I greet you again as I did at the beginning of this celebration,

Alleluia, Christ is Risen!

And all the people you say, He is risen indeed, Alleluia

And then I will say, He has been raised, he is not here

These few words from today's gospel capture fully the reason for our being here this morning.

Do not be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He is raised, he is not here.   ( Mark 16: 6)

These capture the very essence of our faith as Christian. Everything else in our belief and practice is but commentary on this fundamental assertion. Within a few decades of Christ's death St Paul would tell the Christians in Corinth, "If Christ has not been raised then our proclamation has been in vain and our faith has been in vain" ( 1 Cor. 15:14).

There are so many way to talk about new life and there always have been. You don`t even need to be religious to use such language. And it is not only religious people who refuse to accept as real what plainly stairs us in the face: death. We all die. All things die. Everything becomes a "wreck of time " to quote from the famous Good Friday hymn.

Antiquity is replete with examples of our refusal to accept death as the end. Every religion, ancient and contemporary, has a language, an imagery, and cultic practice, that speaks of the birth of new life, of the transformation of life from one form into another. It is just built into humanity to seek the light. Every week in our creed we Christians confess God to be, "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God...."

Even secularists, those who are at this moment brunching with friends and family rather than gathered in worship, have rites of new birth. They may at this very moment greeting one another with "Happy Easter" and taking their seats at tables embellished with spring flowers and bunny rabbit dishes full of little chocolate eggs. And even the most steadfast atheist is not forsaking extra days off this week in protest of the Christian feast.

Belief in a supreme being within and beyond this earthly life has been the foundation of every great civilization in recorded history. This fact is so obvious that those concerned about the erosion of faith in western societies have turned around the question posed by the great Russian author Fodor Dostoyevsky, who asked "Can civilized man believe?". The question they now ask for the twenty-first is, "Can unbelieving man be civilized?" In other words, it is possible for humanity, without a concept of a transcendent reality, survive the dark side of human behaviour? Or can love for humanity be sustained without love for God? In my view, there is no answer to this question since the experience of atheistic societies is so rare in recorded history, and the recent experiments in atheistic communism so limited and short-lived, than no conclusion can be drawn.

And yet despite the persistence of belief systems in human societies it is rarely, on a personal level, easy to believe. Life is so ambiguous. At our birth, if our parents should attach a tag to our big toe telling us what the world is like, what should they write? Should it say "This is my Father`s world", or should it say " Life is a tale told by an idiot."? I guess those of us who are here this morning have decided on the first descriptive phrase.

But just how deep is our conviction about this being "our Father`s world"?

The story is told of William Temple, one of the twentieth century's most famous Archbishops of Canterbury, who during a Good Friday service, stopped the singing of that great hymn When I survey the Wondrous Cross" before the fourth and final verse. He asked everyone present to read careful the verse to come, which reads,

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
that were an offering far too small,
love so amazing, so divine,
demands my soul, my life, my all.

We do not come by faith easily. There is nothing about the resurrection which is easy for us to understand or to live. And this has been the struggle of Christian believers since the first Easter. Faith is a journey to a destination at which we never arrive. Maybe that is why I am always suspicious of believers who have no doubts, religious people who have everything neatly packaged and all the answers in hand. Theologian Soren Kierkegaard once commented on why it is that we believers are always faced with groping our way to life`s meaning by saying that, although we think we would like to have all the facts told to us plainly such knowledge would deprive us of our freedom and our dignity leaving us as robots. Or, to put it in biblical imagery, if we were to see God face to face, we would perish.

Concerning life, "stuff happens" as the popular expression goes. Let me share with you a short poem about how life feels to us most days written by Kenneth Fearing:

Wow he died as wow he lived,
Going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and,
biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired,
zowie did he live and zowie did he die.

Those of us who are older and have been through the wows and the whops and the biffs, bams and zowies of life can only stand back in amazement as we see our children step into the great adventures of life- so ill-prepared and knowing so little, it seems. I suggest to you that this sense that the meaning of life unfolds as we step into it is very much the sense of the story of the resurrection of Jesus as recorded in the gospel of Mark from which we just read. Marks`gospel is unique in that sense. His account of the resurrection is only 8 verses long whereas the other three gospel writer provide accounts of one or more chapters in length. Mark offers no post- resurrection appearances of Jesus or miraculous events as do the other evangelists. No, Mark is simple. The young man in dazzling garments tells the women that Jesus goes on before them into Galilee. They are not to hang around expecting to see him but they are to step out and expect Jesus will go before them. That is the essence of faith for Mark.

It is fascinating to see how each gospel explores differently the meaning of the resurrection. In fact they do not even agree on the details of what happened.

For example in Luke`s gospel the first people to arrive at the empty tomb are the women who are met by "two men in dazzling cloths"; in Matthew`s gospel Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, as she is described, are met at the tomb by an angel of the Lord,"His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow". In John`s gospel , Mary Magdalene goes alone to the tomb, finds the stone rolled aside, runs to find Peter and another disciple who return with her, and then later on she is addressed by someone she believes is the gardener but whom she realizes is Jesus himself. And in Mark`s gospel, it is Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome who go to the tomb and when they enter they find a "young man dressed in a white robe". And they tell no one out of fear!

If a police report were being filed on this incident they would have a real problem. No two accounts of what happened are alike. But you see, this was not seen as a big problem for the gospel writers nor for the early church. Their purpose was not to describe what we might call objective facts, rather their purpose was to explore the meaning of event in the lives of people.

What strikes me about these accounts is that they are real. Because they are different they are inclusive of the many different dimensions of faith and how people come to believe. This is not to say that it`s okay for each one to believe just anything as they may one choose; but it is to recognize that faith is formed in each of us and in our community of faith in an infinite variety of ways.

Can we communicate this openness and richness to others? We have no reason to dispute history as we have received it. The biblical account remains the starting point and the ultimate destination of our journey of faith The only fact that really matters here is that we expect to be renewed in Jesus Christ. We expect Jesus to be "going ahead of us" as Mark's gospel puts it. That expectation alone is a form of resurrection. For some people that is as close to resurrection as they will ever get in this life. And as Martha Stewart would say, "this is a good thing".

So often churches assume that the belief issue is all sewed up for people who come to church. As Archbishop Temple`s experiment demonstrated, it is not. We can pretend and impose our doctrinal orthodoxies on people saying "don`t ask questions". We can pretend that people believe. Some people who attend church feel that they have to hide where they are really at and often feel hypocritical in doing so because they fear that they are misrepresenting themselves by sharing in worship. We can pretend that people believe it all or we can be real and recognize that no one can be given faith on a platter or in a set of doctrines.

It is so important that the church relate to people where they are. Surely one of the great fears that people have about the church is that it will require of them some belief commitment that they are not prepared to make. Religion should be about making people real not phony. In fact, I am thinking of changing the slogan on our St John`s letterhead and our pew bulletin to read A church committed to making people real.

Real people are resurrection people. This does not mean we understand everything. This does not mean we have it all together. This does not mean that we are better than others. It does mean that we live with hope in our hearts. It does mean that we strive to live remembering the big picture of God's promises to us. And it does mean that we are prepared to step out into life trusting that opportunities for new life will be put in our way by God if we expect them.

Do not be alarmed... set aside your anxious self concern...you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. He goes on before you into Galilee.