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Good morning. Happy Easter. I’m delighted to see you. Today, it is my intent that when we all walk out of here—no matter what burden we’ve walked in with, no matter what sense of despair we’re lugging around—we leave as people of hope. That we leave as people who know: the bad thing is never the last thing. That we walk out of here as people of the resurrection.
If you came in here from the same world I did, you walked in from a place that can put a scowl on your face or a sigh in your chest, if not a deep sense of consternation. For folks my age, the world can feel pretty exhausting. Some of us thought retirement was just around the corner. Now that corner seems further away.
For those a bit older, who worked sincerely to build a better world with unity, equality, and a fair chance for all, you might be wondering: What happened? How did it come apart so quickly?
And for our younger folks, just stepping into adulthood, trying to find meaningful work—if not meaning itself—trying to navigate constantly shifting norms and expectations, the future may feel uncertain.
Maybe all of us feel like the women who came to the tomb that first Easter morning. They came with spices to adorn a body, anticipating the fragrance of death. And then, inside that cave, they encountered two men in dazzling white who asked: “Why do you look for the living amongst the dead?” (Luke 24:5)
In that moment, despair was disrupted—not erased, not displaced—but disrupted by something they had not expected: resurrection. The women were confused. They were afraid. They weren’t suddenly filled with joy or certainty, because resurrection is never anticipated. It is disorienting. It breaks into our despair, not as a gentle breeze, but as a whirlwind of divine disruption—a disruption that begins by testing the limitations of our imagination.
Suddenly, a future we could not envision, let alone hope to create, becomes possible. Before, the only future we could imagine was the one that we built; and that future was/is rickety and wobbly—and maybe, as we know better today than we knew a few months back, easy to topple off a wall.
But standing in front of the tomb, like those women, we’re confronted by a startling truth: There is no future without resurrection. There is no future without Jesus Christ. Anything less is a world where hopelessness gets the last word.
William P. Young, in his novel The Shack, captures this moment perfectly in a conversation between the main character Mack and Jesus. When Mack is in deep grief and despair, Jesus says: “You are trying to envision a future without me, and that future does not exist.” (William P. Young, The Shack, 2007)
Hopelessness is imagining a future that doesn’t include the God who is right here next to us. When we imagine our lives without Jesus, we become like the women at the tomb, who are: “looking for the living amongst the dead?”
So let me ask: Are we doing the same thing? Are we looking for meaning in the cul-de-sacs of our own power? Are we placing our trust in a future that doesn’t extend beyond the grave? Are we people limited by the sight lines of mortality?
Or are we Jesus people? Are we people of the resurrection, of hope… and not a hope of vague optimism; not a hope of wishful thinking, but a hope that is particular and possible—known in the person of Jesus Christ.
Who are we going to be in this world in which we find ourselves?
The first letter of Peter presents what is possible: “By God’s great mercy, God has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” (1 Peter 1:3)
The Resurrection is God’s way of saying to humanity: “The bad thing is never the last thing, when the last thing is Jesus Christ.”
Of course, “the bad thing is never the last thing” does not mean there are no bad things. Resurrection does not erase suffering, but it does transform it. There is continuity between the tombs we stand in front of and the risen life of Jesus Christ.
We know this because we’ve seen it before. One of my favorite examples is Archbishop Desmond Tutu. My son is named after him—his name is Desmond, not Tutu. Tutu stood with fearless faith against the racism of apartheid South Africa, living in the full knowledge that the tomb of injustice does not have the last word. That’s resurrection living.
But there are others, less well-known, who have lived this same hope. One of them was Mary McLeod Bethune (buh-THOON). Born in 1875 to formerly enslaved parents in South Carolina, she was the only child in her family to attend school. Fueled by her faith in Jesus Christ, Bethune believed deeply in the power of education to transform lives. She founded what became Bethune-Cookman University—one of the first historically Black colleges in the U.S.—a place of learning, a beacon of hope.
Bethune stood in front of the tomb of slavery, a crime this country supported by law for 246 years. Bethune faced down evil, proclaiming in her own way: the bad thing is never the last thing. That’s resurrection living. A lifestyle she modeled for countless people by word and example as a follower of Jesus Christ—and it worked for her…
But we may say: “That was a different time.” “Hers was a different context.” What landed us in church today is different than what landed her in church on Easter Sunday.
Maybe you came here today because that’s what you do each year, or out of respect for the one who invited you, or to honor the memory of someone who inspired you, or just to be filled up on the music of this extraordinary choir. Maybe Jesus is someone you’re not so sure about, and resurrection seems a bit unscientific.
But it was an obligation that got the women to the tomb as well. It was what one did for the dead. It was respectful. Cultural. It was about closure. And yet, they encountered something utterly unexpected… something that not only changed their lives but the world. Something bigger than belief. And not just global, either, but cosmic—resurrection turned everything inside out and upside down.
And here’s the thing: you don’t have to believe in resurrection for it to have changed everything. Just like you don’t have to believe in gravity for it to hold your feet to the ground. Belief isn’t required for the truth to be true.
Resurrection is God rejecting human rejection without denying humanity’s freedom to continue denying the reality of God. Resurrection, in this way, is all about love; for there is no love if there is no freedom. Let me say that again: there is no love if there is no freedom.
And here’s the good news—the way we can engage this love, this divine, immersive, unstoppable love, is particular and knowable in a way that is deeply human. Just like you are. This love is knowable through the particular person of Jesus Christ.
Love is the binding agent of all things, beginning with our relational God: Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—three in one, inextricably connected as love, in love, to share love. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…” (John 3:16) Not to condemn it, but to save it.
Which means: no matter what we’ve done, no matter who we’ve nailed to the cross, no matter who we’ve stuffed into a tomb, no matter what systems are failing, or who is wrecking what for whom—God is here. God has shown up. God is showing up. God will continue to show up.
For as Paul writes in his Letter to the Romans: “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor heights, nor depths, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.” (Romans 8:38–39)
That is what we have stepped into today: Love. And that is what we’re going to step out into when we leave this place… love.
We may have come in expecting the tomb, but we will leave as resurrection people. Enlightened not because everything out there has changed, but because something in here has. Because we have remembered—or maybe just realized: We are people of hope. We are Jesus people. We are people of the resurrection. Because our God is the God of love—and this guarantees: the bad thing is never the last thing.
Resurrection punctuates this point. Which is why we are no longer looking for the living amongst the dead. Jesus Christ has risen!