Easter Sunday
5 April 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
LIVING OUR BAPTISM #8: PRACTICE RESURRECTION
Matthew 28.1-10. 1 Corinthians 15.20-28, 51-57
We have spent the Holy Season of Lent diving into the depths of God’s cleansing waters, learning what it means to Live our Baptism. Living in the waters of Baptism: We learn to see ourselves as God’s Beloved. With the help of God’s Holy Spirit our desire is to turn from our sin, from all we do that brings harm upon ourselves and others and creates estrangement with God. As God loves us with water the stain of our sin and shame and guilt and all the terrible things others have taught us to believe about ourselves – every stain is washed away in the healing, forgiving waters of God’s love. In Baptism, we vow to follow Jesus, name him Lord of our lives, and pledge our ultimate allegiance to the Kingdom of God. And as Jesus in his baptism experienced the call of God upon his life and the Holy Spirit anointing him for his life’s mission, so we in our baptism begin to discover God’s call upon our lives and are anointed by God’s Spirit for our vocation. We are baptized into Christ and into the Body of Christ as members of one another to continue the mission of Jesus in the world. We now belong to the family of God, never to be alone again, with more brothers and sisters than we could ever count, to love and care for one another. In Baptism, we identify with Christ in his death and resurrection. As we are immersed in the baptismal waters, the Bible says we are buried with Christ, we die to our old way of living. And as we rise from the baptismal waters, we are raised with Christ, raised to walk in newness of life.
One of my favorite ways of describing this walking in newness of life comes from farmer and writer Wendell Berry who at the end of one of his poems pens the phrase: “Practice resurrection.”1
Practice resurrection. Such a life-giving pair of words both encapsulates the meaning of our baptism and sends us forth on our mission as God’s people. To Practice Resurrection is a form of spiritual practice learning the ways we can experience new life. If the resurrection of Jesus means the defeat of death, we can embrace life in all of its fullness, we can learn to see resurrection happening all around us.
Dying and Rising is a lifelong journey of transformation. There are things we sometimes continue to do, like an old habit we need to break, which undermine our resurrection lives. So on this day of new life we say to such harmful things: “Watch me, with God’s help, turn away from you!” We begin to let go of the things that are killing us.
If in Baptism we die to our old self, our false self, our old patterns of death and destruction, we then rise from the waters of Baptism to walk in newness of life, in the ways of Resurrection. And it is the work of the Spirit in our lives to help us finally let go of our past and “Practice resurrection!” Where in your life do you need to Practice Resurrection?
Baptism is also a powerful symbol of our resurrection in the life to come. Our lives do not end in death. In dying we receive the Final Healing, the Universal Homecoming.
Near the end of his life Jesus spoke to his bewildered and grieving disciples and said to them and to us in our grief: Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Abba’s house are many rooms. (More rooms than we can ever know.) . . . I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself that where I am, there you may be also. (John 14:1-3). The Great Homecoming.
The disciples, that night in the Upper Room, could scarcely have believed what Jesus said was to come. It went beyond all they could imagine. But following his Friday death
came Sunday morning, the one we call Easter, when God raised Jesus from the dead. And all heaven started breaking loose!
First Corinthians 15 is Paul’s great sermon on the Resurrection. He begins by recounting all the resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ to his disciples, then to others in the days following Easter. He recounts his own encounter with the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus. And as he brings the sermon to a climax he says: Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. That is, his resurrection will be yours too, his resurrection is the sign of things to come! For as in Adam we all die, so in Christ we shall all be made alive.
In the Book of Acts it is called “the restoration, or reconciliation, of all things”, that time when, to use Paul’s words, “God will be all in all.” It is the resurrection of all God’s children into the Everlasting Arms.
Near the end of his Resurrection sermon Paul says, shouts, sings: Lo, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. (I heard of a church that put that verse above the door of the nursery: “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”) Then Paul says it again: For the trumpet will sound, and the dead shall be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed! Changed, transformed, in the light of God’s Eternal Love, the Light that purifies and heals.
John Donne the great 17th century poet and preacher at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, preached a sermon on the Resurrection and pronounced his own Resurrection hope: I shall rise from the dead . . . from the prosternation of death, (I’m not sure what “prosternation” is, but it sounds like something I want to rise from!) I shall rise from the dead . . . from the prosternation of death, and never miss this sun . . . for I shall see the Son of God and shine myself as that sun shines. I shall rise from the grave, and never miss this city . . . for I shall see the city of God, the new Jerusalem.2
Dying and Rising. Resurrection life. A New Birth. A New Creation. Do you believe it? Do I believe it? With most of me I do, and not just on Sundays! As for doubts you and I may share, doubts are not a disqualification. Paul said we all “see through a glass darkly.” But we have faith in a love that wins, a grace that saves.
Baptism is a sign of Rising, of Resurrection in this life and in the life to come. It is a belief that undergirds my living and is my gladdest hope. Even when grief places a veil before our eyes and keeps us from noticing the ways Jesus continues to appear in our lives with resurrection hope, sending our hearts into the wilderness, we can always as Jesus did return to our baptism and remember who we are and whose we are.
Ann Voskamp writes: “Maybe the only way Jesus could bear going into the barren wilderness for 40 days was because God had just bathed him in baptismal waters and marked Him with that name: BELOVED. In a loud world, you can only know the way through your wildernesses if your (true) name echoes within: Beloved . . . Maybe our greatest crises aren’t the wildernesses we find ourselves in – but that we don’t believe we are wildly loved in the midst of them? . . . Maybe the secret way out of every single wilderness – is to actually feel really, deeply, loved. . . We are marked by Love, for Love . . . and the One who came through the fire, names us Beloved, and we are His, and He is ours forever, and so with Him, we can do nothing less than rise.”3
In the ancient church, baptismal candidates would stand in the river at dawn on Easter morning. As a way of turning from the power of sin in their lives they would turn their face to the darkened west and renounce the powers of darkness. Then they would turn to the east
toward the dawning sun and declare, “Jesus Christ is Lord!” And in this practice,
all the meanings of baptism find their triumphant fulfilment: Resurrection. Eternal Life. Christ is Risen.
Easter happened, and it happens still. As we seek to daily live our Baptism we would do well to pray the words of the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins as he says of the Risen Christ: Let him easter in us.4
Yes! May Christ easter in us until the day of our final resurrection!
Christ is risen! Thanks be to God!
______________________________________
- Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” in The Selected
Poems of Wendell Berry, Counterpoint, 1998, 87-88
- John Donne, “Meditation 17,” Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Oxford University Press, 1987, 86. Rendered here in a modern English version.
- Ann Voskamp, “How To Feel Really Loved, Which Is The Way Through Every Wildernesses (& your Lent),” 19 February 2026 Email Blog)
- Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oxford University Press, 1970, 63