Easter 2026- Resurrection and Repentance

Pastor Ian Graham explores how the resurrection of Christ completely reorients suffering, injustice, beauty, and the story we live in.

Transcript

John 20 And The Empty Tomb

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The Word of God this morning from John chapter 20, verses 1 through 18. Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. She ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, They've taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him. Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down and looked in and saw that the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus' head, not lying with the linen wrappings, but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed. For as yet they did not understand the scripture that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes. But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, Woman, why are you weeping? She said to them, They have taken away my Lord, and I don't know where they have laid him. When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know who it was. Jesus said to her, Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for? Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to her, Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus said to her, Mary. She turned and said to him in Hebrew, Rabuni, which means teacher. Jesus said to her, Do not touch me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father, but go to my brothers and say to them, I ascend, I am ascending to my Father and to your Father, to my God and to your God. Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, I've seen the Lord. And she told them that he had said these things to her.

Metanoia As A New Direction

Daryl Davis And Real Reorientation

Why Are You Weeping And Grief

Resurrection Justice And Mercy

Beauty And The Gardener Of New Creation

The Story We Live Out

Prayer And Coming To The Table

SPEAKER_01 2:35

If you are new to coming to church, or this is something you just feel some sense of cultural compulsion or pressure, welcome. No, seriously. It's no small thing to change your routine and your habits to get up out and to come to worship in a place where maybe you're not familiar with it. You're not uh used to the idea of people getting in a room and singing together, or you've you've maybe spent some time away from church because church's been a hurtful place for you. Uh sincerely, I pray that you have felt the welcome of God, who we believe is risen in Christ here today. And I pray you've been warmly received. Uh really honored to be here together with you today. We uh we turn the heat up so that you can have a good nap and to increase the degree of difficulty for me, because famously people's attention really peaks when it's uh a hundred degrees in here. So uh challenge accepted. Welcome if you fall asleep. The grace of a good nap is is a gift on Easter to you from Ecclesia. My name is Ian. I have the joy of uh being the pastor here alongside some of these incredible people you've seen up here leading us in worship. And it's a joy to celebrate Jesus' resurrection with you. I can scarcely think of a word that I have heard less in our popular culture than the word repentance. Much less to see it in action. When was the last time you saw somebody just say, I'm sorry, without a million qualifiers, and just say, I'm sorry? It's a word reserved for church settings, and even in those settings, it carries with it a certain connotation. And I want to say very plainly, my goal for us today is nothing short of repentance. But repentance is not simply a transactional, I'm sorry, or feeling bad about ourselves, or trying to conjure up some sort of guilt, so we can somehow, maybe, as we suppose, see ourselves the way that God sees us, that we suppose he's disappointed with us, or that he always sees what's wrong with us. Repentance comes from the Greek word in the Greek New Testament, where we derive the story that we just read and so many others. The Greek word metanoia, it's about a complete change in orientation. You were walking one way and then you turn and go a different way, a changing of our way of seeing the world. Fleming Rutledge says the Greek word metanoia means to turn around, to reorient oneself in another direction. It means to receive a new start all together. And it's this kind of repentance, this kind of dramatic shift of up-ending of our orientation that the resurrection invites us into. Traveled the world playing with the likes of Chuck Berry, Percy Sledge, the Drifters, and so many more. And after playing in a bar near his hometown of Silver Spring, Maryland in the 1980s, a man approached him and said this. I've never heard a black man play the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis. Gerald Davis looked at this man and said, Where do you think Jerry Lee Lewis learned how to play the piano? And the man sat down for a drink. And during the course of this conversation, the man would reveal both the extent of his ignorance and that he was a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan, the KKK, sitting down. No, Davis didn't send him away in anger, didn't say, How dare you? He just invited him to sit down for a drink. They parted as friends. And it inspired Davis with this sort of lifelong mission to befriend people that hated him for the color of his skin. And what he found was that in the context of a drink in a bar or a friendly conversation, he could get past the defenses of bitterness and ignorance. And as he simply talked to people and showed them how their blind hatred had made them truly stupid, people began to change. Through the course of Davis' life, some forty former Klansmen have renounced their membership in the KKK. And they've done something quite strange. They've actually given Daryl Davis their hoods and their robes as sort of an emblem of repentance. And he, in a very cheeky way, just keeps them as signs of his victory, these signs of hatred transfigured into signs of peace