Sermon Spotlight: Easter Sunday
The Rev. Aron Kramer
The Angel said to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, “He is not here. He has been raised.”
And then, almost as an afterthought, almost too simple after everything that has just happened, an earthquake, angels, tomb stones being rolled away, the angel gives the women their instructions: Go quickly, and tell his disciples. He is going ahead of you to Galilee. There you will see him.
This year Holy Week has been filled with epiphanies, like the seismic language found only three times in Matthew. Like when Chip mentioned something spectacularly new and fresh to my ears and mind in his sermon on Maundy Thursday, Jesus must have washed Judas’ feet knowing that Judas was the one who would betray him. The other epiphany, almost as if I have never read the Gospel of Matthew before, is this idea of heading home to Galilee.
Not Jerusalem. Not the Temple. Not any seat of power, not even towards the center of history, the place where the week's events have shaken the very foundations of the world. After the procession and the arrest and the cross and the earthquake and the empty tomb after all of that the risen Christ sends everyone back to where they started.
Go back to Galilee, says the Angel, tell my brothers to go back to Galilee and there they will see me. It is not the ending I would have written.
We have been through much together this Holy Week. On Palm Sunday we stood at the beginning of a procession, a sort of tremor that shook and stirred the city, as Jesus arrived. On Thursday we washed each others feet, stripped the altar and prepared our hearts for the death of Jesus. On Friday night we prayed as the second tremor, the earth shaking when Jesus died, washed over us.
We sat together in that, in the exhaustion and the broken trust and the impossible situations and the three-in-the-morning waking. We held the cry of Psalm 22 together My God, my God, why have you forsaken me and we let it be enough for the night.
And now the ground shakes one final time, the third tremor. The tomb is empty, the guards, Pilate's men, the soldiers of the empire are face down on the ground like dead men. And the women, who came early in the morning with no expectation of anything except the continuation of their grief, are running from the tomb with fear and great joy, fear and joy, simultaneously, both things true at once, neither one canceling the other out.
The Easter story Matthew lays out for us is not clean. It is not the neat bow we often hope for and desire. It is fear and great joy, running together, down a road toward something that hasn't fully revealed itself yet. And the destination is Galilee.
Let me tell you a little about what I know about Galilee. Galilee was not impressive, it was not where things happened, it was the countryside, fishing villages, farmers, tax collectors, ordinary people living ordinary lives far from the centers of power and prestige. If you need a more relevant or current example, for those of us who grew up on the east side of the river, it’s how we see Minneapolis and the western suburbs, simply not impressive. (That was a joke!)
We read in scripture that when Nathanael first heard that the Messiah might be from Nazareth, his response was immediate and honest: Can anything good come out of Galilee? The disciples had left Galilee to follow Jesus. They had walked all the way to Jerusalem, the holy city, the place where history was made, where God's story and the world's story come together. They had been part of something enormous: the procession, the Temple, the upper room, the garden. They had been at the center of the most significant week in Christian history.
In their minds, in our minds even, any progression would certainly remain staunchly entrenched where the action was. Where the center of power would be, and yet they are being told to go back. Go back to the boats and the nets and the familiar shoreline. Go back to the neighbors who knew them before any of this happened, who remember who they were before they became a disciple, before they got swept up in something bigger than themselves. Go back to the ordinary, the unglamorous, the place that familiarity has made almost invisible to them.
I suspect these instructions landed on the disciples the way it lands on us. With a particular kind of deflation. It might be the equivalent of going back home and moving into your parent’s basement. With the quiet, uncomfortable suspicion that maybe the significant thing is always happening somewhere else. That the place we are is never quite enough. That if we could just get to the right city, the right position, the right moment then we would finally be where the action is, where we matter, where the risen Christ would obviously choose to appear. But Jesus is already in Galilee. Already there, already waiting in the ordinary place, the familiar place, the place that didn't seem like enough.
There is something happening in our world right now that makes the image of Galilee land differently than it might in another year. We have spent three plus months watching the centers of power shake and shatter. We have watched institutions we trusted crack and in some cases collapse. We have felt the ground move beneath our assumptions about how things work and who is protected and what can be counted on.
And one of the temptations in that kind of shaking is to believe that the answer is a better center of power, a different Jerusalem. That if we can just get the right people into the right positions, if we can just find the right leverage point, if we can just be in the room where it happens then things will change. The resurrection sends us in a different direction entirely.
Not to a new Jerusalem, but back to Galilee, back to the community in front of us. Back to the neighbor we have been meaning to see. Back to the local, the specific, the ordinary, the place where we actually live. This is where the risen Christ chooses to meet his people. Not at the center of power, but in the place that doesn't look like it is enough.
