Singing Resurrection When the Earth is Being Crucified: An Easter Sermon

After asking the question, What does resurrection look like in our time of climate crisis throughout Lent this year, I answered it on Easter Sunday. Christ is Risen!

Happy Easter! Christ is Risen. Alleluia!

Throughout the season of Lent, I offered a weekly reflection series for paid subscribers exploring the question, “What does resurrection look like when it is the Earth that is being crucified?”¹ On Easter Sunday, I celebrated with a local congregation and offered an answer to this question. Unlocked for all subscribers, that sermon is below. Enjoy!

I will be celebrating Earth Sunday at Grace United Church in Burlington, Ontario, this Sunday, April 27! Please join me, in person or online.

Grace United Church is located at 2111 Walkers Line, Burlington, Ontario. The service begins at 10:00 am.

Can’t come in person? The service will be livestreamed here:

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Singing Resurrection When the Earth is Being Crucified

I preached this sermon on Easter Sunday for the community of the Alwyn Pastoral Charge in Kazabazua, Quebec.

Scripture Reading: John 20:1-19

Let us pray:

God of Life, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our minds and hearts lead us to deeper understanding of you and the love you call us to live. AMEN.

What does the resurrection look like when the Earth is being crucified? This is the haunting question asked by Stephen Blackmer, an Episcopal priest who, before he heard the call to ministry, was an environmental activist. How do we celebrate Easter, celebrate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, in a world that is burning, flooding, and going extinct? How do we say we believe in life after death when our actions are shutting down the life systems of the planet, killing life and the ability for life to flourish? How do we sing resurrection in the midst of the climate crisis?

The climate and ecological crisis is an existential crisis; it is literally threatening existence itself, now and especially in the future. And it is a crisis of meaning; we have never experienced a crisis of this magnitude, and it is entirely human-caused. It is causing eco-anxiety around the world, and making us question so much of what we knew and believed.

Given that for us as Christians the resurrection of Jesus is the existential event that changed everything, it is important for us to consider, this Easter Sunday, what the resurrection means today, in light of the climate crisis. How can we celebrate the power of life over death, when our ways of life – the energy we use, the consumption levels we’re used to, and the vast inequity among people as a result – are so death-dealing? How can we sing “Jesus Christ is risen today!” when the Earth itself is dying?

In my weekly newsletter, Faith. Climate Crisis. Action, I explored some of these questions in reflections I wrote for the season of Lent this year. Each Friday, I explored the Gospel lesson for that coming Sunday in Lent, to hear what our scriptures can teach us in our time of climate emergency.

In doing so, I discovered a few things. First, I discovered that while we are regularly being tempted to keep living the way we always have, to ignore the increasing storms, wildfires, and floods, we are supported by God and by the natural world itself, to resist such temptation. We can make the changes we need to make, and call on government and industry to make the changes, with the support of God and the natural world, the Earth community that we are a part of.

Second, I learned that if we are going to truly face the climate crisis and work for meaningful change, we need to lament. We need to lament what we have done, lament the pain the Earth and its people are in, and lament that there is so much that has been permanently lost. We need to realize that God is lamenting, too. And so we are invited to lament, to rise our cries and tears up to God.

Third, I discovered that, like the prodigal son, we are lost. We have lost our way in the world, so divorced from the natural world around us, and lost in our ways of living that are destructive. Yet, we can find our way back; God is inviting us back to new ways of living and relating with one another and with the Earth community. God is waiting to welcome us with open arms, unconditionally and with the full force of God’s love for us!

Fourth, we are invited by God to a ‘reckless abundance’ of climate action. Reading the story where Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with a whole year’s worth of expensive perfume, we learn that we are being invited to show an abundance of love like Mary did. We are invited to take radical climate action as a way to show a reckless abundance of love for God, God’s creation and God’s people.

I didn’t get a chance to finish my reflection for Palm Sunday, but as Jesus rides into Jerusalem to his death, he tells the authorities that even if the people hadn’t welcomed him with shouts of “Hosanna, save me!” the stone would have cried out. I’m reminded, when I hear that, that the stones today are crying out. The whole of the natural world is crying out, “Hosanna! Hosanna! Save us, O God!” Save us from the death that is coming. Save us from the increasing heat and storms, the droughts and hunger, the flooding and melting of the ice.

