Preached by the Rev. David Henson, April 5, 2026
Easter basket. Easter bunny. Easter candy. Easter eggs.
Easter hat, Easter dress, Easter suit, Easter vest.
Easter brunch. Easter lunch. Easter ham. Easter lamb.
Easter lily. Easter flowers. Easter brass. Easter sermon.
Easter vigil. Easter sunrise. Easter Sunday. Eastertide.
It all makes for a very traditional, very typical Happy Easter.
But this year especially, I can’t help but notice all these joyful, colorful, delightful things are set against a much darker and somber backdrop more fitting for Good Friday than Easter Sunday. Good Friday makes a lot more sense amid the tumult of a world at war, the crashing waves of unrest in our culture, the storms of loss and torrent of despair in our own souls and lives.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with our typical Easter celebrations. I love them, and some of my best memories are wrapped up in these experiences. I look forward to and participate in these traditions each year.
This year, it just sort of feels like throwing a party on a ship slowly sinking into the depths.
And it makes me wonder whether we’ve whittled Easter down to little more than an adjective. The word we use to describe other, less important things.
But true Easter, the Easter of the Gospels, is anything but just an adjective.
Instead, Easter is an earthquake, rattling the bones of the entombed to new life and trembling the souls of soldiers who, as guardians of the grave, had kept meticulous watch over the way of death in the world.
Easter is the joyous rupture of everything all creation has ever known to be true: that death has the final word on life rather than the other way ‘round. But no longer. No longer do we have to shape our souls around our inevitable deaths and our last mortal breath. Instead, we are invited to live within the eternity of God’s love, the new era that erupted from the empty tomb, in which Christ has, for all eternity, destroyed the gates of hell and broken the bondage of sin for all people, for all time, in all places.
Because through Easter, Christ has transformed death from the period punctuating the end of life into a comma, a brief exhale in the unbroken thought of unending life.
Easter is not only this new reality, it is also the new way of living.
As the writer of Matthew seems to understand it, Easter isn’t just an adjective but neither is it really just a noun.
It’s a command.
Go!, the angel tells the women.
Go tell the disciples.
Go to Galilee.
Go, and I’ll meet you there.
In Matthew’s Gospel, there’s no meeting the Resurrected Christ in the upper room to touch his wounds. No appearances in Jerusalem or on the Road to Emmaus.
It’s just—
Go.
Go.
Go to Galilee.
It’s so curious that the very first thing they’re to do in the new resurrected era of the world isn’t to meet the Resurrected Lord, but to retrace their footsteps from Jerusalem, all the way back to where it all began, where they were first called to be his disciples.
And during the days and days of that journey, to revisit and relive it all, and remember his stories, his miracles, and his teachings. Except, this time, to hear them, knowing how the story ends, not with the cross, death, and the grave, but with the empty tomb and new life. It will rewire their souls with a new reality, and rewrite their minds, the assumptions, anxieties, and the fears they had originally carried with them.
All of what was old and dying in them will be made new, reborn through the liberating knowledge that life and love have triumphed even over the grave.
They will keep pulling on the thread of the Resurrection until the logic and power of death in them have unraveled completely.
So that by the time they arrive in Galilee, the truth of Easter will have begun to take root.
The truth that Easter isn’t just an adjective. It’s not just a noun. And it’s not just a command either.
Easter is a verb.
At its heart, Easter is a verb, the primary action word of God.
The great Jesuit poet Gerald Manley Hopkins perfectly captures this idea in his poem about the catastrophic wreck of a passenger ship in 1875. The ship ran aground near the coast of England, but stormy seas and raging weather made a rescue impossible.
So with horror, and within sight of the shore, the ship was slowly torn apart. Among the dozens dead were five Franciscan nuns fleeing religious persecution.
The tragedy broke something loose inside Hopkins and he tried to make sense of such an awful tragedy by writing poetry again for the first time in years.
He takes readers through the fateful night and through his swirling cadence, you can almost feel the waters rising up over your head and you can feel the shipwreck not just of the situation but of faith itself.
And beyond that one shipwreck in history, the poem has a universal quality that captures how it always feels when we find our lives or our world shipwrecked, hulls breaching in catastrophe, taking on water we cannot stop.
Shipwrecked by the death of a loved one, hulls breached by the loss of a relationship, taking on water you cannot stop through unexpected illness, poverty, violence, and all the brokenhearted revelations of a broken world.
But, then, when death and despair seem to have the final word in the poem and our own lives, Hopkins springs this extraordinarily powerful and arresting phrase.
Calling out for God, for hope, he writes, “Let him easter in us, and be a dayspring to our dimness, a crimson-cresseted east.”
Let him easter in us.
Easter as a verb. And a verb that happens not primarily amid the joyfully good times when life seems simple, easy, and undefeated. Rather it is the action of God precisely when all hope has been lost, when death has consumed everything beautiful in our souls and the world, when stone of the tomb and the stone of our hearts are immovable, when we are lost and everything seems wretched and wrecked, and marooned in despair.
And no good can possibly come of it.
That is when God easters.
Let him Easter in us.
If Alleluia Christ is risen is the triumphant proclamation of this holy day, then this is the cry of our hearts in this season.
O God, easter in us.
Earthquake us
Command us.
Send us.
In the midst of shipwrecks beyond our control, easter in us.