Between Grief and Hope
Luke 24:1-12
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
April 20, 2025
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysq27HceUHw
The night before my mother died, my father, my brother and I were in her room, keeping vigil. It was during the Covid lockdown. She had been moved from the hospital to a nursing home for her last week of life, for what they called Compassionate Care. Something had changed in my mom’s breathing or her vital signs and the staff had alerted us that the end might come soon. So our nuclear family – Mom, Dad and two kids— were together, sleeping in the same place for the first time in decades. In fact, during that night, at some point it struck me that the last time we had all slept in the same room was probably in our pop-up camper on family vacations when I was a teenager.
But on this night, we didn’t sleep much. My father was in a recliner next to my mother’s bedside where he could hold her hand. It had been a hard few days for him and I knew that he was physically tired and emotionally weary. But he seemed the least ready to sleep of any of us. As the night wore on, he told stories. Stories of the 63 years of his life with my mother, including some from before my brother or I were born. Stories we had heard countless times and some brand new ones. Then he moved on to stories from his earlier life, before he met my Mom. More and more memories. They just tumbled out. One story led to another. I kept thinking that he should really get some sleep, that we all should, but the need to share the stories outweighed that for a long time.
Because that’s what we do when we grieve, we remember. You and I have shared many funerals, celebrations of life. At those times, our primary tasks are to remember our loved one and to remember our faith. We gather photos, trying to capture a life span in images. The photos trigger stories, the stories trigger other memories. We remember what our loved one used to say, the way they laughed or made an entrance, habits that were endearing or annoying, their favorite things and pet peeves. We remember their accomplishments and special trips and weekly routines. We remember and we grieve for what we have lost in that death.
The women from Galilee are deep in grief at dawn that day. They are women of means who have been financially supporting Jesus since early in his ministry. They have undoubtedly been telling stories. As they gather water and soft cloths to wash his body, as they grind and mix the burial spices, as they reach out to clasp and arm or exchange a hug, they are remembering. Perhaps Mary Magdalene recalls that day when Jesus healed her, the profound difference he made in her life. Joanna, was the wife of Herod’s chief steward. Maybe she remembers Jesus’ own grief when Herod executed John the Baptist. Some memories make them laugh, like when Peter tried to walk on water, or that time Jesus spotted a grown man up in a tree or his joke about trying to put a camel through the eye of a needle. They laugh and they cry. They remind each other of all that was so good and true about Jesus and all that has been lost in his death.
They are still remembering, still deeply grieving as they make their way to the tomb. When they arrive and see that the heavy stone is rolled away, their first thought may be of grave robbers. The nails used on the cross were considered to have magical powers. [1] It may come as just one more gut punch on top of the pain they’re already carrying. Before they can process that, two beings appear, presumably angels. They say “What are you doing here? Why are you looking for the living among the dead? Don’t you remember what Jesus told you?”
They have been remembering. It is pretty much all they’ve done for the last two days. But, as Biblical scholar Sharon Ringe says, the memory of Jesus’ teaching about his death and resurrection “has not been available to the women to help them understand. . . The chaos and horror of the events have blotted out memory.”[2]
Friends, we are grieving. We are grieving the loss of ideals that we believed were bedrock in this country, grieving unfounded attacks on our allies, grieving the wanton destruction of our institutions, threats to agencies that support life at the basic level, like Social Security and Medicare and the right to due process, as well as support for deeper, richer meaning in life like the endowment for the arts and the wide swaths of the histories of black and brown people and women which are being whitewashed, deliberately expunged from official records. We grieve. We lament. We speak and shout in anger. That is right and good. But we must also remember who we are and whose we are. We cannot allow the chaos and horror of these days to blot that out.
I recently heard about a church that is in danger of forgetting its identity. This church is one of the most progressive churches I know. It is old enough that it was active in the abolitionist movement before the Civil War. In more recent decades, it offered sanctuary to undocumented immigrants and was one of the early leaders in advocating for the LGBTQ+ community.
