Where is Your Victory?
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, May 10, 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 Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, the 15th chapter, verses 12 to 28 and verse 55.
12 Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised, 14 and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and your faith is in vain. 15 We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. 17 If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. 19 If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
20 But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. 21 For since death came through a human, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human, 22 for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. 23 But each in its own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. 24 Then comes the end, when he hands over the kin-dom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. 25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 27 For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” But when it says, “All things are put in subjection,” it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him. 28 When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all.
58 “Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Friends, you’ve heard me say it before, some passages from the Bible are made for preachers. 1 Corinthians 15:55 is one of those passages: “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”
“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
Paul’s paraphrasing Hosea 13:9-10:
“I will destroy you, O Israel;
who can help you?
10 Where now is your king, that he may save you?
Where in all your cities are your rulers,
of whom you said,
“Give me a king and rulers?”
This is God’s judgement on Israel after they had requested a king, despite God’s words through the prophets that a king would not help them in the way they thought a monarchy would. And then, their king having failed them, they watched their kingdom collapse. They saw what it looked like when the powers of death had their way with a people.
But Paul takes that old lamentation and flips it. He takes what was once a threat and turns it into a taunt. A challenge. A dare.
Paul’s an interesting character to name grief for the community. He’s far from insulated from grief. He’s buried people including close friends. He’s preached to and written letters to communities where the dead were accumulating. He’s come close to death many times himself. But he’s also someone who once caused great grief and death to this very community. And still, as he holds the tension of causing grief and suffering it, he taunts death: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
Naming the problem: resurrection doubt
Friends, the passage we heard comes from a church that is not so different from us. The community in Corinth was made up of people who were trying to make sense of Jesus, trying to make sense of their own lives, trying to reconcile the faith they had received with the world in which they actually lived.
And there were people saying, “There is no resurrection of the dead.” Not just “I struggle to believe it,” but “that’s not a thing that happens.”
Paul doesn’t respond with a shrug and say, “Well, believe whatever you want.” He responds, “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain, and your faith has been in vain.”
That’s strong language. If Christ is not raised, the whole thing falls apart. Paul’s saying: resurrection is not an optional add‑on for people who like more mystical theology. It’s the center of the Christian imagination. Without resurrection, our faith collapses into wishful thinking.
Now, I know some of you hear that and think, “Okay, but resurrection is exactly what I struggle to believe.” Maybe you can get on board with Jesus as a teacher, as a liberator, as the one whose life shows us what love looks like in public. But a body raised from the dead? A whole future where the dead are raised and all things are made new? That can sound like a bit much.
If that’s you, you’re not alone, and you’re not outside the story. In fact, you’re sitting with the Corinthians, with people who have always struggled to imagine that death’s apparent finality is not the last word.
What is resurrection, really?
Part of the problem is that we’ve been handed some very strange images of resurrection: floating spirits, disembodied souls, zombies, a kind of spiritual escape hatch from the material world. But that’s not what Paul’s talking about. When Paul says “resurrection,” he’s talking about bodies. Real, actual, embodied life. Not ethereal souls finally leaving these “bad bodies” behind, but the healing, renewing, and raising up of bodies in God’s future. Resurrection is God saying, “I will not abandon creation. I will not abandon your body. I will not abandon the bodies that empire has crushed.”
The Corinth Paul was writing to was a city soaked in hierarchy: differences of class, wealth, gender, ethnicity, and status. Some bodies mattered more than others. Some lives were disposable. Some people were close to the centers of power; others were enslaved, exploited, or ignored. Sound familiar?
When Paul talks about resurrection, he’s not only comforting them with the idea that they will “go to heaven when they die.” He’s announcing that the God who raised Jesus from the dead intends to undo all the power structures that treat some bodies as sacred and others as expendable.
Resurrection says: the last word about your body isn’t what empire says, not what white supremacy says, not what Christian nationalism says, not what queerphobia says, not what ableism or fatphobia says. The last word about your body belongs to God, and God’s word is “life.”
Christ as first fruits: the beginning, not the whole harvest
Paul calls the risen Christ “the first fruits of those who have died.” “First fruits” is an agricultural image. It’s that first part of the harvest that comes in, the first ripe fruit on the vine. You don’t look at the first fruits and say, “Well, at least we got something.” You look at it and say, “This is the sign that the rest of the harvest is coming.”
When Paul calls Jesus “the first fruits,” he’s saying that what God did in the body of Jesus is the beginning of what God intends to do with all creation. Jesus is not the exception, but the pattern. It means that what God does with Jesus is what God will do with us, with our beloved dead, with creation itself.
And that’s a direct challenge to the way power works in our world. Because in our world, the way you keep people in line is by threatening them with some form of death: death of reputation; death of livelihood; social death, exile, exclusion; and sometimes, yes, physical death.
If you can convince people that the worst thing that can happen is to lose your life, or your place, or your status, and that after that there is only silence, you can control them. You can keep them quiet, compliant, manageable.
But resurrection says: the worst thing that can happen is not the last thing that can happen. The God who raised Jesus from the dead is not done yet.
The powers that be, and the power that is Paul says, “For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”
That language can sound violent if we’re not careful. Christians have absolutely abused this language to justify the domination of other religions, of colonized peoples, of women, of Queer and Trans people, of anyone who didn’t fit the imposed norm. “Look,” they said, “Christ will put enemies under his feet. And guess what? We get to act in his name.”
