I had the honor of preaching for the Rise community at our Easter service this year. Here is the text of that sermon!
Happy Easter, my friends. I’m going to make this participatory in a simple way. I’m going to say He is risen, and that’s your cue to say or type in the chat or just think to yourself, He is risen indeed. Let’s try it.
He is risen! (He is risen indeed!) Good, good. Remember that, we’ll come back to it.
Do you remember the poster of the kitten hanging on the branch? Or “Shoot for the moon, even if you fail, you’re land among the stars.” “It doesn’t matter how slow you go, so long as you do not stop.” I was a kid in the 1990s, and schools were full of posters like this. One of them had a point, though. “What matters isn’t the number of times you fall, but the number of times you get back up.”
Teachers, parents, everyone loved these quotes, as evidenced by their Facebook posts to this day. But the achiever in me found it hard to believe them. If you fall, even if you finish the race, everyone’s going to see that you’re covered in dirt, right? If you go at your own pace, what happens when you get left behind? And do they know how far apart the stars and moon are?!
But then we grew up and all along the way, boy howdy did we fall. We learned to fail. We learned what it was to experience shame and rejection. We endured pain and suffering. We were disbelieved and discounted, our worth in the dust with our dreams. We lost people we thought we couldn’t live without and somehow we’re still taking in each breath, no matter how much it aches to keep going. We had the doors slammed in our faces and “moved through” stages of grief like a tennis ball in a dryer.
And then, like Job, maybe we have friends come along and lament with us for a while but the questions start like “What did you do to cause this?” and “Have you tried just ……….. [fill in the blank]?” The friends we thought we could count on get tired of our pain and our needs and we have to seek community who get us, who know what it’s like to feel trapped behind a stone in the dark. We start to wonder where we went wrong, or if God is that kind of deity who plays with people’s lives out of jealousy or testing or insecurity.
And we know we’re far from perfect, but hear this: you did not earn your suffering through either a need to prove your holiness or as punishment for some sin. That’s not Love. Sometimes the only answer we get is that we can’t know. Sometimes there is no why. Sometimes the world and our lives are terrifyingly out of our own control. And maybe the only way out is through. There are consequences for our actions, yes. But even then, we can rise again, each day fresh with no mistakes in it yet. We can start a new life, repairing and repenting for the harm we’ve done and building a better future.
That’s faith. It’s not memorizing a list of doctrines or achieving a resume of holiness or working our way up the ladder of church leadership into an inner circle. It’s trusting that it’s possible our hope is not in vain. It doesn’t require absolute certainty and perfect answers, but being willing to keep asking the questions. Even when everything is cold and quiet and dark in the night of the soul. Even when we are alone and can’t see the path out of the graves we are in.
I hope at some point in these deaths and mourning, we have all seen the dawn. We’ve remembered that spring returns after the long winter. We’ve fought for each step out of the night to just survive long enough to see the daylight. We’ve brought life out of the desolate places where everyone said we were never going to see hope again.
We are Rise Women. We, this whole community, we know resurrection. Even for those of you who barely showed up today, unsure if this whole Jesus thing is for you, for those of you who don’t know what to believe anymore, who feel like their faith is unraveling thread by thread. We say this for you when you can’t believe it yourself. For those of you who are so ready to be given an open door, your faith is on fire and you just need the opportunities you know you are skilled to handle. For those of you who are here, yet again, another unremarkable Easter. For those who are ready to do more than just survive the day to day. Say it with me: He is risen. (He is risen indeed.)
Sarah Bessey writes: “In the scriptures, the word for resurrection is usually a Greek one, anastasis. Often used in reference to the resurrection of Jesus, it’s somehow a physical sort of noun to me. After all, it means a rising up, a raising up, a standing up. After a time in the dirt, after our falling, after taking a seat, lying down, even after our collapse, our seeming end — anastasis is our rising. Like Jesus, we are raised up to new life. We find life out of death, water in the desert, hope out of grief. I’ve begun to see a multitude of resurrections hiding in plain sight in my life, far from traditional understandings of revival and grandiose demonstrations.”
This is crucial. It’s not the altar calls and the mountain tops. It’s not always the memorable testimonies and the huge achievements that become stories passed on through generations. Sarah says, “The regular resurrections of our lives are just as miraculous as the big, showy, attention-getting ones.” Just as much. Resurrection isn’t a ticketed event, where we all gather round to watch Jesus perform the stone-rolling trick. This story is about a woman weeping because her friend and teacher has been stolen from his final resting place. This is about the slow realization that the horrific assumption is not as it seems. The resurrection story is between friends reuniting and assurances from angels and eyes opened in conversation, in a cemetery garden, in a home, on the road, at the dinner table. This is a story of everyday ordinary rising.
The bread of life, broken for you and for many. Take it. Observe the power of the leavening, and then see the holes in his side. Feel how the dough refuses to turn to dust when beaten, strung out, encased in darkness and heat, but instead becomes whole, complete, the life it was always meant to impart.
Jesus knew his metaphors, huh? He knew this one, this one would make sense down the millennia. Bread is our friend. Even people who can’t eat things in your average gluteny loaf have invented other kinds. This is the stuff they left out of the He Gets Us ads. Bread. Timeless.
Another metaphor often used in Easter sermons is the flowers that require the dark and pressure of the ground to break open and sprout. The birds that must crack their shells and leave the nest in order to fly. The coal into diamonds and the oysters with their pearls. I’m sure you’ve heard them all, and maybe have some of your own that resonate with you.
