Christ is risen! HE IS RISEN INDEED! Dear friends, sisters and brothers in Christ, what a joy it is to greet you this morning in the name of our risen Savior. And how important it is for us to be here this morning, on this Easter day, to remind ourselves and to witness to the world that God's love for us and for this world is alive and well as the sun comes up this day.

Welcome this morning to receive the blessing of joy, Easter's greatest gift. Recently I heard a wonderful definition of this joy. A father asked his little daughter why she loved her Sunday School teacher so much. The little girl said: "because her eyes twinkle, like she's smiling inside all the time." That's just maybe the best definition there is of the blessing of real joy. Not just any joy, in the ways we so easily use that word--the joy of a new outfit, a dream vacation, that new fishing rod. But the deep, holy, reality-based joy of Easter. "Her eyes twinkle, like she's smiling inside all the time."

Now surely that Sunday School teacher had lived a life full of all the kinds of things we all experience. She'd had her ups and downs. She'd had her share, or maybe more, of life's sorrows. No doubt her heart had been broken a time or two. She had known tears as well as laughter, grief as well as happiness. And even so, her eyes twinkled as if she were smiling inside all the time. And for that, the little girl loved her. This is Easter joy. Over the centuries, we have fluffed Easter up so much that it's almost unrecognizable. We've coated it with gobs of sugar and pounds of chocolate. We've sweetened it with lilies and decorated it with new clothes and extra everything. But at its heart, let's not forget, is God's precious blessing of joy. An almost incomprehensible joy, discovered at the tomb of all places. A joy experienced in the heart of darkness. A joy defiant against all odds. A faith strong enough for us to live these days with grace and hope.

This year we all need Easter more than ever. We need to rediscover the joy that comes through faith in God. In this year, our lives have been seared by September eleventh's horror and its aftermath. We live with a new kind of sadness and fear. We are strong, and we are bouncing back. But we are not the same. No one ever is after facing death, and death on such a massive scale at the hands of an enemy we cannot find is profoundly unnerving. We joke about bomb scares now the way Californians have long joked about earthquakes, our humor tinged with fatalism and fear. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when our government recently revealed its new color-coded terrorism alert scheme. Frankly, knowing that it's only a yellow day and not an orange day is not real reassuring.

This year, we need Easter more than ever. From all over the world, the news continues to be horrific. It's as if we are living in a time of uncontrolled violence, falling from bad to worse and beyond, the worst about us gaining the upper hand, the most villainous of human qualities spilling out and poisoning everything.

This year, we need Easter more than ever, in the full power of its word for us, the full measure of its blessing, its news that is still and ever "good news" especially for such a time as this. It's right there in Matthew's gospel, the word we need this Easter.

As the first day of the new week was dawning, the women, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, the mother of James, had gone to the place of death to see. Right up to that moment, the story was quite believable to them. Their friend and teacher, beloved by many, had offended those in power and they had put him to death. He had been crucified and buried. That much they knew. No doubt their eyes were red from weeping that morning, their hearts broken, their spirits crushed. They went to the tomb to see and to mourn. But as we know, this story would suddenly take a whole different turn.

The earth itself shook and trembled, unable to contain the life within. An angel opened the tomb and sat defiantly on the stone as if to say: "Ha! This stone cannot hold back the power of God!" And the angel was glowing like lightning and the guards were paralyzed with fear. But the angel comforted and instructed the faithful women: "Don't be afraid. Jesus who was crucified has risen, just as he said. He's going on ahead of you now to Galilee. That's where you'll see him, not here. Go and tell the others!"

The guards were still immobilized, but the women quickly ran off to tell the other disciples. And as they ran, they ran right into the Risen Lord. These women were the first to see the resurrected Christ and I have no doubt that from that moment forward, their eyes began to twinkle as if they were laughing now on the inside.

Matthew tells us something about them that we need to know, lest we think this story is just a bunch of hocus pocus that has nothing real for us to hang on to. He tells us that as the women ran from the tomb, they carried this extraordinary news with a mixture of fear and great joy. Fear and joy: That one phrase tells us that we can trust this story. The fear was still there, just like it is for us--but also now great joy. That makes sense to us, all things considered. Matthew is being honest with us about them. For only in telling the truth about their lives can they witness convincingly to the truth of their risen Lord.

