Easter Sunday – The Resurrection of Our Lord
Texts: John 20:1-18;
Jer 31:1-6; Col 3:1-4
YouTube: https://youtu.be/f8zBQbpAsQo
Excerpt Page
GOD’S HOMECOMING IN JESUS:
‘RESURRECTING’ THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN FAMILY
I’ve shared with you my favorite Easter story two years ago. I’d like to share a briefer version of it with you this morning as an entree into how to faithfully tell the story of the Bible as a whole.
My favorite Easter story revolves around Philip, an eight year-old boy with Down Syndrome. He enjoyed his church’s Sunday School class, even though the other kids didn’t seem to feel comfortable around him because of his differences. They didn’t fully accept him, it seemed. One Easter season, on a beautiful Spring morning, their teacher handed them each a hollow plastic egg, the kind that opens up with a twist. She instructed them each to go about the church yard and bring back something in their egg that represented new life. It was a glorious exercise as they all went out and returned with surprises in their eggs. As each egg was twisted open, it revealed things like flowers, blades of newly green grass, and even a tiny butterfly that fluttered away. Then came an egg that was empty. One of the children remarked, “Someone didn’t do it right.” Philip’s tiny voice spoke up, “I did do it right. It’s empty. The tomb is empty. Jesus is risen.” From that day forward, Philip was fully accepted by his classmates. They all felt a special bond. So, when Philip died a couple years later from complications of a heart defect, at his funeral each of his classmates came up to the altar: they twisted open and placed an empty plastic egg there. The tomb is empty. He is risen.
This story certainly represents the promise of new life, for God in Jesus Christ has defeated death. There is resurrection life promised to each of us here, not only something to celebrate here this morning but also when we face death ourselves, or the death of our closest loved ones. The promise of resurrection life is one of the treasures of our faith, one which we most certainly celebrate today.
But this story of Philip also represents what I consider perhaps an even greater gift of Easter: namely, God’s power of life in Jesus Christ coming into this world to renew all life together, beginning with unifying the human family for our given purpose to care for all life. Philip’s story is also about the overcoming of felt differences such that renewed community becomes possible. Whereas Philip had been on the fringes of acceptance amongst his fellow classmates, their joint Easter experience around an empty plastic egg ushered Philip fully into their faith-family-experience. They had truly become Beloved Community together, part of God’s human family.
Siblings in Christ, in this age of rising authoritarian rule across the globe, featuring seemingly intractable divisions within the human family, I want to emphasize this morning this element of Philip’s Easter story — the part that involves renewal of our human experience of being family, of being “siblings” in Christ. Renewal of the unity of the human family is what I believe is mostly timely for this age of war and division in which we find ourselves now. Moreover, the community/family aspect of Philip’s story also brings one of those the topics from 30,000 feet — namely, how we can faithfully tell the biblical story as a whole — and why the way in which we tell that story can make a huge difference for our broken world.
Last week, we traveled to visit our son in Washington D.C., which included travel time sitting in airports and on airplanes. I brought my headphones with me and started to listen to two brand new books. And these two new books — even though I’ve yet to complete either one of them (perhaps, then, a slightly dangerous thing to speak on them) — these two books have come together in a way that resonates with my personal faith journey on how to best understand the Bible’s story to guide me through my walk of faith in life.
The first of these two books is literally about just that: how to more faithfully read the Bible’s story. Written by renowned and prolific biblical scholar N. T. Wright, who is also a bishop in the Church of England and a huge influence in my faith journey, this first new book is called God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal.1 I’ve included the first several paragraphs of the book in your Excerpt Page this morning, where he makes crystal clear why he thinks the popular version of Christianity is all wrong. The Bible’s story is not about ‘going to heaven when you die.’ It’s about God fully coming home to earth in a way that finally renews all life on earth. It’s what we pray for when we pray the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” It’s most certainly what the Old Testament is about. If we read the New Testament accordingly — as written by jews, whose scriptures were the Old Testament — then we see it proclaims Jesus as the beginning of God’s homecoming through the resurrection on Easter. God is coming home to renew earth through Jesus and the Holy Spirit. God didn’t send Jesus to save us from this world and take us elsewhere — “to heaven.” God sent Jesus to save this world itself, which God lovingly created in the first place.
Wright doesn’t mince words here. He says, ‘This is what most believers believe today. It’s what unbelievers unbelieve.’2 In other words, many of our friends and family who aren’t here today because they don’t believe this anymore. Or they believe it, but the mission attached to it doesn’t seem to matter very much, not enough to be here anymore. That’s why getting the story right, and understanding the mission attached to it, can be so important.
OK. Since God’s homecoming is not the familiar way we’ve heard the Bible’s story, we might immediately ask together: so why didn’t God finish the job on that first Easter? Why isn’t God already fully home with us? Why is raising Jesus from the grave only the launching of the world’s rescue mission and not its conclusion? Why did Jesus need to then send the Holy Spirit to continue the rescue mission while taking his place at God’s side in heaven? Why? Why? Why couldn’t God have finished the thing so that we would already be enjoying a fully alive creation? Answer: Because in love God must allow for human freedom. Love never forces itself. And God is love. So God allows for us, tragically, to say “No.” And we, in our sinfulness, have decidedly said no to being one human family. We find all manner of ways to remain divided from one another, and so God can not yet come home to a family that’s not yet a family. We’re broken, we’re divided.
