Announcing the Resurrection is Women's Work
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Friends, listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to Matthew, the 28th chapter, verses 1-10 and 16-20.
After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. 2 And suddenly there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3 His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow. 4 For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. 5 But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. 6 He is not here, for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. 7 Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” 8 So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy and ran to tell his disciples. 9 Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. 10 Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted. 18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit 20 and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
This is the word of God for the people of God.
“Announcing the Resurrection is Women’s Work: A Sermon for Easter Sunday”
Before the Men Knew Anything
It was still dark. Matthew’s precise about this. The sun had not yet crested the hills outside Jerusalem. The stone was still sealed. The guards were still at their post. The men, for all we’re told in the Gospels, were still locked behind doors, tangled in paralyzing grief, racked with shame, and bound by fear. They had run. They had denied. They had watched from a distance or not at all.
And we shouldn’t fault them. The man they had been following for several years, who said that he was one with God, that he was the Son of Man—coded language for being the messiah—this man had been condemned to death and executed in the most brutal and public way that the world had yet invented. No, we shouldn’t fault Jesus’ followers who were in hiding. They didn’t know how the story would unfold. What might we have done under similar circumstances?
But we should remember who was there. Mary Magdalene was there. And so was another Mary who is only called “the other.” Tradition holds that this other Mary was the wife of Clopas and was present with Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Jesus at his death and burial. Despite having the same name in the text, early Christian accounts suggest that she was Mary’s sister and therefore Jesus’ aunt.
So, on that morning, when it was still dark, before the sun had risen, before the announcement, before the earthquake, before the angel arrived dressed in white. These two women were already on their way to the tomb.
Let that sit for a moment. The first witnesses to the resurrection weren’t Peter, John, Andrew, James (who was the son Clopas and “the other” Mary), the other James, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, Thaddaeus, or Simon the Zealot. They were women. Women whose testimony, under Roman law and under the social customs of first-century Judaism, was considered legally insufficient. Women whose voices were systematically discounted in the public and religious life of their world.
And yet. God chose them. Not despite their marginalization, but as if to announce, from the very first moment, that the logic of the resurrection is not the logic of empire. It’s not the logic of patriarchy. It’s not the logic of a world that decides who counts and who doesn’t. The resurrection begins at the margins. It always has.
What the Angel Said and What Jesus Said
The angel speaks first: “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Go quickly and tell his disciples.”
Go and tell. That is the first commissioning of Easter morning. Not a quiet suggestion. Not a gentle invitation. A directive. Go. Tell. Announce the resurrection. And who receives it? Mary Magdalene and the other Mary.
But then, and don’t rush past this, on their way, Jesus himself meets them. They take hold of his feet. They worship. And Jesus echoes the angel almost word for word: “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee.”
Notice what Jesus does here. He calls the male disciples his brothers and he sends women to tell them. Read that again. The risen Christ, in his first post-resurrection appearance to any human being, commissions women to be the bearers of the news to men. He reverses the entire assumed hierarchy of who speaks and who listens, who leads and who follows, who carries authority and who receives it.
In a world where women could not testify in court, Jesus makes women the primary witnesses to the most consequential event in human history. In a world where women were taught at the feet of men, Jesus sends women to teach men. The first sermon ever preached about the resurrection was preached by Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to a room full of frightened men who desperately needed to hear it. These Marys and Jesus’ mother, Mary, have rightly been called apostles to the apostles and disciples.
Go and tell. Twice in one morning, the first proclaimers of the resurrection are commissioned. The first preachers of Easter are women. This is not incidental to the story. This is the story. One detail on which all four gospels agree is that women went to the tomb first and women announced Jesus’ resurrection first.
And still, despite clear evidence to the contrary, the church has systematically barred women from ministry in almost every form.
