Sermon for Easter Sunday—The Sunday of the Resurrection (April 5, 2026)
Transcript
This transcript was generated by YouTube AI and edited for clarity.
May only truth be spoken here and only truth be heard. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Please be seated.
Here at St. James, we have the most beautiful graveyard. Raise your hand if you’ve ever walked through it. You could do it today. It is so beautiful, so sacred.
Early this morning, I took a walk through the graveyard—which I love to do on Easter Day—and also because I had to hide the silver and the gold egg.
I visited our friends in the graveyard who died this last year, and some who died longer ago, whom I miss.
When we go to a grave, we might be hoping for some ineffable experience—some connection with the person we miss and long for. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll catch a cardinal out of the corner of our eye. Or we’ll feel a sense of peace, or a butterfly will land on the stone, and we’ll receive some small reassurance, some connection.
What we do not dare to hope for or expect is for that beloved one to appear to us—alive again—someone we might embrace not just with our hearts, but with our hands, with our arms, with our whole selves.
And when these women went to the grave of Jesus, they were not expecting to see him. They went like we do—to sit, to cry, to wait.
Something happened that this world has trained us not to expect. Everything in that moment turned upside down.
It was not natural. It was not like a seed planted in the earth bearing fruit again after a long winter. It was like something that does not happen and cannot happen.
The earth shook with the power of a transformation of reality. An angel came down from heaven—white, radiant, blinding—so that the powers of death, the powers of hatred and evil, represented by the soldiers guarding the tomb, were cast down. The ones who had dealt death became like dead men.
And the world was lit up.
And the angel said to the women, “I know—I know that you are looking for Jesus.”
And we are all looking for Jesus.
And we don’t dare look for Jesus in a world that has trained us, again and again, to believe that it is Good Friday that is most real: the hanging of love on a tree, the death of the innocent, the destruction of the good.
This is what we have faced with great courage all through Lent, deepening through Holy Week.
Good Friday is very easy to preach, because it is very easy to believe that human beings would hurt and destroy a God who came to teach us how to love. To believe that, all you have to do is turn on the news.
But God’s messenger knows what we are looking for.
What we came to the grave to see, to hold, to cling to, is Jesus—the way, the truth, and the life—the fullness of God’s love for humanity revealed in human likeness.
We don’t dare to believe. But so it has been witnessed to us: He is risen.
He is risen.
The women do not see him risen. The angel says, “You are looking for Jesus. Go tell people he is risen. Go live your life. Tell people—witness—that life is more powerful than death, and love stronger than hate, and goodness greater than evil.”
Even if you don’t dare to believe it deep down in your gut, go out and start telling it as if it is true.
This really happened.
We say: he was crucified, died, and was buried. And on the third day he rose again. This really happened.
If it didn’t happen, then we really do live in Good Friday.
And we don’t.
The witness of the Church—the precious gift over the centuries—is that this really happened. They really did meet him on the road when they were out there witnessing. They really did cling to his feet and hold him in their own hands.
He is risen.
That is the only way we have the power to proclaim the resurrection—not just here, in relative safety and great beauty, where we can still fly a flag of welcome for all our neighbors, where we can still welcome everyone through this door, no matter what country they come from or what faith they practice.
This precious, relative safety.
But the resurrection is proclaimed not only here, at this very moment. The bread is being broken and the alleluia is being shouted in basements in Ukraine, in the heart of the Holy Land where bombs are falling—where Jesus himself walked.
And it has been proclaimed over the centuries despite everything that death and evil and sin could deal to the Church—including the Church’s own grave sins.
None of that—none of that—could stop the power of the witness that brings us here today, and draws us into communion with people who are in grave danger even now, all over the world.
But we are called to testify with our lives—with our whole heart and mind and strength.
It is impossible to believe.
I believe it.
Alleluia.
Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.
Amen.