Now I have to admit, I think this memory came to me because of Easter but also because birthdays have been on my mind. All our clergy here have birthdays that are pretty close to Easter and yesterday I turned 29 years old. If any of you forgot your gift for me, don’t worry! I’ll be here all week. I’m totally joking of course. But interestingly enough, having my birthday fall right before Easter this year has felt laden with meaning.

You see, right around my birthday, life has often presented me with challenges I had not anticipated. It’s as though I’m being given the opportunity to prove my own growth before beginning a new year of life and even though it’s hard, it’s usually benefited me in the end. This didn’t begin in my adult life, but if any of you were here yesterday, you may have seen this in action: we had our annual Easter egg hunt and while we were only expecting about 80 people, we ended up having triple that amount! I had to figure out how we were going to stretch our candy and food for all these people, but it became this beautiful moment where lots of people worked together to find a way to make sure all were fed and it worked. But—I was pretty scared for a minute there.

Lessons like that around my birthday have been part of my life for years but the most important lesson I learned like this happened just a few years ago on my 25^th birthday. It was a moment that helped me understand resurrection not just as an event in Jesus’s life, but as an awakening we each are invited to, and it was that moment and realization that drew me to our Lenten series for this year.

If you haven’t been here, for the past six weeks, our worship and sermon series has been around this theme of “Coming Back to Life,” so we’ve talked the way nature comes back to life in Spring and we’ve explored what Coming Back to Life requires of each of us. This morning, as we celebrate that Jesus has come back to life, I want to tell you about that experience and show that resurrection and coming back to life is not only something we each are called to do: it’s a process our faith makes possible.

To set the scene for you, my 25^th birthday coincided with several big life moments. It was the day I had my final ever class in Seminary, it was just as I was preparing to take the last ordination exam I needed to seek a call through the PC (USA), and of course, it was just a few weeks before graduation.

In January of that year, I started a new practice for myself. I was doing Seminary online because of the pandemic and I couldn’t exercise at a gym because of COVID restrictions, so I started running every morning. Slide 3: I was lucky that right behind my apartment, there was this beautiful trail along a canal that goes for miles, so every morning, I would get up, stretch, and listen to a podcast while I ran. Since I’d started this in winter, I was pretty used to chilly runs with snow and bare trees, but by the time my birthday rolled around, everything was in peak bloom.

Slide 4: That morning, I queued up my favorite thing to listen to while running: This American Life and without any planning, it just so happened that the episode in my queue was called “Twenty-Five.” It was a show celebrating the 25^th anniversary of the program and it was all about people who were in the 25^th year of their life.

Slide 5: The episode captured so many facets of what life can hold for a 25-year-old: They profiled a woman who was instrumental in finding a treatment for COVID. There was a story about a woman who won two Olympic gold medals in boxing and made it her mission to buy a house for her family. The episode also included an article adapted from Runner’s World magazine about Ahmaud Arbery, who was shot and killed at 25 while running in his neighborhood by three neighbors who assumed he was a burglar.

Side 6: I was completely absorbed in each of these stories as I ran, but at a certain point I started to feel my chest tighten with every step in a way that was not exercise related. As I heard about women working to find COVID treatments and winning gold medals at 25, I wondered if I was accomplishing enough. Hearing about Ahmaud Arbury dying at 25, I realized that my age, and even good health, were not a guarantee that I would get the opportunity to create a meaningful life.

In short, the stories led me to take an inventory of where I was at 25, and quite unexpectedly I realized Slide 7: I wasn’t satisfied. With graduation looming, I was staring at a lot of the usual unknowns, but there was an added component. Rather than finishing school on my own, I was in a serious relationship with another student, and we were reaching a critical point in determining our future.

He wanted a future together and at times I thought that was what I wanted too. But as the reality of what was coming next approached, a thought in the back of my mind was getting harder to ignore: I didn’t want to imagine a life where we were apart, but I also could not imagine a future where we were together. Slide 7, click 2: Over the course of about a year, I devoted a lot of energy to avoiding this without even realizing it. I took up running and listening to podcasts. I worked and studied and distracted myself, never consciously realizing I was digging myself into a dark hole by doing this.

So as I ran that morning, amid these trees that were coming back to life after their own season of death, I realized for the first time that I was in that hole, distracting myself from all I didn’t want to face. As I’ve thought about this dark hole where I found myself, I’ve wanted to call it, “the pit of despair” which sounds a little dramatic but, if you’re familiar, it’s from the movie “The Princess Bride” which is very tongue in cheek.

Slide 8: I’ve liked calling this dark place the pit of despair because if you’ve seen The Princess Bride, you might remember that when the main character Westley, wakes up in the pit of despair, he’s told the by the person keeping him there: Slide 8, click 2: “Don’t even think about trying to escape. The chains are far too thick, and you’ll have no dream of being rescued either. The way in and out is secret.” I imagine many of you here this morning have at some point found yourself in this sort of dark hole, and I think that quote gets at the fact that when you’re down there, you can find yourself wondering if getting out is even possible.

And this is where seeing resurrection as more than just a moment in Jesus’s life becomes very important. The resurrection reminds us that no pit of despair is too deep or dark for us to get out of and coming back to life requires us to move from the darkness of that pit to the light beyond it. But to understand how this is possible, we have to take a closer look at our scripture for this morning.

Our scripture comes from the story of Jesus’s resurrection as told in the Gospel of Luke. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Luke is noteworthy because at every moment in Jesus’s ministry, he uplifts those who are on the outskirts of society, and this scripture is no exception. It’s women who come to the tomb and are told by men in dazzling clothes that Jesus is not there.

