Mark 16:1-8“So they went out and fled the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”Terror. Amazement. Fear. Well. . . Happy Easter, everyone! You may be hearing Mark’s version of the resurrection with skepticism and doubt. Who in the world writes the greatest story ever told, then ends it with terror, amazement, fear and flight?  If this story ends in terror, fear and flight, why are we even here this morning?If you are even a little bit disappointed, then congratulations. You just got the point of what Mark was trying to show us. So may I state the obvious? Eventually, the women do tell this story.  Peter becomes the head of the Church in Rome. James becomes the head of the Church in Jerusalem. Throughout the centuries, they, along with thousands of others, gave their lives as martyrs for the Christian faith. Men and women who believed in Jesus Christ were so passionate, they would give their very lives for the Holy One who showed us the most perfect way to God. Yet on this Day of Resurrection, we stop for a few minutes in Mark’s gospel. We stand at an empty tomb with Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James (who could be the mother of Jesus, since one of the James was his brother), and Salome—who may have been the wife of Zebedee, the mother of another James and John. For these women, it is not Easter Sunday. It is the morning after the Sabbath. the third day after a brutal crucifixion.  Dawn brings a dreaded reality: a reality that is like a nightmare, because their Lord is gone. Within eight days, there has been a joyful Palm Sunday procession, a Last Supper, a betrayal, an arrest, a denial. They have watched a whipping, taunts, and spitting. They have watched as their Lord stumbled through the cobbled streets of Jerusalem, bearing his own instrument of death. At the end, soldiers took Jesus’ body down from a cross. Then Joseph of Arimatheaa asked Pilate for Jesus’ body. It was he who wrapped the Lord’s body in a linen cloth, then laid him in a nearby tomb.How did they get to this place of darkness, of grief, of such deep loss? The beginning of ministry in Mark had seemed so wonderful. So hopeful. It began in Galilee, after John the Baptist baptized Jesus. Jesus’ ministry began with powerful preaching, amazing teaching, miraculous healings. Yet we must remind ourselves that Galilee was a backwater area. It was on the edges of society, way outside the power circles in Jerusalem. Galilee was a place like that of my own ancestors: like a little Tennessee mining town in a “holler.” You don’t expect much from people who live in a nothing town in a poor area, people who talk funny and keep to themselves, do you? Yet this man from Nazareth, this carpenter who called a small group of people to a new way of life—away from their jobs and families—this man would work on the margins with people who lived on the margins. He would use everyday images to make his teaching come alive—like the day he pointed to some lilies out in a field. “Don’t worry about tomorrow,” he said. Live into today. Trust God to provide for you.Jesus healed crippled bodies, crippled minds, crippled souls—and they began to live amazing new lives. Jesus welcomed children and told us that our view of God’s beloved community should be like that—of child-like innocence. He dismantled the rules of Church and State that kept God’s people imprisoned. He showed us how to wash each other’s feet, how to clothe and feed our brothers and sisters who had been shoved to the edges of society. Jesus shows his followers a radical new way to live.Yet now, on this Easter Sunday, three women stand in front of an empty tomb—three people who, because they are female, pose no threat to Church or State Empires. Judas has betrayed Jesus for money. He is dead. Peter has denied Jesus. Who knows where he is? All the other followers of Jesus have fled. Where are they? We don’t know. Maybe they’re still hiding out somewhere in Jerusalem. More likely, they’ve slipped out of the city under cover of darkness and fled back to Galilee, where they came from. Who is left here? Some insignificant, powerless women.Yet never, ever underestimate people who seem to pose no threat to established structures of economic, political and religious power. Here, at dawn on the first day of the week, three women approach a place of death. They are here, hoping to do what they could not do on the Sabbath. They have brought spices to anoint Jesus’ body. Yet the sight that meets them is unbelievable. Someone has rolled away the stone from the tomb’s entrance. The second sight that greets them? A young man, dressed in white, seated on the right side of an empty tomb. An empty tomb. This angelic messenger, like other angelic messengers in scripture says “Do not be alarmed.” Do not fear. Fear not.Which means you should be afraid, because something that is not-of-this-world has just happened—or is about to happen. Something that human beings cannot explain. Don’t be afraid. You are going to bear a son at age ninety (Sarah and Abraham.) Don’t be afraid. Your fiancée is going to bear the Son of God. (Joseph). Fear not, Mary. You are going to bear God’s son. Blessed are you among women. Fear not, human beings.You thought you couldn’t wrap your mind around these other things? You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet! You thought this carpenter from Nazareth was dead? Stand back. Be amazed.  