Saved alongside--Easter 2026

Thumbnail image by Couleur, Free for use under the Pixabay Content License

Clare L. Hickman

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale

April 5, 2026—Easter Sunday, Year A

Jeremiah 31:1-6; Matthew 28:1-10                         

          “He has been raised from the dead,” the angel proclaims; but before you run and tell the good news, “Come, see the place where he lay.” Come into the tomb. Feel the cool, dank mustiness of it. See the burial cloths. Acknowledge the reality of death, the ache in your chest, the fear that still hangs in the air (this tomb was guarded by soldiers, after all, and though they may currently be stunned, they could stir at any time).

          Jesus has risen. But the full import of that cannot be grasped outside of the realities of the evil this world can do, the evidence of life’s terrible breakability. He is risen. But if you wish to truly believe that, you will have to do it with the very stink of death in your nostrils.

          Kate Bowler, of the “Everything Happens” podcast, remembers the poet Maggie Smith telling her that “she thinks of our lives like those little wooden matryoshka dolls. Inside 45-year-old her is 43-year-old her. And 13-year-old her. And 7-year-old her. All the earlier versions are still there. We are not ‘saved over,’ she said, like a final draft that deletes all evidence of what came before. We are saved alongside.”

[Which is such a relief, in the face of the terrible pressure we so often feel] “to narrate our lives as progress. Before I was broken. Now I am healed. Before I was a caterpillar. Now behold: butterfly. But most of us are not butterflies. Most of us are a stack of selves—hopeful, humiliated, brave, foolish, luminous, achey.”[i]

And I’d say that’s true of the world too: even a world that has been saved, even a world in which resurrection has happened, into which eternity has broken, is something of a stack of worlds. Hopeful, humiliated, brave, foolish, luminous, and achey. Very achey. We aren’t saved over, as some perfectly edited final product. We’re saved alongside, with all of the comments and suggested edits and margin notes still there to refer back to.

It’s a messy way to do it, for sure. But it has the benefit of accepting the actual reality of you, and “the world,” while also holding fast—stubbornly, faithfully—to the possibility (indeed, the reality) of transformation.

That’s the superpower of faith: the ability to imagine something, trust in something, live something MORE. More than the fear and suffering that exist in this life; more, even, than the astonishing beauty that also surrounds us. That all this is not all that there is and can be. And not just on the eternal side of things, though we do believe that. But perhaps even more importantly, we believe that eternity can break through on this side of things.

“On earth as it in in heaven.”

That’s what happened in the resurrection: the divine eternity broke through. Demonstrating that even death cannot completely destroy joy. That grief is not the end of the story. That even the greatest powers on earth, with their armies and their corruption and their systems of injustice, cannot manage to kill hope. Cannot rule out the divine spark of possibility that runs through our veins.

In thinking about hope, which can seem a heavy lift sometimes, I’m reminded of a poem by Caitlin Seida, in which she responds to the famous poem by Emily Dickinson describing hope as a thing with feathers.

Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat by Caitlin Seida

Hope is not the thing with feathers

That comes home to roost

When you need it most.

Hope is an ugly thing

With teeth and claws and

Patchy fur that’s seen some [things] shit.

It’s what thrives in the discards

And survives in the ugliest parts of our world,

Able to find a way to go on

When nothing else can even find a way in.

It’s the gritty, nasty little carrier of such

diseases as

optimism, persistence,

Perseverance and joy,

Transmissible as it drags its tail across

your path

and

bites you in the …

(well, you get the picture)

That’s an image of hope that has taken the angel’s suggestion to come into the tomb and take a good whiff of death. Just as we too have stood in the place of death, the place of despair, the place of endings and brokenness and overwhelming obstacle. The rat knows what it’s up against, and so do we. But he is risen: the angel told us that, and we feel the truth of it, deep down, like an ache in a broken bone that’s beginning to heal. So when the rat says, “Let’s do this thing,” and heads out of the tomb … we follow. 

Maybe we’re imagining it, but it feels like the earth is shaking under our feet. As it shook with the crowds who rose up in the face of empire, to acclaim Jesus as King on Palm Sunday. As it shook when he took his last breath on the cross. As it shook again when he burst free from the bonds of death, this very morning. Because God’s power cannot be contained, no matter how hard the worldly powers might try. They will try to silence opposition, and the rocks will burst into song; they will claim their might to be right and their executions just, and the sun itself will darken in grief and condemnation; they will roll huge heavy stones to try to keep it down, and the very earth will shake them loose. No matter what the worst of humanity’s instincts try to do, God’s unstoppable power will continue to rise up.

Eternity, breaking through into Time. Scribbling its notes in the margins. Rewriting paragraphs. Suggesting a transition here, perhaps some stronger character development there. Showing us how to believe that there is potential in this questionable manuscript that we’re all writing as we go. How to believe that God’s power still breathes through all of it, still shakes the foundations. That despite all of “all of this,” God lives. He is Risen. Come and see!

[i] Kate Bowler, https://katebowler.substack.com/p/3-ways-to-keep-moving-forward-right?publication_id=5305716&post_id=191283270&isFreemail=true&r=60h1ey&triedRedirect=true