The theme for this Easter Sunday is "GALILEE--THE EASTER DIRECTIVE!" The texts are, from The Prophet Micah: "God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does God require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." From the Letter of James: "Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that God has promised to those who love God? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich that oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?" And, from the Gospel of Mark: "The young man said to the women, "Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised up; he is not here! But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you into Galilee-and it is there you will see him!"

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Here is the Easter directive: Jesus of Nazareth-the one you are looking for-is not here-for he is going ahead of you into Galilee-and it is there you will see him!

Here is the Easter charge: Jesus of Nazareth-the one who was crucified-has been raised up to God! He is not here! But he is going ahead of you into Galilee-and it is there you will find him!

So what does such a directive and a charge mean for us-here today-on this Easter morn? What does it mean that Jesus has gone ahead of us into Galilee-and it is THERE that we will find him? It is my humble hope that you will grapple with this question this morning by going on a journey with me-a journey that will help us to move beyond the normal interpretations of the Easter event, a journey where we will hopefully meet a Christ who confronts us in the present and speaks truth to our lives today.

And so it is that we must begin our journey in Galilee! For you see, Galilee was no resurrection resort. Galilee wasn't the first place you would rush off to for a respite, much less head off to if you had just recently been raised up from the dead! No! Galilee was a broken place, a rough place-a territory filled up with the faces of those who had suffered the indignity and disinheritance of Roman rule. Galilee was a place of survival, and struggle, and political subordination-and the folk who inhabited the region were people whose socio-economic plight was tangible and tragic!

The name Galilee was derived from the Hebrew colloquial phrase by which the area had been known since the time of King Solomon-galil hagoyim-which literally meant "circle of Gentiles". Galilee's Hebrew name was a fitting one, for Gentile populations surrounded the region-thus Galilee's borders were never quite secure, and its Jewish-ness was never quite certain. Was it any wonder then that Galileans were thought by most to be without class or tradition-believed by many to be citizens of a region from which nothing good could finally come! Trashy! Low-class! A human blot on the Roman landscape!

And yet . . . and yet it is in this Galilee where Jesus carries out the majority of his ministry. As the author of Mark tells us at the onset of his Gospel, it was from Nazareth of Galilee that Jesus came to be baptized into ministry by John. It was in Galilee that Jesus proclaimed and practiced the good news! It was in Galilee that Jesus called forth his first disciples, and healed the sick, and wrangled with the Pharisees, and ate with the despised, and questioned Rome's oppressive power. And it was toward this rugged territory that Jesus pointed at the conclusion of his final meal alive-for as he said to his followers, "'The shepherd will be struck down and the sheep will be scattered.' But after I am raised up, I will go before you into Galilee!

And so it was that Galilee, the central site of Jesus' ministry, was not just some quiet pastoral scene where gentle Jesus meek and mild taught his noble truths! No! Galilee was a place that was incredibly hard, and harsh, and hurting. It was a place filled up with the ostracized and the condemned, and the hated. It was a place of oppression, and dis-ease, and domination. It was a place to get away from and not a place to go to!

How interesting, then, that Galilee was the very place Jesus said he would be found even after the finality of the cross! How fascinating, then, that Galilee was the very region in which Jesus said he would be present even after the terror of the tomb!

We heard the story read from Mark this morning-that at dawn, after the Saturday Sabbath, a group of women bought burial spices and proceeded to the tomb. They were nervous, shaken, wrapped in grief-for in a matter of mere days all of Jesus' faithful followers had scattered in fear, as sheep would do in the absence of a shepherd! And as the rising sun began to cast its gleam across the common graves, these women began to realize that they too were now at risk of being publicly associated with this once dangerous, but now dead, Galilean. But here, right here is the hard challenge of Mark's Easter story. Don't miss it! For as the women approach Jesus' tomb, they find that his tomb was not only open but it was empty! There was nobody outside the tomb and NO BODY inside the grave! Nobody there-except a young boy, who makes this most important pronouncement! (Let me translate it directly from the Greek) : "Do not be amazed!", he says. "Jesus the Nazarene, the one you seek, having been crucified, is not here! He was raised up-for behold the place where they put him! But go tell his disciples and Peter this: "He goes now ahead of you into Galilee! It is there that you will see him, even as he told you!"

Now can you believe it! Here in Mark's gospel there is no glowing apparition of Jesus! No Savior-sighting! No roadside companion who vanishes into thin air! No ghost-like gardener looming among the lilies for the women to take hold of and touch!

No-the women are simply given an Easter directive-Jesus' new zip-code, if you will-and it is Galilee! For it is there they are told, there amidst the hurt and the hate of that region, there amidst the squalor of that territory, that the resurrective presence of Jesus' life and the restorative power of his ministry will be found!

Yet upon hearing this radical news we are told that the women, "going out quickly, fled from the tomb. And with trembling and fear, they said nothing to no one-NOT A WORD-for they were terrified!"

They said nothing to no one-NOT A WORD! THIS is how Mark chooses to end his Gospel-with Christ's scattered followers too afraid to even come to his grave and the women too terrified to even speak of his gone-on-ahead-of-them presence in Galilee. That's troubling and disturbing, to be sure-so disturbing, in fact, that novelist Mary Gordon felt compelled to make this pointed comment about Mark's closing narrative. She writes: "Mark, the harshest and sparest of the Gospel writers appears to give us nothing more than an unhopeful Easter-for his manuscript concludes" not with a flourish of faith but rather "with a failure of nerve!" This ending was also troubling to many of the earliest readers of Mark's text, so much so that two different writers composed two new and different Easter endings in an attempt to neatly finish Mark's Gospel-if you don't believe me take a look in your Bibles-but still, even with these efforts, Mark's original ending appears to leave us with a collapse of spirit truncated by terror.