Like them, we experience the pain and confusion of this world, but as Christians we know that God has also spoken another word. And so you see, in order to believe, in order to have faith, we don't have to become something we're not.

We don't have to paint our lips into happy faces. We don't have to pretend that life doesn't do us in sometimes. We don't have to have it all together. We don't have to shut our eyes to the world and its pain. We don't have to have our life over here and our faith over there. The gospel of Jesus Christ holds it all together for us and that is the blessing of Easter joy.

Sometimes we think Christians are supposed to rise above this life, become immune to its sorrows and woes. But it's just the opposite! If anything, we rise to go deeper. Christ blesses us to become more honest, more engaged, more committed to the truth of who we are and to living out Kingdom values in this torn and battered world.

No doubt our twinkly-eyed Sunday School teacher had had the same experience as a man who told me once that as he stood beside his father's grave, he was surprised to realize that he was feeling both fear and joy. He feared the future without his dad and he was filled with loneliness and sorrow. At the very same time, he realized that he was also nearly overcome with joy. He couldn't understand it at first, and then gradually realized that he was filled with gratitude for the blessings of his father's life and love for him. Fear and joy, the "odd couple of human existence" as one preacher has called them.

Perhaps this blessing of joy is best expressed in the language of the heart and soul. We know it, but it's hard to put into words. It comes at the birth of a child, in a desert night sky full of stars, in a life well-lived, in music so beautiful it hurts. The church's word for this joy is "alleluia." The ancient custom was not to say or sing it through all of Lent, nor to have flowers adorn the sanctuary either, so that by removing all symbols and sounds of praise and joy, that when they return in superabundance on Easter morning, the surprise of their exuberance might match our own.

Alleluia, alleluia, we say over and over again this day. Not because there's no reason to be afraid, but because our fear is now embraced by a much greater love. There is one living Christian who embodies this life of engagement and joy better than any other I know, and he is Desmond Tutu, retired Archbishop of Capetown, South Africa and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Having been in his presence on three different occasions, I can tell you that this man moves with a lightness in his step. In his seventies, he would rather be dancing than walking. He loves a good joke, especially on himself. He likes to begin his sermons with a story. He tells of a little boy who asked his dad, a preacher, why he always started his sermons with a prayer. "I'm asking God to help me as 1 deliver the Word, my son." "Well why doesn't he?" the little boy asked.

This is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a man who helped lead his nation out of apartheid. A man who led his new country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and for months and months heard testimony to the most brutal repression and torture of which humans are capable. And who still came out on the other end insisting on forgiveness and reconciliation, for his country, for Rwanda, for the Middle Fast. This is a man who has suffered through prostate cancer and lives to tell the story of healing.

This man, who has seen every kind of evil and suffering, bubbles over with joy. He said: "the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ puts the issue beyond doubt: ultimately goodness and laughter and peace and compassion and gentleness and forgiveness and reconciliation will have the last word and prevail over their ghastly counterparts."

This is the Easter joy C.S. Lewis once called "the serious business of heaven. " It is the courage that enabled those first women to see the place of death and to see their Risen Lord. It is the energy that propelled them from that deadly tomb on down the road into life so new they couldn't possibly have imagined it before. It is the wellspring that keeps us going and keeps us from going crazy. We sang it earlier: "break the bread of new creation where the world is still in pain; tell its grim demonic chorus: "Christ is risen, get you gone!"

Joy is the blessing of the Risen Christ. It is the blessing we so need this Easter day. It is the life we need to keep on doing the work of the Kingdom. Christ is Risen! HE IS RISEN INDEED! Alleluia!

NOTES:
1. The Sunday School teacher anecdote is from Homiletics.
2. The C.S. Lewis quote is from The Living Pulpit: Jov. Volume 5 No.4.
3. Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness. Image Books. octoher 2000.
4. Additional inspiration came from Homilv Service. March 2002.

© Patricia E. Farris. 2002. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution. All other rights reserved