Some of you will read later today, in the Alleluia Booklet you receive as you leave, about where my own call to priesthood began. It didn’t happen in a cathedral, or at a moment of obvious profundity. It occurred in a most ordinary and unlikely place: on a dock, on a lake.
It is so easy to stop seeing what's actually right in front of us, easy to stop noticing the weight and the beauty of the ordinary places we pass through every day because we have been there long enough to take it all for granted. But, we are reminded that the risen Christ appears in Galilee. In the place his disciples had already been, in the place they knew so well they had almost stopped seeing it.
This is what I have been fumbling with all of Lent, not quite able to name it. On Palm Sunday, when God announced the arrival of this King who is not a King, not through imperial cavalry and machines of war, but by a borrowed donkey, surrounded by ordinary desperate people crying out in the only words they had. On Good Friday, when the most honest prayer available was not a triumphant hymn but a human cry of abandonment from an ancient psalm. And now this: the first message of the resurrection is not: go to the palace, not: go to the Temple, not: go to the seat of power, but rather, go to Galilee. Go to the ordinary place. Go back to where you started.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People quoted another Rabbi who said, “The language of God is human beings”. Who shows up when there is sorrow and brokenness? You do. Who shows up when there is injustice? You all do. Who shows up to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, share the Good News? You do, each of you show up as the hand, feet, mouth, eyes, ears and heart of God in our midst. You are how God speaks to us.
You showed up this morning. Some of you barely. Some of you not sure exactly why. Some of you carrying everything these past months have put on you, plus everything this week has asked. You came anyway, which is, I think, exactly what it means to go to Galilee. Not because you were certain. Not because the fear had cleared. But because love has its own stubbornness, and grief has its own weight, and the ordinary place keeps calling you, us back.
The third tremor has happened. The ground has shifted not back to where it was, but into something new, yet deeply familiar. The risen Christ is already ahead of us, already in Galilee, already in this room, these faces, this community, this ordinary and specific and sometimes maddening and irreplaceable place.
Go back to Galilee. Jesus will meet you there. In the known, in the familiar, in the faces and bodies you already love, and even some you don’t.
Alleluia. Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.
Easter Sunday
April 5, 2026
The Angel said to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, “He is not here. He has been raised.”
And then, almost as an afterthought, almost too simple after everything that has just happened, an earthquake, angels, tomb stones being rolled away, the angel gives the women their instructions: Go quickly, and tell his disciples. He is going ahead of you to Galilee. There you will see him.
This year Holy Week has been filled with epiphanies, like the seismic language found only three times in Matthew. Like when Chip mentioned something spectacularly new and fresh to my ears and mind in his sermon on Maundy Thursday, Jesus must have washed Judas’ feet knowing that Judas was the one who would betray him. The other epiphany, almost as if I have never read the Gospel of Matthew before, is this idea of heading home to Galilee.
Not Jerusalem. Not the Temple. Not any seat of power, not even towards the center of history, the place where the week's events have shaken the very foundations of the world. After the procession and the arrest and the cross and the earthquake and the empty tomb after all of that the risen Christ sends everyone back to where they started.
Go back to Galilee, says the Angel, tell my brothers to go back to Galilee and there they will see me. It is not the ending I would have written.
We have been through much together this Holy Week. On Palm Sunday we stood at the beginning of a procession, a sort of tremor that shook and stirred the city, as Jesus arrived. On Thursday we washed each others feet, stripped the altar and prepared our hearts for the death of Jesus. On Friday night we prayed as the second tremor, the earth shaking when Jesus died, washed over us.
We sat together in that, in the exhaustion and the broken trust and the impossible situations and the three-in-the-morning waking. We held the cry of Psalm 22 together My God, my God, why have you forsaken me and we let it be enough for the night.
And now the ground shakes one final time, the third tremor. The tomb is empty, the guards, Pilate's men, the soldiers of the empire are face down on the ground like dead men. And the women, who came early in the morning with no expectation of anything except the continuation of their grief, are running from the tomb with fear and great joy, fear and joy, simultaneously, both things true at once, neither one canceling the other out.
The Easter story Matthew lays out for us is not clean. It is not the neat bow we often hope for and desire. It is fear and great joy, running together, down a road toward something that hasn't fully revealed itself yet. And the destination is Galilee.