But look at who Paul names as the final enemy: death. Not “those people over there.” Not people who don’t believe like we do. Death.
And what are the allies of death? Everything that deals in death. Systems of white supremacy and racialized violence. Christian nationalism that worships power and control instead of Jesus. Economic systems that treat human beings as disposable for profit. Queerphobia and transphobia that tell people they’re better off dead than fully themselves. Ableism that treats some bodies as burdens rather than as bearers of God’s image.
Paul’s vision is not of Jesus trampling our human enemies. It’s of Jesus dismantling everything that allies itself with death. Ultimately that includes death itself.
When Paul says God will be “all in all,” he imagines a reality in which nothing stands opposed to the life of God, nothing is organized around death anymore. Every structure, every system, every “principality and power” that feeds on death is abolished.
Where death looks like it’s winning
Now, if we stopped here, this would just be a big beautiful theological picture, and you could leave thinking, “That’s nice. In some cosmic future, death won’t win.”
I don’t know about you, but I don’t live in that future. I live in a world where we are grieving, where we are all tired, where we are still reading the news and asking, “How is this happening?”
We see death’s shadow in so many places. So, when Paul says, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” it can sound like a triumph that skips over our lived experience. It can sound like a boast that ignores the reality we inhabit every day. It can sound like a victory lap we haven’t earned.
But what if those questions are not the words of someone pretending death doesn’t hurt? What if they’re the words of someone who has stared death in the face, who has watched their friends be martyred, who has felt the power of empire, and still dares to say, “You do not get the last word?”
Resurrection as courage, not escape
So, what does any of this mean for us, here, now, as a small community with limited capacity, as people who are tired, who are trying our best, and who are sometimes just hanging on?
First, resurrection is the promise that God is committed to this world and these bodies, which means that what we do here matters. How we love, how we resist, how we show up for one another, it all matters. Nothing done in love is wasted.
Second, resurrection gives us courage. If death is not the final word, then we are free to live authentically, to tell the truth, to resist systems of death, and to be honest about our own wounds. Death loses some of its power to intimidate us into silence.
Third, and this is important, resurrection courage doesn’t mean we all sign up for more and more exhausting activism, more and more commitments, more and more “doing” until we collapse. Some of you are already at your limit. Your days are full. Your bodies are tired. Your nervous systems are frayed.
If I stood here and said, “Because of the resurrection, you all must now go out and do ten more things for justice this week,” that wouldn’t be good news. That would be cruelty dressed up as piety. Not to mention that most of you would probably say, “Ok, show us your ten, pastor.” I ain’t got the time for two, let alone ten, new commitments and I doubt you do.
So what do we do?
So, what do we do with “Where, O death, is your victory?”
For some folks, the faithful response is simply to trust that God is not done with you. When you feel like everything is closed off, you might whisper, “This is not the end of my story.” That is an act of resistance.
For other folks, the faithful response is grief. You’ve lost people, dreams, communities. You’re sorrow, processed, unprocessed, and still processing. To let yourself grieve in the presence of the God who raises the dead is an act of faith. You don’t have to rush to hope. You can cry out, and in your crying you are still held by the One who promises new life.
Other people, particularly those of us who can’t stop asking what more we can and need to do, the faithful response is a small act of solidarity with someone whose life is under threat. Maybe we check in on a Trans friend who’s scared. Maybe we make a phone call to someone we don’t get to speak to often or we decide to give a small donation to some good cause, or we use our social media to amplify voices our friends and family would never otherwise hear.
Maybe you need to rest more or maybe you just need to keep showing up, praying with your souls and with what strength you can muster. Every act of love and every moment of lives lived in love testify to the forces of death that they cannot and will not have power over your life.
“Where is your victory?” as a daily question
The title of this sermon is “Where is Your Victory?” Sometimes we aim that question outward toward death and its allies; toward systems of oppression, toward the stories that tell us we are worthless, toward the numbness that keeps us from feeling.
But I also want you to hear that question as something you can carry with you in a gentler way. When you encounter something that feels like death, a conflict, a loss, an injustice, you might quietly ask, “Where is your victory?”
Not because you see the victory yet. Not because you are sure how the story ends. But because you are aligning yourself with the One who has already begun the harvest. You’re saying, “I do not yet see the resurrection here. But I’m staking my life on the God who has promised that death will not win.”
Ending in hope, not certainty
I want to be clear: this isn’t about certainty. You don’t have to walk out of here today with all your questions about resurrection resolved. Faith is not a multiple‑choice test with one right answer. Faith, in this sense, is more like leaning. It’s the direction you lean when you don’t have all the evidence.
Paul leans toward resurrection. He leans toward a God who will not abandon bodies, a God who will not surrender the world to death, a God who created the world good and desperately, urgently wants to reconcile the world to God’s self.
My friends, my hope for us, is that we, too, will lean in that direction. That when we see death seeming to win, we will remember that it is already on borrowed time. That when we feel the sting of sin and the weight of systems that harm, we will remember that they, too, are not eternal.
And that together, in whatever capacity we have day-to-day and in our ordinary lives, we will practice resurrection. Because Christ is raised, and the first fruits have already appeared. The harvest is not yet complete. But death’s victory is slipping through its fingers.
Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?
May our lives, in all their beauty, begin to answer: “It’s not here. Not anymore. Not forever.”
Amen.