© 2025 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon will be available here. Video can be seen here.
Anyone have a picnic planned for this afternoon? Anyone buy a new outfit you were hoping to show off? Anyone hide Easter eggs all over your yard so your children or grandchildren could find them in their raincoats and galoshes? This isn’t the beautiful, sunny, picturesque celebration we had in mind, but Christ is still risen all the same. Alleluia!
Sometimes our plans don’t work out, but that doesn’t stop us from trying. Anyone here married to a planner? I’m talking about the kind of planner who has backup plans to backup plans—the sort who makes you leave for the airport four hours before your flight just in case a herd of elk decide to block the interstate. Anyone live with one of those?
If so, these last few months haven’t been easy, have they? All of us are having to plan for contingencies we never dreamt were possible. And bad weather is only the start. How do you plan for retirement if you don’t know whether there will even be a stock market in five years? And what a luxury it is to even contemplate retirement! What’s it like to plan a wedding when you aren’t completely sure that your marriage will be legal by the time the date rolls around? What it’s like to plan to have children when you aren’t sure you would be able to get the life-saving treatment you need should that unlikely possibility come to pass? What’s it like to go shopping for a family dinner when you can’t be sure that your undocumented spouse will even come home from work tonight? In a world of deep uncertainty, we need the confidence of Easter.
Two summers ago, I decided it would be a good idea for our family to have an emergency preparedness kit. I bought a hand-cranked weather radio and phone charger. I bought some extra flashlights, toothbrushes, and toothpaste. I bought some peanut butter and canned chicken and other shelf-stable foods. I bought a can opener. I bought a little fishing tackle box that I could put some medications in. I bought some large jugs of water. And I put it all in a waterproof plastic bin, which I slid into the back of my closet. I was so proud of myself. We were ready.
A few months ago, I decided I needed to update its contents and switch out the shelf-stable items and medication for newer supplies. When I opened the bin, however, I discovered that everything inside was submerged in a pool of water. The seams on the water jugs had ruptured, and everything that was supposed to keep our family safe in the unlikely event of an emergency was immersed in the gross, rusty waters of my own miniature flood. The irony is not lost on me that my efforts to prepare for a disaster became their own disaster.
Having an emergency preparedness kit is a good idea, but pretending that it is an infallible means of protection only leads to disappointment. Striking the right balance between planning for the future and setting yourself up for frustration depends upon your ability to accept that, while you can anticipate some of what the future holds, there is no amount of planning that can make you immune from what life will bring. Ironically, the more you try to hold on to the myth of unassailable peace and security the more quickly those dreams slip through your fingers. Letting go of that need for certainty is the only way we can find certainty. That may sound like bad news, but I assure you that it isn’t. It’s how the true hope of Easter becomes manifest in us.
After Peter and the other disciple had gone into the tomb, seen the linen wrappings lying where the body of Jesus had been, and gone back to their homes, Mary Magdalene stood outside and wept. “Woman, why are you weeping?” the angels in white asked her. “They have taken away my Lord,” she said, “and I do not know where they have laid him.” Into that moment of paralyzing grief, Jesus revealed himself to her. “Mary,” he said tenderly. “Rabbouni,” she replied, overcome with joy. Her first instinct was to wrap her arms around Jesus and never let him go, but, before she could even touch him, Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ And Mary went with joy to tell them.
The instinct to seek the warm and loving embrace of our savior is a good and holy one, but all too easily our desire to be close to Jesus gets wrapped up in a different sort of hope—one that comes not from God but from the idol of security that put in God’s place. In uncertain times, we are desperate for certainty, and, often without even realizing it, we cling to Christ’s victory over sin and death as if it were a shield for the faithful in this life. When that sort of claim is made by others, it’s easy for us to recognize it as hollow. The false lure of the prosperity gospel or Christian nationalism is easy for us to spot. But, when it’s our retirement account, our pathology report, or our research grant that we’re worried about, it’s a lot harder to avoid the theological trap of thinking that, if God really were up there and if he really did raise Jesus from the dead, why doesn’t he step in and help me now?
The miracle of Easter isn’t about providing certainty in this life. It’s about the certainty Christ gives us for the life to come. As Saint Paul wrote in his First Letter to the Corinthians, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” If the victory of Jesus is only supposed to make this life—life in this broken and fallen world—easier, then we are the butt of a terrible two-thousand-year-old joke.
Jesus didn’t die on the cross and be raised on the third day to make this life easy. He died to carry us safely from this life into the next, and that unassailable truth has the power to shield us, not from hardship and suffering, but from the damning conclusion that the hardship and suffering we endure in this life will have the final word. They won’t! They can’t! Because Christ has defeated them once and for all. But that’s a victory we cling to not with our hands but only with our hearts.
“Do not hold on to me,” Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, “because I have not yet ascended to the Father.” The Jesus we hold on to is the one who has already gone into heaven to prepare a place for us. That part of us which is already linked to him—already united to the risen and ascended Jesus—clings to him even now in heaven. Even though, for now, the promise of salvation is only partially realized, its certainty is enough to sustain us when we encounter suffering in this life. How we face the challenges and uncertainties ahead of us is completely transformed by our faith in the one who was raised from the dead. We must not allow our hope in the resurrection to be diminished by pretending that it is supposed to make this life easy. But we can allow our confidence in what lies ahead to bring hope and light and life even to the hardest parts of our lives.
Sometimes the hardest part of being a Christian is remembering that the stronger our faith becomes the harder our lives on the earth become, too. That’s because, when that part of you that already dwells securely in the heart of the risen Jesus grows, your willingness to live not for this life but for the life to come grows as well. Those of us who belong to one who was raised from the dead and who now lives and reigns from heaven above are given courage and strength to let go of our need for security and certainty in this life. We cling, instead, to the promise of the new life that awaits us. We hold on to the one who is risen and who has ascended into heaven, Jesus Christ, to whom and with whom we belong for ever and ever. Amen.