
Why do I say something so outrageous, so heretical even, as the death of God? Quite simply, because I believe Jesus is divine and sacred scripture and history teach us that he died on the cross.
When my mother was dying in hospice 29 years ago in Richmond, Virginia, she would sometimes hold onto this crucifix while lying on her deathbed. At the time, I thought that was morbid because as it happens with many families, we were trying to make her comfortable. But now, these decades later, I know why she did that. She was comforted in the thought that the suffering Christ was in solidarity with her, in her suffering, in the suffering of her family watching her die, in the hour of her death. one of my favorite songs “Christ Was Lower Still,” there’s a lyric that cries out, “In your wounds I find room for all of mine.”
Have you ever been betrayed? Have you ever felt abandoned by your friends? Have you ever felt forsaken by the God we worship? Have you ever agonized over a life-or-death decision? Did Jesus like us agonize over the cruelty and violence of his day, the same cruelty and violence we’re witnessing in our day? Scripture teaches us that Jesus experienced all these things.
Christ himself entered into the full experience of the absurdity of death. Jesus in whom there was no trace of death, died the absurd death that is the fate of all of us.
And as with Jesus, that suffering didn’t last. The crucifixion, the cross, is the shadow side of the resurrection.
I know you probably didn’t come here today for a Good Friday sermon, so are you still with me?
The followers of Jesus were stunned when they learned of his resurrection. They had absolutely no expectation of the resurrection. His women followers, among them his mother and Mary Magdalene, were the first to announce his resurrection. The men didn’t believe them. We should note that Mary Magdalene was the first evangelist. Can you imagine her emotions, upon seeing the resurrected Christ?
The resurrection is the light that breaks through the darkness, Christ was dead and is now raised to life. Death where is your sting?
What was a wall that is death, became a gate, which is the resurrection thereby offering us a basis to live in hope. That’s why we proclaim when we celebrate the eucharist, that love is stronger than death. That’s what I’ve come to learn in my own journey of grief that the love that makes me mourn frees me to live in hope.
As Henri Nouwen wrote, because love is stronger than death, now, today, now, our lives can be lived as a promise. Love can never die.
Can I get an ‘Amen’?
I think the story of the betrayal, suffering, death and resurrection is universal to all human experiences, and is not just a quaint pious religious holiday, but a universal experience that brings us hope, even in troubled times.
While the great theologian Karl Rahner called death “the absurd arch-contradiction of existence, the fact that Jesus rose from the dead is the glorious manifestation of the victory of love over death.”
So, if you remember only one thing I say today, remember this: The resurrection is about love. It is a feast day that says, death doesn’t get the last word. The resurrection of Jesus is a proclamation throughout all time, that God loves each and every one of us unconditionally. God won’t stop loving us.
We can contemplate Easter in two opposing ways: one is a story of salvation by death; the other is the story of salvation from death.
I believe the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is salvation from death. Therefore, God has placed a claim on my life and on your life, to live fully in spite of death.
To quote St. Ambrose: in Christ the world arose, in Christ heaven arose, in Christ, the Earth arose.
So as we go out into this world, and face the realities of our families, our lives, our community, the arrests and abduction of our neighbors, the wars that have metastasized across the globe and the chaos that has engulfed our planet, know this: Christ has risen, God has defeated death, and God’s presence is as close to us as the clothes on our backs and as the air that we breathe.
Alleluia. Amen.