Easter breathing
On Easter, we breathe in deeply, filling our lungs with Easter's promise, and breathe out, together, an Easter breath: a breath that speaks of love's assurance, a breath that sings of hope's promise.
This sermon on John 20:1-18 was preached on Easter Sunday, 4/20/2025, at the Trinitarian Congregational Parish of Castine. A livestream of the service can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
Easter began with a breath:
a slight movement of air that troubled the stillness of the tomb,
a whisper of inhalation that broke death’s silence.
Jesus breathed.
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It’s such an ordinary thing, breathing.
We breathe in and we breathe out
22,000 times a day, on average.
Mostly without noticing.
Let’s notice for a moment.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Ordinary though breathing is, the process
is anything but.
Our lungs can hold 6 liters of air.
And that air moves along 2400 km of airways.
Which makes each breath a road trip to Jacksonville.
So, again.
Breathe in.
And let it go.
Let it go.
How we breathe, it turns out, is tightly coupled
to how we are.
Breathing deeply, like we just did,
turns down the volume on the shallow-breathing
fight-or-flight response that fear and worry incite;
a deep breath quiets our nervous system
and calms us.
But if those deep breaths we just took
served mostly to remind you
that you are NOT breathing deeply or easily these days —
and I know a lot of people who aren’t — take heart.
Not breathing easily
is precisely where Easter begins.
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While it was still dark,
Mary Magdalene came to the tomb
where Jesus had been laid.
And while it was still dark
was probably also a good description
of how her heart felt in the wake of the terrible death of the one
“who [had] breathed such life into her days.”[i]
John’s Gospel doesn’t tell us why
she came to the tomb that morning;
maybe she came to say a final farewell,
or maybe she came to grieve in peace,
or maybe she came simply to breathe awhile in the place he was laid to rest.
Whatever it was that brought her,
she arrives to find
that he rests there no longer.
The tomb is open.
And the tomb is empty.
It’s not hard to imagine the jolt of adrenaline,
the quickening of breath,
as Mary runs to get the other disciples.
Not hard, either, to imagine the breathlessness of her words.
They have taken the Lord out of the tomb,
and we do not know where they have laid him.
Together, they run back to the tomb,
and not in a gently jogging kind of way.
Peter and the other disciple are flat-out racing each other,
the early morning hush suddenly loud with the gasping breath
of people trying to keep up
with a world that has been turned upside-down.
Nobody
was breathing easily
as that first Easter morning dawned.
But Easter happened, even so.
We’re still telling that story.
After Simon Peter and the other disciple
saw the emptiness of the tomb,
but before they understood the emptiness of the tomb,
they went home.
But not Mary.
Mary stayed, weeping loudly,
breathing grief’s ragged breath.
Until, a voice.
Not the angels, this time.
A different voice.
An oddly familiar voice, though she couldn’t quite place it.
Woman, why are you weeping?
Whom are you looking for?
She doesn’t recognize him at first;
it’s as if her mind can’t comprehend
that he is Jesus,
that Jesus is.
Who among us could?
But then he breathes her name.
Mary.
And somehow, and she doesn’t know how,
she hears her name spoken
by a voice she suddenly recognizes.
Christ is alive!
Love lives again.
Her own heart lives anew.
Mary breathed in the miracle of that moment —
a deep Easter breath—
and weeping no more, unsure and undone no more,
Mary was sent —
calm, steady, assured —
to breathe out that Good News.
An Easter exhale that sounded like:
I have seen the Lord.
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I have seen the Lord:
who knew mere words
could “hold
such radical light”?[ii]
Mary’s Easter proclamation
of Christ’s risenness, of Christ’s isness,
announced to the disciples
and announces, year after year after year, to us
that when the story seems over,
God is just getting started.
That death
and the forces that deal in death
do not have the last word.
That we are forgiven
and we are free.
That though sorrow may lie thick on the land,
joy will come in the morning.
That we are held, in life and in death,
by a love from which nothing in all of creation
can ever separate us.
