Easter Sunday Sermon

I know this isn’t the traditional way to open an Easter sermon, but I really don’t like romantic comedies. Now, Just stay with me.

The problem always comes in the last ten or fifteen minutes, where we get the super happy Hollywood ending. The dorky guy ends up with the girl of his dreams, they live happily ever after, the music swells, the credits roll. I know why people love that. I get it. But the problem is that I know too much at this point in my life. Love is too real for me now. Too messy. So just once I want to see this: the movie ends, everything worked out, everybody’s happy, roll the credits. The people who wanted the Hollywood ending get it. But then the lights stay down. The credits finish. And right at the very end, one last frame: Five years later. Cut to Prince Charming passing Dream Girl in the hallway, and now she is lighting into him about toothpaste caked on the sink, and would it really kill him to take the trash out one time without being asked? But we never get that part. Nobody warns you about that conversation. I say end it with the toothpaste-in-the-sink conversation. Give me the real thing.

And that — oddly enough — is exactly why I love the Gospel of Mark.

Because Mark doesn’t like Hollywood endings either. He gives us a real cliffhanger. Somebody came along later and added a tidier ending after verse 8, but the original Gospel of Mark ends right there: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Who ends things like that?

And honestly, I get their response. If my friend John died and I went to his grave and found the ground torn open, the casket empty, and a stranger sitting there telling me John wasn’t here but was waiting for me back home, I’d need to change my pants before anything else. The women’s response makes complete sense. It’s deeply human. But here’s the question that sticks in my mind: if they ran away and said nothing to anyone, how did Mark know about it? And how do we know about it two thousand years later?

It got here because someone told someone. Fear didn’t stop it. Confusion didn’t stop it. Human frailty didn’t stop it. The story kept moving.

And that’s the power of Mark’s ending.

By the end of the Gospel, everybody’s gone. The Palm Sunday crowds have scattered. The disciples have fled. The women have run from the tomb in terror. Jesus isn’t even there — he’s risen and waiting for them back in Galilee. The tomb is empty. The garden is quiet. There’s no one left.

Except us.

Mark leaves us standing there in the silence, in the aftermath, in the unanswered space, and asks the question this whole maddening, wonderful, unfinished Gospel is designed to ask:

What happens next?

And I want to sit with that question for a moment, because Mark doesn’t drop it into the abstract. He drops it into a place. Into Galilee — their Galilee, specifically. The region they knew. The roads they walked. The people they already tried and failed and tried again to love well. The messenger doesn’t send them somewhere new and manageable. He sends them back into the complicated reality they came from.

And that’s what makes Easter dangerous.

Because the comfortable version of resurrection — and there is a very popular comfortable version — goes something like this: Jesus died. Jesus rose. The transaction cleared. Believe the right things, behave decently, and wait for what comes next. Resurrection as conclusion. Resurrection as proof. Resurrection as a tidy answer to a question you can then set back down on the shelf.

But resurrection in Mark is not a conclusion. It’s a commission. The tomb does not say stay here and admire what happened. It says he has gone ahead of you. Now Go.

And I think that commission lands differently depending on where you are standing when you hear it.

Most of us in this room are, by any global or historical measure, extraordinarily comfortable. Good schools. Good zip codes. Resources. Buffers between us and the worst of what the world can do. I’m not saying that as an accusation — I live here too. But I want to name it honestly, because comfort does something specific to the soul over time. It makes the big questions feel optional. It lets the suffering of the world remain curated — something that arrives through a screen, something we can engage or close depending on the day. We can care, sincerely and deeply care, about all the right things, and still have our life look almost exactly like the life of someone who doesn’t care at all.

And when things get frightening — and things are frightening right now — people with resources have more exits. You can insulate more completely. Draw the circle a little smaller. Take care of your family, your neighborhood, your people, and leave the rest to someone better positioned. I understand that impulse. I feel it myself. It makes perfect human sense.

