I have to confess that I find it hard to preach on Easter Sunday. On the one hand, Easter Sunday is like any other Sunday. We worship on Sunday because Sunday is the Lord's Day, the resurrection day. So every Sunday a little Easter, and every Sunday celebrates the good news of Christ's resurrection. What more can I say on Easter Sunday that has not already been said on the other 51 Easter Sundays of the year?

On the other hand, Easter is a special festival that focuses on the story of the resurrection in a unique and special way. Easter comes up every year, and it is hard to come up with something new to say about it every year. I have the same problem with Christmas.

The challenge for Easter Sunday is to communicate in some fresh and compelling way the good news of Christ's resurrection in a way that really helps us to appreciate that it is good news. When everyone has heard the stories of Easter many times before, how do I help the congregation hear the good news as news, something that they don't already know, something that isn't obvious to anyone with common sense, something that hasn't already been said in a more compelling way on Oprah, something fresh that brings a whole new way of seeing our lives in God's world? And when the Easter story is so trivialized in our cultural forms of Christianity, when Easter is reduced to a spring fertility festival of bunnies and chocolate eggs, how can I help you appreciate the radical goodness of this news, the beauty and majesty and magnificence of it, a goodness which so revolutionizes those who really hear it that they are never the same again?

The stories of the first Easter help us to enter into the freshness of that good news, news that is really news, no matter how many times we have heard it before, news that really is good. Early in the morning on the first day of the week, the story goes, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb to do the things we need to do when someone we love has died, to cherish, cleanse, anoint him with tears, to handle him with love. Still numb with grief, she arrives to find the tomb had been disturbed, the heavy stone which kept out the scavengers, both animal and human, rolled away. She assumes the obvious: the container of her grief has been smashed and looted, the violence of his death compounded by the desecration of his resting place. It would be as if one of us, our grief still fresh, went to Fairview Cemetery to visit the grave most precious, and found some vandal had spray painted vicious slurs on the gravestone, assaulting the memory of one we loved. She runs, stumbling in her frantic grief, back to the other disciples, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him!"

As if the violence of Good Friday was not enough, this is the assurance that beyond the worst of their fears, there is more, a horror they had not even imagined. Perhaps this is a story that you recognize. Perhaps you have had that experience of a horror beyond the worst of your fears. Perhaps you were expecting the challenges of aging, but not the dementia that robs age of any dignity. Perhaps you were prepared for the challenges of raising teenagers, but not for the addiction that made relationship an impossible struggle. Perhaps you were knew that the cancer would bring pain, but not these endless sleepless nights. Perhaps you were prepared for the worst of your fears, only to discover that there is horror in life beyond your fears.

Here is the challenge of the Easter message. It does not trivialize our fears, or the reality of horror in our lives. Easter is not wishful thinking; it is not the power of positive thinking. Easter follows Good Friday without erasing its horror. When the risen Christ appears to his disciples, he is still wounded. The holes in his hands and side are still present. Easter is the good news that beyond the reality of Good Friday, Sunday still brings new life.

We live in a world filled with bad news. That is why we need to keep hearing the good news again, learning it over and over again. We need to hear again and again that death, though real, does not have the last word, that darkness, though challenging, is powerless before light, that violence, though horrible, is less powerful than love, that evil is less important than goodness, that hate is less potent than love.

One of our United Church overseas personnel is working in the area of Japan afflicted by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident that has ravaged Northeastern Japan. Rev. Robert Witmer and his partner Keiko have been in Japan since 1969, working with our partner the United Church of Christ in Japan, and the Dohuku Centre which serves the indigenous Ainu people of Hokkaido. Rev. Witmer wrote recently that in the aftermath of the disaster that has befallen northeastern Japan, people are constantly encouraging one another to gambette kudasai (pronounced "gam-baht-tay koo-dah-sigh"), to hang in there, to be persistent, to endure in spite of all that is happening.

From people on the street to television anchors on the evening news, people are being excouraged to gambette,to hang in there. But some people are so overwhelmed that they simply cannot cope, and the pressure to hang in there has caused many people to break down to the extent that they need psychiatric care. The horror has exceeded their worst fears.

Witwer says that one television commentator finally announced he was not going to ask people to gambette anymore. He said, instead, that he had started to say amaete kudasai (pronounced "ah-my-eh-tay koo-dah-sigh"). This expression politely encourages people to let themselves be held up by the kindness and concern of others rather than trying to carry the weight of this tragedy all by themselves. It means something like, letting yourself be nursed, like a baby nursing at its mother's breast. Witmer says it reminds him of the Psalm which says "As a child lies quietly in its mother's arms, so my heart is quiet within me," (Psalm 131.2, TEV) and of Jesus' words "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28)

As the days pass and people continue to live in cramped conditions without adequate supplies, as they become more aware of what they have lost and the difficulty or impossibility of returning to the life they once knew, as a feeling of helplessness grows, the weight of the burdens they are carrying becomes more and more apparent, the people of Japan need this assurance that they do not need to bear this burden alone, that they can lean on the strength of others, a strength that can sustain them through the worst of times.

Like them, we need at times, to be reminded that there is a goodness which is stronger than evil, a love which is stronger than hate, a light stronger than darkness, and a life which is stronger than death.

We started this service with a dramatization of one of the disciples, locked in the isolation of his own fear. Fear is isolating and disempowering. Fear is often used in politics, media, and religion, because it is a very powerful motivator. Appealing to our fears buys votes, sells commercials and promotes a self-centred religion. Fear appeals to the worst in us, rather than the best. But the risen Christ appeared to that disciple as to Mary, with a hope beyond the worst of our fears, a hope that addresses our fears at the root, a hope that whatever horrors we may encounter, we do not need to live in fear, a hope that nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God, a love which bears us up like a nursing mother bears up her child.

What would it mean to leave fear behind? What would it mean to stop just trying to survive and to really stake our lives on what we think to be good and true and just and beautiful and worthy? What would it really mean to act out of the best of who we are?

This year, I read a novel by Cormac McCarthy called The Road. Some of you may have seen the movie. It is the story of a father and his small son travelling through a bleak, grey, wasted land where nothing grows, and some disaster has devastated everything. The father and son are alone, "each the other's world entire" (p. 5) They live for each other, and nothing else. There is nothing to eat, and the father and the son spend their days scavenging, trying to find anything that might provide nourishment, and trying as well to avoid the murderous roving bands which see them as possible nourishment. The world is divided into good guys and bad guys, and they don't know any other good guys. They live in fear, and they have lots of reasons to fear. "Trust no one," the father repeatedly tells his son. The bad guys often pretend to be good guys, and you can't take the risk that someone who at first appears friendly might "Trust no one but yourself and me."

There comes a point at which the father can no longer go on, but the son must. The father must take his last breath, trusting that "Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again" (p. 236). And it does. Goodness does find the little boy, but in order for it to find him, he must unlearn fear. He must learn that without trust, life is just surviving. With trust, life hums with mystery and meaning. Even in the face of the horror beyond our worst fears, goodness finds us. It always has. It will again. Watch for it. It is searching for you. And it will ask you too, to leave your fears behind.