By Miles Layton

Happy Easter!

Since the mainstream media wants to distract everyone with other stories on Easter – instead, here’s the most important story of the day, year and for eternity – “He is risen!”

Since I’ve been traveling from church to church on any given Sunday to show folks our culture of faith in Northeast NC, I thought I’d pay homage to my family’s church — St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Edenton – on Easter Sunday. 

The end of the story includes photos from Pam Hadden, who photographed a sunrise service at Holiday Island; from Shane Cash, who photographed St. George’s service — Hosanna in the highest!; and from Claudia Dodson, who photographed an Easter egg hunt in Edenton. We also include words of wisdom from Roger Coleman and a column by Jonathan Tobias.    

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Rev. Perdue Leads St. Paul’s in Easter Reflection on Restlessness, Resurrection, and Being Found

EDENTON — The sun had already climbed well above the tree line by the time the congregation of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church settled into their pews on Easter Sunday morning, but the mood inside the sanctuary carried the quiet anticipation that comes only once a year. Flowers banked the altar. The processional had wound its way through the nave. And when the Rev. Melody Perdue stepped into the pulpit, she opened not with a triumphant declaration but with a question.

“I know you are looking for Jesus,” she said, her voice measured and warm. “Have you?”

It was a question she would return to again and again over the next several minutes — turning it over, examining it from every angle, pressing it gently against the hearts of the people seated before her. Her Easter sermon, drawn from the 28th chapter of Matthew, became less a lecture on Scripture and more an extended conversation about the universal human experience of longing.

‘A Common Human Experience’

Perdue opened the service by reading the morning’s Gospel passage aloud — the account of Mary Magdalene and the other Mary arriving at the tomb in the early hours after the Sabbath, only to be greeted by an earthquake, a descending angel, and guards who collapsed in terror. The angel’s instruction was direct: do not be afraid, Jesus is not here, he has been raised.

“Then go quickly,” Perdue read, “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.’”

The passage concluded with the women running from the tomb — shaken, joyful, and breathless — only to encounter Jesus himself on the road, who offered a greeting so ordinary it might have seemed anticlimactic had it come from anyone else: Greetings.

From that text, Perdue drew her sermon’s central thread, and she began it not in the ancient world but in a very familiar one: a person walking into a room and immediately forgetting why.

“I’ve noticed an increasing frequency of this the whiter my hair gets,” she said, drawing laughter from the congregation. “Thankfully, this is a common human experience. And it surely would be convenient if an angel showed up like in today’s gospel and said, ‘I know what you are looking for.’ Sadly, it doesn’t work for us that way. We’re left with that feeling of frustration and restlessness.”

But Perdue was quick to move beneath the surface of that small, comic frustration toward something considerably deeper.

“On a deeper level,” she said, “the frustration and restlessness of feeling that not just a small object is missing, but something bigger, something more important is missing. A feeling that we’re supposed to be doing something, and we’re not quite sure what it is. Maybe a restless questioning that leaves us wondering, Is this it? Am I missing something? We feel it sometimes. There’s an ache, a longing for something more. People write poems and songs about it.”

A Teenager Staring at the Ceiling

Perdue then offered a rare and disarming glimpse into her own past, describing herself as a young person lying in bed at night, staring upward, unsatisfied with the contours of the life she could imagine ahead.

“I used to lie in my bed and stare up at the ceiling and wonder, is this it? Is this all there is?” she recalled. “Am I supposed to just grow up and get a job and maybe get married, have kids, have the house with the white picket fence? Is there something more? Is there something I am supposed to be doing that I don’t even know about?”

It was a portrait of adolescent restlessness that many in the congregation appeared to recognize — heads nodding quietly in the pews, the particular recognition of a feeling one rarely hears named from a pulpit.

That personal admission served as the bridge back to the two Marys in the Gospel text, whom Perdue described with evident compassion. She asked the congregation to consider what it would have felt like to have followed someone who represented their deepest hopes — not just personal hopes but communal ones — only to watch him die violently.

“To have the one in whom you have placed all your hope, not just for yourself but for your country, your people,” she said, “the one for whom you left behind life as you once knew it, the one in whom you poured what little resources you had and believed in them — to have that one violently and viciously taken from you in the most brutal way possible.”

The women, she noted, had not gone to the tomb expecting a resurrection. They had gone to grieve, to mourn, and simply to be near the one they loved. What they found instead was seismic — literally and otherwise.

A Jesus Who Defies Expectations

The earthquake, the angel, the fainted guards, the rolled-away stone — Perdue walked the congregation through the scene with a storyteller’s eye for detail, pausing to offer what she called a loose translation of the angel’s opening words.

“Don’t freak out,” she said. “That’s loosely translated.”

More laughter. Then a pivot.

“I know you’re looking for Jesus,” Perdue continued, returning to the angel’s actual words. “However, the Jesus you’re looking for isn’t here.”

The Jesus the women sought, she explained, was not the Jesus they were about to encounter. The risen Christ described by the angel was already moving, directing and calling people toward him. He was not available to be contained, she said — not by governing authorities, not by religious authorities, and not by death itself.

“This Jesus, who has always defied expectations, cannot be kept — cannot be controlled,” Perdue said. “Not by the governing authorities, not by the religious authorities, and not by death itself.”

And then, suddenly, the women encounter him on the road. Running. Breathless. The angel had told them not to be afraid, and yet.

