Your Turn

This is the English-language homily delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregations of Unfinished Community and Ashiya Christian Church on Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026, drawing from Jeremiah 31:1-6

Easter is a time of celebration; a day when we embrace renewal, and the bringing of new life.

Resurrection.

But…the thing is, a lot of us don’t really know what resurrection is, exactly. We THINK it’s the same as regeneration, the taking of something old and bringing it into a new life by patching it up, fixing the holes, and filling it with new life so it can re enter the world as a new and better version of the old and broken thing it used to be, like patching a worn out shoe, or re-covering an old sofa.

But resurrection…isn’t the repairing of something broken.

It’s the raising of something dead to an entirely new life, enabling it to fulfill its purpose in a way it never could have before, no matter how many times it was patched or re covered.

When something is resurrected it is an entirely new creation, the perfected version of the imperfect original.  New and improved.

But, like Jesus, it had to go through hell to get there.

For so many of us, when we face the worst, most painful times in our lives, they make us think that we are faulty, or our relationships are faulty, or that our lives are faulty, because if it weren’t…then why would it hurt so much?

And when we feel this way it can be so easy to sink into despondency….hopelessness…despair. We can start to think that there is nothing that can be salvaged, nothing that should be salvaged, and all that can be done is to discard it entirely, and begin again with a whole new creation.

But…that isn’t how God works.

God doesn’t discard something broken, nor does God rebuild it to a patched and cleaned up version of what it once was.

God resurrects.

We don’t like to think about it, but Jesus died. He was tortured, subjected to unimaginable torture and an historically barbaric public execution, lay in the grave for three straight days. Can you imagine suffering more than that?

Can you imagine how tired Jesus must’ve been when the divine wake-up call came? Who among of us, after experiencing all of that, would be ready and eager to step back into the arms of the same exact people who made him to go through all that?

In our broken, sinful, limited humanity, we can scarcely imagine being able to go back to that kind of world again. To go through that again. To be that person again. Because if we experienced all that, if we lived through all that, what could possibly be the point of going back?

What would that accomplish?

I’m often reminded of the resurrection of Lazarus. Many of you have heard me preach on that exact story and point out that the resurrection of Lazarus depended on two things: Jesus calling out, and Lazarus answering.

We think of the resurrection as a miracle that happens to Jesus, or a miracle that happens to Lazarus, but the miracle isn’t in just in the calling…it’s in the answering.

The resurrected Christ is the same person who died, to be sure, but he’s been transformed by the experience rather than simply destroyed by it. There signs of his suffering remain - the wound in his side, the holes in his hands - he’s not erased what happened.

But he’s chosen to accept it, to release it. To deny that pain, that suffering, a hold on his spirit and to returning by God’s calling not as the person who was broken by it, but as the person called to repair it instead.

We spend so much time wishing for resurrection to come upon us, wishing for someone to raise our broken spirits from the dead, wishing for life, and light, and joy, and happiness to come into our darkened tombs; so much time spent wishing that we miss the fact that we have been given a calling, and with that calling a choice.

To rise as something new, to adorn yourself with your tambourines and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers, to repair that was broken and live as the perfected version of what we were always supposed to be, what we were made to be..

Or to remain silent in the tomb, waiting for light to shine through a stone we never tried to roll away.

Jesus is our example, our savior who bore all the hurt and pain a person could bear, who suffered and died at our hands, only to come back again, dust himself off with broken hands, stand up on wounded feet, and turn to us all of us say.

“Ok. Now it’s your turn.”

That’s the Easter calling, my beloved friends; to refuse to surrender to the despair and hopelessness of the grave, to hear the loving call of our creator bidding us to rise, not as the broken, overwhelmed, crushed and destroyed people who first fell into the grave, but as a people made free by the choice to step into a world of pain with love abounding, still bearing the scars but having learned from them, grown beyond them, made perfect by the weakness that led us to the cross, the grave and, eventually, to the quiet voice that whispers to us in love.

Come out. Try again. Stand up and enjoy the fruit you planted!

You can do this. I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.

And I am with you always, to the end of the age…and still further beyond.