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And now that brings us to today. It brings us past the agony of Good Friday, when Jesus uttered “It is finished” and died. It brings us past the emptiness of Holy Saturday, when all is bleak and uncertain. It brings us to this moment, this moment when Mary Magdalene discovers that Jesus is alive again, and is called to go out and proclaim, “I have seen the Lord!”

“I have seen the Lord!” Mary cries with joy! Christ is risen! Hallelujah!

And so I ask again, what does resurrection look like when the Earth is being crucified? What does it mean to sing resurrection while the climate crisis rages on?

Well, it means much the same, in some ways, as it did for Mary, Peter, and the Beloved Disciple. It means recognizing that while oppression and violence continue in the world, Jesus has heralded a new realm. Jesus has shown us that the kin-dom of God has begun. Jesus has shown us that the kin-dom of God is here already, but not yet in its fullness. Jesus has shown us that love wins out over hate and fear. Jesus has shown us that death doesn’t have the last word. Jesus has shown us that, in our very bodiliness, whatever that is meant to look like, we will be returned to life in fullness with God once again.

It means much the same for us today, as it did for Mary and Peter and all of the disciples. It means coming together in community, to resist temptation, to lament for what is hurt and suffering, to find our way back when we are lost, to show reckless and abundant love for one another and the world, and to continue to sing “Hosanna! Save us!” to God.

Singing resurrection while the Earth is being crucified means something more, too. We are in a time of existential crisis that we’ve never faced before. As Christians, as people who follow God known through Jesus Christ, this means that resurrection right now calls for something more.

Returning to the Gospel story, we read that the Beloved Disciple, upon seeing the empty tomb, “saw and believed,” but it was only a partial belief. He didn’t yet understand that Jesus had to rise from the dead. And Mary’s faith was also only partial, even after Jesus called her name in the garden and she realized that he was alive again.

Faith is only partial if it is just a matter of believing. Jesus said to Mary, “Do not hold onto me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and sisters and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Jesus was telling Mary to go out and proclaim what she had seen, and she did. She went out and said, “I have seen the Lord!” And I would be remiss if I didn’t remind us all that Jesus first showed himself to a woman, and it was a woman who was the first preacher.

Faith is only partial if it is just a matter of believing. Mary was told to go out and proclaim the risen Christ. Further, as we know from the whole of Jesus’ ministry, to proclaim the risen Christ means to act in the world, to live a life of discipleship, to show in our actions that this is true. The resurrection is shown in our actions; in the ways in which we live out the call to discipleship in our lives. To proclaim the risen Christ means to act so that love wins out over hate and fear; to act so that death isn’t the final word; to act so that life wins out over death. This is what it means to participate in the kin-dom of God, to be part of the ‘already’ of God’s reign.

So to finally answer the question, what does the resurrection look like when the Earth is being crucified, is to respond this way: It looks like climate action. It looks like the reckless abundance of radical climate action, here and everywhere. The resurrection looks like making uncomfortable and sacrificial reductions in how much we consume – what food we eat, how we get around, how we heat our homes, clothe our bodies, and more. The resurrection looks like reaching out in community, within our church communities, but also in our local communities, to work together to mitigate against further global heating, and adapt as a collective to the consequences that are here and coming. The resurrection looks like taking radical political action – holding our elected leaders to account, taking to the courts to sue banking institutions that are funding fossil fuel expansion, and even engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience, like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. did, when nothing else is working.

The resurrection, when the Earth is still being crucified, looks like a discipleship of radical climate action. That is when we can sing Christ is risen! Christ is risen, indeed. Hallelujah!

This Easter Sunday, we are called to go out and proclaim, “I have seen the Lord!” like Mary Magdalene did. This Easter Sunday, we are called to go out and proclaim the resurrection. This Easter Sunday, we are called, every single one of us, to go out and take climate action. This is how we sing resurrection in our time of climate and ecological crisis.

Christ is risen! Christ is risen, indeed. Hallelujah!

1. Episcopal priest Stephen Blackmer asks this question in “Being Church as If Earth Matters: A Response to Journey of the Universe from One Episcopalian’s Perspective,” in Living Cosmology: Christian Responses to Journey of the Universe, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2016), p. 140.