Alleluia! Christ is Risen! (He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!) Even as we loudly proclaim these words of hope and promise, I cannot help but sense that Easter feels different this year. I promise that I will try my best not to preach a sad sermon for Easter, on this day of celebration, but I also cannot ignore the reality of pain, grief, and heaviness that fills the lives of people in this congregation and around the world. If you are like me, you woke up this morning and things didn’t feel much different from the days before. Yet, in an act of resistance, we wake up and shout “Alleluia! Christ is Risen! (He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!) anyway.
We gather this morning to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ, but the story of Christ’s resurrection cannot be separated from the pain and hardship in the world, both in our time and in Jesus’. As good Lutherans, we know that both of these realities can exist at the same time. It’s part of why I love our Easter story so much. It invites us into this reality and messiness of the story without asking us to wrap everything up into a nice, neat bow. It doesn’t ask us to put our grief and pain in a box or pretend that it doesn’t exist for the sake of celebrating this day. Because grief and difficulty accepting the promises of the Resurrection are integral to our Easter story. We would not have our story without them!
Our story begins with the women going out to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body. These are women deep in the throes of grief, who still cling to the traditions of anointing their beloved dead with oil and spices (Luke 24: 1), hoping it will bring structure to this time when their world feels destabilized. They wake up early on that Sunday morning, likely wanting to have gone on Saturday, but being unable to since their Sabbath lasts from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. If you have experienced death of a beloved one, you know how difficult it can be in those hours and days between their death and when we finally get to complete the rituals we use to lay them to rest. We feel sad, anxious, untethered, and like the only thing we know how to do is keep putting one foot in front of the other because we are worried that we won’t know what to do next if we stop for even a minute. So, these women leave their house at the break of dawn, hurrying to the tomb, as a way of processing their grief and finding some closure after the horrific scenes they witnessed just a few days before.
But instead of finding their beloved Jesus’ body, they find two men who start questioning their faith and saying things like, weren’t you listening when Jesus told you he wasn’t going to be here? (Luke 24: 5-6). It can be easy to misconstrue this as a lack of faith on behalf of the women, but I think that their presence at the tomb with the spices is a sign of deep love and commitment to their friend and teacher. Despite hearing these promises of his Resurrection, it took a reminder by these two men at the tomb for the women to actually remember what Jesus had said because they were otherwise too consumed in their grief, and they wanted to honor his life. This doesn’t make their grief any less valid or the promises any less real. But, as we know, it can be so difficult to believe the promises of God to be true when we are sitting in our grief. Some days, we will be like the women at the tomb, needing to be reminded, while other days we will be like the men at the tomb, and we will be able to remind others of these promises God gives to us in the Resurrection of Christ. Neither of those is better than the other.
The same thing happens when the women return to the male disciples and tell them about their experience and the men don’t believe them, they need to go have someone check for themselves (Luke 24: 11-12). As frustrated as I get while reading this that the men would assume the women would be spinning this tale out of their grief, I also cannot blame the men for not wanting to believe it because they too are grieving and don’t know what to make of this new reality. Despite the amount of times Jesus warned them about what was to come, resurrections weren’t something they had a lot of experience with. Even those who would have witnessed Jesus raise Lazarus from the grave, also witnessed Jesus weeping with the others who mourn, knowing that he was about to raise Lazarus (John 11: 17-35). I know that is not our Gospel story for today, but I can’t help but think that witnessing this intertwining of grief and resurrection gave even an unconscious example to the disciples that both realities could exist at the same time. Either way, knowing that the tomb will be empty, that he has risen, doesn’t take away from the very real experience they all had as they watched him hang from the cross, and it doesn’t make any of this easier to believe for them.
With those realities, we gather again today to recall the promises that through Christ’s death and resurrection, God has defeated the power of death, and that God is doing a new thing in our midst. Yet, even as we gather, we grieve for those who are gathered around us in the company of saints because we would rather have them here with us. Even on this resurrection day, people will still die, and people will still be born. These promises aren’t ones that can instantly make everything feel better, but they are the foundation in which we are promised that we are still loved and held even as, and especially when, we are surrounded by grief and pain. These promises remind us that even if the grief never fully goes away, hope and love still exist entangled within it too.
The heart of our readings today is the promise that God is doing a new thing in our midst, not just once, but an ongoing newness that spreads out from the news of the Resurrection. Even in our Isaiah reading, the promise of the new things that God is doing (Isaiah 65: 17-25) is being spoken to people whose ancestors experienced slavery, exile, and perceived abandonment by God. They are promises spoken to people who still experienced death, who feared the wild creatures that could cause them harm, who didn’t know how to move forward with their new reality after their exile. That does not make the promises any less true but makes them all the more needed.
I cannot help but think about how our world today continues to be in need of hearing these promises again and again. We cannot share these promises enough to hearts that are hurting, to people who are aching, to those who wonder how certain things can even be happening in our world right now. These promises are hard to hear, and I don’t mean just hearing them spoken aloud, but they are hard to trust and to hold dear. When we look at the pain of the world around us, it can be hard to hope in the resurrection and the newness that God is bringing to the world. Like the women bringing spices to the tomb, we want to lean on the things we know, the things we can see and do, the things that have brought us some sense of comfort in the past.
Even in the newness, we get to hold onto some of those traditions of the past that help us to remember these promises that we proclaim. The promises that others proclaim for us and to us when we are like the women at the tomb and the disciples who cannot fathom what is happening. This is why we gather communally to celebrate the promises of Easter, so that we can proclaim them to one another and for one another. We gather today to eat pancakes, sing our beloved hymns, decorate the cross with flowers, and shout out that Christ is Risen! We do so surrounded by flowers given in memory of the beloveds who have gone before us, hearing again the story of the empty tomb and the promise of the Resurrection, hoping and trusting that the promises of God will meet us when we need them. That they will make a home in our heart, so that even if we cannot listen to them today, they will be there when we are ready, continually reminding us that God draws us close beneath the shadow of the cross and declares that it is not the end, but that the promises of God are just beginning. No matter how hard it is for us to believe at times, the Resurrection story is a story of hope and resistance, and a promise that hatred, violence, and fear no longer have the final say. Because of that we can boldly proclaim today, Alleluia! Christ is Risen! (He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!).
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Sunday April 6th, 2025 Worship