But something happened a few years ago. The church installed a Black Lives Matter sign in a highly visible place on their front lawn. Some of the neighbors and passers-by objected. Threatening phone calls were made. The church Facebook page was targeted. The sign was vandalized and had to be replaced. Fear and anger swirled. After some time, the pastor gave in. They let the church’s active anti-racism ministry go dormant. They took down the sign and silenced their own voice on racial justice. In response, some church members left because they were so disheartened and let down by the pastor’s lack of courage. It made me sad to learn this story. It seems like the fear and chaos of those events blotted out the pastor’s memory of that church’s long history of courageous, risky, justice-seeking. The pastor lost courage and along with it, maybe they lost hope.
The women are grieving. They have forgotten what Jesus said -- that he would be killed and rise again. But when the angels remind them, it seems that they remember. And somewhere between remembering his words and seeing the empty tomb, they dare to hope that resurrection could be true.
On the strength of that hope, they go to tell the other disciples – that the tomb is empty. That the angels say Jesus is alive. But the disciples are having none of it. They think it is nonsense, that the women are in indulging in fantasy, ridiculous drivel. Except, maybe underneath their bluster, they also have a glimmer of hope. Just a tiny, persistent wish that it could be true. Something they don’t acknowledge in words.
I say that because Luke tells us that Peter slips back to the tomb on his own, just to see for himself. He sees the graveclothes and the empty tomb and he marvels.
What is the hope of the empty tomb? The hope is resurrection. The hope is that death is defeated. Death, in all its forms, is the enemy, the thing we fear, the thing we rage against. For Biblical people, death was anything that diminished life – sickness, injury, injustice, cruelty, war, oppression, evil. Death separates us from those we love. Death dulls our senses and steals our joy. But on Easter, Jesus overcame Death. In the resurrection, death is definitively defeated.
Rebecca Solnit is an activist and a writer. She advocates for human rights, women’s rights and the environment. After Hurricane Katrina, after 9/11, after the wars kicked off by 9/11, she wrote a book called Hope in the Dark. She says this “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch feeling lucky. [Hope] is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door. To hope is to give yourself to the future.”[3]
Hope is an emergency ax—I just love that. Hope propels the women from the tomb to telling the others. Hope persuades Peter to check out the tomb for himself. The hope of Resurrection sustained the early believers and sent them out across the known world to share this good news – Death is defeated. Love has won.
I know that Resurrection is a difficult concept. Hard for our rational minds to absorb. One of the most compelling arguments for belief in the resurrection is that its first witnesses went on to live so boldly that they died for their faith. They no longer thought it was an idle tale, but something so true that they shaped their lives around it. Something so true that we should shape our lives around it. Something so sturdily real that we can give ourselves to God’s future.
Professor Tom Wright declares: “If God’s world of justice and mercy and beauty has already been inaugurated, then those who believe in Jesus’ resurrection must be . . . people who do justice and mercy in the present, people who, together with [others] in the body of Christ, work for God’s healing love in creation; people who do beauty; people who celebrate art, because art and music . . . are ways in which we can pierce through the imagination, which gets stuck in the old creation, and can help people to imagine . . . that there might actually be a new creation in which the bullies and the wicked empires of the world are not in charge, and in which Jesus is in charge. .”[4]
Friends, some of us are grieving. Some of us are raging. Some of us are tempted to despair. But we do not grieve as those without hope. We have the hope of the Resurrection. We know that everything that relies on violence and cruelty and fear and pain, as real as it may seem, is already dying.
In this moment, this critical moment, we see the suffering, we hear the groaning of creation, and we know the world needs the truth of Resurrection as much as it ever did. Friends, we are Easter people and our calling is to proclaim loudly and boldly that death is not the end of the story. Our calling is to grab that emergency ax and wage peace against violence, to wage love against hate, to wage truth against fear, to wage hope against despair. Our calling is to follow Jesus all the way to Life because Jesus is in charge. Alleluia! Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed.
[1] Amy-Jill Levine, Ben Witherington III, The Gospel of Luke New Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 650.
[2] Sharon H. Ringe, Luke: The Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995), p. 285.
[3] Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, 3rd edition, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), p. 4
[4] N.T. Wright, Resurrection of the Son of God Preview, Published on Vimeo. May 17, 2017. vimeo.com/217829344