Resurrection is Not Clean
Part 3 of A Holy Week Series
I. Epigraph / Invocation
We have come to the last day. Not the clean one. Not the lily-scented one from your auntie’s Easter program, where everybody wore white and nobody said the names of the dead. No. This is the cracked tomb. The gutted hallelujah. The grave still echoing.
This is the final part of our Holy Week witness. We began in procession; palms wilting under empire’s heat. We knelt beside the lynching tree on Friday, naming every cross dressed up as justice. And now; we rise. But not like they told us. Not with everything fixed, not with pain erased.
We rise with the wound still open. With blood in our teeth. With trans names stitched into the seams of our praise songs. With Gaza still on fire, and yet we are the ones who burn brighter.
Resurrection is not clean. It is not quiet. It does not wear perfume. It smells like sweat. Like breath returned. Like the perfume of a lover who said your name and meant it. The tomb cracked not because death surrendered, but because love refused to bow.
So come. Come with your dirt still on you. Come, Black and breathing. Queer and unrepentant. Tired and tender. Come. You, who have been told you were too much, too loud, too soft, too bent, too broken. You, who were never meant to make it. Come anyway.
Because this time, the stone wasn’t rolled away for spectacle. It rolled away because we pushed. Because we prayed. Because we wouldn’t stay buried.
And here we are now. Still bloody. Still breathing. Still holy.
Welcome to the resurrection. It is not clean. But it is ours. And it is already happening.
II. Resurrection Is Not Clean
They want us to believe that resurrection is polished. That it shows up in pressed suits, in white linen, in soft music swelling beneath polite hallelujahs. That it is painless. Final. Instagrammable.
But resurrection, real resurrection, is never clean. It comes with the stench of sweat and silence. It shows up in the middle of the night, breath caught in your chest, a whisper saying, not yet, beloved. Not yet. It comes wearing the same clothes you died in. It comes carrying the same grief. The same body. The same bruises. Just—breathing.
This resurrection ain’t for spectacle. It’s for survival. It doesn’t need approval. It needs breath. Because what they don’t tell you is this: Jesus rose with wounds still open. Jesus rose still Black. Still queer. Still criminal in the eyes of the state. Still carrying the memory of the cross on his back like some of us carry our grandmama’s prayers. Still tender from betrayal. Still aching from the silence of his friends.
They don’t want you to know that resurrection limps before it dances. That sometimes it doesn’t dance at all. Sometimes it crawls. Sometimes it lays in bed all day whispering, I made it. I made it. I made it. And that counts, too.
We don’t rise like empire teaches—loud, triumphant, immaculate. We rise together. With cracked hands. With chosen names. With borrowed breath. We rise in hoodies and heels. In silence and in scream. We rise at the funeral repast. At the clinic. At the protest line. At the HBCU graduation. In the mirror, after the tears dry, and the scar reminds us: you’re still here.
And we do not rise alone. The tomb opened, but no one entered it alone.
Black trans girls. Grieving mothers. Fags with gold teeth. Boys who vogue like it’s a hymn. Aunties with Bibles and blunts in the same bag. We all found the tomb together.
It was a dancefloor. A jail cell. A voting booth. A hospital bed. The back pew. The frontlines. A closet cracked open by truth.
The resurrection happened not when the stone rolled away, but when we refused to stay silent about what we saw inside. We saw the cloths. We saw the blood. We saw the space that was supposed to hold death, and instead—it held a door.
That’s what resurrection really is. Not a magic trick. Not a reward. A door. A decision.
To get up, even when it hurts. To laugh again, even when your ribs still remember the sob. To hold another’s hand when you’re not sure you trust your own. To believe in tomorrow, not because you’ve seen it—but because you’re still here to imagine it. And what is more holy than that?
Because truthfully, empire still rages. Anti-trans bills still multiply like locusts. Gaza still bleeds beneath silence. Black mothers still bury sons with state-signed death certificates. The 2024 election gave us no savior. Just a choice between shadows.
And yet—here we are. Refusing to stay buried. Refusing to forget our names. Refusing to let despair be the final gospel.
This is what Easter means for us: Not escape. Not erasure. Not perfection.
But a radical return. To the self. To the breath. To the we. And we say: we are still here.
That is our hallelujah. That is the gospel. That is the rage and the joy and the yes that even crucifixion couldn’t crucify.
So no, resurrection is not clean. It is not polite. But it is ours. And it is enough.
III. A Theology of the Unburied
There is a gospel they never preached to us. One not found in stained glass or starched collars, but passed down through back alley altar calls, whispered across kitchen tables, tucked inside the breath of Black queer survival. A gospel of the unburied.
Because if Jesus got up, then so did we.
But not without the wound. Not without the memory. Not without the truth that we were never meant to rise clean. Resurrection, in this body; in these Black queer bodies—does not come as reward. It comes as refusal. It is not the end of suffering. It is what we do with our pain when the world stops listening.