and friendship. The resurrection invites us into this sort of repentance and reorientation. I want to look at four areas today where the resurrection is trying to reorient our compasses towards God's true north. But Mary, beginning in verse 11, stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, Woman, why are you weeping? Mary stood outside the tomb weeping. Now remember, we have the advantage of knowing the end of the story. We know what's about to happen, but Mary did not know what was about to happen. Why are you weeping? Easter begins in aching sorrow. And the first question that Easter poses to us is not a patronizing or dismissive question. The question is invitation to testimony. The angels don't ask Mary, woman, why are you weeping? You have nothing to weep about. They ask her to bear witness to the pain that she has experienced. For many of us in here today, the question, why are we weeping, just as it did for Mary, has names, dates, diagnoses, shame, cycles of pain, the inability to feel God's presence attached to it. Why are you weeping, you know? One of my favorite songwriters, Stephen Wilson Jr., writes of grief. He says, grief is only love that's got nowhere to go. It's a beautiful and haunting sentiment. We feel the rawness of grief and the weight of it. But if grief is only love that's got nowhere to go, then our grief is simply an exercise in trying to console ourselves. But the resurrection is trying to invite us to see that grief is testimony and protest about the way the world is. Grief is somehow tapping into the way that the Creator designed the world and seeing that death is not what should be. All that is crooked and malformed is not as it should be. Grief cries out to God and says, There must be more. Mary stands in as the mother of all who grieve on this Easter day. But the question first is not hers. The first question is Heaven's question and ultimately Jesus' question. And the question reveals a God who bears the scars of all that grieves us, all loss, all pain, all death. And the question reveals to us that our tears are not mere puddles drying up in the scorching sun of life. The tears of our suffering are tributaries of the great river of God's unending love. He has gathered them up preciously in a bottle. They will be transfigured and transformed in the life of the resurrected Lord. He will wipe every tear from our eye. And the hands that will wipe every tear from our eye bear the scars of his victory and his redemption. Diane Langberg says, Jesus is the only one who will bear scars in heaven. And Jesus doesn't minimize all that we have suffered. He doesn't minimize the tears and the accumulated pain of all the years. Rather, he gathers them up unto himself on the cross and undoes them. Why are you weeping this Sunday morning? Easter invites you to pour your heart out to God, your pain. And in one and the same vein, it shows us that in trusting our tears to the risen Lord, that there is a resurrection coming, a restoration of the years the locust has stolen, amending a healing. Our suffering is not in vain, but is a part of God's grand creation bringing us to his new life. The second justice. Implicit within this statement is Mary's presence at the cross of Jesus. The injustice of that moment, as the innocent one is crucified among the guilty. The brazenness with which injustice triumphs and mocks in our world is infuriating. It often leaves us full of rage and feeling powerless. In America, the richest nation the world has ever known, somewhere between 11 and 13% of children live below the poverty line. The Epstein documents, in which a coordinated multinational systemic effort to traffic and abuse little girls has been buried under partisan politics in America, which is all the appearance of many people in power protecting themselves and their accomplices. Jesus was tried and convicted under the cloak of night and executed by the state under the false pretenses that he was a violent revolutionary. His case has all the hallmarks of a tragic miscarriage of justice, the type that has been carried out in our world every day and in our nation. Brian Stevenson, who I think is one of the most poignant Christian intellectuals in America, his work with the Equal Justice Initiative has established the National Monument for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. The monument seeks to tell the truth and give some measure of dignity to those who are erased from this earth by horrible acts of racial violence. Names of people who were unjustly killed by lynch mobs around the United States of America, and the places where these travesties and horrors were inflicted. An inscription at the monument reads this for the hanged and beaten, for the shot drowned and burned, for the tortured, tormented and terrorized. For those abandoned by the rule of law, we will remember. With hope because hopelessness is the enemy of justice, with courage because peace requires bravery, with persistence because justice is a constant struggle, with faith, because we shall overcome. C.S. Lewis describes two children on a playground. One takes the other's toy, and the one who's had his toy taken says, That's not fair. And if there is no standard, no moral arc to the universe, no guidance, no God at the center of it, then that protest, that's not fair, really has no bearing in reality. This is Nietzsche's conclusion. There is no standard, therefore, might makes right. The will to power is all. But if there is a standard, if there is one who sees even those things that people would tell themselves that nobody sees, even those things that seem hidden in the dark, then the resurrection tells us that there is a light coming that will bring into the light everything that is hidden in the shadow right now. That there is a justice and a judgment that will be revealed by the hands of God. James Cohn says this the gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God's presence and Jesus' solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair. The resurrection of Jesus