This week I’ve received Easter greetings from all over the place. It’s one of the fun things about being a pastor! China, Nepal… and this morning at 6:08 AM an email came in from the McMahan family who recently moved to Iowa. I’m happy to report that Christ is also risen in Iowa!

(whisper) Shhh. Don’t tell anyone, but it’s Easter morning. Maybe you knew that. Two billion people in the world (150 million of them in the United States) call themselves believers in Jesus Christ, and the resurrection celebration of this Easter morning is at the center of the Christian faith. This is an important weekend that lies at the center of many people’s faith.

But it would be easy to miss it. Yesterday’s newspaper contained nothing about Easter, other than the very small and normal Saturday “religion” column on page B2 in the “Local” section. There was a front page story about a high schooler training to set a Guiness record for the fastest time to crawl a mile. There was a major article on cutting down some trees near Ingraham High School. There was an article about WSU approving the building of a new dormitory in Pullman. But nothing on Easter.

Stores are open, coffee is flowing, people are strolling. Folks at Starbucks (my favorite place to do market research!) were talking about Easter as the start of spring, or what they would be eating or the kids’ egg hunts. The signs on the library doors in Seattle say “Closed Sunday due to historical low usage.”

Parentheses: (Easter). Shhh. It’s Easter.

I’m not criticizing our culture. Do you know how funny it all sounds?! A claim that “Someone around 33 AD was raised from the dead, and people are still celebrating it in 2008.” It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? The general and increasing silence about Easter around us isn’t what should surprise us. Christoph Blumhardt said many years ago “It is not the worst (thing) if some people are unable to believe that Christ rose from the dead…The sad thing is that so many people today claim to believe it, and yet it means so little to them. It has no effect in their lives.”

Why is this? Let’s listen again to the story that Kurt just sang so wonderfully, this time reading the words of the text from the gospel of Matthew.

Reading: Matthew 28:1-10.

Some of you will remember a woman named Henrietta Whitehill, “Chic.”

Chic was a longtime part of this congregation, lived in a neat house over on 8 th West where they often hosted small groups of various types from Bethany. And anyone who knew Chic at all knew that she wasn’t afraid to say whatever might be on her mind.

I had never met Chic when I received a message that she had called the church office and requested to meet the “new young pastor.” That was me. So shortly after, I stopped by the house on 8th, knocked on the door, introduced myself and the very first thing Chic ever said to me was “Oh, good, I’m so glad you came by…I wanted you to meet me before you buried me!” First thing she ever said! I said, “Well, Chic, I might have just wanted to meet you anyway!”

Fast forward a year or two. I talked with Chic just a few days before she died, and she knew that she only had a short time to live. I said “Chic, how are you really doing? How are you on the inside?” She said, “Well, Dan, I know this:I don’t have anything to be afraid of.”

I’ve never forgotten that. “I don’t have anything to be afraid of.”

But I noticed as we read both scripture stories this morning that fear is a very common response in peoples’ lives. I think it is in our lives as well. In the first reading (Mark 4:35-41), the disciples in the boat were scared of the storm. They were maybe even a little scared to wake Jesus up. And after Jesus had miraculously calmed the storm, his first words to them needed to be: “Why are you afraid?”

In the gospel story of the death and resurrection of Jesus, fear is everywhere. Certainly Jesus’ followers were fearful as he was arrested and then executed. When he died, Matthew says an earthquake hit and the centurion and soldiers nearby the cross were “terrified.” When the angel of the Lord rolled back the stone from Jesus’ tomb, the guards were so afraid “they shook and became like dead men.” The angel’s first word to the women is “Don’t be afraid.” The woman ran to spread the word with great joy and fear. When they met Jesus, his first words to them needed to be “Don’t be afraid.”

Fear was everywhere. Still is. Still exists around us and in us. The philosopher Ernest Becker once said that human beings are characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death.

Fear is powerful. Fear can paralyze us so that we can’t move or respond to what we know is true. Fear can dominate our attention and keep us from seeing what God is doing. Fear can block us from being able to hear good news (Dale Bruner says, “fear jams the gospel”). Fear can keep us from resurrection living. Fear can make resurrection seem just too good to be true.

There’s an awful lot of opinions floating around today that try to make resurrection more palatable, to fit into categories that we understand better, like physics or psychology. Some say that Jesus actually experienced a resuscitation, that he was brought back to life at that time and would die again later. Some call the resurrection an affirmation of the human spirit. For some it is a symbol of truth, or a spiritual state of being, or a metaphor. Some think resurrection is an affirmation of some set of ethical or moral values. Some think the disciples had “visionary experiences.”

Friends, if that’s what all we’re talking about for resurrection… then we’re done for today. If that’s all I had for you, I’m wasting your time and I’ve been wasting my time for the last nine years, so let’s go home and have a nice meal and an egg hunt… (but not go to the library!). If that’s all resurrection is, we don’t need to be here because you can get all that at Barnes & Noble, or listening to talk radio or watching Oprah.

There is no way to talk about resurrection in familiar categories, because it is not familiar…it happened once only. Do you think when the women went to the graveyard they were expecting someone to be raised from the dead?! There is no way to talk about resurrection in a way that is comfortable because it is abrasive, it is intrusive.

