Show Notes
In this joyful episode of Peaceable and Kind, host Derek Vreeland celebrates the Easter season with reflections on how the resurrection of Jesus Christ transforms everything—from how we view the cross to how we live with hope in a broken world.
As Lent gives way to Easter, Derek invites listeners into the celebration of resurrection life. Drawing from scripture, church tradition, and personal Easter experiences—from pancake breakfasts to fire pit hot dog roasts—he shows how the resurrection shifts our understanding of defeat and death into triumph and new creation.
Join Derek as he begins a new series exploring the lasting impact of the resurrection. You’ll be encouraged to view your suffering through the lens of Jesus’ victory and reminded that the light of resurrection still shines in today’s darkness.
Key Takeaways:
The resurrection of Jesus is the foundation of Christian faith—it’s not metaphor, but a historical, physical reality.
Without resurrection, the cross looks like defeat; with it, the crucifixion becomes a moment of divine victory.
Resurrection reframes how we experience despair, allowing us to live with unshakable hope even in dark times.
Christian traditions—like Easter gatherings and communal meals—help anchor us in joy and the story of new life.
Choosing silence and holding onto hope in the midst of chaos can become a powerful witness to the peace and kindness of Christ.
Whether you’re basking in the light of Easter or struggling to hold onto hope, this episode offers encouragement grounded in the good news that resurrection changes everything.
Scriptures mentioned in this episode:
1 Corinthians 15:13–14
1 Timothy 3:16
Psalm 30:3–5
John 8:3–11
Revelation 21:4
Preorder Derek’s new book, Incarnation: 8 Lessons on How God Meets Us here: https://amzn.to/42jSZAs
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Transcript
Narrator: Welcome to Peaceable and Kind, the podcast where we explore the transformation. Of living out Jesus’ call to peace and kindness in our everyday lives. Each week your host, Derek Vreeland, will delve into the stories, scriptures, and practical steps that help us embody these essential Christian virtues.
Derek Vreeland: Welcome back to another episode of Peaceable and Kind. I am your host, Derek Vreeland, and thank you for joining me for this episode. And if you are new to Peaceable in Kind, I would love to hear your feedback. If you want to leave a rating or review wherever you’re listening to this podcast That helps a lot. And if you enjoy Christian content like this, let me encourage you to share this episode or another episode, one of our previous episodes. uh with someone that you know who might appreciate it. I got a text uh just a couple of days ago. uh from someone who was listening to the podcast and had reached out to me because they have my number and I’m not giving my number out to everyone but you can Find me on social media if you’d like to reach out, send me a message. I’m on Blue Sky, I’m on Threads, Instagram, Facebook. and the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. You can find me out there at Derek Vreeland and send me a message and let me know what you think. Well, we have arrived in the season of Easter. Here at Peaceable and Kind, we’ve been spending time during the season of Lent. Pursuing the cross for the season of Lent is a bit of a journey with Jesus to the cross, but last Sunday was Easter Sunday. So I hope that you are experiencing the joy that comes from Easter in the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus You know, we worship on Sunday mornings, at least most Christians worship on Sunday morning because every Sunday morning marks the resurrection of Jesus. But one time a year, we just go all out and have this great big celebration of the resurrection, this celebration we call Easter And it seems to me as a pastor who, well, I’ve been a pastor for more than 25 years, I’ve been in the church more than 30 years. And it seems to me that Easter and Christmas, these are the two times of the year that if people are going to consider going to church, they’ll go uh either Christmas or Christmas Eve or Easter Sunday morning and I’m so glad that they do. So I’m not sure what you are doing this year to celebrate the resurrection, hopefully uh you’re able to worship on Sunday or or sometime this weekend. Um our church has a couple of different traditions and one of our newish traditions Is that we serve pancakes in the church four-year before church. Now we’ll have hundreds and hundreds of people every year. I don’t know how many people come to church. Um on Easter Sunday. I I suppose as a as a pastor I should know that because if pastors talk about attendance in their church, they’re going to talk about the Easter attendance. Uh but it’s hundreds and hundreds, I don’t know, close to maybe a thousand people. We can fit fifteen hundred people in our sanctuary, and it seemed pretty full. on