But there’s a problem, and the problem is theological before it is anything else. You can’t confess that every human being bears the image of God and then treat the suffering of those human beings as a logistical problem for someone else to solve. At some point — and Easter seems like as good a time as any —  theology and life have to meet each other.

The risen Christ isn’t in the sanctuary waiting to be admired. He’s already in Galilee. He’s gone ahead. The question is whether we are willing to make the trip. And if he’s already there, then faithfulness means following him there. So let’s talk about what that looks like for a church like ours.

For a church like ours, that looks like proximity. Not concern from a comfortable distance, but actual nearness — learning names, sitting across tables, letting another person's reality interrupt our own. There are roughly twenty miles between this building and some of the most concentrated poverty in this country. That’s not very far. The risen Christ is already there. The question is whether we’ll go meet him there.

For a church like ours, it looks like understanding that the gifts in this room — the law degrees, the medical training, the financial expertise, the seats on boards and commissions — aren’t just tools for private advancement. They’re gifts that can be turned outward. It looks like showing up in the rooms where decisions get made, because those ordinary rooms — school boards, zoning meetings, city councils — are often where the kingdom is quietly built or quietly blocked, one vote at a time.

And it looks like a church that holds its own resources the way the resurrection holds everything: not clutching them for self-preservation, but releasing them for use. The building. The land. The money. The reputation. They aren’t assets to be protected, but tools to be spent. It looks like a congregation willing to ask honestly: What do we have? What is it for? And who are we here to serve?

I want to be honest about what this costs. Not to frighten you, but because the sermon that skips this part isn’t telling you the whole truth.

It costs comfort. Not all of it — no one’s  asking you to sell the house. But it costs the version of life organized around never being interrupted. The version where our schedule is ours, our resources are ours, our attention is ours to allocate as we see fit. Resurrection doesn’t leave that untouched.

It costs certainty. We won’t always know if what we’re doing is working. There will be days when the work feels invisible. Seasons when it feels pointless. We won’t always be able to draw a straight line between our faithfulness and the outcome we hoped for. And we’ll have to keep going anyway — not because we have proof that it matters, but because we’ve met the risen Christ, and we can’t unknow that.

And it costs the appealing fantasy that faith can stay private. Sealed off from power. Sealed off from the ways suffering lands on actual bodies in actual places. The resurrection won’t stay indoors. It never has.

Here is what I mean by that. Every time the world has tried to bury something — a people, a hope, a movement, a truth — resurrection has a way of insisting otherwise. Not magically. Not without cost. But insistently. The early church was a ragged collection of frightened people who shouldn’t have amounted to anything, and they turned the ancient world inside out because they actually believed that the grave didn’t get the last word. Not just about Jesus. About everything.

That’s what resurrection looks like when it gets loose. Not a doctrine to be defended, but a reality to be inhabited. A refusal to accept as permanent what God has called intolerable that’s been handed down from generation to generation.

And here’s the grace in all of this — because there is grace, and I don’t want to leave without saying it plainly.

We don’t go to Galilee on our own strength. That’s the whole point. The women ran from the tomb terrified and told no one, and the story still got here. Two thousand years later, on a Sunday morning in this room just north of Chicago, the story is still moving. Not because the first witnesses were courageous or capable or had it figured out. But because the risen Christ had already gone ahead of them, was already waiting, was already at work in the world before they took a single step.

He goes ahead of us too. Whatever Galilee looks like for us — whatever the twenty miles, whatever the room, whatever the interrupted Tuesday afternoon — he’s already there. We aren’t going somewhere God is not. We are going somewhere where God is waiting to be found.

Mark ends his Gospel in a quiet garden with a question hanging in the air. The tomb is empty. The risen Christ is already in the living world, in the faces of actual people, in the places where the kingdom is being built and the places where it is desperately needed.

And what happens next isn’t finally a question about what we believe.

It’s a question about whether we trust him enough to follow.

That is Easter.

That is the unfinished Gospel.

So go and write the next chapter.