Not long ago, my husband Javen and I had the chance to see “The Color Purple”—a dramatic staging of Alice Walker’s classic novel at Theatre Latte Da. It follows the life of the main character, Celie, who suffers through a lifetime of forced servitude to abusive men. Celie takes at face value what they say about her, that she is ugly, powerless, and good for nothing but endless labor. We see her virtue in repeated acts of generosity and compassion, but Celie struggles to believe that her life is lovely or valuable. Musical numbers lead the audience along a journey of Celie’s self-discovery, gradually shifting to more hopeful melodies, until a climactic moment near the end. In a showstopping performance, Nubia Monks as Celie declares with operatic conviction, “I am beautiful!!” The audience would have been lifted from our seats by the swelling music, had we not already jumped to our feet, calling back to the stage, “YES!! You ARE, you ARE beautiful!!” I don’t know if every performance has the electricity of the preview night we attended, but it captures for me the affirmation and essence of Easter itself. You are beautiful.

What a gift such glimpses of brilliance are, because otherwise the tarnishing of the world takes hold. We can come to believe—like Celie at the start—that there’s no hope or no better way, that closed doors remain closed forever, and all there is in life are dead ends. Doubt, discouragement, and dreariness can become constant companions, and it’s difficult to recognize the Good News that we are not alone, and that we are not at the end of our stories.

That’s the battered and beaten-down place that the disciples of Jesus are at in the beginning of Easter morning, suffering under the conviction that death reigns. They have come through devastating experiences of the previous few days—Jesus’ betrayal by one of their own companions, the Messiah’s arrest and brutal torture, before being put on the cross to die in their sight. We can feel the shell-shocked despair that Mary and the other traumatized disciples must have been carrying as they approached the tomb on that Easter morning.

Bessel van der Kolk is one of the world’s leading trauma researchers, learning from veterans, those who have been incarcerated, and others who experience trauma. One of his books about trauma’s effects is called “The Body Keeps the Score”. He describes how folks who endure lasting trauma carry the symptoms afterward. Our bodies start producing unnecessary stress hormones, we feel chronically restless or disturbed, and we don’t feel at ease even in situations that are objectively safe. Trauma changes the brain, he has found, and it colors our perceptions of the world. Folks who live through trauma may feel stuck in the past, or have difficulty believing the bad situation won’t happen again.

The Bible doesn’t report any trauma specialists at the tomb that first Easter morning, but in Easter’s resurrection we see trauma transform into joy. The tomb of death is empty, angels are proclaiming a more-real reality of New Life, and the raised Christ himself is going on ahead to Galilee. When the disciples first go from the empty tomb “quickly with fear and great joy”, they do so towards a future unlocked by these new realities. Overcoming trauma, they run from a paralyzing past to a liberated and liberating future.

I’m not going to try and convince you one way or another about the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ two thousand years ago. But I’m here trying to believe alongside you that in our own lives, in the face of whatever trauma and death we may bear, resurrection still happens. The ultimate message of Easter is that no matter how dead you feel inside, or how dead your life dreams may feel, God is making a way for you! As Alice Walker has written, “Terrible things can happen to you in life… and you can still be happy. You can still find joy. You can still love, in spite of it all…” Easter frees us from paranoid hiding in the face of death, failure, trauma, or scorn. All these are in the rearview mirror, and ahead of us is the future’s quest of seeking, celebrating, and growing further into our beautiful lives.

By happy accident, this Easter Sunday is also the annual Trans Day of Visibility. Or maybe this is a divine alignment, because transgender liberation is a deep and affirming echo of Easter’s proclamation of life rather than death. My friend and seminary classmate delfin bautista describes this experience: “As people wrestling with different understandings and embodiments of gender, we stare into the tombs of our pasts, we come to recognize that who we were, who we were forced to be, who the world expected us to be is no longer there and perhaps was never there.” delfin continues, “… The Resurrection did not change Jesus into something new but simply affirmed who he always was. …We as trans people do the same—we affirm who we are, sometimes privately and sometimes publicly and sometimes both, coming out of the tombs of closets, binaries, and imposed expectations.” On several occasions, I’ve had the honor of leading a celebration service by which we bless a trans person’s chosen name, pronouns, and identity. These blessings take as their inspiration the baptismal ritual because this is a new birth, and the new name is proclaimed with divine celebration: “You are God’s beloved!” Trans folks refer to the name they were given growing up as a “dead name”, because it’s for a gender identity that is dead, giving way to a new name and new life ever after.

We live amid such resurrections, such Easter overturning of death into new life. Trans folks and other brave siblings can show what it means to overcome trauma, to pass through death and be raised up into joyful wholeness. We are an Easter people, inspired by the Easter Good News, committing ourselves to God’s transforming of trauma and pain into new life. The resurrection happens now. Christ is risen within each of us now, as we choose to live by his love and go in his ways. In the book “We Make the Road by Walking,” which we’re reading as part of Healing Faith, author Brian McLaren suggests that where the risen Christ “most wants to be seen is in our bodies, among us, in us” (pg. 170). He describes Easter as an uprising: “An uprising of hope, not hate. An uprising armed with love, not weapons. An uprising that shouts a joyful promise of life and peace, not angry threats of hostility and death. It’s an uprising of outstretched hands, not clenched fists. It’s the ‘someday’ we have always dreamed of, emerging in the present, rising up among us and within us.” (170)

This Easter uprising will continue in the world forever, by God’s grace, and within this congregation far beyond just this day. Because Easter is not just a Sunday, it is a “week of weeks”; there are seven more Sundays in the Easter season. Over the course of those weeks, we will be telling more Resurrection Stories about real people who face death-dealing circumstances and find new life. Just as we work to bring the kin-dom of heaven on earth, we can also expect that resurrection is possible within our own lives. We can be resurrected from despair over many things. It is not easy, for sure, but we are not alone, and we are not at the end of our stories, not until we can sing with Celie’s conviction, “I am beautiful!” Just like an architect puts down a vision of a skyscraper that hasn’t broken ground yet, Christ’s resurrection gives us a vision of God’s future, full of resurrection stories. It is up to us who receive that vision to live into it. Christ has been raised, and we are being raised, and we shall be raised forever. Alleluia!