But we already know what it feels like when this rising is softer, don’t we? Not a grand performance with a light show and a drum roll. As Barbara Brown Taylor writes in her book Learning to Walk in the Dark, “By all accounts, a stone blocked the entrance to the cave so that there were no witnesses to the resurrection. Everyone who saw the risen Jesus saw him after. Whatever happened in the cave happened in the dark. As many years as I have been listening to Easter sermons, I have never heard anyone talk about that part. Resurrection is always announced with Easter lilies, the sound of trumpets, bright streaming light. But it did not happen that way. If it happened in a cave, it happened in complete silence, in absolute darkness, with the smell of damp stone and dug earth in the air. Sitting deep in the heart of Organ Cave, I let this sink in: new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.”
So if today doesn’t feel triumphant and bright, if we are struggling to see in the unknowing and uncertainty that surrounds us, our anastasis might still be on the way.
Maybe it’s already in motion, even if we haven’t seen the light yet. Maybe it won’t come without you digging your way out and demanding to be untied from your grave clothes when others tried to bury you. But listen, Rise Women, maybe your story isn’t over yet.
Maybe there is rising left to do. Resurrection still to come. Maybe you’re going to be walking through life on the road of grief, and the worst seems to have happened, but then. But then you see Jesus is right there with you. The Spirit is forging you into a risen loaf. The Creator who mixed all of your ingredients together: your anger, your humility, your joy, your passion, your strengths and weaknesses, your empathy and your impatience, all of it. The Creator is bringing new life on the other side of this tomb.
Hope doesn’t come with instant yeast, though, you know? So sad. Hope comes with day by day, inch by inch, clawing our way through in defiance. Hope can be defiant, with refusing to let the forces of hopelessness win. Hope comes with noticing the little things and gratitude practices and breathing in and out, hanging on for just one more day. Hope rises in community and in embodiment and in connection. Hope rises when we are in this together and no one is left behind in our resurrections.
We’re not giving up.
There’s a scene in my favorite movie, Captain Marvel, that you’ve probably seen. Some may roll their eyes at its sincerity and call it cringe for being too genuine, but I love this stuff. At the climax, the enemy is telepathically showing Captain Marvel all the times in her forgotten past when being a fragile human girl made her weak. She experienced sexism from boys and men, she experienced physical hardship training for the Air Force, she experienced pain and deep grief and failure. But instead of being defeated by this evidence, Captain Marvel remembers for the first time in years what happened next in each of those scenarios, from her childhood on to adulthood. She got back up. She climbed out of the crashed go-kart and stood up in the batter’s box and got up out of the dirt and stood ready to fight as a trained Air Force pilot. She looks into the camera and every girl and woman in that audience knows. This isn’t just about a superhero story. This is about us. She is each one of us who has fallen. This is our power reflected back at us, the power of resurrection as we rise against all that would hold us down.
The Bible has stories like this. Dry bones coming back to life. Servants and only sons and little girls and Lazurus, a beloved brother and best friend of Jesus himself. All die. All rising again in the power of the Spirit. So many metaphorical risings too. Healings and storms calmed and songs of conquering their oppressors. There are many ways resurrection shows up. But it’s not the grand display of power every time. It’s the otherwise unremarkable days. The long, long, weary nights. The simple and ordinary moments, often too fleeting, and yet, and yet we can draw on this hope. We can know we are not alone.
Jesus didn’t just rise against the biological reality of death. He rose after betrayal and loss, after immense pain and suffering, after being disbelieved and disavowed and discredited. The shame and the humiliation and the abandonment. The despair and the inevitability despite his deepest pleas that he wouldn’t have to go through with it in the end. The loneliness and anxiety and tears.
I don’t say that to trigger some sort of Passion of the Christ flashback or church trauma. No one is about to cue up stats about how much physical torture the human body can endure to guilt-trip you into behavior modification. It’s the opposite of that, actually.
I’m saying, we Rise Women know some of these feelings Jesus is walking through here, living a fully human experience. We know betrayal, grief, pain, suffering, shame, abandonment, fear, depression. We know the nights pleading with God over and over to take this cup from us. We know loneliness when our friends don’t show up for us or when they even collaborate with those working against us. We know tears. We get it.
So believe me when I say, through the power of the Holy Spirit that rose Jesus from this grave on this Easter Sunday morning, you are not alone. You are not done yet. You are not trapped behind this stone of despair and hopelessness forever. Now, hear me, your conditions might not change. Like Jesus, you may still have the wounds in your side and scars on your hands. You may not be fixed or healed or have a perfect solution waiting for you when we leave our time here today. But I will promise you that hope can be a resurrection for you in the midst of it.
How? Honestly, I don’t know. That’s between you and your resurrector. Those of us with ADHD often say we don’t really have a sense of time. There are only two times of day to an ADHD brain: now and not now. We have that in common with the theologians who describe God’s time that way. We live in the now and not now, the kingdom of God isn’t here yet with its peace and reconcilation and wholeness and everything made right, but it is also here now on earth as it is in heaven. And, what’s more, we’re the ones called and equipped to bring it about, as the emissaries of hope, the ones running back to our friends to proclaim the mystery of the faith: He is risen! (He is risen indeed!)
The now part of resurrection is realized every time the Spirit moves us to bring life and renewal to ourselves, our neighbors, our communities, Creation, and the world around us. We live in both the now and not now. I don’t pretend to know God’s plans or if or when God will show up and reveal that it’s been him all along walking beside you. Keep your eyes open, though, because that resurrection lives in you.
It’s what we do. We rise.
Leader: We are rising.
ALL: We are rising indeed.
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