What I have for you is this - when we talk about resurrection, we’re talking about what Jesus said would happen (6 times in Matthew), what all four of the gospels say happened, the thing that started the biggest revolution ever seen on the earth, with resurrection we’re talking about this: in Jesus, God came to earth, was killed and buried, and was raised from the dead. That is the thing that the gospel says and that Christians believe. The dead Jesus got up, with life in him, never to die again. And offers us the same thing. That is resurrection. And we cannot be quiet about that.

There are at least three things that means to us.

First, the thing we think of most often, I suspect, that Christ’s resurrection means that when we die we go to heaven, we can be with Jesus, resurrected to some kind of bodily life after death. That is right and true. Christ has gone ahead of us, he has prepared a place, death is the end of the story no longer, there is more to come. But we dare not stop there.

Second, Jesus’ resurrection means that Jesus is with us now as well as future, life AND death, and that we can know him. That presence, in our joys and in our pain, in every circumstance, that is right and true as well. But we dare not stop there.

Third, Jesus’ resurrection means God has begun to set things right, that we are not just waiting to be beamed off of the earth, but to work in God’s kingdom and continue on in a new heaven and a new earth, but it’s beginning here and now, and so we can live, truly live, part of the life God intended in the first place. We can walk with people who are broken, we can feed the hungry, we can be peacemakers. God is restoring all things. We live in a here and not yet.

You’ll notice that when the gospels talk about resurrection, they don’t talk about some kind of individual immortality. They talk about what it means to live in response to the resurrection.

And on a very practical level…resurrection means we don’t have to be afraid.

Many of us fear death. We don’t have to. It doesn’t mean that death is a friend. But Christ has been through death. He has defeated it. He has set our resurrections to follow his. We don’t have to be afraid of death.

Many of us fear being alone. We don’t have to. Christ experienced utter loneliness on the cross, separated not only from people but from God so much that he cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But in Christ’s resurrection appearances he set about building God’s family, and sent his Spirit to always be with us. We don’t have to fear being alone, we have Lord and family with us.

Many of us fear being insignificant. We don’t have to. We work a lifetime for respect, status, an identity, success in ways our world recognizes. But Christ took on what seemed to be total failure, being misunderstood, being shunned, spat at and executed as a common criminal.

Jesus became nothing for our sake, that we might be something for His. Jesus died for us. There is nothing that can convince us more that God knows us and cares about us than that. We are immensely precious to the God of the universe, we don’t have to fear being insignificant.

To all of these things, the resurrected Christ comes and says “Don’t be afraid!”

And we can’t be quiet about that.

Have you ever gone hiking with a backpack that, if truth were known, was probably too heavy? You set off all full of energy. After an hour you are sweating. After two you wish you’d left things behind. By lunchtime it is grinding you down into the ground with every step. And when you finally get to take it off, it feels so incredibly good. Amazingly good! You feel so light, you didn’t realize how weighted down you were.

What if we could just put off all our fears? What if could just set them down and not pick them back up? And be free to live. How different would that be?

Reynolds Price is a longtime author from North Carolina, a Rhodes scholar who has taught English at Duke University for decades, and written novels and poems and books and even a couple of songs for James Taylor! And I can’t totally tell you where he is faith-wise, but I think it’s safe to say he’s on a journey.

In 1984, and by his own description not a particularly spiritual person, Reynolds Price was walking across campus and a friend noticed how different his posture and his walking gait were from normal. He didn’t think much about it.

But a month later, he began to have trouble with some of his movements and went to a doctor where they discovered he had an advanced, infiltrating cancerous tumor and cysts in his spinal column. He underwent very aggressive radiation and chemotherapy treatment, and several surgeries, was in a great deal of pain and at one point was not expected to live much longer.

In the middle of this, Price had an experience he didn’t know what to call. A vision? A dream? In the middle of the day, he felt himself vividly (smells, feels, sounds) transported back to the Middle East, 2000 years ago, beside the Galilean Sea (which he had visited twice). Thirteen men were sleeping beside the sea, and when one of them woke up and looked at him he realized it was Jesus. Jesus invited Reynolds Price out into the cool water of the lake, and picked up handfuls of water and poured them over his head, and back, and the scars from surgery. Then Jesus said “Your sins are forgiven.” Jesus turned to walk back to the shore.

Price remembers saying “Am I also cured?” Jesus stopped, turned around to face him and simply said “That too.”

Over the next months, he surprisingly recovered, though he doubted his own healing many times. But he clung to that experience with Jesus and found himself less afraid of the future than ever before. And, he found himself thinking in entirely different ways. At one point he said “I’ve had to figure out who I am, and how I should live because everything has changed. It’s all new.”

And what about for you? For me? What if we could set down our backpacks full of fears, and simply live with Jesus now and going forward, trusting that in the resurrection all our deepest fears are covered…what would life be like? Wouldn’t it be totally different?! Chic Whitehill was exactly right, we don’t have to be afraid. We don’t have to be afraid of dying…or of living…or of being alone…or of being insignificant.

And if those things are true, then the last thing we should be is quiet about Easter.

In some places in our world today, people have to be quiet about even speaking the name of Jesus, for fear of their very lives. But for us, living here and now, saying that we are people who follow a risen Christ, the only thing we have to fear is…well, nothing. There is no need to be quiet.

Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed!)

Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed!)

Christ is risen! (Alleluia, He is risen indeed!)

Amen.