A warm welcome on this Easter Sunday to our visitors. We are pleased to have you in our home as guests today. I want to acknowledge that people are here from a wide variety of perspectives on the continuum of belief. For some, the truth of the resurrection of Christ is a fundamental, literal truth that they have accepted from birth and which they have never doubted. For others, it is a truth reclaimed from the ashes − you walked away from the beliefs of your youth and have found your way back. Others are actively struggling − they want to believe but find it difficult to even understand what resurrection meant then or means now. And perhaps others understand the resurrection of Jesus as an intriguing ancient story, but more metaphor than truth; you are just not sure a metaphor for what.

But wherever you are on that spectrum, you come with a certain spiritual hunger, a longing for sense and meaning and hope − else why come to this house at all? We each, whatever our theological differences, hunger for shalom, for peace; and wonder, as did these people who followed Jesus, if he could be the answer to that search.

As a people, the Jews had been a subject people to one great Empire after another − Persian, Babylonian, Greek, Assyrian and now, the Romans. They told stories to one another of a glorious past and hoped that God might intervene in human history, as their sacred texts told them he once did to deliver them from the power of Egypt. They prayed for a deliverer, a new Moses, a second great warrior−king like David, who would drive the pagans from the Holy Lands once and for all time and re−establish the glory of Israel. Some of their prophets − gifted men who claimed to be the voice of God in their generations − promised such a leader, one anointed in power, a Messiah.

Into this crucible of despair and hope, Jesus was born. At an early age, seeking to escape the gossip and rumors of a small village around his questionable birth, Jesus left Nazareth and became the disciple of a strange prophet who had emerged from the desert wastelands − John the Baptizer. John spoke powerfully to the peasants of Israel to change their hearts in preparation for the coming of God's sovereignty on earth. The old order of the exploitation of the many − 90−95% of the people lived in desperate poverty − by the elite, aristocratic few; was passing away and God's justice was near. Such a radical message would lead to John's execution by the state but then Jesus took up the mantle of his mentor John and began his own ministry.

Gifted as a faith healer and exorcist; Jesus was also a gifted storyteller and preacher. But more than that, Jesus lived as if the future Kingdom of God was present now, by sharing his table with outcasts, those defined by Torah as unclean and unacceptable. And he called his followers to do the same. In short, he taught and lived compassion and by his example, suggested that God is a God of compassion and mercy too.

A hero to the peasant class as was John before him, Jesus came into Jerusalem during the week of Passover. And a provocative entrance it was − riding a donkey, he ridiculed the entrance of the Roman governor Pilate who came into the city riding on a great stallion. One comes in humility and vulnerability; the other in arrogance and in power. The peasant pilgrims chanted David's coronation hymn and hailed Jesus as King David's son, this strange Galilean rabbi. Those who dared likely jeered Pilate and his cohorts.

Once in the city, Jesus' first act was to disrupt and symbolically shut down the worship in the Temple by overturning the commerce of those who exchanged profane and sacrilegious Roman money for acceptable Jewish coins. Like the prophet Jeremiah a half millennium earlier, Jesus suggested that the sacrifice God desired was compassion and justice and absent these things, the worship of Jerusalem was an abomination. He called for repentance. Such a challenge to the power and prerogatives of the rich by a rabbi loved by the poor could not be ignored, especially during Passover when the city was teeming with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. Condemned by the Temple authorities to the Roman governor, Jesus is quickly executed by the State as an insurrectionist on Friday as Sabbath begins, so that the word of his death might not stir the crowds to riot and rebellion.

His disciples and the crowd that had followed him from the Galilee as well as the Judean peasants were devastated by the news of his death and filled with a fear that they too might be arrested and crucified. The hillside outside the city was studded with wooden stakes which stood like naked sentries waiting to be clothed with the broken bodies of new victims.

But beginning on the third day, Sunday, and then continuing on down through the ages, Jesus, though killed by the power of the Roman Empire and the collusion of the wealthy aristocracy of the Jewish Nation; yet Jesus lives.

The communities of followers in the decades following Jesus would tell stories about their experience of a risen lord. They point to the experience of one who is unlimited by time and space; who appears to believers in the Galilee and in Jerusalem at the same time, who is seemingly a stranger and yet a friend known in the breaking of bread, who is physically present and then vanishes from their sight, and who comes to one − Paul − as a vision on a Damascus road. Whatever we make of these stories, the issue is not whether they are factually accurate − history remembered accurately − but rather what do they mean. For beginning in Jerusalem and down through the ages to our own time and place, men and women continue to experience Jesus as a living presence in their lives. Many today − like those of long ago − speak of Jesus as "the Way", by which they mean that through dying comes new life and transformation as a power to change.

But beyond this, if Jesus lives, then the cause for which he died − the dream of God about how human life on this planet should be ordered − that dream is also alive and is vindicated. The dream of God − the yearning of God's heart − that the world should be a place of God's justice and peace in which all people have an adequate share in the abundance which has been provided. A world structured around the principle that the few should prosper while the many suffer − in short, a world organized around death − is NOT of God. That Jesus lives is God's yes to Jesus and no to the world as it is.

Paul said it in three words: "Jesus is Lord." And if Jesus is Lord, Caiaphas is not. If Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not. If Jesus is Lord, Hillary and Obama and Romney and Giuliani will not be. If Jesus is Lord, George Bush is not.

Jesus lives and is Lord is not just about something that happened in a marginal province of the Roman Empire two millennium ago but is about how you and I choose to live today. It is not simply what we believe or struggle to believe, accept or doubt or are simply confused by. It is a matter of what we choose to give ourselves to: seeking our own personal transformation and working together for the transformation of our world; healing our own brokenness and seeking to heal the brokenness of the world.

Resurrection is not about old life resumed. It is not resuscitation at all. It is an invitation to something new; a response to the yearning of God's heart for each of us and for the world God gave into our care − it is a journey toward Shalom.

What is this bonding,
this glue among us,
this cohesiveness
that holds us in the hope
of shalom?

The longing won't die.
The hope keeps emerging
like a new sprout
that preserves on the stump
of a felled tree.

Even in the daily barrage
of obscenities
some new star melts
into my eyes
and the promise persist.
Here in the darkness
some new light
stirs within me…

In the face of Jesus
is the peace
that passes all understanding
the everlasting Sabbath…
Shalom!