The church taught us about a risen Christ wrapped in glory. But they didn’t tell us about the dirt still under his nails. The blood still wet in the seams of his robe. They didn't say he came back with the wound still showing. That the hole in his side wasn’t healed, just hallowed. That his return was not to erase the cross—but to reclaim it.
We carry that same theology in our bones. We do not run from the sites of our pain. We transform them. We don’t wait for heaven to descend. We build it in the ruins, right here, with trembling hands and battered breath.
Because we are the unburied.
We are the ones who heard the empire call us unworthy and decided to stay alive anyway. We are the ones whose names were not spoken in pulpits but carved into each other’s palms. We are the ones who learned to resurrect in public. To get up on stages and sidewalks and stretch our arms wide like wings. Like we remember what it means to fly. Even when the world tries to clip us again.
The tomb did not open so we could return to silence. It opened so we could speak.
So we could shout. So we could testify—not that we were untouched, but that we were undone and still chose to live.
We build our theology out of the ashes they left us. Out of policy and protest, poetry and practice. We worship with protest signs. We pray in gender euphoria. We anoint each other with cocoa butter and kitchen grease, and call that communion. We turn the reading banned from the classroom into the benediction on our tongues. This is what it means to believe in a God who does not float above our grief, but sits inside it.
This is not some distant God who waits in clouds. This is the God who was misgendered by preachers and still walked through the crowd, blessing the ones who had been burned by belief.
This is the God who was arrested. The God who had no home. The God who wept and cursed and kissed his friends tenderly and without shame. This is the Jesus of the unburied—the one who did not ascend to escape us, but stayed close to our breath. Close to our rage. Close to our joy.
And if this Jesus rose, so too must the Black trans girl who lived when the law told her she shouldn't. So too must the queer boy in rural Georgia, who danced in the mirror until he saw a miracle. So too must the tired auntie raising grandbabies in a neighborhood gutted by greed, still finding a way to say grace over instant rice.
So too must the ex-vangelical who still prays in secret, hoping God hears the name they chose. So too must the refugee mother who named her child freedom, and meant it.
Resurrection is not the absence of empire. It is the audacity to breathe beneath it. We do not wait for freedom to arrive dressed in gold. We make it from our scraps. From our scars. From each other. This is the theology of the unburied: We are not clean. We are not safe. But we are alive. And we are holy.
IV. The Sound of Rising
If resurrection has a sound, it is not a choir rehearsed in harmony. It is not a clean note held in perfect pitch. It is not polite clapping or a well-timed organ swell. It is not what the cathedral taught you to expect.
Resurrection sounds like noise. Holy, feral, unapologetic noise. The rustle of a body shaking off death. The exhale of someone who didn’t know if they would make it—and did. The whisper of a trans boy binding his chest with trembling hands and still daring to call it a prayer.
Resurrection sounds like a grandmother’s laugh after a cancer scare. Like a drag queen humming gospel while painting her face in a church basement. Like the snap of a fan in the front row of a ball. Like a Black boy screaming into a mic at a protest, voice cracking but still singing. Like a body catching the Holy Ghost on a dancefloor, sweat flying, knees buckling, glory swelling in the space between beats.
We do not rise in silence. We have never risen in silence. We shout. We moan. We sing. We sob. We murmur our names back into our bodies.
Even when the world turns away. Even when the mic is taken. Even when the book is banned. Even when the ballot fails. Even when the church locks its doors and swallows the key. We still sound like survival. Because sound is survival.
The empire banks on our silence. That’s how it keeps us buried—beneath policy, beneath shame, beneath doctrine that dares to call erasure holy. But we were not made for silence. We were made for rupture.
We were made to speak, to dance, to spit bars and pour poems and bless each other with kitchen-table sermons. We were made to testify in the minor keys. To pray with pierced tongues. To teach children how to laugh loud enough to rattle stained glass. Even our weeping is a kind of praise.
Because resurrection is not just breath returning; it is sound breaking free. It is the voice of the body saying, I am still here. It is the echo of the tomb once it’s been emptied and left behind. It is the laughter that the state can’t legislate. The poem they can’t redact.The scream they cannot convert into silence.
And it is not just solo. It is choral. We rise with each other’s voices in our throats. We sing the names of our dead like refrains. We carry each other in cadence, in beat, in backbeat.
The sound of rising is not tidy. It’s tambourine and trap beat. It’s old gospel and bounce. It’s James Baldwin and Big Freedia, woven into the same breath. It’s moaning into the shoulder of a friend who has been there. It’s a child saying, “Mama, I feel safe.” It’s a lover whispering, “You’re real.” It’s your own voice, in the dark, saying, “Stay.”
