An Easter sermon preached at Putnam and Hebron Presbyterian Churches in NY in April 2026

Text: 1 Peter 1:3–9

Friends, here we are once again, celebrating the greatest season of the year. Easter! The resurrection of the Lord. In the Easter good news, we not only revel in God’s intention to save us from ourselves, to save us to God’s love, but we also bask in the confidence that God can accomplish our salvation. How do we know this? Because God raised Jesus from the dead.

This is the heart of the Gospel, that the whole world—including us—is subject to the powerful grace of God in Jesus Christ. That Gospel was accomplished at Easter, and it is what makes this the greatest season in the Christian year.

We can affirm the goodness and wonder in Easter, though, and still struggle to revel in it as much as we should. The joy and goodness of this season can be hard to sustain in our present moment, when so many of us are weighed down with anxiety over the world, our nation, our families, our friends, ourselves.

The economy brings us worry, as basic necessities get harder to afford, despite politicians trying to convince us otherwise. The hubris of technocrats threatens to overturn what it means to be human—with machines to drive our cars, do our thinking, and tell us right and wrong.

Illness haunts us, exacerbated by the struggle millions of Americans have securing health insurance, our nation having decided that health is a commodity we are comfortable letting corporations put a price tag on. The airports are a mess, the world thinks we’ve gone nuts, and many of our neighbors have learned to dislike each other because they don’t share each other’s politics.

With all that’s going on in the world, we might be excused if we struggle to appreciate the Easter good news. Where’s the good news in all that surrounds us? Well, in a word, nowhere, and that’s kind of the point of Easter. The good news of Easter isn’t to be found in economic prosperity, technological advances, or the brilliant minds governing us from Washington DC. The good news that saves us is to be found in God. The good news is in the truth declared to us in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ: that our economy and our politics and our health and our spiritual lives and our families and our local communities and our world are all caught up in the saving grace of God in Jesus Christ. Whether the signs of that grace are obvious to us or seem scarce, God’s grace is here—triumphantly here—working in all of us by the Spirit of the living Christ and moving us along an arc toward the kingdom of God.

That’s the good news infiltrating all of our crummy news. God is at work. The God who worked in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The God who flexed his cosmic muscles in Christ, and time assured us that God’s flex is for us. That power is for the ends of love. That power is directed at our protection and toward the “salvation of our souls.” If Easter means anything, it means what the PCUSA’s Brief Statement of Faith declares: that through the resurrected Christ, “in life and in death, we belong to God.”

What impact does the Easter good news have on us and in us? The First Letter of Peter says it is nothing less than “a new birth.” The story of the resurrected Christ is an invitation to be fundamentally changed by God’s promise to love us, to save us, and to never let us go. Trusting in that promise brings about a fundamental change of orientation. We are reborn into it. When we take it seriously, we see ourselves, our neighbors, our nation, and the world around us from a radically different perspective.

We see grace where others see nothing but cynicism and distrust. We see goodness bursting through when others point to hate and destruction. We see hope, because we know that even when things look like they are going to hell in a handbasket, God has promised that he loves us, and he has assured us that his love will triumph in the end. Jesus Christ is alive! God wins!

This new perspective that looks for the small clues of hope and goodness and love and light is the effect that resurrection faith ought to have on us. Look for the signs that God is working in the world, because you know he is; you know God’s work carries the imprint of love, and you know God is up to the challenge. You know all of this because God raised Christ from the dead. In that truth we are reborn! We see the world in a different way.

Faith is trust.

And what does this “new birth” look like? First, it is a new birth into faith. So often we Christians think about faith as believing certain things. But in the annals of Christianity, faith has usually been about something more fundamental than propositions to which we assent. Faith is trust. We trust in God’s expression of grace toward us and love for us in Jesus Christ. We trust even when we don’t understand—and none of us completely understands the ways of God.

The Easter Gospels make it clear that faith is trust without total understanding. The four Gospels don’t describe the resurrection of Christ the same way, and in fact sometimes they contradict one another. And I think that’s beautiful. The writers of the Gospels didn’t really understand what they were writing about. It was a mystery of God. The people in those resurrection stories are represented as not understanding what was happening. Mary didn’t recognize Jesus when he was standing right in front of her. Thomas could not understand the resurrection until Jesus physically confronted him. Faith requires trust, even when there’s a whole lot of ambiguity or uncertainty about the ways of God. Faith is trust in the message that God loves us, God will save us, and God has the power to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth.

So faith is a characteristic of Easter rebirth. So is joy. Peter’s first letter mentions joy over and over again. Easter people find joy in the assurance of God’s saving power. Rejoice, he says, for you now interpret the world through the lens of God’s powerful love. Rejoice, because no suffering or trial of the present life can dampen the positivity that comes from knowing that God has us and will never let us go.

The joy we are called to find in the Easter gospel is not naïve happiness or plucky optimism. It doesn’t require us to ignore the crappy things going on around us. Easter joy recognizes tragedy and evil for what they are, but it nonetheless persists in celebrating what lies beyond those trials and tribulations: God’s promise that we belong to him, in life and in death. Thus, joy becomes a fundamental character trait in people who have experienced Easter rebirth.

It’s a joy that we feel and that we share. And this brings us to another characteristic of Easter rebirth: love. We love the Lord who gave his life on our behalf. We love the God who raised Jesus from the dead and promised us new life and true life in him. We love the image of God in the people we encounter in this life. We love the ones whom Jesus loves. We love our neighbors as ourselves. We love the ones in whom Jesus saw himself, the least of these, as he put it—the poor, the vulnerable, the hungry and homeless, the incarcerated, the immigrant, the socially ostracized. We love them because Christ first loved us, and gave his life for us.

No one who claims to have been touched by the Easter good news can participate in or even tolerate the opposite of Easter love—hate, division, rejection. Those who stand with the resurrected Lord stand on the side of love.

And finally, Easter rebirth comes with a solid dose of hope—what 1 Peter calls the “living hope” into which we were given this new birth in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. If Easter means anything, it means that we are in God’s hands, and those reliable hands give us hope. If Easter means anything, it is a promise that the arc of the moral universe may be long but it bends toward justice, love, righteousness, and kinship, and its success is guaranteed in the one who raised Christ from the dead!

Therefore we have hope, a living hope that animates how we conduct ourselves in a world full of hopelessness. We do not give up hope, even if “for a little while [we] have to suffer various trials.” For we know that this world and everyone in it belongs to God, even when surrounded by evidence that suggests the contrary.

So in our present darkness, when cynicism reigns and despair is a constant temptation, when the voices of hate and disdain are louder than the voices of love, we maintain hope, we practice hope, we live hope. For we know that these days of lies and liars, of hate and division, of wars and rumors of more wars are not all there is to this world. God raised Jesus from the dead, and therefore “by his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope … and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.” We are “being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”

In this we hope, in this we rejoice, in this we love, in this we trust, “even if now for a little while [we] have had to suffer various trials.” For God raised Jesus from the dead. Love wins. God wins. That’s the Easter Gospel.

Friends, our world desperately needs people touched by the Easter good news. From our local communities to our nation to the world, we need people who stubbornly hold on to hope, faith, love, and joy in this present darkness. Easter is our rallying cry. May we so absorb the glory of this season that we respond to the risen Christ like Thomas did, “My Lord and my God!” And then may we may walk in that world out there with the signs that we have been changed—with faith and hope in God’s power to change hearts, to change our world; with love for those who love us and those who don’t; and with joy in our spirits, radiating from the good news we possess, that for us and the world, God raised Jesus from the dead.

This is Easter perspective. May we be reborn and transformed by our encounter with the risen Christ. Amen.