What Resurrection Means to the World’s Largest Psychedelic Church
On Easter Sunday, April 5, Pastor Dave Hodges delivers the annual Easter Sermon at Spirituality & Beyond 2026. This is the sixth year. It is a real religious service, for a community of more than 137,000 members. Here is what the Easter Sermon means in the Church of Ambrosia tradition.
Seven years ago, Pastor Dave Hodges stood in a room in Oakland and delivered the first Sermon for a community that was just beginning to understand what it was building.
The Church of Ambrosia has 137,000 members now.
The sermon has changed in the way that everything changes when it is practiced honestly over time: it is deeper, stranger, more specific, and more sure of what it actually believes. What has not changed is what Easter is, theologically, for this community. It is the day when the questions the whole gathering has been circling all weekend are given a name.
The Entheogenic Communion Thread
There is a serious body of religious scholarship suggesting that the earliest forms of Christian communion may have carried entheogenic significance: that the ritual of “eat of this, drink of this” was connected not only to symbolic remembrance but to direct encounter with the divine through altered states. Acacia appears throughout the Hebrew Bible in ritual contexts and has a long association with mystical experience. The visions in scripture, the burning bushes, the prophetic trances, the mountaintop revelations: these are descriptions of altered states.
The Church of Ambrosia does not own this interpretation. But it does take it seriously. Easter is when that theological undercurrent comes to the surface.
What Saturday Builds Toward
When Pastor Dave joins Shane Mauss on Saturday afternoon for a conversation about the Hero’s Journey and beyond, he is speaking as a founder who is responsible for thousands of people navigating the most disorienting experiences of their lives. When he joins Mitchell Gomez on Sunday for “Temple of Harm Reduction,” he is speaking as a pastor who takes his community’s safety seriously enough to say the hard thing plainly.
The Easter Sermon is what comes after all of that. It is the integrative moment: where the thread running through the whole weekend is tied into a coherent statement.
The Form of the Thing
The Easter Sermon is not a lecture. It is a sermon in the genuine sense: religious oratory delivered by a religious leader to a community that has gathered to receive it.
For many of the people in that room, this is the context they come to SB6 specifically for. For others, it may be the first time they have heard a church sermon that felt like it was actually talking about something real in their experience.
Both are true simultaneously in this room every year.
Pastor Dave’s Easter Sermon – Sunday, April 5, 2026
Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland | Tickets: luma.com/wemhukuo