Sunday. And so we’ll have a ton of people in church, but I don’t know how many pancakes that we serve or how many people we serve pancakes, but we have this very large foyer that gives us space uh to serve these pancakes. And we have brought in a guy, he’s he’s local, and he calls himself the pancake man And he has this long griddle and he has a motorized uh pancake batter distributing machine that will distribute the batter right on top of the griddle And he says he can do over a thousand pancakes an hour. It’s actually fun to watch. But I love our pancake breakfast before church. Because a couple of things happen every Easter Sunday with our pancake breakfast. One, uh, people experience community. You know, when you when you shuffle into church and you shuffle out, it it’s hard to really connect with anyone outside of the people you went to church with. But our pancake breakfast, we have tables set up in various places in our four-year. We have a multi-purpose room. We seat over a hundred in there. We also have a coffee shop. Some people take their pancakes over there. But as I walk around before church on Sunday morning, I’m always excited when I see People sitting at a table that maybe didn’t know each other. And so real community happens. And as a pastor, that brings me great joy. But I won’t deny that there are some other kind of pragmatic benefits of our pancake breakfast before Easter Sunday worship Um, because people get to church early, which I like as as a pastor, and just personally, I tend to be an on-time kind of person. In fact, I’m usually early to anything. And I won’t lie, I do silently judge people who show up late. So forgive me. If that’s you, if you’re just a constantly showing up late kind of person, please forgive me. because I have judged you in my heart. Uh so I love that our pancake breakfast gets people to church early. They start filing into the sanctuary before the worship service starts. And then the other kind of very pragmatic thing that happens with our pancake breakfast is everyone gets all sugared up and it brings a different kind of energy to our worship service. And it makes it feel like a real celebration. And so I love worshiping on Easter Sunday because In the season of Lent, it’s a time of fasting and giving things up. It’s it’s self-reflective. Lent is about confessing our sins and repenting and recognizing the brokenness in our world and we’re journeying with Jesus to the cross and his death. It’s just a very foreboding and sort of dark season But with Easter Sunday, and this year Easter came so late, it is fully springtime and Easter Sunday worship. is an experience like no other. And the pancakes and simple carbohydrates really, really add to the energy and the sense of celebration. For our church, we also do an Easter egg hunt for kids after church, which is always so much fun. And now I have grandkids who are beginning to experience that. And I do want to go on record as saying that I am pro Easter egg. I am pro Easter egg hunt. I’m pro Easter bunny. I am pro Easter chocolate. I say bring it on. I even like the marshmallow peeps. Now, don’t judge me for that. See, I’m alright judging you who are late to show up to things. Now you’re probably judging me that I like I like the marshmallow peeps. Now, you you’ll see them in the grocery store. They’ll have these huge displays. But I don’t know who’s buying the peeps because no one I talk to likes them. But this year during Lent I was giving up sweets and desserts and candy and all that kind of stuff. So when it comes to Easter, I might bring on all the candy. Now I admit that I like the marshmallow peeps, but I like to eat maybe one or two during Easter and that’s it A couple of years ago I joked on a Sunday morning with our congregation uh that I like peeps even though everyone else hates them. And I was really just making a joke, because I like them, but they’re not my favorite candy But I ended up with people the next Sunday bringing me bags full of the Easter peeps. So I don’t like them that much. But what I’m saying is that the the the food and the treats and the candy, all that stuff. that we enjoy around the Easter season helps in the celebration. And so as a church we have traditions, our our family has traditions. So we have an Easter tradition with our family that goes back to actually my wife’s family. And what we do on Easter Sunday after church is we come home. And we light up the fire pit and we roast hot dogs and marshmallows. Actually, you can roast those marshmallow peeps pro tip. Um, and we all the family gathers around the fire pit and we have our little sticks and we just we heat up our hot dogs and we have music playing and we enjoy the afternoon. It is really, really simple, but it makes it easy that we don’t have to prepare some elaborate meal on a Sunday when my whole family, we usually get to church early, we’re serving and doing all sorts of things. And it goes