Resurrection is never mute. It makes noise. It makes music. It breaks open the air and dares to call it sacred. So when you hear it; when you hear the unpolished hallelujah in a cracked voice, when you hear joy return like a bassline, when you hear grief stutter into laughter, when you hear your name said right for the first time; know that it is not just sound. It is the tomb breaking. It is the earth groaning. It is the stone rolling. It is us, rising. And we are not quiet about it.
V. A Benediction for the Unburied
Let this be your benediction.
Not a dismissal. Not a closing hymn. Not the kind of polished ending we were taught to crave. No. Let this be a sending. A breath passed between survivors. A laying on of hands across time zones and bloodlines. A Black queer gospel spoken without permission but full of power. You who have survived—this is for you.
You who woke up still breathing in a world that insists on your erasure. You who walk with limp and light. You who have buried too many and still hold joy like a defiant flame. You who have kissed someone who made you feel seen. You who have called a stranger “family” and meant it. You, beloved, are evidence that resurrection was never a one-time thing.
It was never just Sunday morning. It was every morning you pulled breath into a body they said should not exist. It was every time you came out, again. It was every time you stayed. It was every “I love you” you gave when the church told you your love wasn’t real. It was every Black queer child who said “I am” and meant it.
We are the unburied. And that means something.
It means we do not owe anyone cleanliness. We do not owe forgiveness to the empire.
We do not owe silence to the state. We do not owe smallness to those who benefit from our shrinking. We are not waiting to be accepted. We are not waiting for peace to come packaged in policy. We are not waiting for freedom to trickle down like mercy. We are already rising.
We rise in pronouns affirmed, in dances unchoreographed, in dinner tables made holy by laughter and hot sauce. We rise in mutual aid, in mutual rage, in sacred mess, in holy refusal. We rise in the songs we write. The love we make. The rage we honor. The lineage we carry.
This resurrection is not clean. But it is ours. So go now.
Go into the world not seeking perfection but presence. Go with the memory of what they tried to bury in you—and how it bloomed instead. Go knowing your name was always sacred, even when it trembled. Go knowing that your softness is not weakness. Your tenderness is not a liability. Go knowing that the tomb was empty because we would not stay in it.
You are the gospel now. Your breath is the altar. Your joy is the resistance. Your rage is the scripture. Your love is the miracle. And when the world asks for proof, when they say, “Show us this God you believe in,” let them see you.
Still here. Still Black. Still queer. Still holy. Still unburied. Still rising.
Amen.
And again—amen.
VI. Coda: A Final Breath
This is where the story pauses, not ends.
Because resurrection doesn’t finish anything. It begins everything. Again and again. Every breath, a new defiance. Every word, a new world. Every refusal to stay buried, a kind of gospel.
This is the final piece in a Holy Week series written in blood and hope, in grief and laughter, in scripture and contradiction. From the donkey’s procession to the cross, from the silence of Friday to the rupture of Sunday; I have been trying to speak what I’ve always known in my bones: that God is not far away. That God is not watching from a marble throne. That God is here, in the dust and the dance. In the breathless sob. In the laughter that slips out when you thought you’d forgotten how. In us. Especially in us.
Especially in the Black queer body, the Black trans spirit, the disinherited and the misnamed, the lovers and the left-behind, the fire-starters and the prayer-weary. This series was never about theology in the traditional sense. It was always about survival. About testimony. About crafting a space where belief didn’t mean blind acceptance; but the radical act of returning to the self, to each other, to a God who keeps showing up looking like us.
I wrote these pieces in a time of great political violence, religious betrayal, and spiritual exhaustion. I wrote them with Gaza, Congo, Sudan, and Flint in my heart and my ancestors in my throat. I wrote them thinking about the young ones; Black, brown, queer, femme, trans, being told they are too much, too loud, too soft, too wrong. I wrote them knowing what it means to wonder if there is still room to believe.
Let me say it clearly: there is.
There is room to rage. There is room to wrestle. There is room to break down and be rebuilt. There is room to not know. And still, somehow, rise.
Faith, for me, is not certainty. It is a trembling. A reaching. A breath caught in the mouth that still says, “I’m here.”
So if you’ve walked this Holy Week journey with me—from Liberation Is Coming to The Wound and the Witness and now Resurrection Is Not Clean—thank you. Thank you for making room for these words. Thank you for bringing your wounds and your wonder. Thank you for not turning away.
We are the ones who were not supposed to make it. And still, we do. That alone is enough.That alone is gospel. Let this final breath not be a period, but a comma. An opening. A soft invitation. To rise. To return. To remember. And when next Easter comes, or the next grief, or the next joy too loud for this world; may you already know: You don’t have to be clean to be holy. You don’t have to be whole to be worthy. You don’t have to be alone. You are seen. You are sacred. You are already rising.
Amen. And again, amen.
Saint Trey W.
“sound is survival” - this is so beautiful. Thank you
“The tomb did not open so we could return to silence. It opened so we could speak. So we could shout.” This entire piece is poetry. I was breathless reading it. Thank you for creating it ❤️