This week, we're rereading the Easter story not as a sentimental holiday but as one of the most politically disruptive moments in the entire tradition. Mary Magdalene — a woman whose testimony wasn't legally valid in her culture — becomes the first witness to the resurrection and the first person sent to carry the news. We talk about what it means to stay in the confusion, to be known by name, and why resurrection isn't something you commemorate. It's something you're summoned into.

Missiongathering is a progressive, queer-affirming Christian community. Find us at missiongathering.com.

References in this episode: Howard Thurman, Søren Kierkegaard, Elizabeth Johnson, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Frederick Douglass, Karl Barth, and Augustine.

Holy Saturday. The day between death and resurrection. The day nobody knew how the story ended. We tend to skip this day — rushing from Good Friday's grief to Easter's triumph. But the disciples didn't get to skip it. They sat in it, for a whole day, not knowing. Today we try to do the same. We talk about the grief we rush past, the questions that don't get answered on a schedule, and what it means to be a community living in an extended Saturday — waiting, preparing, staying present to the possibility that love is not finished even when it looks finished.

This episode is for anyone in a long Saturday right now. You are not alone in the waiting.

Good Friday. For centuries, Christians have tried to explain the cross. Some of those explanations have done enormous damage — glorifying suffering, justifying harm, making violence look holy. Today we slow down and look at the cross honestly: not as divine punishment, but as imperial violence. Not as God requiring a sacrifice, but as God entering the deepest wounds of the world to heal them from the inside. We talk about René Girard's scapegoat mechanism, Womanist theology's warning about glorified suffering, and James Cone's insistence that we cannot understand the gospel until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together.

Content note: This episode discusses violence, scapegoating, and lynching.

Missiongathering is a progressive, queer-affirming Christian community. Find us at missiongathering.com.