It’s interesting to me that as we look at the four Gospels, we see that they share much in common.  But differences exist in terms of the particular time that they were written and the particular community to whom the Gospel book was addressing.  Each of the Gospels has its own shade and color in some richly textured ways.  I love the Gospel of John’s version of Easter.  John was written between 110 and 120 AD—a good three or four generations after Jesus’ time.  We see in the Gospel of John a much more highly polished Greek, and since some time has passed, there has been time for the author to think and muse and get very philosophical.  And it is John, by the way, who says, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with us.”  A person would have time to think about Jesus in a more philosophical and broader sense after several generations.   I often refer to John’s story of Easter as “the Dolly Parton version of Easter.”  The reason is, first of all, because I love Dolly Parton; she is one of the brightest businesswomen in this country.  She plays stupid and holds out her hand, and people give her money like you wouldn’t believe.  She has a wonderful Easter song based on John’s version of Easter that she wrote about Mary Magdalene and the women coming and discovering Jesus’ tomb.   And the song gives a high sense of who Jesus is.  But I will admit to you that for a couple of reasons, John really is not my favorite Gospel.  One reason is that Jesus is so much God in John’s Gospel that sometimes it’s hard for me to connect with that shiny Jesus who is there.  There are parts of John’s Gospel that pain me.  We see that the Christian community had been kicked out of the Jewish community by the time John wrote his Gospel.  John doesn’t refer to Pharisees and Sadducees; he speaks to us of Jews.  By that time the Jews had thrown the Christians out.  While I know that John probably didn’t intend this, the very seeds of anti-Semitism find their roots in John’s Gospel.  Many of our brothers and sisters, who happen to be Jewish, bear the anti-Semitism that continues into the very day in which we live.  John’s Gospel continues to cause controversy, as some would use that Gospel in order to deny God’s love for the Jewish people.  But I love other pieces of John’s Gospel. 

 I think, however, that there is no more appropriate Gospel than Mark’s Gospel for his version of Easter as it applies to us in the year 2003.  I can’t help but give you a little bit of a Bible lesson this morning because I have 450 of you here, and you know I may not get you all together again until Christmas!  We will have to see.  I’m teasing; I know you’re all coming back next week.  Mark’s Gospel is the earliest Gospel to be written.  It was written in Rome at a period of time when the church was heavily persecuted.  I often refer to Mark’s Gospel as the Readers’ Digest version of the Gospels.  It’s the shortest of the Gospels, because when people are dying, you don’t spend a lot of time, the way Matthew did, on how you may live the Christian life.  You don’t spend a lot of time weaving an intricate and beautiful tapestry of a plot as Luke did.  You hone in what is central to keep people faithful while they are dying.  And in Mark’s Gospel we see the very central and pivotal point: Jesus’ suffering and his death become redemptive for the people of God.  By the way, the Jesus of Mark’s Gospel is a very human Jesus, who challenges us by his very humanity to discover God in him and possibly God’s redeeming love for us.  In Mark’s Gospel we have the Easter Story told in its more graphic form as well as in a human way.  We all heard those first parts of that chapter that Todd read.  The women came to the tomb and it was empty.  They were afraid and they trembled.  Is there anything in the world that we have lived with in the last year that may make us scared to the point where we tremble and are anxious?  We have seen a war half way around the world.  We have seen young men and women from our country go to a strange land and culture, and some of them have died there and some of them have been tortured.  We still have families praying for the safe return of their son or their daughter.  We have seen what decades of repression by a brutal dictator have done to the people of that country and to the Middle East in general.  And yes, we can’t forget that many Iraqis have died in the last few months and how families there have been torn asunder.  And we want to be hopeful.  We don’t know where all this may go.  We are afraid.  A few years ago the stock market was rolling.  People were making fortunes, and it looked like every American could invest in the stock market and stop working, and watch the money roll in.  Wasn’t that kind of what we thought?  I bet you do what I do everyday—I check the Wall Street Journal online to look and see if the indices are going up or down.  And by the way, everyday it is something different.  There is a part of me that thinks those financial analysts don’t know a whole lot more than I do about where the economy is going, and that is a scary thought.  I know that there are anxieties for all of you personally, and not only those global kinds of things.  I’m a pastor.  I hear in individual lives the pain and struggle.  And since we don’t know what tomorrow might bring, I think that Mark’s Gospel is a good place to begin in the year 2003. 

 Now that we’ve gotten to the human part, we also need to go back to the God part, because that’s what actually brought us here—not the human part.   As I reminded the children today, there is this mantra that is stated over and over and over in the Psalms: God’s steadfast love and faithfulness will endure with us forever.  Wherever we are in our faith and our lives as people of biblical faith, we find in these Psalms an affirmation.  We do not discover the reason for our existence or even make sense of what may be going on in our lives, but we do find an affirmation of who God is and what God is in our lives.  We find in the Psalms the promise that God’s steadfast love and faithfulness will endure with us forever, and no matter what is going on in the world or in your life, that is true.  And if you don’t remember anything else this year, other than God’s steadfast love and faithfulness will endure with you forever, then I’ve done an okay job.  Forget all the virtues we’ve talked about.  The truth is that the mystery of the resurrection is that God, once again, as God had done over and over in the biblical narrative, did something completely surprising and shocking and life affirming.  At the very point where the hopes and dreams of a whole people were crushed, the anointed one, who was going to make things okay, was brutalized and killed and buried.  At that very point where things seemed the worst, there came new life.

 I’m a great fan of the great mystics of the Christian faith.  I’ve read about their lives and their writings extensively.  What is interesting to me is that without exception, every one of them has had what is referred to as a dark night of the soul.  That is a time of deep despair and a sense of God’s complete absence in a person’s life.  And do you know what?  It was immediately after that dark experience that the mystics had that intense experience of God’s presence in their lives.  Their experiences were transforming for them after having contact with God.  This happened for every one of them.  And it says something to me about the nature of our faith that I think is important: The hope that is engendered in the resurrection meshes against the backdrop of human crisis with all of the human fear and trembling.  In the midst of fear and trembling we can discover the real nature of what it means to live our lives in the resurrection message.  All of us need to go from this service reminded, that no matter what may happen in this world, that Easter is about hope and grace and God’s overwhelming love in our lives.  Such hope, grace, and love are still the pivotal and most important parts of our living.  So what do we do from this point on?  We leave this place of worship understanding that we live our lives not with envy, not with anger, not with malice, and not with self-centeredness.  We leave this place of worship overwhelmed with gratitude for God’s grace in our living.  And we live primarily as people of hope.  We don’t live based on what circumstances tell us, but we live in what 2000 years of a community of faith has known: Christ has died; Christ has risen; and Christ will come again.  Let’s bow our heads for a word of prayer.