O God of life, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will. Amen.

      They came to the tomb on the third day, with the spices they’d purchased to anoint Jesus’ dead body.  Anthropologists report that visits to tombs, in those days, were customary not just for anointing and for mourning, but to make sure that the dead person was truly dead.  Biblically speaking, if something happens three times or for three days, it’s real.  If someone was dead for three days, they were really and truly dead.  It was something worth checking.  There are times even in modern hospitals that people wake up in the morgue.  It’s rare, certainly, but it happens.  So Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, went into the tomb, in part, to make sure he was really dead and they found that the tomb was empty. 

      But just in case they (or anyone else) might think that Jesus was not really dead after all, there was a young man sitting inside the tomb (so actually, the tomb was not quite empty).  He testified that Jesus was really dead, and that they should not be alarmed, that Jesus had been raised, and that he was going ahead to Galilee.  What a strange and ambivalent thing, this almost empty tomb.  No resurrection appearances of Jesus in this Gospel of Mark.  The women (and we) just have to take this unknown young man’s word for it, according to Mark.

      Another translation of the ending is: “Once the women got outside, they ran away from the tomb, because great fear and excitement got the better of them.  And they didn’t breathe a word of it to anyone:  talk about terrified.” ¹  That is how earliest version of the earliest Gospel ends!  No angels, no resurrection experiences in any garden, any locked room, along a road or along the seashore.  Nothing -- just a young stranger telling the women who loved Jesus to look for the risen Lord in Galilee, scaring the women into such stunned silence that they were unable to follow the simple directions of “go and tell.”  End of the story according to Mark.

      Now one thing I’ve learned in the past year to my utter delight is that this parish is full of skeptics, agnostics, and atheists!  What I want to say to the disbelievers is that this is the Easter Gospel selection for you.   “They said nothing to anyone for they were afraid” is hardly a definitive shout of victory over death.  As one of my colleagues once asked, “is this any way to run a resurrection?”²

      “He is going ahead of you to Galilee,” the young man said.  The Galilee is where it all began according to Mark (not in Bethlehem or in Nazareth, or in the void before the creation of the world).  And, according to Mark, the Galilee was the place to begin again – not in Jerusalem, not in a new place, but in the same old place.  Back home was the place to begin again.  You know, the stories of Jesus’ life, and death, and resurrection didn’t get written down until many many years after he was gone.  All of the gospels are post-resurrection stories – every bit of them.  There was no one taking minutes or jotting down notes as Jesus grew into his ministry of feeding and setting people free.  There is a way in which the whole Gospel can only be read in light of what happened to those early loved ones of Jesus  -- those women who somehow, some time, overcame their stunned silence and began to tell the stories of what happened in and to the community after Jesus’ death.

      Writing in his book called The Journey with Jesus:  Notes to Myself, Daniel Clendenin says that he believes “the first believers partly because of their chronicle of disbelief – their own and that of their detractors.  To [Clendenin] it rings true.  [Because] they knew from firsthand experience that you cannot compel belief in the resurrection.”  And I always think it’s important to say on Easter Sunday that resurrection is not resuscitation of a corpse – it is a new kind of life.  It’s not the old life back or the old life unnaturally or supernaturally extended.  It is some new kind of life where death has no power.  Death has done its worst – it has done its destruction.  Death and destruction have no power over resurrected life.

      How do people come to believe in resurrection?  I don’t mean how do people come to be willing to recite an ancient statement of belief in the Nicene or any other creed.  And I don’t mean how do people come to think that something happened to Jesus’ dead body that had never happened before and has never happened since.  (I don’t know the answer to either of those questions.) I mean, how do people come to know and experience resurrected life?  How do people overcome their stunned silence and begin to tell stories about the kind of life that death has no power over?  Belief in resurrection cannot be compelled.  Resurrection has to be experienced.

      It is something like movement from no hope, no life, to full of hope and full of life.

      It is something like going from the end of all there is, to the beginning of all there is.

      Amazement and wonder are signs of it.  And laughter is another sign.  Easter laughter.

      There are extra-canonical gospels (those which did not make it into what we call the Bible) that portray Jesus as someone who laughed frequently.  Sadly, there are no descriptions of Jesus laughing in the canonical gospels.  Although I find plenty of jokes that Jesus tells that get lost in the translations of language and context, and lost in the heaviness of the piety of the Church.  I think, among other appealing qualities that Jesus had, that he was a very funny guy.

      In fifteenth century Bavaria, an innovative custom of inserting funny stories into sermons developed called Ostermärlein (Easter fables).  Naturally, it wasn’t long before certain church authorities prohibited such humor, because of a concern that laughing in church was a grave abuse of the Word of God.  The really funny part is that funny stories had to be prohibited numerous times!  Apparently, the preachers just couldn’t stop!

      Theologian Jürgen Moltmann has written that “Easter morning is the Sunrise of the coming of God and the morning of new life and the beginning of the future of the world.  The laughter of the universe is God’s delight.  It is the universal Easter laughter in heaven and earth.”  And a classmate of my dad’s, John Buchanan, has written perhaps “we crowd into churches to be part of worship [on Easter] because this truth is so big that not one of us is up to understanding it by ourselves; we celebrate with hymns because we can sing more than we can say, and with flowers, eloquent bearers of creation’s beauty.  We gather to celebrate the goodness of life – of our lives and God’s gracious, unending presence with us.  When you sing, ‘Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia!’ you can hear, if you listen closely enough, Easter laughter.”  And if you can manage to smile when you sing Alleluia, you’ll hear it better, I swear.

      My little sister was married five short years after our father had died suddenly at age 54.  When she began to plan her wedding, the sorrow of not having her dad to escort her down the aisle was really overwhelming to her.  So she asked our uncle to stand in.  Then, tragically, he died several months before the wedding.  She asked our two brothers to both escort her – not wanting to choose one over the other, and not wanting to walk alone.  As her matron of honor, I was to walk in just before her; our brothers on either side of her.  We would surround her.  We were all wondering how on earth the heaviness and hardness of our loss could be rolled away from what we wanted to be a joyful occasion.  Just as we were about to begin our procession, big lumps in our throats, our eyes brimming with tears, my brother Steve said quietly, “a horse walked into a bar and the bartender said, ‘why the long face?’”  It was something our dad would have said.  We all started laughing through our tears – that was Easter laughter.

      I wonder if the women who went to the tomb on the third day somehow moved out of their fear and stunned silence by telling the stories of how funny Jesus was, and laughing.  I imagine it was Easter laughter that became their experience of resurrection.  It was something like movement from no hope, no life, to full of hope and full of life.  It was something like going from the end of all there is, to the beginning of all there is.  The laughter of the universe, which is God’s delight, can bubble up at the most surprising times, times when we least expect it, in moments of sorrow and solemnity.  Listen for it.  Let it come through you.  Happy Easter everyone!