Because somewhere in the middle of the night, God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, split human history in a cosmic moment no human being witnessed. God Almighty reached into human time and raised Jesus from death to new life. That life exploded into millions of living particles of new life that live in you and me to this very day. How can this be? We have no idea. The truth is that as one writer noted, “Easter is neither a documentable historical event nor a poetic metaphor for renewal; it is a great mystery of faith. . .at its core is the darkness of unknowing.”[1]So what do you and I do with this “darkness of unknowing”? The first is simply to live with such a mystery. I believe that a popular myth in America is that the Christian faith comes in a neatly packaged box. As one writer has noted, center-stage in this country is a “relentlessly unwrinkled religiosity. . .as plain as a thirty second spot or as neat as a set of talking points.”[2]Along with this main-stream, establishment view point is another: the Bible has an ending. Au contraire, my friends. Remember that the last book of the scriptural canon is entitled “Revelation” Not as “it has ended,” but “revelation as it continues.” The truth is that God continues to reveal Godself in new ways. Yes, in the twenty-first century as in the first.Of course perhaps because of that first myth—that Christianity is neat, tidy, and has all the answers, so many people have rejected it. They have scoffed, “My life’s not like that. If that’s Christianity, forget it. I’d rather drink my coffee with a newspaper on Sunday morning. I would rather go to Starbucks, where people are real.”Following Jesus is not fun. It is not an amusing game. It does not manipulate people for any end, whether that be for political, economic or religious power. If you are willing to go to Galilee, back out to the margins where Christianity began, you will find that a life of following Jesus is messy, and most times full of questions, not answers. Yet more than that, it is rich and deep and joyful in a way that makes no human sense. There is a deep mystery about giving up your life to get life. There is a deep mystery about emptying yourself to fill yourself. There is a deep mystery in struggling together as a community of faith, a community that holds hands and stumbles around in our spiritual living rooms in the dark. Together, we search to find that way of Jesus that is filled with light and peace.Yes. God can change death to life for us. Yet here’s the truth: In this human realm, it may not look the way we had wanted or hoped for. Resurrection life has its own clock, its own calendar, and that is not human. Resurrection life explodes beyond human expectations, human time, and human understanding.So what? What do we need to do on this Easter morning? First, we must agree to live in a mystery we do not understand, a life that has more questions than answers. Second, we must decide that if we are going to be real followers of Jesus, we will go back to Galilee and live the way Jesus lived. We will not ask, “What would Jesus do?” We will know what Jesus did, and we will do the same: Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. We will visit the people in prison—and work to set the innocent free from those profit factories we call prisons. We will take care of people who struggle on the edge of subsistence in this society, those who grieve, those who need hope.The risen Christ is not in the tomb. The risen Christ stands this day on the shore of the Galilee, on the edges of your life, waiting for you. Waiting for me. If we go to live with the risen Holy One, we do that best when we go together. It is only together, in community, that we can, and will, change the world—with love.I am going to Galilee today. Will you go with me?© The Rev. Dr. Sheila N. McJilton[1] Mary Luti, in “Pastoral Perspective” about Mark 16:1-8, in Feasting on the Gospels: Mark, Cynthia A. Jarvis & E. Elizabeth Johnson, Editors, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), 530, 532.[2] Ibid, 532.