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To Be Alive                        Colossians 3:1-4                   Easter, March 23, 2008

"What does it feel like to be alive?" asks author Annie Dillard (in her autobiographical memoir An American Childhood). She then goes on to answer the question.

"Living," Dillard writes, "you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. . .what a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling! Knowing you are alive is watching, on every side, your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit."

I love this next image: "Knowing you are alive," she continues, "is riding the planet like a log downstream, whooping."

It doesn't stop there. "Have you noticed yet that you will die?" she goes on to ask. "Do you remember, remember, remember? Then you feel your life as a weekend, a weekend you cannot extend, a weekend in the country."

Annie Dillard's question, "What does it feel like to be alive?" and her companion question, "Have you noticed yet that you will die?" are profoundly important questions. Questions worth asking, I think, on an Easter Sunday morning.

In fact, I think it's fair to say that, in great measure, it is because of these two questions that we are here in this sanctuary on Easter Sunday. These are the questions that help us understand why those of us who never miss a Sunday and those of us who are not particularly "church people" all join together and come to this place each Easter to hear the familiar story of the resurrection.

Even Christians need to be reassured, from time to time, that the God we worship is alive. And nothing does that for us quite like Easter Sunday.

Easter, for us, is the answer to both of the questions Annie Dillard poses. Easter explains what it means to be alive, and Easter also explains why we can live with the stark reality that life is short and inevitably, we all die.

In fact, if I were writing a description of what it feels like to be alive, it would definitely include singing "Sing Hallelujah, Praise the Lord!" with brass accompaniment.

We all know the story of the resurrection. We've heard it read and sung and told, again and again. Yet somehow, we want to hear it again.

Those of us who are parents can remember, I'm sure, sitting at our son or daughter's bedside, storybook in hand, hearing our young child ask to hear a familiar story read, over and over again. In my own case, it was the wonderful writings of A. A. Milne. My young son never tired of hearing the stories of Pooh and Piglet and Eyore and Christopher Robin - even though he knew them so well that when I skipped over a word or misread a phrase he would correct me.

The familiar story, recounted in our Gospel lesson for this morning, is like that for us. We know the story so well; so well that its familiarity comforts us - in much the same way that a well-read episode of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh can give comfort to a young child.

But the resurrection story is more than a comforting bedtime story. It is a direction, a path, a model for how we should live. And living with the knowledge of the resurrection is, in fact, what it feels like to be alive. It is the basis for what Jesus calls "abundant life."

Without Easter, we wouldn't know anything about Jesus. If his story had ended with Good Friday, it wouldn't have been Good Friday at all. It would have been just another Roman execution - one of hundreds that occurred around that time in history.

Without Easter, there never would have been a "Jesus Movement" among Jews in the first century which in turn led to the spread of "The Way," as Christianity was called in those days, in Eastern Europe, then Western Europe and eventually around the world. Without Easter, we would have no church to meet in this morning - and for that matter no reason for meeting.

And while all of that is true, there is something far more important about today than even those significant truths: The resurrection we celebrate today is the most life-affirming event in the history of the human experience. And at the same time, it is the reason that we need not despair when we realize that death is a natural part of being alive.

Mary Magdalene, you'll recall from the familiar story, recounted by all four of the Gospel writers, but particularly by the writer of the Gospel of John - Mary Magdalene was the first person to have an encounter with the risen Christ.

As the author describes it, early Sunday morning Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb, apparently by herself, finds the stone rolled away and runs to tell Peter and John, who come and believe. Mary Magdalene then returns, crying, stoops down and looks inside, only to find a pile of grave clothes and two angels in white robes sitting at the head and foot of the slab where Jesus' body had been. The angels ask her why she crying. She tells them that someone has taken the body and she doesn't know where it is.

When she wipes off her tears and walks back outside, Jesus is there. He asks her what she wants, and, mistaking him for the gardener, she begs him to show her the body. Jesus then calls her by name, and she recognizes that he is not the gardener after all. She recognizes that it is Jesus himself. She reaches out to him but he warns her not to touch him but instead asks her to go and tell his brothers that he is about to leave - to go to be with God.

That day at the tomb, the moment the man who was apparently the gardener said, "Mary!" and she knew who he was, a miracle happened.

And here's the point, my friends: The miracle continues to happen. Thanks to the resurrection, life, for us, is all about encountering the living Lord.

I know some people have trouble believing that Jesus was physically resurrected, that day. They have trouble believing that his physical body somehow disappeared, leaving a pile of grave clothes behind. Perhaps that describes some of you. After all, we sophisticated twenty-first century folks understand the chemistry and physiology of the human body and know that such things don't normally happen.

However, To get hung up on whether or not the resurrection literally happened or to argue over what image a TV news camera crew might have recorded on tape had they been there, is to miss the point.

The central message of Easter is not found in the question "Do you believe it really happened?" but in the question "Have you encountered the living Lord?"

After the resurrection, things do not return to normal for Mary and the other disciples. On the contrary, life would never be the same, for three important reasons:

After the resurrection, things do not return to normal for Mary and the other disciples. On the contrary, life would never be the same, for three important reasons:

First, things did not return to normal, because the disciples knew that the Savior was risen and he was on the loose. They didn't know when they might encounter him again, but they knew they would.

Second, things did not return to normal because they knew that the resurrection meant that God had taken the first step toward cleaning up the mess that described the world as they knew it, and that this cleanup would not happen without their involvement.

And finally, things did not return to normal because Mary and the disciples realized, now, that all of Jesus' talk about the Kingdom of God was not just metaphor. It was reality. This earthly life was not the end, it was the beginning. The beginning of a permanent, everlasting relationship with God. Jesus wasn't the only one who was resurrected. They were resurrected with him.

"You have been raised with Christ," Paul writes in his Letter to the Colossians. "So act that way!" Act as if you know you are truly alive!

One scholar interprets our text from Colossians this way: The resurrection of Jesus is an active assault upon the death and hopelessness of the world. Jesus stands in the midst of the fear of the upper room and turns it into the beginning of a movement.

To be Jesus Resurrected is to be a new power standing over and against the sick world. To be Jesus Resurrected is to be a glorified body, a new order, a new world, a new person; it is to be the church.

The resurrection, for us, is not something that happened "back then." Nor is it something that is "out there," or "coming some day." The resurrection is who we are. It is right here, right now. It is why we Christians are Easter people.

I began, this morning, with a question and an answer from the writing of Annie Dillard. Let me close with another of each.

"Who could believe salvation is for these rogues [specifically, the disciples, but, also, you and me]?" she asks.

And then she answers, "Unless Christ's washing the disciples' feet, their dirty toes, means what it could, possibly, mean: that it is all right to be human. That God knows we are human and full of evil, all of us, and we are His people anyway."

I think if you cut through all the drama and ceremony, all the words and songs, all the sights and sounds and smells of Holy week and Easter, it does come down to that basic piece of extraordinarily good news. Good news that, once again, helps us to define what it feels like to be alive: God knows that we are human and full of evil, all of us, and we are God's people anyway."

That's what we believe, and that's why we are here this morning. Because we, along with Mary and the disciples, have seen the risen Lord.

We are truly alive. We are riding the planet like a log downstream, whooping all the way.

Thanks be to God.

                                                                             AMEN

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