Christ is risen.
Christ is alive.
Love has already won.
That is the promise.
That is Easter hope.
Mary’s words, “I have seen the Lord,” hold all of that.
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And like Mary,
we are sent, as Easter people,
to live lives that breathe and speak and sing
that truth.
“Lives that keep telling the story Jesus told — the one called ‘love one another.’
Lives that help our neighbors breathe a little easier.
Lives that resound with Easter hope.
Lives that sing a daily alleluia
by doing justice
and loving kindness
and walking humbly with our God.”i
Lives of Easter breathing.
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Earlier this week,
in one of those rare moments in which e-mail
feels like a channel of God’s grace,
a story came my way that has helped me to imagine
what that kind of Easter breathing can look like.[iii]
It’s a story about the singer Marian Anderson.
A Black woman, born in 1897 in Philadelphia,
Anderson learned to sing in her church choir.
And despite the formidable obstacles to becoming a Black opera singer
in Jim Crow America, Anderson did just that—
she became an internationally renowned
and critically acclaimed singer.
After hearing her perform in 1935, when she was just 38 years old,
the conductor Arturo Toscanini said:
“What I heard today one is privileged to hear
only once in a hundred years.”[iv]
In the spring of 1939, Anderson
planned a concert in Washington, D.C.
She had hoped to perform at Constitution Hall.
But on the grounds of her race, that request was denied.
Instead, on Easter Sunday, 1939, Marian Anderson
walked out onto the marble steps
of the Lincoln Memorial
to sing for an audience of 75,000 people on the National Mall
and a radio audience of tens of millions,
who tuned in to the live broadcast.
In newsreel footage of the concert,
Anderson stands with Lincoln’s statue large behind her.[v]
She takes a deep breath in
and begins to sing
with an opera singer’s impossibly long exhales.
My country ‘tis of thee,
sweet land of liberty
to thee we sing
land where my fathers died
land of the pilgrims’ pride
from every mountainside
let freedom ring.
Even through the crackle of a decades-old recording,
it’s one of the most beautiful two minutes of music
I’ve ever heard.[vi]
I’ve listened to it
dozens of times in the past week
and my heart and my eyes won’t stop overflowing
at the fierce and courageous hope of it all.
Easter hope.
Hope, even so.
There she stood, that Easter morning,
outside
because she was not allowed to sing inside —
and sang that liberty
is.
There she stood, that Easter morning,
and breathed in the April air,
and breathed out an Easter breath —
melodic strains of hope that drew the collective gaze
out beyond “the most difficult parts of today
into a bright tomorrow”[vii] where
from every mountainside
freedom will ring.
And in the breathing, in the singing,
that tomorrow inched just a little closer.
That’s Easter breathing.
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And so, we gather on this Easter morning
to breathe in, deeply, together —
to fill our lungs and our lives
with the sweet fragrance of Easter’s promise
and then to breathe out, together, an Easter breath.
“A breath that speaks of love’s assurance.
A breath that sings of hope’s promise.”i
A breath that sounds like alleluia!
Christ is risen!
He is risen, indeed!
Alleluia! Praise God!
And Amen.
[i] These sections quoted from or adapted from Rev. Andy Nagy-Benson, ‘Easter Breathing,’ a sermon preached at the Congregational Church of Middlebury, UCC. 4/20/2025.
[ii] This phrase is borrowed from the title of Christian Wiman’s book He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[iii] The e-mail in question was from the essay ‘Entering Passion Week in a Pained World,’ the daily offering from Cloister Notes, by Almut Furchert. 4/12/2025.
[iv] Arturo Toscanini, quoted in https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/MarianAndersonLincolnMem.pdf
[v] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Anderson:_The_Lincoln_Memorial_Concert
[vi] A recording of the live radio broadcast can be heard here.
[vii] This is a quote from someone, somewhere. But my notes have failed me! Whoever you are, thank you. This phrase is beautiful.