Easter Sunday – Dis-order
This sermon was originally delivered on Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025. We recorded Rev. Brandon Nonnemaker, Ed.D., on 4/29/2025 to add it to this podcast series.
Easter doesn’t restore order—it upends it. This sermon celebrates the holy disruption of resurrection, where death is defeated, power is reversed, and grace runs wild. In a world shaped by control and conformity, we are invited to live as dis-orderly people of love, proclaiming that everything has changed—because Christ is risen.
The Glimpses of Grace podcast is a ministry of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville, Georgia. We are passionate about supporting the spiritual growth of souls, and we hope these sermons and conversations meet you where you are and enrich your soul as we all continue to make meaning in the world today.
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Transcript
Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed!
And everything is out of order.
Last night, we stood between darkness and dawn.
The nave was dim, we kindled new fire, told ancient stories,
sung psalms, and stepped into the stillness of a tomb.
We stood in the tension of dis-ease:
The women arrived at the tomb carrying spices and heavy hearts. They weren’t expecting joy. They weren’t expecting angels.
They came to do what was needed of them:
to tend to grief and to care for the body.
Instead, they found the stone rolled away,
the body gone, and their certainty shattered.
They left startled. Bewildered. And now here we are, Easter morning.
And the truth is, it’s still all out of place.
It’s dis-ordered:
The dead lives.
The grieving woman becomes the first preacher.
The garden, once a place of betrayal and death, is blooming with resurrection. The tomb is open, and God has broken the script.
Let’s be honest: we like order.
We love a plan. We crave stability, structure, predictability.
We expect life to work like a recipe—follow the instructions, get results. Beginning, middle, end.
Morning routines of brushing teeth, making coffee, getting out the door. Legal systems, life stages, life cycles…
the transformation from caterpillar, to chrysalis, to butterfly.
Checklists, fall to winter, winter to spring, academic calendars… Church liturgy.
And in a world ordered by exclusiveness, borders, barriers, and broken systems —resurrection is God’s resounding ‘no’ to death-dealing order. And God’s wild ‘yes’ to life in all its fullness.
Easter is not orderly.
Easter is dis-orderly grace.
It is the wildness of God unbound.
It is the breaking of every assumption and every expectation— every system that tells us what can and cannot be.
Easter is a holy disruption.
It is divine mischief, undoing what the world said was final.
Consider Mary.
She comes early, before the sun has risen.
Her heart is heavy with grief, her hands full of burial spices.
She’s ready to do the decent thing—to care for the dead.
But what she finds is unexpected:
the body is missing,
a couple angels in white appear,
a figure mistaken as a gardener speaks her name.
At that moment, the whole world turns upside down.
“Mary.”
It’s not just her name. It’s a revelation.
She turns. She sees…not just Jesus, but the world made new.
She believes. And then she goes.
She becomes the first preacher—not Peter, not John, not James. Mary.
Dis-ordered.
And the kingdom of God arrives.
This is what resurrection does.
It doesn’t just comfort—it confronts.
It doesn’t just soothe—it shakes.
It doesn’t just restore—it reverses.
It upsets the foundations of the systems that thrive on death:
empire, exclusion, exploitation.
It breaks the power of fear.
It interrupts the cycles of violence and despair.
It flips tables.
It refuses to go back to “business as usual.”
Because if Christ is risen—
then the old world has come undone.
Death no longer gets the last word.
The tomb has lost its grip.
Power, fear, hatred, greed…they don’t get to tell the end of the story. Love does. And things will not be the same.
So what do we do with this holy dis-order?
How do we live in a world that’s been turned upside down by grace? How do we live when God has thrown out the rulebook and said, “Behold, I am doing a new thing”?
We do what Mary did.
We open our eyes. We listen for our name.
We turn. We go. We proclaim.
We join the resurrection movement.
We become dis-orderly people—
We are truth-tellers in a world that prefers lies.
We love when it’s easier to hate.
We hope when it seems foolish.
We forgive when revenge seems to be the better option.
We choose joy—not because life is easy, but because Christ is alive. We weep with those who weep, and we stand with those cast out. We build tables that welcome all. We rise, again and again and again. Because resurrection isn’t complete.
It’s not just a moment.
It’s a movement. A revolution of grace.
A re-creation of everything.
And yes, it will mess with your life.
It will disrupt your priorities.
It will force you out of your comfort zone.
It will confuse, delight, challenge, and awaken.
It will break your heart and heal it again.
Because that’s what happens when death is defeated.
That’s what happens when love wins.
So don’t try to put your life back in order.
Don’t try to tame resurrection.
Happy Easter!
May you live in resurrection dis-order.
May you follow the voice that calls your name.
May you carry the news that changes everything:
The tomb is empty.
Christ is alive.
Love has overcome death.
Amen.