back to my wife’s family when she was a little girl, she would go out to her grandparents’ farm and on my wife’s side, her entire extended family, they would be living in different places, going to different churches. But they’d all show up on the farm and there’d be a big bonfire and everybody would show up with their coolers and their lawn chairs and they would roast hot dogs. And so we started that tradition well over 10 years ago. And I love it so much. It is simple. It is fun. The family’s all standing around and we’re laughing and telling jokes. It’s such a great tradition. I love that it’s a part of how we celebrate Easter. And on the next bunch of episodes here on Peaceable and Kind, I want to explore the resurrection of Jesus, particularly how the resurrection changes things. Here on this episode, I’m simply just in this Easter joy mode. And I want to spend maybe a little bit of time today with a bit of an introduction on how the resurrection changes things, but for the next couple of episodes, I want to continue exploring the resurrection of Jesus because it really is that important. So, as we begin talking about the resurrection, it is first important to note that Christians from the very beginning believe in the physical literal historical resurrection of Jesus. We don’t think the story of the resurrection was some cleverly devised scheme by the disciples We don’t think it’s a myth. We don’t think the resurrection of Jesus is simply a metaphor, as if Jesus metaphorically rises in our hearts. We believe the resurrection of Jesus actually happened in history, that it was a true historical event, that Jesus had been dead. and in the tomb and on the third day literally, physically rose up from the dead. This is really the linchpin of our faith If Jesus did not actually rise up on the third day, then everything else we believe about Jesus really falls apart. The Apostle Paul says something similar to this in 1 Corinthians 15, where he writes, 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. See, if Jesus didn’t rise as he said he would, then he is not telling the truth. He is not to be believed. He is not to be trusted But Christians across the board from the beginning have always believed in the simple message That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, he was buried, and on the third day rose again. And so if the resurrection of Jesus is true, and I believe that it is with all of my heart, If it is true, then the resurrection, it changes everything. And the first thing that it changes is that the resurrection of Jesus changes How we see the cross. Because without the resurrection, the crucifixion of Jesus looks like defeat Jesus came on the scene in a long line of would-be Jewish kings, some even from Galilee. who were proclaiming the kingdom of God and gathering followers in a movement, and then they were suppressed by the Roman Empire. That a Jewish prophet would be declaring the kingdom of God and amassing a Jewish revival movement to challenge Rome wasn’t anything new And every single kingdom movement that was raised up in first century Israel was suppressed. So here comes Jesus of Nazareth. just another Galilean prophet declaring the kingdom of God, and he too was executed. His movement was to be stamped out by his crucifixion. But the resurrection changes everything. It changes how we look at the cross. Without the resurrection, the crucifixion of Jesus looks like defeat Now, Paul uses this little phrase in 1 Timothy 3:16, where he says Jesus was vindicated by the Spirit. There’s this line, it’s almost like a creed of sorts where Paul says of Jesus, he was revealed in the flesh, vindicated in spirit, seen by the angels. But it was the Holy Spirit that filled Jesus’ body with life, causing him to rise again. God the Father raised Jesus from the dead By the power of the Spirit. And it’s then the Spirit through the resurrection that is vindicating Jesus Because his crucifixion was a sentence that he had received, unjustly, for being a rival king. That’s ultimately why the Romans crucified Jesus. They crucified him with criminals as a criminal, as a political dissident. And we know this because the sign on the cross said King of the Jews. So he was executed for being a rival king And again Rome would handle these little rebellions by killing and executing the leaders, and so it looked like the Jesus of Nazareth, king of movement, was coming to an end. but the resurrection. It changes that. Though Jesus was sentenced, the spirit in raising Jesus from the dead vindicates Jesus proving Jesus to be right and to be true. Hey friends, I wanted to pause for just a second to let you know that my next book Incarnation, 8 Lessons on How God Meets Us, is available for pre-order. This Bible study is for individual devotional use or for small group discussion. Link to pre-order is in the show notes. It’s interesting to me that the crucifixion of Jesus from a historical