Tonight our Lenten journey has come to an end. It began 40 days ago on Ash Wednesday with the imposition of ashes and with words reminding us of our mortality. We journeyed on to Palm or Passion Sunday, then to Maundy Thursday when we stripped the altar followed by Good Friday which is perhaps the only Christian festival that has not been commercialized except for the sale of hot cross buns. On that day we remembered Jesus crucifixion and death. Then today, Holy Saturday, is the day when Jesus' body lay in the grave. Tonight at the Great Vigil of Easter we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.

I have some childhood memories of attending the Easter Vigil. My mother was a lapsed Roman Catholic and my father a lapsed Lutheran. Some of my friends have remarked that I have inherited something from them. With that background, I suppose I should have become an Anglican but I went United. Although lapsed my parents did not discourage my interest in religion. Each Easter eve mother and I went to the Easter Vigil in a Roman Catholic church in a small city in Czechoslovakia where my aunt and uncle lived.

I shall never forget those dramatic occasions. It was late evening when we came to the church and the sanctuary was in almost total darkness dark except for the light of a few candles. When my eyes became accustomed to the dark I realized that the church was filled with people quietly praying and waiting for the mass to begin. The high altar was shrouded in black lace. Presently the priests came to a side alter. A fire was lit and the priest announced that Christ had risen. The light was then taken outside the church and processed to the front doors. I still recall the laud rap on the door. When the doors were opened the organ began to trumpet and the choir sang and amid incense the light was processed to the high alter and the Eucharist was celebrated. It was magic for me and gave me a sense of something special, something beyond the usual life.

I was acquainted with the story of the passion of Christ. My mother had given me a book written specially for children and I had studied it. I was most interested in the part that took place in the early hours of Easter morning when the women set out for the tomb taking with them the spices and ointments to prepare the body as was customary. But on their way they began to wonder how they would be able to get into the tomb recalling that it had been sealed with a large boulder. To their amazement in the dim light of dawn they saw that the stone has been rolled away and upon entering the cave found the clothes but the body of Jesus was missing. Was the grave robbed, they wondered. Then suddenly two men in dazzling white stood beside them and asked them a question which has rung down through the ages, "Why do you seek the living among the dead?"

I am sure that many of you may have visited the Holy land. Not too many do today, it is not a safe place to go. In 1990 I was part of an ecumenical team to visit Israel and Palestine which consisted of the Primate of the Church, Michael Peer, his secretary Michael Ingham now a bishop, the moderator of the Presbyterian Church, myself and another United Church minister. Of course we also visited some of the historic places, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. You might remember the small room reached by a set of stair where there is a star on the floor and a hole in the middle where you can reach down and touch the very ground on which the manger stood, or so it is said. We visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and also walked the Via Dolorosa beginning at the place called Ecce Homo. This is where Pilate presented Jesus to the masses and said, "Behold the man", Ecce Homo. From there we followed the Stations of the Cross. While walking I seemed to hear a voice, it said to me that this us not the Via Dolorosa, you were on the real road yesterday. The day before we had been to Gaza, a Palestinian refugee area of unbelievable squalor, dirt, small alleys and tin covered roofs, traffic of all sorts and people upon people. It is the only place where I have ever witnessed shots fired in anger as Palestinian youths and Israeli military clashed.

We also visited a hospital and met a young boy who had been shot and were shown an x ray indicating that the bullet had come within a millimetre of a main artery. It might easily have been his death. As I thought about this Gaza experience I felt that I had seen Jesus carrying his cross through the streets of Gaza. This was the real Via Dolorosa.

In his book "The Heart of Christianity" Marcus Borg, an American Lutheran theologian spoke about "Thin Places". This term comes from Celtic Christianity and means "any place where our hearts are opened". Borg writes that God is everywhere but we don't see God, occasionally, however, there is a “thin place” and light breaks into our darkness as it broke into the tomb where the women had come to find and anoint Jesus.

It is redundant to tell of the darkness in the world, there is so much of it, in Iraq, in the Middle East, in the very area that we used to call The Holy Land. Africa was referred to as the dark continent. Today it is dark but its darkness might refer to the prevalence of AIDS. There is terror, environmental desecration, poverty, greed. Even in our much favoured country there is darkness. But there are also Thin Places, places where our hearts are opened.

There is also inner darkness. I think that I am familiar with that kind of darkness, with depression. In one of her sermons Sharon referred to Existence Pain, I think I know what she meant. And even here there are thin places and times when the light of God breaks through.

I have been coming to this church for the past two years and have found this to be one of those Thin Places. Borg writes that worship is about creating a sacred spot - a thin place. I recall the first time when Garth spoke my name as he handed me the communion wafer, he said: "Hanns, the body of our Lord broken for you", I experienced light. I had been recognized and my heart was opened. And the music, the wonderful choir and organ music that opens up this church and makes it a thin place.

Christians have been called an Easter People, not because they believe in an event that took place hundreds of years ago in a remote corner of the Roman empire, an event about which there is a great deal of controversy, on which not even the authors of the synoptic gospels are in agreement. No, we believe in a present reality, an experience. And so on Easter we sing "Christ the Lord is risen today!" Today. To night God's light has broken through and we have glimpsed a new reality.

Thus we go with the women in the early hours, while it is still dark and we come to the tomb and find it empty. We discover the resurrection. He is not there. He is with us here. Now.