Rising Up in Joy
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
April 20, 2025
“Life happens, keeps happening…
One day, it happens; you take a breath, and it doesn’t hurt to breathe.
You start to see people again, really see them.
Hope rises. Community rises. You rise. We rise. Life rises.
… The dead don’t rise – but we do.” Kendyl Gibbons, The Humanist Speaks of Easter
In recent months we have watched as the forces of empire have strengthened their hold on this country. In the last few weeks we have watched as more and more people – international students, and people whose immigration status can be ambiguous – have been captured on the streets and brought to far away ‘detention centers’ where it is difficult for family and friends and attorneys to reach them. There are stories of visa being revoked and people being grabbed before they have been informed about their change in status.
No case has caught the public’s attention than that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man pulled over and quickly flown to El Salvador’s notorious prison, known as CECOT, without even being allowed to make a phone call. It was a mistake, but he has not been released.
It has become impossible to ignore the fact that our time-honored legal tradition that we call ‘being innocent until proven guilty’, or due process under the law, is more and more openly being flouted by the current administration.
This is an odd way to begin an Easter sermon. We usually explore together the meaning of resurrections – the many ways, large and small, that we experience life returning to us after hard and lifeless periods.
But this week, we have been forced to confront the part of the Easter story that is about empire, and oppression, and resistance. And as more news emerged about people being mistakenly captured while going about their business, their stories began to resonate more and more with the story of Jesus’s last week, before he was put to death by the most common means of torture and execution in the Roman Empire.
The parallels between the ancient story and the current events became obvious. People being wrongfully accused and taken into custody. People with no one to speak for them, advocate for them. Lies and slander, mocking and cruelty. People being caught up in a system designed to strip them of their rights, and their liberty, captured and held in cruel and dehumanizing ways designed to humiliate them and cause pain.
We have seen images of people stripped and crammed together into prisons, while the privileged mock them, accuse them of crimes for which there is no evidence, and pose for publicity photos standing in front of the cages in which they are held.
We think of Jesus, having to drag his own heavy cross to Golgotha, the site of the crucifixion. His clothing stripped from him, offered to the captors. Being given vinegar when thirst overtook him. I was reminded of the vinegar by the photo of Senator Chris Van Hollen and Kilmar Abrego Garcia with margarita glasses in front of them, placed there for a staged photo intended to prove how well Kilmar was being treated.
Human cruelty and the craving for power over others is still present, over 2000 years later. If only we could find ways to once and for all rise above that.
As this week leading up to Easter wore on, Kilmar was returned to prison, and Senator Van Hollen back to the United States. Both were disparaged, belittled. In the week leading to Easter, Jesus was betrayed to the authorities, even without the existence of hotlines that make it easy to report a neighbor. He was mocked, even on the cross. “If you are the Messiah, why don’t you save yourself?” And he died there on the cross, but three days later, his body disappeared from a sealed tomb.
What do we know? asked our author. And the answer: Life keeps happening. We do not know what will happen next.
We do not know what happens next, but we do know, from our own lives, and all the stories and beautiful words that surround us during times such as these, that life finds a way. Something will happen. Something always does. The story is never finished.
Trusting that, believing that, for us the question becomes, what is our response? How do we persevere in the face of cruelty and oppression?
It’s very hard to maintain our balance these days. Practically everything that we hold dear, or at least come to take for granted, is being dismantled. Rights are being trampled. Life-sustaining medical research is being abruptly ended. Our financial safety nets are threatened.
If there is a common thread in most of the actions taken since the inauguration on January 20, three months ago today, it is that those have been chosen to threaten both our way of life, and our life itself. Anything that can be considered life-giving, life-sustaining, comes under scrutiny, from weather prediction for dangerous storms, to medical research, to nutritional support for starving children overseas, to schools and libraries. We confront the fear of death in many forms.
But the story is not finished.
What will keep our national story alive is acts of resistance, all across the country, as we rise up against all of the life-threatening decisions being made that would deprive us of our opportunities to grow and flourish.
People ask, “What can we do – what can we accomplish?” And I would say, “A great deal.” For starters, when we gather together in protests, like yesterday at Good Harbor Beach, we are stating loudly and firmly that we know that the story is not finished. And that message: that ancient message that has been carried down through centuries ever since Jesus’s female disciples discovered the empty tomb, is as relevant and important today as it ever was. It’s a message of hope, first and foremost. Every time you put on your sneakers and make a sign, and go stand with your neighbors, you are helping to build hope.
And hope, in turn, helps to create joy. Thinking about hope and joy raises an interesting question; really, something of a ‘chicken and egg’ question. Do feelings of hope and joy lead us out into the streets, lead us to resist? Or is the opposite true – does acting, rising up, standing together with others all demanding to be heard, create the hope and joy we need to carry on?
Perhaps hope is the starting point. Perhaps our willingness to resist at all emerges out of an unshakable hope that here in the United States, we can make our voices heard. And perhaps those acts of resistance, from funny signs to marching, from dumping tea in the harbor to protesting the wealth of billionaires, will rouse in us feelings of joy – joy in the companionship, joy in the work itself, joy in the sense of agency that emerges. We don’t know what comes next, but we know we are going to be part of it.
Now, I always say that joy is not the same as happiness. Here in the US, we are trained to equate joy with fun, or consumption. That’s happiness, and it’s often fleeting. But true joy emerges from a sense of hope being restored, a sense of satisfaction and pride for having confronted the work necessary to keep the story alive.
Author Rebecca Solnit writes that “joy is an insurrectionary force against the dreariness and dullness and isolation of everyday life…”. (Solnit, Hope in the Dark)
Hope rises. Community rises. You rise. We rise. Life rises. Joy rises.
On this day each year, we are asked to engage with one of the greatest mysteries of history. There are those who will ask everyone to take the bodily resurrection of Jesus literally. The again, many others understand the story as a metaphor.
But no matter your belief, we tell the story every year because of its message of hope. The first Easter was not a joyful day. It was full of fear and confusion. But hidden in the mystery was a note of hope for people to grasp. Easter is a message of hope in transformation, and that life will keep unfolding. So often life doesn’t evolve in the way we wanted or expected. But something always comes next.
Our work, whether in resistance and protest, or simply rising to the challenges of our everyday lives, is to let hope hold us in its embrace. To keep asking ourselves, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” To live in faith that by responding to hope rising, we will gain the strength and the resilience to carry on, to let the story continue, until it brings us joy.
Hope rises. Life rises. Joy rises.
May your living of these challenging days be for joy.
Amen.