point of view is awful. distasteful. It is morbid, it is gory, it’s hideous But what’s interesting is that it’s become the central symbol of the Christian faith. And why is that The resurrection. The resurrection changes this ugly implement of death into something beautiful. The sign of our salvation, the sign of our forgiveness, ultimately the sign of our flourishing as real human beings. It’s the resurrection of Jesus that paints the cross with new color. Because without the resurrection, the cross simply means defeat. Consider this. At the cross, we see King Jesus not conquering, but going down in defeat, not killing his enemies, but being killed Not shouting, but suffering, not retaliatory, but offering forgiveness. Not triumphant, but in some way disgraced At the cross, Jesus was not glorious, but hideous, not exalted, but humiliated, not celebrated, but mocked Not revered, but ridiculed, not grandiose but pitiful, not self-assured, but self-giving Crucifixion is not how kings take their throne. It is how criminals in the first century world would meet their doom. The resurrection of Jesus, though, changes all of that. The resurrection helps us see that Jesus on the cross, this is not a defeat This is actually the first sign of victory. It’s not defeat, it’s triumph The crucifixion of Jesus is not the end of his kingdom movement, rather, the cross is Jesus’ very enthronement. And we see all of this through the resurrection. It’s almost as if the resurrection of Jesus becomes a lens. At which we look through to see the cross. Because without the resurrection, the cross is awful. But through the lens of the resurrection, it changes our point of view And now we sing hymns and worship choruses about the power of the cross and about the power of the blood of Jesus. And all of this becomes such a powerful transformative event for us when we see it through the lens of the resurrection And so because of this, because the resurrection changing our view of the death of Jesus, it really gives me hope Easter every year really fills me up with hope. Because it’s the resurrection of Jesus that changes our morning into dancing. It changes our despair into hope. And it’s so easy, particularly in days like what we’re living in, to fall into a pit of despair and hopelessness. And I encounter people from time to time that are just overwhelmed with all of the problems in our world And it feels like it’s like a darkness that’s overtaking them. And for me, I just won’t allow the darkness to win. I am not going to let the darkness of despair and hopelessness get the best of me. Now, I don’t necessarily want to put my head in the sand and pretend like there’s not problems. I mean, we we all see the darkness of moral corruption and injustice all around us. We see it in our news feeds, we see it in conversations. We know we hear about in conversations with friends and and even with strangers. I recently had to go to our local DMV uh to get uh new license plates. And uh the guy sitting next to me uh started up a conversation Now I don’t know what your experience is with your local DMV, uh, but mine is always a challenge. I just needed to get new plates, and I was sitting there in the little waiting area for an hour. And there are all sorts of interesting people in the DMV. It’s so funny. It’s like, I don’t see some of these people in the grocery store at the post office, but at the DMV, it is just like a sea of humanity. All these different people, different faces. different smells. I know that sounds gross, but this is my experience in the DMV. And honestly, I am a pastor and so I I talk for a living. And I live in a very extroverted world and I have a very extroverted job, but but just within myself, I’m really an introvert. So if I get on an airplane, I put my AirPods in as fast as I can because I honestly don’t want to start a conversation with somebody on a plane. And so if I’m in a doctor’s office or stuck in the DMV waiting area, I honestly don’t want to have a conversation. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I’m just telling you the truth. So this guy, he starts up a conversation, and sadly, I had left my AirPods at home. And so, you know, he starts talking, and I acknowledged him initially I wasn’t going to be rude. I initially responded to something about just getting older and grandchildren, but then I got really silent. when he started talking about the mess the economy is in and corrupt judges and something the president had said on TV the night before. I just didn’t want to engage in that kind of conversation. So I I stared at the ground. And I sighed deeply within myself, but I just didn’t say anything. Because I knew that any comments of affirmation would only plunge this conversation deeper into the darkness, right? And I knew that any comments to the contrary would only end in an argument So I chose the third way of silence because I knew to dwell on the darkness with