By Bishop Sam Rodman
A recent article from The New York Times* contained an account of author Melissa Kirch’s surprise encounter with the Northern Lights. She wrote, “I saw the Northern Lights by accident one late summer night, driving with a friend on an unpopulated stretch of highway that sliced through North Dakota cornfields. Against a canvas of total darkness, something like an acid cityscape sprang up around our car, electric green towers and skyscrapers, spanning the space between the road and heaven. It was one of the most exciting things I’d ever experienced.
“We stopped the car and ran out into the fields, trying to get closer to the light, trying to somehow touch these pulsating columns of color that arrived from nowhere and now formed a simultaneously real and impossible landscape.”
I love this description of the sudden and inspiring ways the natural world can surprise us with its beauty and awaken in us the sense of wonder and awe that is too often drowned out by the noise and distractions that surround us in our everyday lives.
I also love her choice of words in the last sentence, where she describes what she saw as “a simultaneously real and impossible landscape.” If you have ever seen the Northern Lights, you know exactly what she is talking about. But the Northern Lights are not the only source of this awe and wonder, though it may be one of the most spectacular. Have you ever been on a whale watch and seen a whale breach; or caught sight of a rare, exotic bird; or even admired the beauty and wonder of your own backyard when the morning sunlight catches the mist as it rises over the wet grass?
I find myself wondering, in this Easter season, if this isn’t similar to the description of what the disciples experienced in their encounters with the risen Jesus after that first Easter: “simultaneously real and impossible.”
The Easter season, in the lectionary, is peppered with these resurrection appearances, where Jesus shows up out of the blue and people have trouble recognizing him at first. Think of the two people walking on the road to Emmaus when Jesus is suddenly beside them. Or Jesus’ encounter with Mary Magdelene, in John’s Gospel, when she supposes he is the gardener, until he calls her by name. These encounters invite us into that place of awe and wonder—and amazement.
The Gospel reading for the fifth Sunday in Easter is actually not a resurrection appearance. It is from an earlier section in John’s Gospel where Jesus is teaching the disciples about the afterlife, about what happens when we die. It is a familiar passage because it is often a reading we hear at funeral services. It is intended to comfort the disciples and give them hope that life does not end in death, that their grief and sadness do not have the last word.
It is also something of a foreshadowing of the things that take place at the end of John’s Gospel: Jesus’ own passion and death, and then his resurrection. Despite the fact Jesus predicts this and tells his disciples again and again that he will rise, they have no idea what he is talking about. So when he appears to them, after he has been raised from the dead, it feels both real and impossible.
On Easter Sunday this year, I was at Grace, Clayton. They are a congregation that has never had a permanent home. The warehouse where they worshipped for the last 15 years was sold, and today they worship in a funeral home while they seek their next space.
To say a congregation is worshipping in a funeral home does make one stop upon hearing it, but it turns out that a funeral home is a very appropriate setting to celebrate Easter. It is a place where our grief and sadness run right up alongside the greatest gift and promise we have ever received: the Resurrection.
A Resurrection Story
I recall going out to lunch with three close clergy colleagues during Easter season several years ago when we were at a conference. For no particular reason, we found ourselves telling each other stories, from our own experiences, that we believed were resurrection accounts: contemporary versions of those ancient encounters with the risen Jesus and the promise of life everlasting.
One of the stories I told was about Esther Stokinger. Esther was in her 90s when we first met. She was married to Herb Stokinger, the retired athletic director of Milton Academy. Esther had already begun to show signs of dementia, and after caring for her by himself for the better part of three years, Stokie, as Herb was affectionately called, realized he could no longer continue on his own and reluctantly placed her in a memory care facility.
One Friday morning, he called me at about 5:30 a.m. to let me know that Esther had died. I made arrangements to pick him up at about
7 a.m. and take him to her room at the care facility for one last goodbye and a time of prayer together. I stopped by the church office on my way over to copy a document I needed to leave for the parish administrator. When I put the document into the feeder, a message came up that something had been left on the glass.
I lifted the cover and discovered a piece of sheet music that must have been from the choir rehearsal that took place on Thursday evening. I just happened to turn it over, and there, to my surprise, was the name “Esther B. Stokinger,” written in Esther’s distinctive handwriting. The piece of music was a setting of “God Be in my Heart,” by John Rutter, the last line of which is this: “God be at my end, and at my departing.”
It had been more than 25 years since Esther last sang in the choir. What do you suppose are the chances that this piece of sheet music, that once belonged to Esther, would find its way onto the copier that particular morning—the very morning of her death. It felt like a message and a promise, a comfort and an assurance. It was both vivid and real, and utterly impossible, all at the same time.
At the end of her article, Kirsch has this to say about her chance encounter with the Northern Lights: “Knowing that the spectacle of the Northern Lights occurs because of electromagnetism doesn’t help to explain the feeling I had that night in the cornfield, the deep gratitude I felt for days afterward.
“I kept thinking about how we’d gone from total darkness to pyrotechnics in an instant. I had this feeling that there was magic in the world around me, that beauty could emerge from nothingness and I didn’t have to do anything to summon it.”
I wonder if that isn’t exactly what resurrection felt like for those first disciples. I know that, from time to time, each of us can have moments when the power of an impossible reality breaks into our everyday lives and opens us up to new possibilities, new ways of seeing and, maybe, of being. I believe this resurrection power and promise is still at work, in the world around us and in our day-to-day lives, more often than we recognize—or even notice.
Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:1-3).
Resurrection is a gift that is both real and impossible. May we come to recognize its power this Easter season, and to trust in its promise, each and every day in this life, and also in the life to come.
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Bishop Sam Rodman is the XII bishop of the Diocese of North Carolina.
*“High Lights,” by Melissa Kirsch, The New York Times, April 25, 2026