Let me tell you a little about what I know about Galilee. Galilee was not impressive, it was not where things happened, it was the countryside, fishing villages, farmers, tax collectors, ordinary people living ordinary lives far from the centers of power and prestige. If you need a more relevant or current example, for those of us who grew up on the east side of the river, it’s how we see Minneapolis and the western suburbs, simply not impressive. (That was a joke!)
We read in scripture that when Nathanael first heard that the Messiah might be from Nazareth, his response was immediate and honest: Can anything good come out of Galilee? The disciples had left Galilee to follow Jesus. They had walked all the way to Jerusalem, the holy city, the place where history was made, where God's story and the world's story come together. They had been part of something enormous: the procession, the Temple, the upper room, the garden. They had been at the center of the most significant week in Christian history.
In their minds, in our minds even, any progression would certainly remain staunchly entrenched where the action was. Where the center of power would be, and yet they are being told to go back. Go back to the boats and the nets and the familiar shoreline. Go back to the neighbors who knew them before any of this happened, who remember who they were before they became a disciple, before they got swept up in something bigger than themselves. Go back to the ordinary, the unglamorous, the place that familiarity has made almost invisible to them.
I suspect these instructions landed on the disciples the way it lands on us. With a particular kind of deflation. It might be the equivalent of going back home and moving into your parent’s basement. With the quiet, uncomfortable suspicion that maybe the significant thing is always happening somewhere else. That the place we are is never quite enough. That if we could just get to the right city, the right position, the right moment then we would finally be where the action is, where we matter, where the risen Christ would obviously choose to appear. But Jesus is already in Galilee. Already there, already waiting in the ordinary place, the familiar place, the place that didn't seem like enough.
There is something happening in our world right now that makes the image of Galilee land differently than it might in another year. We have spent three plus months watching the centers of power shake and shatter. We have watched institutions we trusted crack and in some cases collapse. We have felt the ground move beneath our assumptions about how things work and who is protected and what can be counted on.
And one of the temptations in that kind of shaking is to believe that the answer is a better center of power, a different Jerusalem. That if we can just get the right people into the right positions, if we can just find the right leverage point, if we can just be in the room where it happens then things will change. The resurrection sends us in a different direction entirely.
Not to a new Jerusalem, but back to Galilee, back to the community in front of us. Back to the neighbor we have been meaning to see. Back to the local, the specific, the ordinary, the place where we actually live. This is where the risen Christ chooses to meet his people. Not at the center of power, but in the place that doesn't look like it is enough.
Some of you will read later today, in the Alleluia Booklet you receive as you leave, about where my own call to priesthood began. It didn’t happen in a cathedral, or at a moment of obvious profundity. It occurred in a most ordinary and unlikely place: on a dock, on a lake.
It is so easy to stop seeing what's actually right in front of us, easy to stop noticing the weight and the beauty of the ordinary places we pass through every day because we have been there long enough to take it all for granted. But, we are reminded that the risen Christ appears in Galilee. In the place his disciples had already been, in the place they knew so well they had almost stopped seeing it.
This is what I have been fumbling with all of Lent, not quite able to name it. On Palm Sunday, when God announced the arrival of this King who is not a King, not through imperial cavalry and machines of war, but by a borrowed donkey, surrounded by ordinary desperate people crying out in the only words they had. On Good Friday, when the most honest prayer available was not a triumphant hymn but a human cry of abandonment from an ancient psalm. And now this: the first message of the resurrection is not: go to the palace, not: go to the Temple, not: go to the seat of power, but rather, go to Galilee. Go to the ordinary place. Go back to where you started.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People quoted another Rabbi who said, “The language of God is human beings”. Who shows up when there is sorrow and brokenness? You do. Who shows up when there is injustice? You all do. Who shows up to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, share the Good News? You do, each of you show up as the hand, feet, mouth, eyes, ears and heart of God in our midst. You are how God speaks to us.
You showed up this morning. Some of you barely. Some of you not sure exactly why. Some of you carrying everything these past months have put on you, plus everything this week has asked. You came anyway, which is, I think, exactly what it means to go to Galilee. Not because you were certain. Not because the fear had cleared. But because love has its own stubbornness, and grief has its own weight, and the ordinary place keeps calling you, us back.
The third tremor has happened. The ground has shifted not back to where it was, but into something new, yet deeply familiar. The risen Christ is already ahead of us, already in Galilee, already in this room, these faces, this community, this ordinary and specific and sometimes maddening and irreplaceable place.
Go back to Galilee. Jesus will meet you there. In the known, in the familiar, in the faces and bodies you already love, and even some you don’t.
Alleluia. Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.
Comments
Post a Comment