reveals the righteousness of God. We live in a self-righteous and sanctimonious world, all convincing ourselves that we are on the right side of history. But the resurrection of Jesus upends that and right-sides it and says, No, there is a righteousness, but it is God's righteousness. Jesus entrusts himself to the righteousness of God and is vindicated by his faithfulness. The cross and resurrection of Jesus vindicates our own cries for justice, but it also does something else, something we don't always want to admit. It reminds us that we too have participated in the injustice of this world. That we have contributed to the fracturing of our world. Fleming Rutledge says this the current use of justice as a rallying cry for the church is reductive because it is limited to particular political and economic issues without reference to the righteousness of God. The Christian hope is founded in the promise of God that all things will be made new according to his righteousness. All the references to judgment in the Bible should be understood in the context of God's righteousness. Not just his being righteous noun, but his making right verb, all that has been wrong. Clearly, human justice is a very limited enterprise compared to the ultimate making right of God in the promised day of judgment. Now, this is not particularly good news on this Easter Sunday morning at this point. Oh, there's a God who sees everything I've ever done, darkest moments of my life, when I would prefer that God look away? Yes. But at one and the same time, what we see in the resurrection of Jesus is not that he goes to his disciples upon his resurrection and says, Hey, remember when you guys all left me, you morons? Where were you? No, what does heaven have to say to earth? The first word of the new world, peace. Jesus doesn't even march into the halls of Pilate and say, Hey, remember when you thought you had all this power over me? Things have changed. He doesn't do that. Because what we see revealed in the risen Christ is not a vindictive God. We see a God who makes right, who will bring injustice to right, who will set things on their right course. We see his mercy and his grace. And so when we talk about our own lives and the things that we would rather not admit make up part of our lives, what we find in the face of the risen Christ is not judgment or condemnation, but mercy. And it doesn't mean we have it all together, it doesn't mean we've done everything right. But he offers us, unmerited, of our own account, his grace, his making right action, his righteousness. Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poet, says, I say that we are wound with mercy round and round, as if with air the same. Eccosia, the resurrection of Christ tells us that there is justice, there is a standard. But for those of us who entrust ourselves to this risen Christ, there is mercy upon mercy. We confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us. Jesus and his resurrection reframes and reorients, calls us to repentance when it comes to beauty in the world. You see the cherry blossoms in bloom? Do you see that big beautiful tent outside? Jesus said to her, verse 15, Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for? Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus said to her, Mary. She turned and said to him, Teacher. Now the last Mary had seen of Jesus, again, Mary didn't go to the garden looking for a resurrected Lord. She went looking to mourn at a graveside. And the last she had seen of Jesus, to quote Isaiah, he had no form or majesty that we should look at him. Nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity, as one from whom others hide their faces. He was despised. More than simply disfigured and destroyed, Jesus of Nazareth had been desecrated. Mary initially mistakes the risen Jesus for the gardener. The gardener for her is merely a means to an end. The one who may be able to tell her where to find the dead body of her Lord and friend, but John the Gospel writer is not confined to Mary's misconceptions of who the one talking to her is or what it means that he's the gardener. The story, the creation, began in a garden. From the world of the biblical imagination, the garden is a place of rest, of peace, of shalom. The garden is the place of God's unmediated presence. God, the creator of the universe, walks in the cool of the evening with those made in his image. The garden is a place of work, uninhibited by the curse and the fall, mission. Jesus is not merely mistaken for the gardener. He is the gardener of the new creation, the one who mends and heals, restores and redeems. And in that first garden in Eden, there were trees that were pleasing to the eye, not utilitarian, not useful trees for food or for shelter, just nice to look at. And Mary, through no fault of her own, overlooks the beauty of the gardener that is before her until, that is, he says her name. John's subtle nod to the resurrected Jesus as the gardener is not just a way of calling us back to the garden. It's his testimony that just as the first creation began in a garden, now there is a new creation that is breaking forth right in the midst of this one. Colossians 1, he is the firstborn from among the dead. Jesus, the new Adam. We are now in Christ, drawn to his beauty, drawn to his goodness. Jesus' resurrection doesn't upend the ordinary vocations of our lives, it hallows them. Do everything to the glory of God, Paul would write. Our lives live in the embering glow of a world made new. Everything we do with great integrity, effort, selflessness, precision, joy can be a building block of this new creation that is sure and certain because of Jesus' resurrection. Again, the poet Hopkins, because we need beauty, the world is charged with the grandeur of God. And for all this nature is never spent, there lives the dearest freshness, deep down things. And though the last lights off the black west went, O morning at the brown brink eastward springs, because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with a bright wings. The philosopher Roger Scruton says this Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption, of a final transcendence, of mortal disorder into a kingdom of ends. In an age of declining faith, art bears enduring witness to the spiritual hunger and immortal longings of our species. Last, the resurrection is inviting us into a complete and radical and gracious and good reorientation of the story that we are living in. Verse 17 of John chapter 20. Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, I have seen the Lord. And she told them that he had said these things to her. Jesus instructs Mary to go and tell the disciples what she has seen and experienced. Mary Magdalene, on that first Easter Sunday, apostle to the apostles. We can't hear the Easter story without hearing a woman proclaiming the good news that everything is new. I took on a weird spiritual practice this lint. Instead of refraining from news and information, I decided I'm gonna go the complete other way. I'm going to newsmax and I'm going to read everything that I come across. I very deliberately did not tell Courtney that I was doing this until this week because she rightfully said, This is a terrible idea for you. I said, I know. And I probably have some apologizing to do for the last six weeks. But little did I know during the course of this the six weeks of Lint that the United States and Israel would go to war with Iran and all the economic fallout. If you want to talk about that, I got some I got some thoughts there. I know more about the Strait of Hormuz than I ever wanted to know. I didn't know that tech companies would begin laying off thousands and thousands of employees in a move that many say is a harbinger of things to come, not to scare you on this Easter Sunday. I've just there's a drought in the western United States. Do you know about this? Not enough snowpack? I didn't really know that we got our water from snowpack. That may be more about me than that, but I've learned a lot about water management. Or in a much more sober way, the civil war that rages in the South Sudan, or the fact that Kenyans and North Koreans have been conscripted into the Russian army to fight in their ongoing invasion of Ukraine. What I was trying to do with this very foolish Linton practice was just to inhabit a story that is different from the story of the resurrection. Pastor in the UK, Pete Hughes, says, the story that we live in is the story we live out. And I just tasted a little bit of what it would mean to live outside the story of the resurrection, to live with the facts on the ground and nothing more in our world. The story of our world tells us is that everything is broken and breaking, heartbreaking, urgent, and unwieldy. And the thing about the Jesus story is that it doesn't say, no, no, no, actually, the world is a little better than you think. It actually says it's far worse and far better. Perhaps you consider yourself a rationalist here today, and the story I've laid out sounds a little bit too much like a fairy tale, and this fairy story to be true. The author of the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R. Tolkien, said, exactly right. You are 100% right that this sounds like a fairy story. He describes the Gospels as the true myth, the story that is the fountainhead of all the epic tales we tell ourselves, from the Odyssey to the Avengers. He says this he says, the Gospels contain a fairy story, or a story of larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy stories. The consolation of fairy stories, the joy of the happy ending, or more correctly, of the good catastrophe, the sudden, joyous turn, for there is no true end to any fairy tale. This joy is not essentially escapus nor fugitive. In its fairy tale or other world setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure, it denies, in the face of much evidence, if you will, universal final defeat, and insofar as good news, giving a fleeting glimpse of joy, joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. For the rationalists in here, the notion that there is a God at the center of the universe that is loving, kind, personal, merciful, and good likely doesn't track with what your eyes have seen. Charles Darwin famously traded in his faith after observing the violence and brutality of the animal kingdom. Perhaps you're a romantic in here today. And the idea of God being nice and feeling good towards you is really nice. You like that. But you don't see how that has any bearing or demand upon your life in the here and now. All you can do is try your best to be a good person and do right by others. You know, you think of how ready we are in our culture to talk about the universe as a vague and depersonalized force. Universe, send me good things, send me good vibes. And the good news of Jesus and the resurrection is that the center of the universe has a name: God, Father, Spirit, and Son. And the center of the universe not only has a name and demands our allegiance and our worship, that the center of the universe knows your name. I've been struck by the astronauts on the Artemis spacecraft being flung out past the moon. And one of the things that they described is the vantage point of seeing Earth as a whole. And how that was such a stunning reality for them to behold, to see the place where we all live, the thing that we all have in common, at this vantage point in totality. They're talking about the significance of that and what that means. And the beautiful thing is, not only does God see it as a totality, he sees it up close. And not, God just doesn't see things like I see my children or my wife. I see them up close. I can't know their thoughts. I can't know what makes them tick. But God sees the intricate parts of who we are. The psalmist tells us that he made them, that he delights in them. And that never, not for a single moment, has he ever turned his face from you. Even those moments where, if we're honest, we would have rather he turned away. Those moments where we participated in the brokenness and the