Easter 2026

Happy Easter!

Readings: Isaiah 65:17-25 & John 20:1-22

Christ is risen! Alleluia! Today is the day we rejoice at the empty tomb, at the resurrection of Christ Jesus, at the proclamation of salvation! Today we shout with joy over the promises of a new heaven and a new earth! All things are reconciled to and made new in Christ! Alleluia! I can be joyful about this because joy comes from a deep place of knowing, but if I’m honest, I struggle to be happy. As I look around at the world today it doesn’t seem reconciled or new at all. In fact it seems pretty scary and chaotic and violent actually.

Where does that leave us? What is the Easter story to us here today, over 2,000 years removed from the empty tomb? I could stand up here and give you all the usual answers, tell you exactly the same thing you may have heard your entire life. I could proclaim: Christ has died! Christ has risen! Christ will come again! I could proclaim: Your sins have been washed clean by the blood of the lamb, sacrificed for you, which has opened up for you the way of salvation. And these are meaningful proclamations.. however they don’t necessarily provoke you to THINK about or DO much.. they might offer comfort, which has it’s place.. but perhaps we are in a moment of disorder that demands the discomfort of growth.

Easter gives us a plethora of material to dive deeper into God and expand our spiritual understanding. Easter begs the meaningful questions like.. who really was Jesus? Just how human or divine was he? Did Jesus HAVE to die? What is resurrection exactly? How and when will it happen for us regular, non-Jesus people? What is salvation? What did Jesus save us FROM.. or FOR? Are we ALL saved or is salvation just for a few? Is salvation individual or communal? Is salvation a one and done deal or do we have to continue to accept it.. or seek it? If Jesus saved us from sin… what exactly is sin anyway? Is sin one thing or a plethora of things? Are some sins worse than others? Are heaven and hell real places? What might they be like…. Do you see where I’m going with this?

I don’t have answers to all the questions, because I can’t talk to God directly like Moses or the disciples. But I do spend the majority of my time thinking about and investigating these things and I’d like to share with you some things I’ve found in the wrestling. Not to tell you what to believe, but to give you (if I’m lucky) something new to ponder. So let’s talk about salvation.

I would define salvation as ‘the act of being healed and made whole.’ In Christ’s death and resurrection, the whole world was reconciled to God; to be reconciled is to be reunited. Now traditionally, Church doctrine would say we were separated at the moment Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge after God told them not to. Whether this story is a based on hard fact or is a myth doesn’t matter to me, because either way it portrays humanity’s severed connection with the divine. Salvation then comes from our reconnection/reunification with our Creator, the well spring of life itself.

To be saved is to be reconciled with God, which has both been done thousands of years ago on the cross and is in the process of happening as we grow and learn and heal throughout the journey of our lifetime. Carl Jung, who was a psychologist who often intertwined religion into his work, concluded that we all have divinity within us. God created us in God’s image and we each are made up of the essence of God. Therefore, Jung believed that salvation is achieved when we choose to do our own inner work of healing and connecting to our divine nature within. Jung said that “salvation is the choice for wholeness and we can become whole only when we heal our inner divisions in creative cooperation with God. The key to salvation lies within us.”

At first, I didn’t agree with this because I felt it put too much power into OUR hands. Salvation comes from God, not from ourselves! But then I discovered the power of BOTH/AND. What if salvation is from God and it is also something we can participate in? I do think God saved the whole world from destruction and for love that day on the cross. However, I also know that the world has not yet been made whole, healed, or complete. The world, rather, is in the process of becoming whole, of being healed, of being made new. Part of the gift of salvation is the opportunity for us to participate in this work WITH God!

If we want to join God in the work of salvation for ourselves as individuals and for the whole world.. then we first have to do the work of healing ourselves. One of the theologians who has really become one of my greatest companions on this spiritual journey is Ilia Delio. I was struck by a statement she made in her most recent book, which seems more relevant today than ever, about our unwillingness to do the inner work of reconciling with our divine essence. She “lamented that our religious symbols and language of God fail to provoke the self’s discovery of the psyche; instead religion paralyzes the mind.” And “the frustrated religious ego becomes the warring ego, the wars within us become the wars among us.. what we cannot realize within ourselves is projected onto others, often the innocent of the earth.”

Rereading this struck a new nerve with me as I have watched our country once again drop bombs and wage war on the Middle East. I have listened to the Secretary of War declare this military action necessary in order to provoke the end times, the coming again of Christ. Now I try to be open to all people’s beliefs, however I always have to question beliefs that promote the forces of violence and death in the name of a God of love, peace, and LIFE. If salvation is reunification, reconciliation, healing, and wholeness then it cannot be achieved through death and it’s forces. That is exactly the point I believe Christ revealed to the world on the cross. He could have taken up arms. He could have waged war on the Roman empire, but he chose the path of love, mercy, forgiveness.. peace. I can never say I am right and someone else is wrong; I surrender again and again to the reality that we don’t know. However, the context clues of what God revealed to us in the life of Christ Jesus have led me to believe that we have been saved and we have been invited into the work of salvation: of healing brokenness and division.. of acts of mercy, justice, peace, and love.. until the world is once again whole.

Yes, I do believe part of this includes being saved from death and we have received the promise of eternal life with God. But I think this life matters too, not just the next one. I feel that God believes this life matters too or why would God bother to become human!? Ilia Delio also wrote that Jesus “shows us how to rise above sin, that is, to rise above incompleteness, resistance, and apathy THROUGH the power of love,” and “when one strives to live in the archetypes of love (peace, compassion, forgiveness, and nonviolence), Christ is alive and active in that person, even if one has never heard of Jesus or accepts the Gospel. Such a person is a co-creative agent of salvation.”

To be a Christian is to be a wholenessmaker. To anticipate the coming again of Christ is not to spark war, nor is it to sit passively like a bystander of this life; but is to actively participate in the work God is doing, the work of wholenessmaking… because the earth will experience the return of Christ when the earth has been loved into wholeness. This can only become reality when we realize our worth, see God in everything, and beat our weapons into plowshares – putting everything we have into instruments of LIFE rather than death. Only then will we collectively experience the new creation Jesus spoke of.

Salvation has come.

The kin-dom is at hand.

Christ is risen IN you and if you dare to do the inner work required to recognize the divine within you,

you will be a new creation, forming a new world.

When we pursue wholeness, we pursue God.

I cannot think of a better way to live.

Thanks be to God, our creator and savior, Lord of love, and well spring of life! Amen.

*Read "The Not-Yet God" by Ilia Delio and her other articles at the Center for Christogenesis