The Long Silence the Church Imposed
Let’s say it plainly because particularly on Easter we need to be honest: the church has sinned against women. Not accidentally. Not mildly. Systematically, theologically, institutionally, the church took the very people whom God chose to first announce the resurrection and said that their voices didn’t count. Sit in the pew. Raise the children. Teach the children and other women. Make the casseroles. But don’t preach. Don’t lead. Don’t speak with authority.
The church twisted Paul’s letters, letters written to specific, struggling communities in specific historical moments into universal gag orders. They read 1 Timothy 2:12—“I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.”—as the final word on women’s leadership for all time and all places. But they conveniently ignored the context of Paul’s language (Paul used words that are better translated as “husband” and “wife”) and they also ignored what Paul wrote everywhere else.
In the very same letter (1 Timothy 3:11), Paul discusses the qualifications for women to be deacons. In Romans 16:1, Paul commends Phoebe to the church at Rome, calling her a deacon and a benefactor, using the same Greek word for deacon that he uses when referring to himself and to Timothy. He then greets Priscilla before her husband Aquila, almost certainly because she was the senior leader of the pair. He names Junia as “prominent among the apostles” (the church would later try to give her a male name and erase a woman from such great standing among the apostles).
The selective reading of Paul that silenced women was never neutral scholarship. It was political maneuvering to maintain the power of men at the expense of women and anyone else who didn’t conform to what was considered “masculine,” “manly,” and in line with the preferred and favored gender identity of the time. Christianity wasn’t being particularly original in elevating men over women and anyone considered less than the male ideal. Remember, Mosaic law forbade a man “whose testicles [were] crushed or whose penis [was] cut off” to enter the assembly of God (Deuteronomy 23:1). Religions have a long and infamous history of excluding people without penises or whose penises didn’t pass muster from accessing and holding power.
We have to recognize that the same impulse that told women they couldn’t preach told them they couldn’t vote, couldn’t own property, couldn’t practice medicine or law, and couldn’t testify in their own defense. The church didn’t just reflect that culture; it provided the theological architecture. It gave patriarchy the blessing of God. And that is a sin. It deserves to be named as such.
Fannie Lou Hamer knew what it was to have her voice suppressed by systems that claimed God’s blessing. A sharecropper’s daughter from the Mississippi Delta, the youngest of twenty children, she educated herself by studying her Bible because the plantation system, a system that was nearly unchanged before and after emancipation, gave her no other schooling. She committed hundreds of verses to memory. She sang spirituals as a form of prayer and protest, singing “This Little Light of Mine” while she and her neighbors were held on a bus by police after trying to register to vote.
When she was arrested and jailed in Winona, Mississippi, in 1963 and beaten so severely that she suffered permanent kidney damage, she asked her cellmate, a teenage girl, to sing with her, because she needed God to be present in that cell. Her faith was not decorative. It was the substance of her survival.
And when she testified before the Credentials Committee of the 1964 Democratic National Convention, describing the violence she had endured simply for trying to exercise the rights the Constitution guaranteed, President Lyndon Johnson was so threatened by the power of her voice that he called an impromptu press conference just to bump her off live TV. The most powerful man in the world interrupted his own schedule to silence a Black woman from Mississippi. He didn’t succeed and the networks ran her testimony in full that evening. She educated a nation.
The church that told women like Fannie Lou Hamer to be quiet was not following Jesus and it wasn’t just following empire. It was constructing empire under the disguise of faith.
The Women Who Went Anyway
Here’s the thing about resurrection: you can’t suppress it. You can try. You might be able to make it quiet or push it far to the margins, but resurrection will eventually conquer any power that tries to stop it. Jesus overcame death and the grave. The powers of this world don’t stand a chance.
Women went anyway. They preached anyway. They led anyway. They built the church often while the institution was busy telling them they were out of order.
The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis has served as senior minister of Middle Collegiate Church in New York City for two decades, building one of the most joyful, multiracial, and radically affirming congregations in the country. She preaches with the full weight of the Black church tradition and the full range of her own prophetic voice on racism, on democracy, and on the sacred worth of every human being. She didn’t ask the church’s permission. She followed God’s lead and did the work.
