Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
Easter Day, April 20, 2025

Jesus, you were clothed in garments of glory at your rising —
may that glory shine in the heavens above
and in our hearts below in a thousand ways. Amen.

On this Easter Day, this Sunday of the Resurrection, Christians around the world gather, as they have done in every generation, to ponder the meaning of a stone rolled away from an empty tomb. But an empty tomb alone doesn’t tell us very much. Explanations abound for the emptiness, not all of them necessitating Christian faith.¹

We tend to forget how unsettling the discovery of a missing body must have been to the women who went there very early “on the first day of the week.”² They were hoping to complete the Jewish rites of burial after the body of Jesus had been taken down from the cross and quickly placed there as sunlight faded away on Good Friday, marking the beginning of the sabbath.

The sabbath was and remains today a time of rest for observant Jews. It lasts from sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday, and on this sabbath the body of Jesus rested in the tomb. Those who remained on the other side of the stone which sealed that tomb, who had followed Jesus and had loved him, were overcome with grief. They were also surely afraid that what had happened to Jesus — an innocent person who had been arrested, mocked, treated with cruelty, and then executed in the name of the Roman Emperor, the most powerful human being on the face of the earth — might happen to them.

There are many people in the pews right now, people sitting close to you, who know what that feels like. Perhaps you are one of them, with tears of sorrow close to the surface, ready to burst forth over the death of someone whom you loved very much. Or maybe you’re afraid and confused at the state of the world in which we now find ourselves living, with anxiety about your job or your retirement accounts or your children and their future.

In the midst of all of this, there are rumors of a love more powerful than death. You may have heard these rumors from a messenger of God as you stared into the distance at the cemetery, from a preacher standing in a pulpit on Easter morning, or — more likely — from a friend putting her arms around you, standing beside you in the ruins of your life, and sharing with you a hope that there is something beyond all of the disappointment.

One of the curious things about the passage that was read this morning from the Gospel of Luke is that we didn’t hear about a resurrection appearance, an encounter with Jesus on the other side of death.³ That comes next in this gospel, and like other stories found in the New Testament, these encounters are mysterious. People don’t immediately recognize Jesus in the garments of glory, as it were, even his closest friends. Some of them doubt, but most come to believe that God is good and loving and bringing forth a new creation, with Jesus having defeated both death and everything else opposed to God’s reign.

Jesus once said, in his most famous sermon, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.”⁴ I can’t help but wonder if there’s a connection between those words and stories about the risen Jesus, stories of those who eventually see Jesus in living color, as it were.

I’m wearing my owl cufflinks today, which seems appropriate since an owl is the mascot of Rice University and since owls adorn the outside of this church. Some of us even believe we can see hints of owls hidden in the scrollwork and woodwork around these very walls. If you’re a kid, tell me after this service if you think you’ve discovered any big owl eyes.

Some owls, like many other birds, are migratory. And a couple of months ago, I learned how scientists now think these birds find their way.⁵ It’s something akin to The Twilight Zone. These birds are able to sense the enormous magnetic field surrounding our entire planet, which almost seems impossible because, although huge, it’s really weak — 10 to 100 times weaker than the small magnet holding your grocery list on the door of your refrigerator.

They have a chemical compass inside their eyes, which gets activated when photons create what are called radical pairs, magnetically sensitive molecules, allowing the birds to “see” the earth’s magnetic field. They know the direction they’re heading in under the night sky based on how these radical pairs are spinning or dancing inside their eyes. And the light of stars, many of them hundreds of light years away, keeps that compass working.

In the same way that a dog, with two color channels, will never be able to experience the colorful world seen by us, with three color channels, we’ll never be able to experience the colorful world seen by birds, with four color channels. We can’t imagine what that would be like, and that’s before adding a kind of filter birds have which may make it as if they have six color channels and the fact that on top of all of that these migratory birds can also see the earth’s magnetic field and then use it to find their way in the darkness.

One woman, marveling at the universe and envious of the birds, put it this way: “These birds . . . get this direct visual experience, like a message from that hidden, foreign realm.”

I don’t think the meaning of Easter can be reduced to quantum mechanics in nature. But nature does offer the possibility of cracking open the door just enough for each one of us to rediscover a sense of awe and wonder about this world in which we live, a sense of awe and wonder even when things feel as if they’re flying apart either within us or around us.

I really do believe many of the friends of Jesus encountered him after the resurrection, in a way that wasn’t the result of emotional trauma and that was more than a dream. It’s possible that Jesus appeared to others as well who never recognized him. It’s possible that their world view made it impossible for them to see familiarity in his face or that their hearts were not open to receive love for one reason or another. But that doesn’t mean the resurrection didn’t happen or that love wasn’t standing in front of them in the person whom they were ignoring. People need not be ghosts for someone to look through them.

For nearly 2,000 years, Christians haven’t encountered the risen Jesus in the same way those friends did. We catch only glimpses now and then of the resurrection, of the new creation. So how do we calibrate our spiritual compass in order to catch those glimpses?

Well, I think the birds I was talking about earlier offer us a clue.

Some scientists think those migratory birds can only see the earth’s magnetic field at night. After a day filled with eating and resting, as many of them do right across the street on the campus of Rice University, lots of them fly to the tops of trees and gather there to watch the sunset. That’s when they’re calibrating this chemical compass inside their eyes. And then as they behold the vesper light, to borrow a phrase from the Book of Common Prayer, they’re watching an invisible universe become visible, as the earth’s magnetic field comes online, as it were.

Once their chemical compass is set, with those magnetically sensitive molecules dancing inside their eyes, they can take flight and make their way through the darkness, beneath the stars, without becoming lost. And I think that happens here in a Christian community.

We come here like lost balls in high weeds, pausing together for a moment to lift up our hearts, to raise up our heads and see where we are in this world. Here we are welcomed into the compassionate embrace of a God who is overwhelmingly good and loving. That doesn’t mean most human beings who’ve lived on this planet didn’t endure suffering or poverty or cruelty. Most of them did experience all of those things in ways beyond my comprehension. But it does mean, for me at least, that if God is good and loving, this world cannot be all that there is. It also means we are called as Christians to help those who are suffering, as long as we’re on this side of the grave, in the name of our risen Lord.

Many of us here today believe that the rumors of a love stronger than death are true, and that gathering within these walls resets our spiritual compass so that together we can make our way beneath the stars, through the darkness, whatever that might be for us. And we invite you to join us so that you don’t have to find a way through the darkness alone.

There is more to this universe than what you thought you could see when you walked through the doors of this church this morning. May you be given a glimpse of that today, so that resurrection light shines not only in the heavens above but also within your heart.

ALLELUIA! ALLELUIA! ALLELUIA!

1. Dale C. Allison, Jr., The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History (New York: T&T Clark, 2021) 116-166. This book offers the best discussion I have ever read about every aspect of the burial of Jesus, the empty tomb, and resurrection appearances in the New Testament. ↩︎
2. Luke 24:1. ↩︎
3. Luke 24:1-12. ↩︎
4. Matthew 5:8. ↩︎
5. Annie McEwen, “Quantum Birds,” Radiolab podcast, February 14, 2025. All of the explanations of this that follow, including the note about color channels, come from interviews in this episode. ↩︎