empty complaints, just complaining about everything that’s wrong. only gives the devil a foothold in my heart. Let me give you permission while I’m telling this story, let me give you permission to not always have an opinion on everything Let me give you the freedom to choose silence or to simply say, I have no opinion about that. It seems like today we are pressured to have thoughts and opinions about everything, particularly things that are wrong in this world. And maybe you have opinions, but I learned a long time ago that you don’t have to share with everyone everything you’re thinking all the time. It’s okay not to have an opinion, and it’s okay to be silent. Remember Jesus when he was confronted by the Pharisees, when they had grabbed this woman caught in the act of adultery, and Jesus is out in the street teaching, and they throw this woman at the feet of Jesus, and they say, We caught this woman in the act of adultery, and the law says we should stone her. What do you say? They were asking Jesus for his opinion. And how did Jesus respond to the Pharisees? The Bible says he stooped down and started riding in the dirt. He was being pressured and challenged. The Pharisees were trying to trap him. And his initial response was not to have an opinion, but it was silence. Now eventually, after taking a moment in silence, then Jesus very famously responds, Let him who has no sin cast the first stone. and Jesus broke the spell of the angry crowd and they all left and he he offered forgiveness to this woman. It’s a beautiful story. But in that I see such wisdom in certain moments of just being silent. Because sometimes silence can be like thunder. So when this man’s going on and on and on about everything that’s wrong with our world, I just was quiet. And I think he picked up the message and went back reading something on his phone. Really didn’t bother me after that. And, you know, I I know that things are bad. I mean, it’s not completely dark yet, but it’s getting there. There’s darkness of evil, corruption, injustice all around us. But we’re now living in the season of Easter And for me, the light of resurrection pushes back the darkness of despair. Because if God has raised Jesus from the dead, then Jesus can make all sorts of dead things come alive again. The joy I feel when I reflect on the resurrection gives me hope that life is not all suffering. It’s not all crucifixion. God is the God both of crucifixion and resurrection. It’s almost as if crucifixion and resurrection becomes a paradigm for our spiritual journey That we will go through seasons of crucifixion, seasons of suffering and loss, but that’s not the end of our story because that’s not the end of Jesus’ story. Yes, God will allow us to go through seasons of suffering. There is times of crucifixion and metaphorical death. But that always is going to lead to a resurrection, to new life, to things being made new And so this just fuels my worship. It causes me to want to worship God with all that I have. When I think about worship, I’m often reflecting on the Psalms. And here’s just a couple of verses from Psalm 30. This is Psalm 30, verses 3 through 5 in the message translation And I love the Psalms because they’re filled with praise. They’re filled with worship, with lines like these. All you saints, sing your hearts out to God. Thank him to his face. He gets angry once in a while, but across a lifetime there is only love. The nights of crying your eyes out give way to days of laughter And I know it feels like there’s times that we’re being crucified, but what we discover is that on the other side of crucifixion is resurrection. And in the light of resurrection, we actually see that our entire lives have been filled with love. The love of God that never leaves us, even in our darkest days. So playing a little bit with Psalm 30 here, it’s as if Jesus rose from the dead so that our nights of crying would give ways to days of laughter. Yes, when you’re going through the hardship, feel the feelings that are associated with suffering. Feel the feelings when they come, but take hope that one day Pain and sorrow and suffering will be no more because death will be no more. Well, I hope this ancient hope in the resurrection of Jesus fills you up today. I hope it sustains you. And then as you walk through your neighborhood or you walk through your school or workplace, I hope that this hope and light of resurrection pierces through the darkness of the people around you. May this hope in the resurrection of Jesus, may it be a little door for the gospel so that others may know the love of God revealed in Jesus and that they might be transformed just as we’re being transformed Well, I do hope you’re having a wonderful Easter celebration. We’re going to continue here on Peaceable Kind to talk about the resurrection of Jesus. But that’s all that we have for today. Thanks for listening. Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.