April 05, 2026
• Rev. Dr. Rob Fuquay
St. Luke’s UMC
April 5, 2026
EASTER
Rise
“I Believe…in the Resurrection of the Body”
Luke 24:1-12
Doesn’t that seem a strange way to end the Easter announcement, with Peter “wondering to himself what had happened?” If the resurrection is the linchpin of Christian faith, the event that holds together all we believe, doesn’t this seem an odd ending to the Easter story?
Yet, all the Gospels agree that many of the first witnesses on Easter weren’t so sure about what they experienced. Mark records that the women left the tomb and “said nothing to anyone because they were afraid.” (Mk 15:8) Matthew says, “(the disciples) saw (the risen Jesus), but some doubted.” (Mt. 28:17)John says about Peter and the beloved disciple after they left the tomb and “They still did not understand…that Jesus had to rise from the dead.” (Jn 20:9)
All of the Gospels, it seems, leave room for people who are not so sure about the resurrection.
I think of this because of a couple conversations I had in recent weeks. One was with my niece in Denver. She told me last Easter her pastor said in his sermon that believing in the physical resurrection wasn’t really necessary. That didn’t shake her faith—she understood what he was getting at, that faith shouldn’t depend on miracles—but still. On Easter Sunday? It caused quite a stir.
The second conversation happened shortly after. One of our leaders here at St. Luke’s said to me, “I want to confess something. I don’t believe Jesus was physically resurrected. Now my faith is strong—it just isn’t built on miracles. I believe God created the laws of physics and nature. And I don’t believe God would violate them.”
I know this person well. They are one of the most deeply faithful people I’ve ever known. But these conversations got me to thinking about what I believe. What do I believe about the resurrection of Jesus?
I’ve served this church for 15 years and I’m not sure I ever really put it plainly. Since I announced in January my plans to retire in a little over a year, time is growing short. So today I want to tell you what I believe about Easter—and it probably won’t surprise you to learn that I affirm the line from the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe…in the resurrection of the body.”
For the next few minutes, I want to tell you why. Let us pray…
I am drawn today to the Easter story in Luke’s Gospel. Paul tells us in Colossians that Luke was a doctor. That means Luke understood the laws of nature—chief among them the fact that when people die, they stay that way. And yet this same doctor wrote with conviction that Jesus rose from the dead and the experience of the risen Christ changed the lives of his followers.
For a physician to write such things gets my attention. But what gets my attention even more is a question in Luke’s account—a question only Luke records. When the angels greet the women at the empty tomb, they don’t make a proclamation. They ask: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”
Now I would expect the question to go the other way: “Why do you look for the dead among the living?” Because that’s what the women were doing. They went to anoint a corpse. They were not expecting life. They were braced for death. And so the question ought to jar us, because in a place where everyone expected to find death, the angels announce life.
But the angels ask the question the way they do and I think there’s a deeper challenge buried in it—pun intended! “Why are you only looking for the dead? Why aren’t you seeking the living? Seek the living!”
This is one of the reasons I believe in the resurrection of the body, because it pushes toward life rather than the things I expect to find.
It’s easy—especially now—to look only for the dead. To get discouraged about the way things are. To say, “Things will never change. Its always going to be this way. The powerful will crush the poor. Big corporations will just do what they want. People will hurt each other. The whole world is on fire.” It’s easy to believe that. But Easter calls actually calls that a failure to believe.
The question “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” is a dare. It dares me to remain open to the possibility that God acts beyond my expectations. It dares me to believe that God can do more than I think is possible.
I understand the intellectual challenge of believing in the historical reality of Easter. But consider this: if God has the power to create the natural laws that govern world, would God not also have the power to transcend them? When you look closely at the natural world you find that God has already given us little hints of this transcending power.
Think about the caterpillar. It’s basically a fuzzy worm. And yet, sealed inside a chrysalis for a week or two, it is entirely dissolved and rebuilt—and emerges as a butterfly. How do you explain that?
Or consider starfish? Some years ago, oyster fishermen discovered that starfish were destroying their oyster beds. So they pulled them out, cut them to pieces, and threw the pieces back in the water. What they didn’t know is that starfish can regenerate from fragments. They ended up making their problem four to five times worse!
Now, biologists can explain both of these things. We can explain them because we’ve seen them. And I believe these are little hints God gives us of what we have yet to see.
The late Dr. Leighton Ferrell, who married Susan and me almost 35 years ago, wrote in his book Cries from the Cross that “all progress prior to experience is, for the most part, unbelievable.” Imagine telling someone a hundred years ago that human beings would travel to the moon. They would have found it unbelievable—not because it was impossible, but because it was prior to their experience.
Most things seem impossible until we experience them. That’s why its easy to go through life looking only for what we expect to find. But Easter is an invitation to remain open to the possible. And that takes courage. It takes courage to live with hope, because hope means living with the possibility of disappointment.
