It surely must be one of the greatest mysteries of the gospel, that God didn't ensure that there would be living witnesses to the event. Do you ever wonder why God planned it that way, so that the disciples and Mary were only witnesses to the event, after the fact?

As I drive by the church sign every day, it reads, "Because he lives, all fear is gone," and I find myself asking, "Really? Gone where? Fear has left town? Did anyone get a picture?" As I drive on down the road to prepare another Easter sermon about how we really have nothing to fear, I find myself asking, "When I say that this Sunday will anyone believe me? I'm not so sure myself." Childlike, I ask, "Where did all the fear go because, at least in my world, it doesn't seem to have gone too far."

In the community, I see matters settled with guns and knives, and that's just at the local high schools. The morning news reads more like a surreal script from an old western with mortal combat the weapon of choice for settling scores. The police seem to just be putting a chokehold on one kind of drug and the drug lords just find another cheesy alternative to kill our youngest for a buck. I see local political matters settled more by racial power or fear than true community compassion and realize that lynching isn't gone; like drugs, it just morphed into a new form.

I hear parents wondering aloud the same thing I do. How am I going to put my kid through college, not to mention the kid coming behind them? The annual cost of a college education these days at many schools tops the median family income in Dallas! I talk with people nearly every week whose marriages are hanging by a thread or whose jobs just vaporized before their very eyes. Other people just got really bad news from the doctor and the life they had planned on living isn't going to happen.

At church, not a week goes by that someone or some committee doesn't wring their hands, wondering, "How are we going to pay all the bills in a church like ours where the demands of community ministry continue to increase exponentially faster than the resources we have to meet them?" Maybe it's finally time to cut back and hunker down. If we build the hunker-bunker small enough, maybe we finally won't have to worry about running out of money anymore!

By the way, we've had a remarkable first ninety days of this year! We said goodbye to an old friend, Bud Lovell, anxious for ourselves and for him and Elaine at this new juncture in their lives. I heard from Elaine just this week that they are so very happy in their new home and seem to be narrowing down a search for a new church home. Bud seems strangely attracted to a Lutheran church nearby that does a mean job with Friday night fish fries.

Then, in shorter time than any of us imagined, aside from bringing Ron Bowles our way as our interim music minister, the Lord brought us decisively and conclusively to a new music minister, full of vim and vigor. I never have known what "vim" was, but Brad Jernberg seems to have lots of it. Vigor must be the last thing you experience before rigor, but, whatever good thing vim and vigor are as a combination, Brad Jernberg's got lots of both!

Finally, after two hand-wringing years and despite serious and determined political opposition from city leadership, we have been able to finalize a decision about the use of the Sadler gift. In short order, in partnership with Buckner, we should be able to see progress on transforming one of our older buildings into the Sadler Community Center.

We worry about money around here more than my mother did and more than she taught me how to worry about it. Yet, in one hundred and eight years, we've never missed a payroll or failed to pay one of our bills. In more recent years, we've gotten completely out of debt while at the same time expanding our missions commitments. This past quarter we had one of the best first quarters financially weżve had in many years. Before anyone says, "Yeah, but . . .," can someone, anyone, just shout it out, "Thanks be to God!"? Look how faithful God is to bring life where it appeared there was only death, over and over and over again!

Yet, despite all of that, I find myself taking all this anxiety home way too much. Just ask Nancy. Aside from looking forward to seeing my beautiful wife at the end of any given day, I can't wait to see Beau, either. Sometimes I don't know if it's because I wish everyone thought I was the same person my dog knows I am or if I actually wish I were the same dog my dog is. He goes through each day naively assuming that I will come home every night and take care of him. He has no frame of reference for fearing it would be any other way and, somehow or another, simply staring into his big brown eyes makes me wish I saw the world through his, just one day. Yet, I am not a dog and that's not up for a vote. I am human being for whom physical death is inevitable.

In all sincerity, I've come to the place where I really don't fear death anymore. It's inevitable. I admire the way John and Elizabeth Edwards talked to their youngest children about her cancer that has recurred. They sat them down at the kitchen table and asked anyone who wasn't going to eventually die to raise their hands. No one did. Even the youngest knows that death is inevitable. What those children have is the incredible gift of two parents who are committed to showing them how to live in the face of the inevitable.

How do you do that? There are as many ways to die as there are people. You can die in one horrific, torturous moment or in one peaceful moment. Or, you can die one sleepless, fear-filled day at a time. What is it that makes the difference? These are the Apostle Paul's words of witness.

"If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ . . .. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death."

Paul is describing what he would call a pitiful Christian. A Christian who deserves to be pitied, specifically, it would seem, by those who are not followers of Jesus. Pitied specifically because their faith experience has done nothing more than serve as a narcotic to blunt the impact of the pain of present and inevitable reality.

There are two ways that could be the case. One way would be, as the Apostle hypothesizes, that the resurrection of Jesus did not happen. If what we've come here to celebrate was just a fable created by first-century Christians to numb the pain of their reality then our faith is like a finger in a dike that is springing leaks we will never have enough medical and scientific fingers to plug. It will give way, death will wash over us and that's it. Life means nothing! It's just a waste of time, not to mention money, to believe in Jesus, not to mention the church for which he gave his life!

It has occurred to me lately that there is another way for us to be pitiful Christians. It came to me as I was preparing for this past week's Good Friday service with Union Cathedral. Seven different preachers, of which I was the only white one, were given a text from the seven last words Jesus spoke on the cross.