“They’re probably freaking out,” Perdue said.

And then Jesus speaks. Greetings.

Perdue lingered on that word longer than one might expect. It was so plain, so human — and yet, she argued, that was exactly the point.

“I guess I am not sure what I would expect someone to say after they rose from the dead,” she said, “but greetings works. But that’s just what a person would say. This person Jesus — yet at the same time, the one through whom the universe was made, who spoke the world into being. God, who came to the planet and took on the form of a human being simply to be with us, his creation, to connect, to restore relationship, to bring healing and wholeness in our relationship with God and our relationships with one another. Greetings, he says.”

The Gift That Keeps Us Looking

In the sermon’s final movement, Perdue drew the threads together and placed them directly in front of the congregation — not as ancient history, but as present invitation.

“Maybe the reason why we still find ourselves so restless,” she said, “or occasionally that feeling that something is missing — maybe the reason why we feel that ache and that longing is because no matter how much we try to fill it looking for stuff, and no matter how hard we try to ignore it by looking for something to do, we still haven’t found what we’re looking for.”

She paused.

“But maybe what we’re really looking for is not a thing or something you need to be doing, but a person.”

And maybe, she added, the restlessness itself is not a problem to be solved but a grace to be received — “the gift that keeps us looking, keeps us searching for the one about whom the church testifies was fully human and fully God.”

She returned once more to her own story. As a teenager, someone had told her about Jesus and invited her to follow him. She accepted.

“While I know I will still sometimes forget why I walk into a room,” she said, “I will never forget the moment I realized that the something missing feeling I always had was gone. Ever present with me was and is a relationship with the living God that is more soul satisfying than anything you will find on this earth.”

She closed with the same words the angel had spoken outside the empty tomb — words she offered now not as ancient record but as present address.

“Maybe that word from the divine messenger speaks the same word to the empty places of your heart today,” she said. “I know you are looking for Jesus. May you find and be found by him today.”

“Amen,” the congregation answered.

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church holds regular Sunday services. The Rev. Melody Perdue serves as rector.

Thoughts on Easter

By Roger Coleman

At its heart, the Christian faith is a protest movement – a protest of the forces that dehumanize, degrade, or destroy God’s creation.

War is the most obvious form of this destruction. It is to be protested at all costs.

Easter is a reminder of this cost.

The Resurrection is the belief that hope exists in the protest – that love will prevail, that sins will be forgiven, that Creation will be redeemed.

Hope is Risen. Happy Easter.

Roger Coleman is a pastor and a former member of the Edenton Town Council.

The Easter Way of Seeing

By Jonathan Tobias

There’s something about flowers that quietly proves the reality of Easter.

Tulips and anemones, roses and the modest columbine, jessamine and azalea—they arrive each spring as interruptions of beauty, sudden and gratuitous, breaking into the ordinary rhythm of things. We plant the bulbs, tend the soil, and yet when they appear, it feels less like expectation fulfilled and more like visitation. As though, for a moment, something from a higher world has slipped into this one.

Easter is like that.

Christmas can be told. It belongs to history. The Gospels narrate it with names, places, and events. It has a grammar we recognize.

But Easter resists narration. A reality, yes—a true event, indeed—but It does not fit easily into the sequence of days. It breaks the frame. It is, as the ancient Church dared to say, the Eighth Day—something beyond the cycle, beyond the week, beyond the limits of time as we ordinarily experience it.

Christmas can be told.
Easter must be sung.

And yet we speak of Easter as though tomorrow on Monday, we will say it came and went. As though it were a date on the calendar now past.

But Easter, in its deepest sense, does not end. It becomes a way of seeing.

The theologian David Bentley Hart has called this an “Easter optic”—not an argument imposed upon the world, but a vision that reveals the world as it truly is.

There is, after all, another way of seeing. One that assumes that death, decay, and time have the final word. Houses age. Gardens fade. Even the most beautiful things become, eventually, memory.

And then there is the Easter vision.

Not a denial of darkness, but a transfiguration of it. A way of seeing in which nothing given in love is ever truly lost, and in which even what has passed into silence is held within a deeper, brighter life.

The earliest Christians believed that even the depths of death were not beyond the reach of Easter—that Christ descended into the darkness not to visit it, but to fill it with light.

This vision does not close its eyes to the world’s wounds. It sees the injustice, the cruelty, the quiet meanness, the grief that settles into the bones of things. But it sees them in a new light.

For if the most radical injustice—death itself—has been overcome, then no lesser wrong can have the final word.

It is only because of Easter that there can be a true demand for justice: the hope, even the insistence, that all things will be set right—not by our power, but by a love stronger than death.

The Easter way of seeing is, finally, a kind of joy.

Not a shallow brightness, not a denial of sorrow, but a deeper gladness: the knowledge that we are held in an infinite love that will not let creation go. A joy that can endure even in the dark, even in pain, because it trusts that everything—everything—will one day be gathered into light.

Easter does not pass away. It does not fade with the lilies or wait politely for next year.

As a way of seeing, it remains.

And in that light, one truth stands above all others:

The only thing that dies in Easter is death itself.

Easter, once here, is never done.

Pam Hadden’s photos from Holiday Island’s Easter sunrise service

Shane Cash’s Photos of St. George’s Sunday Celebration

Claudia Dodson’s photos from Edenton’s Easter egg hunt on the Courthouse green and from around town.