The Liberating Power of Easter

Sunday, April 5, 2026 - Easter Sunday

The Rev. Charles Graves, IV

LGBTQIA+ Person of Faith

Quote

“We are an Easter people, moving through a Good Friday world.”

~Bishop Barbara Harris, Hallelujah, Anyhow! 

Devotion

As a preacher, I’ll let you in on a little secret—for a long time I’ve been less than enthusiastic about Easter. After all, what more could I add from any pulpit to the joy of Christ’s Resurrection? Jesus is alive, our salvation is restored, and we again see the joy of new life in Jesus. What else is there to say year after year?

On that first Easter day, it was obvious to no one that Jesus was about to rise up from death and show up alive to those who loved him most. It was as shocking and unbelievable as someone you love rising miraculously from the dead today. But in our modern world we know exactly on what date Easter is coming, what it will look like year after year. After all, every store has been selling Easter merch since mid-February! So where is the surprise? Isn’t it just another holiday?

We forget so easily that the Christian celebration of Easter (whose name comes from the German word for “dawn” or “sunrise”) shares its root and heritage in the Jewish celebration of Passover. We forget that our celebration of Christ’s resurrection is deeply and inextricably rooted in liberation from slavery and oppression of all kinds. All four of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) explicitly describe the events of that first Easter as happening at the time of the Jewish Passover feast—the remembrance of God liberating God’s people from the death of slavery across the Red Sea to freedom.

For those of us in the United States, one of the gravest mistakes in American Christianity is that we so often make faith spiritual and individual, divorcing our own liberation from that of one another and from the community. But for Christians and for people of many global faiths, our origins are profoundly collective, communal, and human.

So many of us have been taught as children that Easter means we can go to heaven if we’ve done just what we were told – you’ve all heard it – that at the cross Christ paid the price – the debt, of forgiveness for our sins. We have heard that what matters most is your “personal salvation,” or whether you individually are “saved,” or where you individually will spend eternity when you die. The theological word for that is “penal substitutionary atonement.” For many of us who are LGBTQIA+, we’ve been taught the heinous lie that we are excluded from God’s love embodied at Easter, or that to inherit God’s love or avoid condemnation we must leave behind what is so intrinsic to us that to do so is death in itself. Perhaps you yourself know this all too well.

Beloved, what I want us to realize is that when we believe this lie, we forget the true meaning of Easter and its roots in the liberation story of Passover. And worse than that, we ignore God’s call to be liberated ourselves and to liberate others. Easter isn’t a spiritual boarding pass to Heaven Airways! Easter is our mandate to be liberated and to liberate others. Easter is our mandate to roll away the stones from the tombs that keep ourselves and our communities locked in death, and watch as God makes those whom our society has killed walk free.

Last year I had the incredible honor to preach at Washington National Cathedral for Pride Sunday, a celebration that just a few years ago would have been unimaginable. As I stood in that hallowed pulpit, I remembered that my parents were children in the first years of school desegregation in America. My grandmother was born on the plantation in South Carolina where her parents had been sharecroppers and lived with her grandmother who had been born enslaved. On the same land. My great-grandmother moved to the North with her family and founded an Episcopal church in 1927, just a century ago, because even there the churches were segregated.

It is easy to forget today that we are not as far removed from slavery in America as we think, and by the same token how far our world has come in just a few generations. I come from Black folks who even while being brutalized by a weaponized “Christianity” that was nothing more than hatred, violence, segregation, and slavery wrapping itself in religion, they knew in their sanctified souls that God is the force of Liberation, and never oppression. They never ceased to call on the name of their Liberator, and they sang and prayed and walked and worked so that we could inherit freedoms they would never see.

You and I come here standing here in a long line of Queer folk, not just over the last 10 or 20 or 50 years, but who, for centuries and millennia, of every generation, Trans folk and LGBTQIA+ folk written out of history books and treated with all manner of hostility. They were never acknowledged as God’s beloved, were excluded from marriage rejected by family, derided and called unspeakable names, but we've never failed to show up and keep fighting and keep singing the songs of liberation. I remember as a closeted college student just 15 years ago, going to bed in tears on so many nights, and especially in those days when one state after another began to legalize same-sex marriage, because I knew that mine would be the last generation in this country know what it’s like to be banned from marrying the one I love in the church and under the law. I am now part of the first generation of Americans and people around the world to be legally married to a person of the same sex, and I was able to marry my amazing husband at our church in Texas, officiated by our local bishop. Think of just how recently even that thought would have been completely unimaginable, and now it is reality.

Even now we must never rest on our laurels, as the rights of so many of us seem perpetually under attack. Instead, we continue to sing, pray, fight and labor as our ancestors did, not only to protect rights already won, but for the freedom of everyone in our communities under the yoke of oppression.

And yet they prayed and sang and worked and fought by the power of the Holy Spirit so that we could all live in a world they couldn't dream to see. So, keep praying, my friends, keep singing. Keep working and walking. Don't ever lose heart, because our Holy Spirit hasn't given up on journeying with us every step of the way. The Holy Spirit is still in the business of unity. The Holy Spirit is still in the business of overcoming fear and hatred and division by the unbeatable, uncrushable, unextinguishable power of love. That is the power of Easter.

Reflection

1.    Are there times when liberation feels far away or impossible? How do you tap into sources of new hope in those times?

2.    Think of those who came before you and the obstacles they navigated. What obstacles do we face in our time, and how does your faith help you through them?

3.    Imagine someone in your family 50 or 100 years from now looking back on you and on our time. What do you hope will be better about their world because of you and your generation?

Action

Research some of the stories and leading figures of LGBTQIA+ history and share them with others. Reflect on how your faith motivates the work of liberation for you, and write down ways you can act on your faith to liberate yourself and others.