The text I had been given was from Luke 23:46, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit," Jesus uttered, the next to last thing before he died. The last thing Jesus did was let go of the thing we fear the most, not being in control, of dying. The rest is resurrection history. Just like he taught us so many other things, how to forgive, how to love, how to do justice and how to speak truth to power, Jesus was teaching how to die, by letting go. The next Jesus knew is recorded for us in the text we've read this morning, "Christ has been raised from the dead." That statement is a matter of absolute faith for us, not something that can ever be proven scientifically or even historically

According to our faith, Jesus didn't just get up from a nap. Scripture is quite clear. Jesus didn't arise from the dead. Jesus was raised from the dead by the power of God. That happened on Sunday morning, which is why we worship on Sundays, and, it all started when, on Friday, after absorbing the sins of the whole world for all of time into himself, Jesus said, "Into your hands, Father, I commend my spirit."

This is what occurred to me this past week. The reason Easter is sometimes such a terrible letdown, or just another Sunday, is because we wake up on Monday only to realize that weżre still holding onto Friday, and Sunday never got to happen. To live a Christian faith like that is to live the most pitiful of lives! Living again, the resurrection to new life, is about letting go of Friday's unforgiveness, greed, pride, whatever, so that we can see Sunday's resurrection glory. If we're still holding onto Friday's sin, then two things are true.

The resurrection story will always be someone else's, but never ours, not in this lifetime. We can read about the angel rolling the stone back all you want. That must have been something to see. The only one who ever got to see it, however, was the one who saw it from the inside out, Jesus. The last thing Jesus probably remembered was the last thing anyone remembers, the last moment they see the last light they think they're ever going to see, and things just go dark. Then, out of nowhere, a shaft of light appears and grows wider and wider. Some very familiar voice whispers, "Jesus, get up! It's time to go home!" Then, the stone that had locked you in the tomb is creaking aside as an angel rolls it over. That must have been something to see, from the inside! But, if it's only Jesus' story and never yours, what good is it to you? If in this life only you have hoped in Jesus because that's the way you were raised but you have never been raised yourself, what good is Jesus' resurrection?

If the resurrection has always been someone else's story but not ours, then Karl Marx was right, our religion is just an opiate. It's just numbing the pain for a couple of hours a week, maybe. We come to church and sing about Jesus' resurrection, then climb back into the tomb of our own slow death, one fear at a time. If in this life only, this life, two hours at church on Sunday, we have hoped in Christ but we have no confidence whatsoever that Jesus has conquered death in every form so that our daily lives are transformed by his living power then we are truly a Christian to be pitied.

On May 4, 1922, a beautiful little seventeen-year-old girl, Eula King, was on her way home from her final full day of school before graduation in Kirven, Texas, about twenty-five miles south of Corsicana. It was a three-mile journey that she almost always traveled by horseback. Since both of her parents had already died, she lived with her grandparents who loved her more than life itself.

Eula was always prompt and her horse, which she had taken to and from school for over two years, knew the way home without any help. When she did not show up by 4:30, her grandfather knew something was wrong and started looking for her and asking others to do the same. It wasn't hard to retrace the route. Before long, they found Eula's body just off the road beside a creek bed. She had been horribly assaulted and murdered in ways too brutal to describe from this pulpit.

A black man, who could only be remotely tied to Eula's murder, was arrested and jailed, but not for long. Within a few hours, a mob of white men formed, broke into the jail and hauled him to the center of town. There, in front of the Methodist church and while the Baptist and Methodist ministers prayed over him, they brutally mutilated him and then tied him to a plow and burned him to death. Two other black men, who were known only to have associated with him in the past, were thrown into the flames with him, one at a time, for nothing more than good measure. Then, as if the whole county went berserk, one lynching followed another until bodies started turning up everywhere.

The Monday following the lynchings, the local ministers' association passed a resolution! But, not about lynching, of which they made no mention whatsoever. Instead, they passed a resolution condemning the playing of baseball on Sunday afternoons and strongly urging their parishioners to refrain from participating in an activity that was obviously "in strict violation of the law of God."

If social injustice could be measured on the same scale as tornadoes, what hit Kirven next was nothing less than an F-5 on the Fujita scale. Before it was all over in the next few days and weeks, vigilante justice, an inept sheriff and racial tensions that predated the Civil War all collided like the forces of nature over the windswept Oklahoma prairie, erupting with a force that all but wiped Kirven off the map. The black people who were the backbone of the agricultural community's workforce disappeared overnight. By the end of 1922, the little Freestone County community had all but ceased to exist. In time, it became clear that a white man was almost certainly the culprit in Eula's death. But, it was too late. (Monte Akers, Flames after Midnight, University of Texas Press, 1999). You can go see for yourself the wide spot in the road that was once Kirven.

Charlane Russell, one of the African-American preachers at this last Good Friday's service, said of hatred that, not forgiving someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. Just ask Kirven, Texas. That's what happens when we only sing about Jesus' resurrection but never experience it as our own. That's what happens when the resurrection of Jesus is just Christian folklore to us, not something weżve experienced from the inside out. That's the pitiful result of resurrection faith being totally disconnected from the lives we live every day.

If you leave this place today and go home to say, "Well, the preacher does a good job talking about that spiritual la-la land, but now it's time to get down to real business and figure this out for ourselves." Or, if you sing songs of hope but you go next door to borrow of cup of gossipy cynicism or youżre plotting ways to get even with whoever got the better of you, then Jesus' resurrection is his and not yours and the story of it, at best, has served to do nothing at all to you except to numb you for a couple of more hours, maybe.

Or, we can embrace the truth of this scripture. The last enemy to be destroyed is death, our own, when we let go of what's killing us and find out for ourselves what it's like when a small shaft of light pierces our darkness and a strangely familiar voice shouts, "Wake up! It's time to get up and go home!"