Easter Sunday
April 5, 2026
St. Dunstan’s
The Rev. Patricia Templeton
Every year on the Tuesday before Easter, the clergy of the Diocese of Atlanta gather at the Cathedral to renew our ordination vows.
At that service we are asked this question: “Will you continue as faithful stewards of the mysteries of God?” Our answer is, “By the help of God, I will.”
We are here in this beautiful church this glorious morning to celebrate one of God’s greatest mysteries – that Jesus, who succumbed to the power of death on the cross, has been resurrected to new life by our loving and powerful God.
And we rejoice that God’s power to overcome death will also bring new life to every one of us when our earthly lives are ended.
People in our day are uncomfortable with mysteries. We prefer answers and solutions. We want to verify and quantify things. We want tangible proof. We want to know how and why.
Theologian Diana Butler Bass writes that for far too long Christians have looked at the resurrection as a problem to be solved.
I would wager that each of us have tried to solve that problem. We long for tangible proof, to be able to explain how it happened, to know it for sure as a verifiable fact.
But this is not a mystery that can be solved in that way. There were no eye witnesses to the resurrection, no web cam stationed outside the cave where Jesus’ dead body was laid. We cannot scientifically quantify or verify what happened.
Even scripture is vague on the details of how the resurrection happened to Jesus, or how it will happen to us. Scripture offers four or five different versions or interpretations of what the resurrection of the dead means.
What they all agree on is this. That women on that Sunday morning long ago went to prepare Jesus’ body for burial and found an empty tomb. That the risen Christ appeared to his friends and disciples numerous times.
And that those events changed the disciples’ lives, and has continued to change lives for centuries.
One of my favorite authors, Barbara Kingsolver, writes about mystery in her novel Prodigal Summer. One of her characters was, as a child, entranced by butterflies. She thought of them as ballerinas as they danced around her yard.
One day she caught one, delighted to be able to examine it up close. As she clutched it tightly in her hand, she saw that it was no ballerina.
“Its body was a fat, furry cone flattened on one end into a ferocious face like a tiny, angry owl’s. It glared at her, seeming disdainful.
“She hadn’t given up her love for butterflies after that,” Kingsolver writes, “but she’d never forgotten, either, how a mystery caught in the hand could lose its grace.”
Ironically, the butterfly is a symbol of resurrection.
I suggest this morning that we not clutch this butterfly too tightly, that we resist the futile temptation to try to solve the mystery.
Instead, let’s celebrate that empty tomb. Let’s celebrate that Jesus’ resurrection is also for us; that those we love who have died to this life have been reborn into a new and different life. Let’s celebrate that we, too, will share in that new life when our earthly lives have ended.
And as the resurrection changed the disciples’ lives, may it change ours, too.
Clarence Jordan, a 20th century Christian saint from Georgia, who founded Koinonia Farms, a Christian community near Americus that still practices radical hospitality and equality, said this about the resurrection:
“The proof that God raised Jesus from the dead is not the empty tomb, but the full hearts of his transformed disciples. The crowning evidence that he lives is not a vacant grave, but a spirit-filled fellowship. Not a rolled-away stone, but a carried-away church.”
In other words, we should worry less about what people say they believed happened 2,000 years ago and more about whether we are living as if resurrection is a reality in our lives today.
The new Archbishop of Canterbury Sara Mullaly puts it this way. “The resurrection is not only an event remembered; it is a living reality that shapes our hope, our witness, and our shared calling as Christians.”
How are we partnering with God today in transforming despair into hope, apathy into compassion, hate into love, and death into new life?
Irish writer and performer Peter Rollins has a powerful monologue about what it looks like to practice resurrection, or to fail to do so.
“Without equivocation or hesitation I fully and completely admit that I deny the resurrection of Christ,” he begins. “This is something that anyone who knows me could tell you, and I am not afraid to say it publicly, no matter what some people think.”
Rollins pauses, then continues:
“I deny the resurrection of Christ every time I do not serve at the feet of the oppressed, each day that I turn my back on the poor; I deny the resurrection of Christ when I close my ears to the cries of the downtrodden and lend my support to an unjust and corrupt system.
“However,” he adds, “there are moments when I affirm that resurrection, few and far between as they are. I affirm it when I stand up for those who are forced to live on their knees, when I speak out for those who have been silenced, when I cry for those who have no more tears left to shed.”
We live in a world where pain and suffering abound, a world that cries out for hope and the promise of new life.
What Christ’s resurrection shows us is that even in these times, even in the darkest and most unlikely places, God is working to bring new life. We are called to help in that task.
“In a wounded world, we are called to be people of resurrection,” Archbishop Mullaly reminds us. “People who live not in fear, but in hope; not in despair, but in the promise of new life.”
This day we celebrate again the great mystery of the resurrection. We proclaim with St. Paul, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”
And once more we loudly rejoice and say
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen, indeed! Alleluia!