🕊️The Great Reversal: Living in God's Easter Hope

Floating in God's Presence: An Easter Meditation on Divine Love

An Easter sermon for Sunday, April 20, 2025

Growing up in Louisiana, I had a memorable experience at my grandparents' camp on False River. Now, if you've never seen these Louisiana waters, picture something black-green and completely opaque. Though I'd been swimming before at the YMCA with my family, this was different. I'd heard stories about alligator gars, had seen eels and snakes, and the sounds of bullfrogs and crickets at night from my bed in their unfamiliar house had already put me on edge.

When my grandfather tossed me into that mysterious water, I thrashed around in panic. I couldn't see what was below me and was absolutely convinced I was about to become breakfast for whatever lurked beneath.

"Stop fighting the water!" my father called out. "Be still and calm. Be a part of it!"

It was the most counterintuitive thing I'd ever heard. Stop fighting? Be one with the very thing I feared would swallow me? But in my desperation, I tried it. I stopped the frantic splashing, laid back, and...floated. I discovered I could rest in a kind of participatory freedom, existing as part of the created order designed to be with—not against—the world surrounding me. The very thing I feared was actually supporting me.

I've been thinking about that moment a lot this Holy Week. Because the Easter story is, at its heart, about the most significant reversal in human history—a reversal as counterintuitive as discovering that what seems to be drowning you is actually holding you up.

For three days, it seemed like death had won. The disciples were hiding behind locked doors, the women were preparing spices for a body, and the great teacher they'd followed was sealed in a tomb. Everything pointed to defeat.

And then, the great reversal. The stone rolled away. The tomb empty. Death itself undone.

But this wasn't just any reversal. It wasn't just a surprise ending to a sad story. Easter reveals the true pattern of God's presence in our world—what looks like absence is actually presence; what looks like defeat is actually victory; what looks like death is actually the birth of new life.

This is why we've been reflecting on incarnational theology and participatory freedom this week. Easter shows us that God's very nature is to be with us. The incarnation isn't a rescue mission or a divine intervention to fix something broken—it's the revelation of who God has always been and will always be. As theologian Sam Wells reminds us, God's purpose and means are the same: being with us. Or as Karl Barth beautifully expressed it, we witness in Christ the revelation of God's divine self-establishment—God's decision "never-to-be-except-to-be-with-us."

When Jesus rises from the dead, he doesn't discard his humanity like it was a disguise he no longer needs. He keeps his wounds. "Put your finger here," he tells Thomas. These wounds that should represent failure and defeat have become the very proof of love's victory—the evidence of God's determination never to abandon us, even in our suffering.

In our theological language, we might say that Easter reveals the true nature of freedom as interindependence. We aren't freed from one another, but freed for one another. We aren't autonomous individuals achieving salvation alone, but participants in a divine life that connects us all.

Let me try to make this concrete. Imagine three different ways of thinking about freedom:

First, there's what we might call "imperial freedom"—the freedom of domination. This is the freedom to do whatever you want regardless of consequences for others. It's the freedom of Caesar, of empire, of power over others. This kind of freedom always comes at someone else's expense.

Then there's what we might call "liberal freedom"—the freedom from constraint. This is the freedom to be left alone, to not be interfered with. It's valuable but ultimately empty if that's all freedom means. A person alone on a desert island has perfect freedom from constraint, but what good is it?

Easter reveals a third kind of freedom—what we've been calling "participatory freedom" or "interindependence." This is the freedom to love, to be with, to participate in one another's lives. It's not freedom from others or freedom over others, but freedom with others.

When Jesus rises from the dead, he immediately seeks out his friends. "Mary," he says in the garden. "Peace be with you," he says behind locked doors. He eats with them, walks with them, and restores relationships with them. His resurrection freedom is expressed as presence, as being with.

This is what we mean by participatory freedom as interindependence. We depend on each other, but not in a way that diminishes us. Rather, we become more ourselves by being present to one another. As we've been discussing in our theological reflections, we receive the gift by being the gift, and we are the gift by receiving it. This mutual giving and receiving reflects the very life of the Trinity—the eternal dance of divine relationship that is God's nature.

The women who went to the tomb that first Easter morning weren't going there seeking resurrection. They were going to perform one last act of loving presence—to anoint a body. But in that faithful act of being with, even in death, they became the first witnesses to new life.

This is the pattern of God's presence with us. When imperial power said, "We rule through domination," God answered by being born in a feeding trough. When religious authorities said, "We determine who belongs," Jesus ate with sinners and outcasts. When the powers of death said, "We have the final word," God spoke a new word of life from within the grave itself.

This Easter, we're invited to live in this great reversal—to stop fighting the water, so to speak, and discover that what we thought would drown us is actually holding us up. We are invited to trust that even in our darkest moments, God is present—not observing from a distance but being with us, transforming our reality from within.

Easter isn't simply an event that happened 2,000 years ago. It's God's "yes" that resounds across time—God's affirmation of our true identity as creatures made to be with God and with one another. Sin and death aren't eradicated from the world, but God's will to be with us conquers our enmeshment in them, recreating us so that all things are made new.

I experienced this kind of reversal during a difficult period in my own life. On Election Day 2024, within moments of learning the presidential results, I received the devastating news of my own: a diagnosis of amyloidosis, a rare disease with a name as difficult to pronounce as it was to understand its mechanisms.

My wife and I lived in fear, beginning to anticipate that our life together would be shortened. I, always one whose robust health was celebrated by my physician, suddenly contemplated a crushing death within the short term. One night, I remember my wife Sajeena weeping. Still, she never failed to be with me through it all—accompanying me to the endless wave of appointments in which my body was probed and tested in an effort to assess the disease's progress and prognosis.

After a few months of trauma, we learned I have a rare form of a rare disease that renders it much more manageable, with a long life possible with certain changes in my nutrition and attention to important longevity practices. But in that period of vulnerability, I discovered something I couldn't have learned any other way. The community that formed around me wasn't diminishing my freedom—it was expanding it. By accepting help, by acknowledging my dependence on others, I didn't become less myself. I became more fully human, more connected, more alive to the gift of each day.

This is participatory freedom. This is interindependence. This is the pattern of the resurrection life. Like justification, it's renewed each morning—indeed, in each moment—as we accept God's invitation to be who we were created to be.

The Easter story invites us to live in the great reversal, to find strength in vulnerability, to discover life in letting go, and to experience freedom not as the absence of connections but as the fullness of loving presence.

When Jesus appears to his disciples after the resurrection, he breathes on them and says, "Receive the Holy Spirit." This breath, this Spirit, is the very life of God flowing through the human community. It's not something we possess individually but something we participate in together.

As we celebrate Easter in this community today, we're practicing participatory freedom. We're showing up for each other, breaking bread together, and being with one another in joy and sorrow. We're living in the great reversal, where our interconnectedness isn't a limitation on our freedom but the very expression of it.

This is what it means to live in God's Easter hope. Not that all our problems will magically disappear. Not that suffering won't touch us. But that even in our darkest moments, God is with us. And that through God's presence, what seems like drowning can become floating, what seems like an ending can become a beginning, and what seems like death can become life.

Easter invites us to recognize that God's will to be with us isn't about fixing what's broken in the world but about revealing and sustaining who God has always been—the one who refuses to abandon us despite our enmeshment in structures that embody our decision not to be with God, with each other, and not to steward the superabundance with which God sustains us.

Christ is risen—indeed. In his rising, we discover our own resurrection—not as isolated individuals but as members of one body, breathing the same Spirit, participating in the same divine life that flows through us all.

So today, I invite you to float in the waters of baptism. To trust that what seems most threatening—our vulnerability, our interdependence, our need for one another—is actually what holds us up. To live in the freedom that comes not from dominating others or separating from them but from being with them in love.

Accepting God's "yes" - choosing to be who God called us to be—this is Easter's ongoing invitation. This is the greatreversal. This is resurrection. This is joy.

Amen.

This Easter reflection is part of our ongoing theological exploration of participatory freedom. If you've found it meaningful, please share it with others who might benefit from this perspective on resurrection hope.