Easter Sunday 2026

Wednesday night, my husband and I were watching Survivor. At the end of every episode they have Tribal Council where one member of that episode’s losing tribe is voted off of the show. As that tribe enters tribal council, host Jeff Probst instructs them to take a torch and light it in the fire because, “This is part of the ritual of Tribal Council because, in this game, fire represents life. As long as you have fire, you are still in this game. When your fire’s gone, so are you.” As Jeff was giving his spiel, I turned to my husband and said, “the liturgy of Survivor”. He chuckled and I said, “I’m not joking” and he said, “oh, I know you’re not”.

While we most often think of liturgy as occurring in the church, so many other things in our lives have what are essentially liturgies. I read an article last month about the liturgy of Taylor Swift concerts. The word liturgy comes from the Greek leitourgia which roughly translates to “the work of the people”. While it is often written down - ours is as the liturgy of the word and of the table - a written liturgy that has no way to be physically enacted doesn’t make any sense. Liturgy does what it does by the doing. It is our beliefs embodied. Sometimes a written liturgy looks confusing and then when you get up and rehearse that liturgy all of a sudden it makes perfect sense.

Survivor has a huge emphasis on fire outside of Tribal Council. It is the one constant throughout the show. Most of the rules are not set in stone. They’ve had people surprise return after they’ve been voted out, this season the tribes had to earn their flint, they change the rules all the time. They just have to answer to themselves, as Jeff Probst and CBS (there’s no Book of Common Prayer here for guidance). You never get a lighter or accelerant to help with your fire; the best they’ll give you is that flint. So while the fire is symbolic of not getting voted out, it is also symbolic because it is so important. It is bringing something vitally important to the game out of the game to draw attention to its importance. Having that physical torch at Tribal Council makes it so much more meaningful than Jeff just giving a talk about fire every week. And to have it extinguished when you’re voted out makes it very clear that your time is over and done.

We extinguish a fire as part of our liturgy during Holy Week. On Maundy Thursday, when all of the reserve sacrament was consumed and the aumbry was empty, I blew out the presence candle; that is, the candle that shows that there is sacrament present. We believe that the sanctified bread and wine contain the real presence of Jesus Christ and the candle symbolizes that presence. And then we light a new light before we re-light the presence candle. We did so with the Paschal Candle this morning, where a new flame is lit at the Easter Vigil. As we processed that new flame into the church, we sang, “the light of Christ, thanks be to God”. We began the Vigil with scriptural accounts of God’s work throughout Salvation History. And then the Paschal Candle will be lit every time we worship together throughout the entire Easter Season, at funerals, and at baptisms where each newly baptized Christian is given a candle lit off of the Paschal Candle as a sign of the light of Christ that now shines in the baptized, as we did with Ela, who was baptized at the Vigil this morning.

Light plays an important role in the story of the first Easter. All four of the Gospel accounts place the story at dawn. Because Saturday was the Sabbath, the two Marys were waiting for first light so they could work again. How many women, exactly, were there changes based on which Gospel account you’re reading, but all four of the Gospel accounts name Mary Magdalene as being at Jesus’s tomb.  An angel who looked like lightning appeared proclaiming the presence of the Lord and the earth shook.

The word used for “earthquake”, “seismos”, refers to the sudden, often violent quaking of the earth through which God repeatedly announces His presence, judgment, deliverance, and the climax of history. The word is used fourteen times throughout the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation, linking the term to Christ’s atoning work, the advance of the gospel, and the consummation of the age. Jesus uses the word in Matthew as well as in Mark and Luke to describe the “birth pangs” of the age to come. 

Earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, there is a curious usage. In Chapter 8, Jesus got into a boat with his disciples. A windstorm arose on the sea, about which the disciples freak out, while Jesus sleeps through it until said panicking disciples wake him. Jesus rebuked the winds and the sea, just as he would do to demons, calming them. The word for the storm? “Seismos”. In this case Jesus is demonstrating his divine identity, bringing order to the chaos of the earth. This calming of the storm is 20 chapters earlier, a foreshadowing of God’s presence at the resurrection. 

The earth also shook just one chapter back at Jesus’ death. At his resurrection, the earth shook again. Creation responds to both the Redeemer’s humiliation and his victory. Throughout Scripture, earthquakes serve as divine megaphones to announce God’s holiness, validate Christ’s redemptive work, liberate God’s people, and herald the approaching Day of the Lord. They challenge the complacent, comfort the trusting, and direct all creation toward the unshakable reign of God through Jesus Christ.

The women in Matthew have a very different reaction to the resurrection than the women in Mark. In Mark, they ran away, terrified and said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. The end. But, we know that this is not totally accurate because, well, we’re here. They clearly said something to someone. But Matthew is a huge tonal contrast to Mark, because today we heard how they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy. They were afraid but they allowed  themselves to hope even though they haven’t yet seen Jesus. But they did see the angel who looked like astraype, “lightning”, which throughout Scripture serves as a sensory marker for the divine, something they would have known. The angel’s radiance affirms that the empty tomb is no earthly intrigue but a heaven-initiated act. Lightning’s brilliance verifies the triumph of life over death and commissions the women as credible heralds of the risen Christ.

Neither one of these nature words - seismos and astraypo - appear in Scripture to simply describe a meteorological phenomenon. It’s like in The Lion King when Mufasa appears to Simba in the sky, gives him a ghostly scolding, and Rafiki’s response to it all is, “The weather! Very peculiar.” Obviously it isn’t just weird weather. Rafiki knows that. In the same way, Scripture is never simply a story about weird weather. Any story in Scripture that tells about weather is about who is in charge of the weather. Who calms the storms and brings order out of chaos. Whose presence is announced through fire and cloud and earthquakes and dazzling light.

In The Episcopal Church, every Sunday is a Feast of Our Lord. That’s why, in Lent, which is a season of fasting, the Sundays aren’t referred to as the Sundays of Lent but rather the Sundays in Lent - and those Sundays aren’t counted in the 40 days of Lent. Every Sunday is a mini Easter. After planning the liturgies of Holy Week, each one of which we do only once a year, planning Easter Sunday is almost a sigh of relief. We know how to do this. I like to say that Easter Sunday is a regular Sunday with brass. There is no special page in the prayer book called “Easter Sunday”. So why the special emphasis today? Why does today matter any more than any other Sunday?

Because this is the day. This is the day that death was overcome. This is the day that the earth shook and the presence of the Lord was proclaimed. This is the day that everything changed; that the cosmos were reordered and Christ rose, victorious, over the powers of sin and death. While every Sunday matters and I love them all - even when it feels like we’re somehow at the 3000th Sunday after Pentecost during the dog days of summer - it all matters because of today. During all of those other Sundays, we are remembering this Sunday. This Sunday. On Easter Sunday, God calls us out of the darkness of death to be His light in the world. Thanks be to God. Amen.