The Rev. Dr. Serene Jones serves as president of Union Theological Seminary, one of the most storied institutions of theological education in the world, a place that shaped Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, and many others. She’s a systematic theologian whose work on trauma and grace has opened the gospel to people the church had given up on. She’s training the preachers and scholars who will carry the faith into the next generation.
The Rt. Rev. Dr. Katherine Jefferts Schori became the first woman elected Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in 2006, leading 2.4 million Anglicans through some of the most turbulent years in that denomination’s history. Conservative provinces of the Anglican Communion threatened to break away over her election. She served faithfully for nine years anyway.
The Rt. Rev. Yvette Flunder is the Presiding Prelate of The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, a Black Queer Pentecostal woman who built a movement at the intersection of the Black Pentecostalism and radical Queer affirmation. A woman who has been told her whole life that she had to choose between her Blackness and her Queerness, between her faith and her full self. She refused to choose. She built a network of clergy and churches instead. She’s proof that the Spirit doesn’t wait for institutions to catch up before doing something new.
And just 11 days ago, the Most Rev. and Rt. Hon. Dame Sarah Mullally—who has the coolest ecclesiastical title other than maybe the Pope—was installed as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury. The first woman to hold that office in its more than 1400-year history. A former nurse who spent years at the bedside of cancer patients before she was ever ordained, she processed into Canterbury Cathedral and took her seat in a chair that had never held a woman. She is now the spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide.
But Archbishop Mullally, Bishop Flunder, Bishop Jefferts Schori, the Rev. Dr. Jones, the Rev. Dr. Lewis, and Mrs. Hamer are far from the only women who have broken significant ground in the church, and they are not the end of this story. Yes, it might have taken 1,400 years from the founding of the See of Canterbury for a bishop to be a woman, but in many parts of the church women continue to be excluded from ministry. Some parts of the church are still failing to do what God did on Easter morning before sunrise. God is patient. God is also very persistent.
Go and Tell. Your Commission Too
We’re now in the final movement of Matthew 28. The scene has shifted. We’re on a mountain in Galilee. The eleven disciples see the risen Jesus, who speaks to them: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” This is the Great Commission.
Even though Jesus speaks these words to eleven men, the Great Commission isn’t given to a credentialed elite. It’s not given only to those who never wavered. It’s given to a group of people on a hillside. A group of men who never missed an opportunity to screw up. People who had failed, fled, and doubted and it’s given to us too.
That commission has always been women’s work. From the first moment. From before the sun came up on the first Easter morning. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary didn’t wait for a church council to vote on whether they were qualified. They ran from the tomb with great prophetic joy.
Here’s the call this Easter day. Not just to celebrate the resurrection, but to proclaim the resurrection. To live like resurrection people.
Do we believe it enough to open every door of this church and every door of Christian leadership to women, without qualification, without asterisks, without the quiet assumption that men are the default and women are the exception?
Do we believe it enough to advocate for women’s leadership in the broader church? To refuse to give our fellowship, our dollars, our participation to institutions that still use the name of God to keep women out?
Do we believe it enough to actively seek out, encourage, fund, and follow women preachers, pastors, theologians, bishops, not as a progressive gesture, but as a theological conviction rooted in what happened before sunrise on the first Easter morning?
And if we believe those things, do we also believe that we must affirm gender expansive people and platform gender expansive leaders? Do we have enough faith not just to move mountains, but to break the titanic grasp of the gender binary?
This is not a secondary issue. This is about whether we believe the resurrection. Because if we believe it, if we really believe that Jesus conquered death and that the first thing he did was commission women to carry the Good News, then we can’t build churches and communities that tell women to sit down and shut up. We can’t. The two things are incompatible.
The church is still catching up to Easter morning. Let’s help it get there.
Alleluia.
Christ has been raised from the dead,
the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
For as in Adam all die, *
so also, in Christ shall all be made alive. Alleluia. Amen.