Rise up

John 20: 1-18
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
April 12, 2020 – Easter Sunday

What do you say, Church? I feel like Good Friday and Easter have been turned upside down and inside out by this pandemic. You may have heard it said that we are an Easter people living in a Good Friday world. But it hasn’t exactly worked out that way, has it? For much of human history we have been a Good Friday people living in an Easter world. The earth is full of resurrection power. After the ravages of a wildfire, a forest will grow again. After a flood or ocean storm, the waters find a different but familiar shore. Leaves wither and die, fall to the ground, their cells disintegrate and become food for worms. Twice every year, in the northern and the southern hemispheres, the earth comes back to life, green and growing, birds and animals of all kinds birthing their young. And we rise up along with it; our “hearts unfold like flowers before you, opening to the sun above.”

And yet we can be such a Good Friday people. We live with fear, prejudice, pain, violence, poverty, racism, misogyny, and gross inequality; we desert and betray what holds us together; the innocent carry and die on their crosses; leaders wash blood from their hands; the crowds chant “Crucify him! Lock her up! Lock him up!” We free the popular bandit and satisfy ourselves with bread and circuses.

This is the underbelly of what we call normal, what some people’s normal is every day. Author and activist Sonya Renee Taylor writes, “…we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate, and lack. We should not long to return.” Even now we feel a sense of obligation to keep things as ‘normal’ as possible; that we should be productive, in our routine, that somehow we’re going to pick it back up again, even though none of this is normal. We don’t want to let things fall apart even though they are tragically falling apart.

To borrow an image from a friend, it’s as though we’ve built our society, our beliefs, our economics, our social norms, our ideas about what it means to be civilized, what it means to be a democracy—all of it—with Jenga blocks all resting on the one block of “we are the apex of evolution, the crowning achievement of creation, and this is the way we’ve always done it”. And yet whenever this tower has threatened to fall, instead of allowing it to fall apart and find another way to live, we fortified our flawed design because God forbid we ever admit we got it wrong. And also because enough of us benefit from that flawed design that favors certain folks and leaves the rest behind. We don’t need to return to this normal. When we ache for resurrection, we don’t want to resurrect what was, like Dr. Frankenstein reanimating mortal flesh.

And yet that is exactly what we are yearning for, what is being prepared for us. Earlier this week an article on the website Medium gave this warning: “We want desperately to feel good again, to get back to the routines of life, to not lie in bed at night wondering how we’re going to afford our rent and bills, to not wake to an endless scroll of human tragedy on our phones, to have a cup of perfectly brewed coffee and simply leave the house for work. The need for comfort will be real, and it will be strong. And every brand in America will come to your rescue, dear consumer, to help take away that darkness and get life back to the way it was before the crisis.”

What else is that stimulus check for but for CPR on a system that will be the death of us? What else is it for but a worker-based service economy that barely pays enough to live? What else is it for but our healthcare that is chained to our employment? What else is it for but overpriced medication and underpaid and yet still out of reach childcare? What else is it for but more panic buying when the next wave of the virus hits us? What else is it for but that perfectly brewed cup of coffee, to feel good again, to comfort ourselves, to forget for a moment that some of us will be dealing with all kinds of trauma for quite some time?



What if instead that stimulus check was used for reparations to African-Americans and indigenous Americans? What if states started a fund for those most affected by the pandemic? What if instead of taking care of ourselves, we took care of each other?

I can imagine that first year after Jesus was killed and many more after that were harrowing. The resurrection story we read this morning was written 60-70 years after Jesus’ death. The first gospel written, the gospel of Mark, was written 40 or so years after, around the same time the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. Mary and Peter and that beloved disciple and the rest of them were Easter people living in a Good Friday world their whole lives long. Life as they knew it would never be the same. The only way the disciples and many others got through it was together, and not only that but by living as Jesus lived and loving as Jesus loved.



If we need the image of the crucified Jesus to soften our hearts toward all suffering, our humanity has a problem. A God who suffers with us means little if we are not willing to suffer with others; a God who knows how to grieve rings hollow if we are not willing to grieve in such a way that blesses others. A God who raises the dead means little if we only expect to be restored to what was.

When we read these resurrection stories—especially this one—the tender way Jesus speaks to Mary, her tears and astonishment—we can understand that the resurrection never really was about only life but about love, about life lived in the service of love. Life as we know it comes to an end but love goes on. Our grief, our fears, our pain—this is our love turned inside out, out of our control, and we desperately want to be saved from this. And yet we know that the way of love is through our grief, our fears, and our pain. UCC pastor Seth Wispelwey reminded me yesterday that resurrection doesn’t mean you wake up without scars. And we will have scars from this pandemic. The scars of our grief. The scars of our love—a love that only knows how to give itself away, which how resurrection works.

Radical theologian from Northern Ireland, Peter Rollins, wrote that when we turn our backs on the poor, when we close our ears to the downtrodden, when we support an unjust and corrupt system, we deny the resurrection. But when we cry for those who have no more tears left to shed, when we speak for those who have had their tongues torn out, when we stand for those who are forced to live on their knees, it is then we affirm the resurrection, we rise up, and it has power to change lives.

Like the song says, we will rise up and we will do it a thousand times. We will rise in grief, in tears, in pain but we will also rise up in love and in power and with healing. In every ending there is a beginning—tender and hard-won, tenacious as hell and it will take all that we have. A yes to resurrection is a yes to everything before it, even catastrophe. Every love is a covenant of sickness and health, plenty and want, joy and sorrow, especially the unbreakable, unshakeable covenant of being human together. And the only way we will rise up and move forward is if we lift each other up. Resurrection doesn’t happen without us; it happens through us.

Martin Luther King’s daughter Bernice King tweeted on Good Friday: “Love is infinite and inspired. Love is sacrificial and sacred. Love graces and grows. Love came. Love illuminated. Love gave all. Love got up.”

Beloveds, Good Friday is here, but today we proclaim that even though love gave all, love got up. And love will rise again and us with it. Amen.

Benediction - (c) 2014 Cynthia E. Robinson 


Mary wept before the Lord
Her voice was nothing but a broken chord
She couldn’t see the dawn but neither could you
He spoke her name, she reached for him
With all she had, out on a limb,
She sang a trembling, hopeful Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah


For the hundredth time we’ve heard the word
That Love is mightier than any sword
But it still has trouble going through you
That’s okay in this Good Friday world
‘Cause Love still has the very last word
From the dust we’ll sing a fresh new Hallelujah!

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah.