In freedom, the Spirit of Christ empowers us to live out lives of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control.

In the power of the Risen Christ, Resurrection liberates bodies and lives. Resurrection breaks everything free, and then invites us to take the next step into this new life of liberation.

Like, Paul and Lydia and Ananias and Tabitha and the women at the river outside the city gates, and the widows in Joppa, we welcome each other in to the life of Resurrection.  In Christ, we experience Resurrection in depth of belonging – in hospitality and tender mercy – embodied in community – embodied in us.

In our baptism, we are baptized into community – into a family of all God’s children. In Christ, we are baptized into life with each other.  

In this Sunday's sermon, we venture into the world of Revelation. Enlivened and empowered by Resurrection, we experience the Risen Christ in fierce resistance and in tender mercy.

In breakfast on the shore with the Risen Christ, the disciples experience Resurrection in their bodies. They experience not only Jesus’ Resurrection, but their own.  (This homily followed an enactment of the Scripture, from the play "Fish Eyes.")

In worship, we heard the case for Thomas, who history has wrongly judged for doubting. To Thomas’s questions, the Risen Christ responds with the gracious offer of himself and of life. The case for Thomas is the case for us. 

In Resurrection, Jesus draws us into expansive life, and gives us a future we can live from.

If the stones shout out, what will they shout?  Will they shout praise, and protest, and lament? In the fullness of Holy Week, what we experience is Christ filled to the fullness of our humanity, as we are filled to the fullness of Christ’s.