fracture of the world, we would rather have God not looked our way, he doesn't turn his face from us. There has never been a moment where God has not had his eyes of loving gaze fixed upon you. That he knows in the words of the psalmist, the words that we speak before they're even formed on our lips, that if we make our bed in hell or we rise up to the heights of heaven, he is there. And so all the stories that we try to tell ourselves are transfigured and made better in the Jesus story. The resurrected Christ is inviting us into his story. One of the things that ultimately gives me pause when I get too comfortable in a story that is less than God's story is that those stories are ultimately either faith in myself or faith in people, which sounds nice on its face and is the advice of just about every Disney movie. But in my lived experience, and I'm far from the first to discover this, but I'll just speak for myself here, is an incoherent way to live. If I put my faith in myself, I put faith in my own performance, my own demonstration that I matter and I have worth, my own ability to have wisdom, my own ability to be good. And yet the incongruence and the tensions that I live with, if I'm honest, not me all the time. I'm not good. I'm not logical. I'm not all that impressive. My ability to accomplish things lessens with each year that I live. If I put my faith in some vague notion of humanity or people, sure, we see glimpses of remarkable self-sacrifice and virtue. But we also have mountains of accumulated history of brutality and domination and callousness. The only other coherent philosophical notions seem to be to put faith in a vague and personal universe and hope everything works out. Or worse yet, to put faith in nothing at all. As Paul says, without the resurrection, we are amongst all to be pitied. C.S. Lewis writes, I believe in the resurrection as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. So to the rationalist, the romantic, or maybe you like me, you spend too much time looking at the story of the world and you just become resigned. Cynical. Things will never change. To all of you, I'm simply one that has received. And I say that as a representative of so many of us in here. We've seen the risen Christ. We've seen, in some way, through faith, the scars in his hands, healing all the scars of our lives, the beauty of his face shining upon us, drawing us to the fountainhead of all beauty. The risen Christ vindicated as the Lord of the true God, vindicated from all injustice. I believe in the resurrection because it makes sense and coherence of everything else. Everything will be brought into the light as Jesus steps out from the grave. I put up this chart during our Good Friday gathering. Just it's a little far away from that. Some of the things we knew were happening, other things we have to get past the layers a little bit. For us in here today, you may have all sorts of different vantage points that you're coming from. You may be so mired in your own cycles of shame and accusation that you never feel close to God. You may be so appalled at what you see in the world that you're like, God, what are you doing? What are you up to? And the cross of Jesus is the convergence of all of these things onto the willing Savior of the world as he takes it all upon himself. Assuming all of our debt, all of our hatred, all of our cursing, all of our bitterness, all of it. And laying it upon him. Easter Sunday is Jesus transforming all the bleakness and evil and darkness both of our hearts and this world into new life and new creation. So you get all these words that do a lot of work love, joy, peace, all those kinds of things, but then you get everything else towards infinity because God is risen in Christ Jesus. We pray, come Holy Spirit. God, with the power of your story, the resurrection of Jesus, have its way in here. Lord, that it would be received both as a call to repentance, God, to reorient, but in the vein of the words of the gospels, Lord, that it would be good news of great joy for all the people. God, that we would delight in the gift that you have given to us, God, that we would receive your forgiveness. God, that we would receive your consolation, that all will be well and all manner of things made well. With the reality of the empty tomb and the risen, Lord. Give clarity to our lives, make them fit together in the light of your kingdom, your reign, your goodness, God. And may we see ourselves as you have called us, Lord, as your children. Love of the Father lavished upon us joyfully, abundantly, and fully. God, we ask these things in your name, in the power of the risen Lord, we pray. We ask you to be present in this room in a special way. Pray these things in your name. In the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, we pray. Amen. Ecosia, I want to invite you just in that same posture. We're gonna stand for a moment and then we're gonna come to the table. And as you're doing that, I just simply want to invite you to stay connected to the story that we just encountered. You can stand, you can stand, sorry. And I was like, wait, yeah? Yeah. We believe that because Jesus is alive, that he's present here in this room. And you're like, okay, I'm looking around for him. But the power of his spirit poured out into our world, he is present here, and especially in gatherings like these. And he may be calling you to put something down. He may be saying, hey, this habit in your life you think is serving you or is bringing you life or pleasure, I've got more for you. He may be confronting you in that call to repentance with a new reality. And in all these things, he's comforting us. He's a good king. As Tolkien writes, the hands of the king are the hands of a healer. And so pour out your sorrows, pour out your shock and awe at the way the world is, pour out your longing for more here in this place. The resurrected Lord meets you here in his power. He is here, he is risen, he is risen indeed. Let's worship together and then we'll come to the table in just a moment.