Radical possibility

 

Luke 24: 1-12
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
April 20, 2025 – Easter

Photo of two large stones in a stone wall with green leaves in between poking out into the sunshine.

It’s Easter Sunday. Resurrection Day. Are you feeling it? Are you feeling new life rising? Is hope greening within you like tender new leaves on a tree branch?



Or are you feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, or anxious? Have you arrived at the tomb with doubts or confusion or sadness? Or are you a muddled mess of all of it?



A few weeks ago, as I was thinking about what I would say today, I was connecting more with Good Friday than with Easter. I remembered a poem I wrote in the spring of 2013, before we found each other, and I was feeling pretty low at that time. I called it “Good Friday World” because we don’t live in an Easter world. As much as it is beautiful, we live in a world of violence and greed and uncertainty, and some days it all hurts too much. The last line of the poem reads “The cross, in all its shame and neglect, wouldn’t have happened if God hadn’t walked away like the rest of us.” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Like I said, I was feeling pretty low.



I say this because it’s only half of the truth of Easter if we talk about life and love without talking about death and loss. We can’t arrive at Easter without first living through Good Friday and Holy Saturday. As I once heard it said, I can’t speak to you of resurrection if you do not realize that you have died. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that we all have been grieving in one way or another. The crucified of this world, the people who are treated as disposable, are being used by empire as they always have been: as a warning to say, “This could happen to you”.



And so, the losses that occur with the living of a life now feel extra, magnified, made larger and heavier in the midst of everything happening in the world right now. Like a stone in front of a tomb that holds the one you love most in the world. Which I can imagine was how Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women who were with them were feeling in Luke’s version of the resurrection. So we are in good company.



It is no small thing to show up in this world. To show up with love, with care, even in the midst of grief and pain. Though the names and number of women differ, all four gospels have Mary Magdalene present at the cross and at the tomb. Mary understood the assignment of disrupting one’s life for Jesus. In the Catholic tradition she is known as the queen of the apostles. It is no exaggeration to say that we have Easter because Mary Magdalene showed up early on that first day of the week and said, “I have seen the Lord”.



Showing up for Good Friday, for pain and loss, showing up with compassion, is a spiritual practice that takes time. Nonviolence takes a very long time, while it takes barely a second to choose violence, as Good Friday illustrates all too well. While the story says Easter happens on the third day, showing up for resurrection can also take a long time.



This past Thursday—Maundy Thursday, that day of shadows when Jesus commanded we love one another as he loved us—I attended the Delaware General Assembly for a vote on the Senate floor for House Bill 140 – the Ron Silverio/Heather Block End-of-Life Options Act. This day was more than ten years in the making. Both Ron and Heather, who were activists for this bill, had died while this bill was in process, as did others whose names I do not know. People who had a personal story to tell, told their story to lawmakers again and again, reliving their story each time. Time and again, people who were counting on the passage of this legislation had to listen to misleading testimony and endure what felt like callous remarks from those opposed to this bill, often resulting in tears. Showing up with compassion for this ten-year-long Good Friday and Holy Saturday had taken its toll on many of those present.



We had been instructed that there was to be no reaction, no emotional outburst after the vote had taken place. During the opposing testimony, one activist had been keeping her tears to herself by covering her mouth with a napkin. When the final vote was tallied 11 to 8 in favor of the legislation, she couldn’t contain herself and let out a single cry. The sergeant at arms escorted us out of the chamber into the hallway where everyone could release their emotions freely.



As I comforted the woman who had been crying, I felt a lump rise in my throat. I excused myself to the bathroom to get a tissue and once behind the door, I surprised myself as I sobbed into a paper towel. Ten years is a long time to carry something. Even the next morning, as I was making breakfast, thinking about the previous day, I cried once more, realizing that these feelings went all the way back to 2009 when the story began with officiating the funeral of a church member who had various cancers for 30 years and died by suicide with a gun, to 2011 when I officiated at the funeral of his wife. I had no idea that their story would be part of this story, that it would become a resurrection sixteen years later.



Because life and death are intertwined, the passage of this bill was Easter for those who worked for it and for those who will use it. Now death will come as a friend. Now there will be peace of mind rather than dreaded uncertainty. Now there will be hope instead of despair.



Because people showed up with dogged compassion, because community was built around care and love, because people disrupted their lives time and again, what was once a radical possibility now will become reality. Easter is about radical possibilities. Easter is about how love is winning even when it looks like it’s losing, about loving even when all hope seems lost.



Easter reminds us, as Frederick Buechner says, that the worst thing is not the last thing.  That the story is not over and that death and empire do not have the last word. Love does. Freedom does. Hope. Justice. Peace. The story, the work that began two thousand years ago still goes on. It goes on when we show up for the crucified of this world and for radical possibility to become reality. Amen.

Benediction – lines from “On the Pulse of Morning” by Maya Angelou

Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out and upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.
… Here, on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, and into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope—
Good morning.