“Practice Resurrection”
Matthew 28:1-10
Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
First Congregational UCC, Manhattan, KS
April 5, 2026
Two or three weeks before Easter each year, I start praying regularly and in earnest that God will deliver a sermon. I’m not picky about how it arrives: lightning bolt in the sky, a dream, uploaded directly into my brain. Doesn’t matter. Just, “Dear God, please show up with something you want the people to hear on Easter morning.”
This year, I prayed as usual. I prayed while driving, while loading the dishwasher, before falling asleep. And the same message was delivered again and again. Unfortunately, it is not a sermon. It’s a poem by Wendell Berry. Over and over again, for weeks now, this poem has been on my mind, day and night. Wouldn’t leave me alone.
Wendell Berry is a poet/novelist/farmer/eco-activist/prophet from Kentucky. This particular poem is one of his “mad farmer” poems - written under the name of Berry’s alter ego. “Mad” because he’s angry about the state of the world. And “mad,” too, because some have dismissed him as a little unhinged.
Berry wrote this particular poem in 1973. A year, not unlike our own in apocalyptic flavor. War was raging in the middle east and ending in Vietnam. There was an oil embargo. Chile’s President Allende was killed in a coup. The Supreme Court was debating women’s rights. The American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee and Marlon Brando boycotted the Academy Awards. Gay liberation was making strides as the first PFLAG meeting was held in Greenwich Village and psychologists removed homosexuality from the list of mental illness. Oh, and the Watergate hearings happened.
In the midst of these seismic shifts, the Mad Farmer speaks, unleashing a manifesto.
Only, it’s a strange manifesto. Doesn’t quite fit the form.[1] There are no carefully-crafted statements of belief or step-by-step solutions. It’s not linear or cohesive. It sounds more like the Book of Proverbs or Ecclesiastes. It’s puzzling. Like a parable, you can pick it up again and again and turn it over in your mind, finding something new each time.
Okay, enough talking ABOUT it. Let me share it with you. And if you’re the type of person who does better reading along, you can find it as an insert in your bulletin. Click to read:
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
I think the reason the poem wouldn’t let me go this year is because it speaks to the choices that are ours to make in the midst of chaos. Berry wrote in a time of unbridled capitalist consumption, seemingly-endless war, government corruption, and ongoing struggles for liberation. The first stanza lends itself to despair. We read it and can feel a bit like pawns on the global stage. Cogs in a machine.
But then the Mad Farmer speaks about the choices that are ours to make:
…friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world.
And a little further on:
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
Today’s story from the Gospel of Matthew begins with a pair of women making choices like these. Doing something that doesn’t compute. Expecting the end of the world and being joyful anyway. Practicing resurrection.
Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” (most likely Jesus’s mother) went to the tomb early that morning. Just a few days earlier, they had been present at Jesus’s crucifixion, “looking on from a distance.” That, too, was a choice, of course. A choice to do something that doesn’t compute: willingly witness pain and suffering.
The Greek word used for the women’s activity in both passages is the same one: theoreo. They “looked on” from afar at the crucifixion. And when they came to the tomb early in the morning, the text says they “went to see.” Theoreo means seeing. But not just any kind of seeing. It’s perhaps better translated into English as beholding, contemplating, considering. It’s watching with intention because you expect something important will happen. [2]
I think that Mary and Mary were there that morning because they were expecting resurrection. Practicing it. Looking for it. Theoreo. Prepared to consider and behold it.
I can’t help but notice that they didn’t bring spices to the tomb as the women did in the gospels of Mark and Luke. They weren’t showing up to anoint his body. They don’t seem to anticipate finding his body. In John’s gospel, Mary Magdalene is astonished when the messengers ask her, “why do you look for the living among the dead?” But in Matthew’s version of the story, Mary and Mary seem to be doing just that. They have come to look, see, behold, consider the reality of resurrection.
They are choosing to
Listen to carrion – [to put their ears]
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Unlike some of the laughably clueless disciples, Mary and Mary get it. They’ve been told to expect resurrection. To look for new life. To believe in second chances. To hold onto hope, even when it makes no sense. And so they do. They are practicing resurrection. And they find it.
Notably, this does not solve all their problems. The good news comes hand-in-hand with an earthquake. The women receive the gospel from the angel and leave quickly with fear and joy to tell the others. The fear doesn’t go away. The chaos doesn’t stop swirling. But they are joyful despite considering all the facts. The women are listening to the carrion and practicing resurrection. Resurrection is not just something they observe - they join in.
I can’t help but think that the same must be true for us today. The same chaos that swirled in the first century is still here, now. The facts that we are left to consider in 2026 feel very much in line with the facts the Mad Farmer beheld in 1973.
And so the invitation is the same: practice resurrection.
Get up every day and expect it. Expect glimmers of new life even in the midst of disaster. Be unsurprised when you bend your ear low to the carrion and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Place yourself in spaces where you’re likely to find it - watch the ranchers practice resurrection as they burn the fields in Spring. Go down to Be Able to see what faith in second chances looks like when it takes on flesh and dwells among us. Talk to a parent who has come out of an IEP meeting or a hospital room feeling like hope might finally be on the horizon. Sit with an elder who tells you with confidence they’re not afraid to die because they know death is not the end of the story.
In a 1973 interview, Wendell Berry said, “[If] you come from farming stock you know…when you plant a row in the garden each spring that thousands upon thousands of your own people have done it every spring, and that you’re participating in an act that has had to take place every year since agriculture began.”
And so it is for us. The Easter story is our inheritance - passed down by faithful ancestors, year after year in an unbroken chain. And the invitation is still there:
every day, do something that won’t compute;
expect the end of the world, laugh;
listen to the carrion;
go forth in fear and joy;
love the Lord, love the world;
practice resurrection.
NOTES
[1] With gratitude to Matt Wheeler who notes that the “manifesto” isn’t very manifesto-like in this lovely post: https://rabbitroompoetry.substack.com/p/manifesto-the-mad-farmer-liberation
[2] Commentary about theoreo found in Preaching the Gospel of Matthew: Proclaiming God’s Presence, by Stanley P. Saunders, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010). 294.
[3] Berry interview: https://www.motherearthnews.com/sustainable-living/nature-and-environment/wendell-berry/
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