And that, my friends, is the main purpose of God in Jesus launching a rescue mission of creation. For God to fully come home to God’s creation, Jesus had to address the sin of our being a seemingly hopelessly divided family. And so Jesus came amongst us on the fringes of one of our ‘greatest’ human empires, even letting himself become a victim of the kinds of death we wield against each other in our divisiveness. Like Philip, he was on the fringes of human community when God raised him from the tomb of our dividedness, bringing about a new and holy spirit of once again coming together as family.
Let’s use John’s Gospel as an example of reading the Bible’s story in terms of God’s homecoming. It begins at the beginning of all things. ‘In the beginning,’ writes John, ‘the Word was with God and created all things and all life through the Word of love.’ But John’s Gospel will especially tell the next phase of that story: the Word of God’s love became flesh and dwelt in our midst. God was beginning to come home. Yet right from the beginning that Word experienced rejection (11 verses in!), and so that Word-made-flesh was destined to become God’s lamb sacrificed to our sacrificial machinery, in order to take away that sin of the world — the Sin which keeps the human world divided. Jesus persisted through our rejection, trying to teach us to see God as our loving Father, while also performing works of that Father’s love as signs of healing — healing the things that are broken. But things become more clear, especially first to his closest disciples, when the Son begins to reveal God’s glorious love through our rejection of him on the cross. On the night before that event at the Last Supper, which we remembered together on Thursday, Jesus their Rabbi and Master washes his disciples feet. And then he makes a big deal of beginning to call them “friends.” ‘Yes, I’m your teacher and master, but you are my friends.’ He gives them a commandment to love each other as he loved them — as he is just about to show them by laying down his life for his friends.
Finally, on Easter morning, God’s power of life to raise him again makes Jesus once and for all . . . OUR BROTHER! As Mary recognizes her Rabbi, Jesus for the first time in John’s Gospel refers to his disciples as siblings. “Go and tell my brothers everything!” he tells Mary. And on that night, in a story we will read next week, Jesus blows on them the Holy Spirit and commissions them all to unify God’s family here on earth. He commissions them to forgive sins and to hold fast everyone in the Beloved Community. The work of unifying God’s family is of the utmost, so that he and God the Father can finally return fully home to the creation, bringing fullness of life.
That’s it! That’s the Bible’s story. God coming home to God’s family. But we are still in the middle of the part in which we are working with the Spirit to unify the human family before God can fully return. How are we doing? I would say we got sidetracked — big time! — by understanding the Bible’s story as ‘going to heaven when you die’ — especially when paired with the simply false story of God sending large segments of the human family to hell as eternal punishment. That, I’ve come to believe, is anti-Gospel, the opposite of the Bible’s story. God is not about eternally dividing the family of creation. God is about globally and gloriously restoring it, unifying it. Bringing it to complete harmony so that all life comes to fullness.
So we need to get back on track! We need to correct our understanding of the Bible’s story as God’s Homecoming by first understanding why our sin continues to block it, and how in Christ and in the Holy Spirit we can help to heal the divisiveness of our sin. Which is where the second book that I started to read comes in. It’s a gem for us to better understand how our divisiveness is working in our moment of history. I began to sketch out how Ibram Kendi’s book, Chain of Ideas,3 can help clarify our vision for the task in my Good Friday sermon. The Sermon Notes and Excerpt Page from that sermon are still available on the back table.
Let me end this morning with a few words of hope from Kendi’s Epilogue. Very briefly: The billionaire oligarchs, who are trying to take charge of our world in an authoritarian manner, are trying to convince us that the world is a zero-sum game, where a few people win and a whole lot of people lose. They try to convince us that we don’t want to be replaced as winners by those not worthy. “You will not replace us!” is their motto. But I believe Ibram Kendi is speaking God’s kind of language in assuring us that the world can be a positive-sum game, where there’s plenty enough for everyone so long as we share. And when we consider what we just gleaned from John’s Gospel, this positive-sum approach happens not when we look to be led by those at the very top, but when we see everyone from an “alongside” approach. Jesus as our Rabbi and Master washes our feet, calling us to mutual service. Jesus calls us “friends.” Jesus calls us brother and sister, “siblings.” Kendi ends his book with these words (on today’s Excerpt Page): “Either humanity will see themselves as one in all our differences or humanity will one day be done. I am hopeful humanity will choose to be one.”4 Amen, Brother! That is the Easter hope we claim today. Let us go forth celebrating it through the way we live our lives! As brothers and sisters to all of God’s children! To learn to live in love. Amen.
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, April 5, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/f8zBQbpAsQo
Excerpt Page
Notes
1. N. T. Wright, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal (HarperOne, 2025).
2. Wright, Homecoming, 3.
3. Ibram X. Kendi, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age (One World, 2026).
4. Kendi, Chain of Ideas, 510.
