Sermon For Resurrection Sunday

The Morning That Changed Everything

Brothers and sisters, we come this morning to the oldest announcement in the Christian faith. Not the most complicated. Not the most philosophically refined. The oldest. And it is this: the tomb is empty.

Luke tells the story with a kind of quiet precision that makes it all the more startling. The women arrive at the tomb before dawn on the first day of the week. They are carrying spices, which means they are carrying grief. They have come to do what the living do for the dead: tend the body, honor the loss, close the chapter. They are not coming with expectation. They are coming with sorrow.

And then everything stops.

The stone is rolled away. They step inside. The body of the Lord Jesus is not there. Luke says simply that they were perplexed. That is a gentle word for what must have been a profound disorientation. They had watched him die. They had seen where he was laid. They knew where they were going. And now the one fixed point of their grief had vanished.

Two figures appear beside them in dazzling apparel, and the question they ask is the question that echoes across every Resurrection Sunday that has ever been observed: "Why do you look for the living among the dead?"

It is worth pausing there. Because that question is not a rebuke. It is an invitation. It is as if the messengers are saying: you have come to the right place, but you are looking for the wrong thing. You are looking for a corpse, and there is no corpse here. You are looking for an ending, and what you have found is a beginning.

"He Is Not Here, But He Has Risen."

The women run. They tell the eleven and all the rest. And Luke records something that is, in its own way, as important as the empty tomb itself. He says the words seemed like nonsense to the disciples, and they did not believe the women. Peter gets up and runs to the tomb anyway. He stoops down, sees the linen cloths lying there, and goes home amazed, wondering what had happened.

Amazed. Wondering. Not yet certain. Not yet transformed. Just standing in the presence of something he cannot yet name.

This is where many of us live, is it not? We have heard the announcement. We may have heard it many times. But we are still in that early morning place, stooped at the entrance of something we cannot fully comprehend, wondering what it means, wondering whether it is true, wondering what we are supposed to do with it.

The resurrection is not a doctrine we master. It is a reality that masters us.

Now the apostle Paul, writing decades after that morning, has had time to think through what the empty tomb means. And what he gives us in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians is not a poem about springtime or a meditation on hope in the abstract. It is a sustained argument about death and what has happened to it.

Paul has spent the whole chapter establishing the fact of the resurrection. He has named the witnesses. He has traced the logic. And then he arrives at the end of the chapter, and the argument gives way to something that sounds almost like a shout. "Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, death, is your victory? Where, death, is your sting?"

He is quoting the prophets. He is reaching back into the deep wells of Israel's scripture. And he is saying: this is what those words meant. This is the moment they were pointing toward. The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law, but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

That is the central claim of this morning, and it is the central claim of every sermon for Resurrection Sunday that has ever been preached faithfully: Christ is risen, death is defeated, and the life we live in response to that fact is not wasted.

But I want to stay with Paul's argument for a moment, because he does not stop with the declaration. He moves immediately to the question of what it means to live in light of it. And this is where the passage becomes not just theology but pastoral care.

He says: "Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord's work, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain."

That word "therefore" is doing a great deal of work. Paul is not simply offering a motivational conclusion. He is drawing a direct line from the empty tomb to the way we spend our days. Because Christ is risen, your labor is not in vain. Because death has been defeated, the work you do in faithfulness to God has a permanence that death cannot touch.

This matters enormously, because one of the quiet temptations of human life is the suspicion that nothing we do finally matters. We work hard and the work is undone. We love faithfully and the loved one is taken. We build something and it crumbles. We pray and the silence stretches on. And underneath all of it, there is the ancient fear that the grave has the last word, that the ending is always an ending, that nothing endures.

The resurrection answers that fear directly. Not by promising that nothing will be lost in this life. Not by guaranteeing that every effort will be rewarded in ways we can see and measure. But by establishing, once and for all, that the God who raised Jesus from the dead is the God who holds all things, and that what is done in faithfulness to him is held in hands that death cannot open.

Your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

Think about what that means for the person who has been praying for a prodigal child for twenty years and has not yet seen the return. Your prayer is not wasted. Think about what it means for the one who has served quietly in this community, in ways no one has noticed or applauded. Your service is not forgotten. Think about what it means for the person sitting here this morning who is not sure they believe any of this, who came perhaps because someone invited them, or because it is Easter and it seemed right to come. The invitation that brought you here is not a small thing. It is connected to the same story that began at an empty tomb.

The women came with spices and left with news. That is the shape of Resurrection Sunday. You arrive carrying whatever you are carrying, and the question that meets you is the same one that met them: why are you looking for the living among the dead?

Where are you looking for life? In the places that cannot give it? In the certainties that have already crumbled? In the versions of yourself or your world that are already passing away? The resurrection does not offer us a better version of the old life. It offers us a new kind of life altogether, one that has passed through death and come out the other side.

Paul says that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. The perishable cannot inherit the imperishable. He is not being grim. He is being honest about the nature of what God has done. The resurrection of Jesus is not the resuscitation of a corpse. It is the first appearance of a new order of existence, one that the whole creation is moving toward, one that we are invited to share.

And we share it now, not only at the end. We share it through faith, through the waters of baptism, through the bread and the cup we will receive at this Table. Every time we gather as the Body of Christ, we are rehearsing the truth of Easter morning. We are saying, with our bodies and our presence, that the tomb is still empty, that the Lord is still risen, that death has not had the last word and never will.

The disciples who heard the women's report thought it sounded like nonsense. Peter ran to see for himself. And what he found was not proof, not a vision, not a voice. He found an empty tomb and linen cloths lying there. He went home amazed.

That amazement is the beginning of faith, not its conclusion. The resurrection does not remove the need for trust. It gives trust something solid to stand on. The evidence is not the kind that compels belief without remainder. It is the kind that invites us to step forward, to stake our lives on the claim, to live as though the announcement is true because it is.

Be steadfast. Be immovable. Keep excelling in the Lord's work. Not because you can see the full outcome. Not because the path is clear or the circumstances are favorable. But because you know, on the authority of an empty tomb and a risen Lord, that your labor is not in vain.

This is the word the Church has carried across twenty centuries of history, through every kind of darkness and confusion and grief. Not a philosophy. Not a program. A proclamation. He is not here. He has risen.

And because he has risen, we are sent. Sent from this place of worship into the ordinary days of our lives, carrying not spices for a burial but news for a world that is still stooped at the entrance of the tomb, still wondering, still amazed, still waiting to hear the question that changes everything.

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

He is risen. He is risen indeed.

Go and live as people who believe it.

Sources Consulted

The Holy Bible, Christian Standard Bible. Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2017. Luke 24:1-12; 1 Corinthians 15:50-58.

The Book of Common Prayer. New York: Church Publishing, 1979. The Easter Vigil and the Great Vigil of Easter liturgies, pp. 285-295.

N. T. Wright. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

Richard Hooker. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Book V. Edited by W. Speed Hill. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977.

Gordon D. Fee. The First Epistle to the Corinthians. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987.

Joel B. Green. The Gospel of Luke. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.