What I want to draw your attention to though is what the men at the tomb say. They ask the women, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen. Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee that the Son of Man must be handed over to the hands of sinners and be crucified and on the third day rise again.”

There’s something unique in the way these men talk about Jesus: They refer to him as the Son of Man which is not usually a phrase we hear others call Jesus. It’s actually the phrase used most often in the Gospels by Jesus to describe himself. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke alone, Jesus uses this phrase about 70 times to describe himself. So why was Jesus so fond of talking about himself in this way?

The answer to that question is in something we talked about at the beginning of Lent. On Ash Wednesday, we read the story of Creation, and you may remember I drew our attention to the way God creates humankind by breathing life into the dust of the ground. In Hebrew, God creates “ahdahm” or humankind from the “adamah,” the dust of the ground. So adam being formed from the adamah, makes it clear that human beings are as ordinary as dust.

I tell you that because in Hebrew “son of man” translates to “bar adam,” and that phrase in the Old Testament is often used to contrast the majesty of God with the ordinary nature of human beings. So when Jesus uses this title, he’s speaking about himself in a very human way.

The men at the tomb though, talk about Jesus as the son of man saying he has risen after being crucified, connecting Jesus as son of man to the divine process of resurrection. And so, son of man, which in Greek is “huios tou anthropou,” son of humankind, captures this paradox that Jesus’s ministry is a divine calling, but it is also deeply connected to humanity.

This paradox helps us understand something crucial about the entire ministry of Jesus and most importantly, his resurrection because so often when we think about Jesus, we see the way he lived as beyond our grasp, with resurrection—This cosmological process of dying and coming back to life—being way beyond human capacity. But these heavenly figures at the empty tomb seeing him as the son of man shows that Jesus’s connection to humanity is perhaps the most important part of him and it’s an invitation to all of us to be part of his resurrection.

Now I have to note that resurrection in the literal sense is very hard for us to see ourselves in because we don’t have the same ability to be raised from the dead as Jesus was. What I want to suggest though, is that understanding Jesus’s connection to humanity can help us re-define the way we understand resurrection.

What I want to suggest is that appreciating Jesus’s humanity, we can see resurrection as a process we are each invited to be part of when we come back to life after any period of death. That may be the death of a dream, a new beginning that involves leaving something behind, or a death we experience through suffering. But every time we find ourselves in the pit of despair, surrounded by darkness and manage to return to light, we come back to life and experience resurrection just as Jesus did so many years ago.

Knowing that, I want to return to the pit of despair, because the truth is, leaving it and coming back to life is not easy. Just two weeks ago, Laura shared a sermon on Barbara’s behalf that illuminated this. She talked about coming back to life through compassion and empathy, which involves being willing to go to a person who is in the pit of despair and sit with them. You don’t look down from above and say, “Looks bad down there…want a sandwich?” You join them in the dark.

But sometimes when we are down in that dark hole, it takes a while for us to realize we’re there, and by the time we do, we can have a hard time summoning the strength to climb out or asking someone to sit down there with us. The voice telling us to not even think about trying to escape can become the loudest. And sometimes the darkness we face is just too overwhelming for others to join us.

I think Jesus actually found himself in that situation before his death on the cross. He asked his disciples to be with him as he prayed in Gethsemane knowing he was nearing death. One by one, his disciples left and betrayed him. No one could handle the darkness, so he cried out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The son of man found himself in the pit of despair.

But the amazing thing about finding yourself in that pit is it forces you realize that there is no place we go where God is not with us. God’s love is present even in the places of deepest darkness, when it appears all light is gone. And seeing resurrection as something we are part of is crucial because if we think resurrection is not possible for us, we wait for God to do something to get us out, rather than recognizing God was with us all along.

Knowing God is with us, we become strong enough to feel around in the dark. And by doing so, we realize the pit of despair wasn’t actually a hole in the ground after all. Instead, it was a tomb and all we needed to do to find light was to roll away the stone.

That’s what I had to discover for myself at 25. The pit I found myself in was very dark because I was waiting for God to do something—to fix me and my life—all the while not realizing God was with me the whole time. Perhaps the greatest gift I experienced in that was seeing how afraid I was to allow certain things in my life to die. I was afraid of letting go of a relationship, of failure, and grief, so I tried just about everything to bypass that, which made coming back to life impossible.

Darkness, death, and failure are necessary to the process of coming back to life because they allow us to experience our humanity as Jesus did. Sometimes this looks like a quiet decision to face what we fear. Sometimes it’s the courage to find that stone that’s keeping us in the dark and roll it away, even if we’re not sure what waits on the other side. Regardless, this process of resurrection transforms each death and failure into something holy. And that’s what we celebrate today. Not just that Jesus rose from the dead, but that through God’s love we do too.”

And so, as we celebrate that Jesus is not among the dead, but the living, it’s my hope that each of you will see resurrection as a cosmological process, but not one that we as human beings are removed from. Every experience of moving through pain and darkness toward light is a resurrection that brings us closer to God. And perhaps the greatest gift we receive in this life is that we get the opportunity die and come back to life many times and each time are brought closer to God.

So may you find the courage to experience death and resurrection. To awaken, seeing the life of Jesus not as distant and removed from the human experience, but as an invitation to die, awaken in the darkness of the tomb, and summon the strength to roll the stone away. Amen.