2025 Easter Message from Bishop Russell Kendrick

I’m not sure if it’s still true, but for most of my life, I remember that every year on Easter Sunday, one of the major television networks would wade into the waters of Christianity by airing one of the old classics—Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments. Both, oddly enough, starred Charlton Heston. Worse yet,  they’d show one of those sanitized  “life of Jesus” films where Jesus is portrayed as some sort of stoic plastic figure floating through life rather than the passionate liberator that we meet in the Gospels.

In my opinion, if there were ever a movie to watch on Easter, it would be The Shawshank Redemption.  It’s not explicitly Christian. There are no miracles or angels. But it is a story about freedom—about the triumph of life over the confining powers of death and despair. And that is the heart of our Easter faith.

The movie follows Andy Dufresne [DUFRAIN], a banker wrongly imprisoned for murder, and his friendship with another inmate named Red. While Andy’s dramatic escape after twenty years is the story’s climax, the movie is ultimately about a deeper liberation--- not just from prison walls but from the shackles of regret, fear and hopelessness. This is captured in one of the memorable scenes in the film when Andy and Red are leaning against the cold concrete walls. Andy says:  “I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying.”  Until that moment, Red didn’t even know he had a choice. And that brings us again to Easter.

In Luke’s account of the resurrection, the grieving women come to the tomb expecting to find a locked up prison and a dead body. Instead, they are met by an empty cell and angels who ask, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.”   The tomb is empty. Christ is alive. He is free.  And because He is alive and free, we can be free too.

As one of our hymns proclaims:

He is risen, he is risen! Tell it out with joyful voice;He has burst His three days’ prison; let the whole wide earth rejoice!Death is conquered, we are free—Christ has won the victory.

Or in the words of Paul: "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free." (Galatians 5:1)

We are free.  Just let that sink in. 

Free from whatever keeps us bound up in fear.Free from whatever shackles us  to the past.

Free from the restraining narratives of scarcity and despair that whisper, “This is all there is.”Free from the prison of despair.

But here’s the thing: this Easter freedom isn’t just about us. We are not simply freed from something; we are freed for something.

We are freed for compassion in a world shackled by hatred and contempt.

We are freed for hope in a world paralyzed by fear and threats.   

We are freed for peace in a world threatened by bullies and tyrants.

We are freed—not as a license to do whatever we please, but as a call to embody the way of love.

This is what it means to be Easter people. This is what it means to be church.

There’s a scene in Shawshank that captures this aspect of freedom.  Andy locks himself in the warden’s office, puts on a LP record of an opera and blares it over the loudspeakers. The music echoes through the walls of the prison yard, and for an instant, everyone stops and listens---a moment of unexpected beauty in a place designed to crush the spirit.  As Red reflects: "I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about... but I like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words."

Andy didn’t just care about his own freedom, he wanted others to have it too. So he turned up the volume of something so beautiful that transcended their reality as they knew it. That is our calling too.

We are called to turn up the volume of God’s love and mercy  in this world. 

The freedom we celebrate in Easter does not mean life gets easy.  There can be risk because there is still much in this world that binds, bullies, and breaks.  But we are not without choice.  At the end of Shawshank, Red is finally free from prison, and repeats Andy’s line,

“It comes down to a simple choice.  Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

Because Christ is risen, we have been given the freedom to live.To live as people who know that love is stronger than death.To live as people marked as Chrit’s own forever, sent forth in peace to love and serve the Lord.

So let’s go forth and live—not just for ourselves, but for the sake of the world.

And as we go, let’s invite others to live, too.

Alleluia. Christ is risen.   The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.