That’s why it’s easier to look for the dead; to not expect things to change; to never be disappointed. I’ve seen it happen to people in church. They can sit in a pew for decades, never miss a Sunday, but also not expect God to actually show up and do something unbelievable.
It takes courage to live with hope for sure, but when we do, every now and then, we experience God showing up and doing the impossible. And when that happens we start to believe that maybe things can get better.
Dr. James Howell, wrote a devotional book on the names of Jesus in Isaiah. When he came to Everlasting Father, he shared very personally and hinted at his own Easter hope. He wrote:
I think of my father, a military hero and fine citizen who, as a dad, was distant, critical, and emotionally unreachable. We were not close. When he died, people glibly told me to enjoy the happy memories. I couldn’t fish any out of my head. But hasn’t the Everlasting Father, with wonderful planning and great might, guaranteed there will be the day when we will meet once more, face to face, with hard layers peeled back, and we will embrace, shed tears, tell stories, and laugh robustly?” (And His Name Shall Be Called, p95)
Like my friend James, I believe in the resurrection of the body because it gives me hope. Great hope.
Seek the living!
But another reason I believe in the resurrection of the body is because it gives me a responsibility. The writers of the Apostles’ Creed found it important to say not just, “I believe in the resurrection,” but, “I believe in the resurrection of the body,” because it refuted a popular heresy at the time. Many believed that the material world was evil and inferior as opposed to the spirit world that is good and divine. In other words, everything in this world is not of God.
Yet one of the first truths in scripture is found in the creation story in which each day God made the heavens and the earth God said, “It was good.” The resurrection of the body is an affirmation in the goodness of creation, which means God’s plan for this creation carries on. The ultimate outcome of this physical world is not that it will end up one day in a cosmic waste basket. No, God’s plan for this world is eternal.
That’s why at the other end of the Bible it says in the Book of Revelation where the writer pictured that glorious outcome, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” (Revelation 21: 1)
In other words, resurrection constitutes both the physical and the spiritual. But what will that look like? Well, we aren’t talking about a bad zombie movie. If all God does is bring these bodies back to life, and keep spinning a world that already has problems, what good is that? After all, some of us are getting tired of the problems we have with our bodies now. Imagine having to live forever with them!
In Paul’s grand chapter in First Corinthians 15, he recognizes this issue many people. He said, “But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” (1 Corinthians 15:35) And then he goes on to answer, “If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” (15:35, 44, 54)
So resurrection includes both the physical and the spiritual, and that means that this world and all the people in it matter. The way we care for this creation, the way we care for our own bodies, the way we care for and respect each other, all matters.
Believing in the resurrection of the body gives us a responsibility to live our faith in the way we care for this planet and the physical needs of this world.
Easter doesn’t just give us a great hope for life in the hereafter. This hope gives us a job here and now!
In Martin Luther King Jr’s last public address in Memphis the night before his assassination, he spoke to Garbage workers. He said…
It’s all right to talk about long robes over yonder, in all its symbolism, but ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. Its all right to talk about streets flowing with milk and honey, but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day. Its all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis. (The Life We Claim, Howell, p159)
And I believe he would add, the new Indianapolis!
Seek the living!
So there’s one last reason I believe in the resurrection of the body and it’s what I can’t deny. Throughout the Easter story and the stories of the earlier believers, there were people who had the same experiences of the risen Christ, and some didn’t believe while others did. The ones who did couldn’t prove it or explain but they also couldn’t deny it. They couldn’t deny having experienced something that just might be true.
And that’s my story too.
I was on a youth beach retreat. I woke up early one morning before sunrise. I went for a walk on the beach. I was really wrestling with this idea of being called by God. How can you know? How can you really know?
As I was walking in the very early twilight, I could make out a figure walking toward me. Once near, I could tell it was a man, not an old man but older than me. He said, “You mind if I walk with you?” I said, “Not at all.” We talked about where we were from, how we both love this time of morning, how the quietness soothes the soul.
As we walked he would keep looking up at the horizon getting gradually brighter as sunrise neared. It happened to be a Sunday. He kept looking up and saying, “It’s going to be a beautiful Lord’s Day.” He talked about his faith and how trusting in God can be hard, but its always been worth it in his life,” then suddenly another, “Yep, it’s going to be a beautiful day.”
Finally, he said, “well, I need to turn around here. You take care. I’ll be seeing you around.”
I walked on for another 20 feet or so, and thought, “How odd is that? To randomly meet someone on the beach who talked so much about faith. And he said, “I’ll be seeing you around.” I thought, “I’ll never see him again.”
So I turned around to get one last glimpse and he was gone. Now the beaches in SC can be really wide, probably 100 yards or more. He could have run like Jesse Owens and not reached the sand dunes that fast.
As the sun came up I thought, “Now that was really weird!” Then another thought, “What if it wasn’t? What if it was real, not random? What if that was an orchestrated meeting, like, perhaps, an angel?”