They said nothing to no one-NOT A WORD-for they were terrified!

And yet, and yet maybe we too know something of this terror. Maybe we too don't really want to grapple with all that this ending implies about our own lives of faith in the here and in the now. For we are not so different from these first frightened and scattered followers of Jesus! We are not so different . . . for we know too well how to deal with a dead Jesus-honoring him with perfumes and spices, commemorating his life with flowers and lilies, entombing his memory within the confines of a Sunday morning hour-an hour where too often the morning message is calm and non-confrontive! Yet let me tell you an Easter truth that may be hard for us to hear this morning-and it is this: An absent Jesus is far easier to handle than a present one! A lifeless Jesus is far easier to contain and restrain than an active one! A dead Jesus can be safely approached with all of our decency and good order intact! But a living Jesus can radically explode into our present and wreak havoc with our safe and secure lives. Indeed, the message of the cross is simple when we observe Jesus nailed to it and immobile-but it becomes complex when Jesus is absent of his tomb, on the loose, gone ahead of us into rough and rugged places with the full expectation that we follow him to such locales!

Yes, far more terrifying than the pain of the crucifixion is the prospect of a resurrection that comes with expectations of US! Far more terrifying than an empty tomb is the revelation that we might just have to get up and out of this place of pew and pulpit if we are to truly encounter Christ's risen and radical presence. Far more terrifying than Jesus going ahead of us into treacherous territories is the directive that WE TOO must venture out and into our own cultural and global Galilees, places of hatred and hurt, of injustice and inequity-for it is HERE that we will find Christ's resurrective presence active and alive this day!

"Do not be amazed!", Mark tells us! "For the one we are looking for is not here!" A dead Jesus entombed by set doctrine and laid out by stringent law is now absent from the grave! For look out! Jesus' living presence is loose in our world! Jesus' living presence is free from our restraints. Jesus living presence has gone ahead of us into Galilee, and it is THERE that we will see him and it is THERE that WE must go-doing justice, loving kindness, while walking humbly on his way!

Don't miss Mark's point! Don't turn away from it in terror-for Jesus goes ahead of us this Easter morn into Galilee, into the harsh terrain of refugee camps-where globally more than 35 million people continually toil to not only eat but to exist, where innocent Iraqis have discovered too quickly that our War on Terrorism is, for them, nothing more than the terror of war, and where the needs of Palestinians, the largest group of refugees in the world, continue to be dismissed and demeaned! The one we came searching for this morning, Mark tells us, is not here-for he has gone ahead of us to be with folk such as these! It is here that he can be found! And it is here that we are called to bring the resurrective presence of his life and the restorative justice of his ministry!

He goes ahead of us this Easter morn into Galilee, into the decimated lands of sub-Saharan Africa-where over 22 million people have died of AIDS and another 38 million are currently infected, where over 450,000 people have died violently in Dafur, where more than 250,000 people have been driven from their homes, where 65% of Dafuran refugees have witnessed the killing of a family member by military forces, and where the role of Western nations in peoples lives has not only been one of disappointment and incompetence but also one of insult, condescendence, and racism. The one we came searching for this morning, Mark tells us, is not here-for he has gone ahead of us to be with folk such as these! It is here that he can be found! And it is here that we are called to bring the resurrective presence of his life and the restorative compassion of his ministry!

He goes ahead of us this Easter morn into Galilee, into the rugged territory of our own nation-where the political right has moved away from supporting the poor and the political left has moved away from sheltering them, where 39 million Americans continue to live at or below the federal poverty line, and where 10% of our nation's children, nearly 7 million kids in all, daily struggle to survive in households with yearly incomes of $6,500 or less! The one we came looking for this morning, Mark tells us, is not here-for he has gone ahead of us to be with folk such as these! It is here that he can be found! And it is here that we are called to bring the resurrective presence of his life and the restorative equity of his ministry!

He goes ahead of us this Easter morn into Galilee, into the neighborhood of East Palo Alto-our sister community now ranked third in the state for violent crime by the F.B.I, our sister community where the rate of HIV infection among women ranks second in the nation per capita, our sister community where East Palo Alto women-young and old-- have a 40% greater chance of being sexually assaulted than women living on this side of our interstate divide! The one we came looking for this morning, Mark tells us, is not here-for he has gone ahead of us to be with folk such as these! It is here that he can be found! And it is here that we are called to bring the resurrective presence of his life and the restorative compassion of his ministry!

He goes ahead of us this Easter morn into Galilee, into the divided territories of the Church-where people who are gay and lesbian are deemed unfit to guide and lead in ministry, where faithful folk are being slandered by the pharisaic practices of the Lay Committee, and where innocent children are too often preyed upon by Protestant and Catholic leaders alike! The one we came looking for this morning, Mark tells us, is not here-for he has gone ahead of us to be with folk such as these! It is here that he can be found! And it is here that we are called to bring the resurrective presence of his life and the restorative healing of his ministry!

Hearing such a word, listening to such an Easter directive, Mark tells us that "going quickly, the women fled from the tomb! And with trembling and fear, they said nothing to no one about this-NOT A WORD-for they were terrified!"

But what will you say this Easter morn?

Where will you now go so as to find Christ loose and alive in the world?

For he has gone on ahead of you this day-into Galilee-and it is there that he awaits your presence! AMEN