Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here.

Let me start with one of my favorite stories, a parable of how we celebrate Easter.

There was a man who lost his car keys and so he was on his hands and knees, searching near a streetlight, when a policeman came along and asked him what he was doing.

He told him, “I lost my car keys” and the policeman began to help him, soon a half-dozen other kind people joined the search. After about 15 minutes they gave up and the policeman said “Are you sure that you lost them here?” and the man said “No, actually I lost them down there”, and he pointed to a dark alley.

“Well then what are we doing looking here by the street lamp?”

To which the man replied: “Isn’t it obvious? The light is much better here!”

A great Easter story every year, but especially this year. We have come this year, to this festival, looking for some news of hope in the darkness of our current events. It has been a tough year for most of us, a tough couple of weeks for some of us.

The ripple effects of the economic meltdown continue to erode our savings, alter our plans, shatter our dreams and destroy our confidence: college tuitions seem even more impossible then ever before, mortgage payments can’t be made or mortgages themselves can’t be obtained, jobs continue to evaporate, retirements that were once fine-tuned are now postponed, as the songwriter put it, until the 12th of Never, and that’s a long, long time.

And the old wisdom may still hold true “money can’t buy happiness” but loss of money, and worries about money, have caused strains and stresses in marriages and between generations and siblings and friends and have caused people to do and say things that they ought not be doing and saying.

At its extreme, you can’t pick up a newspaper without reading, two or three times a week, about some suicide/murder/crime/mass slaying that has occurred. More than 50 people have been killed in the last month in incidents across the country and the root cause has often turned out to be a depression, an anger and a hopeless despair over finances and job loss and home foreclosures.

It has been a tough year.

And so here we are, on another Easter morning, and within us we know that we need more than some colored eggs and candy rabbits.

And here we are, on another Easter morning, because within us we know that there is an Easter message that we need to hear this year.

And so we look. But most of are looking in the wrong places. We look where the light is good, we don’t look where we lost the keys.

We look back at the first Easter. We tell the story about the moved rock, the empty tomb, the folded clothes, the confused disciples and all of the rest and we try to imagine how it was, but isn’t it true that it connects to almost nothing in our lives? We’ve never seen anything that spectacular, have we?

So we enjoy the story and go back to our lives and Easter is not there any more than Jesus was in the tomb.

Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here.

Don’t get me wrong, we need that story, that’s the Great Easter story, that’s the center point of it all, from Dawn of the first Easter to this very moment, Christ could not be confined by Death, by a Rock or by our half-hearted faith.

That’s a great story, the light is good in that story and in our deepest sorrows at the death of a loved one, we are grateful for that story.

But what about the Small Easter moments that we need? If we can’t find him in our daily lives, maybe it is because we are too busy looking back to where the light was good.

Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here.

Or maybe we look to the future too much.

And the light is good there also and there is great comfort and hope to be gained in looking there. That which is to come is also a Great Easter. Because Jesus Christ is alive, we too shall live forever and each year we count on Easter to give us a peek at what is in store for us. We want the hope of immortality confirmed again today, we want to hear the promise of that land in which we have true citizenship, that house of many rooms where we will all be reunited with those whom we love who have gone on ahead. I certainly do not want to take from anyone the sense of awe that has so often sustained me when I have heard the Great Easter story and felt the reassurance that even death will not prevail against the love that defines our God. I would not want to have faced the deaths that I have known without the confidence and hope that the best of God’s love is yet to come.

However, if we have been looking for the key to Easter, the key to life lived day after day with joy, hope and faith, if we have been looking for that by searching where the light is brightest – in the familiar and comforting stories of Easter past or in the glowing and shimmering promise of eternal life in the full presence of God’s holiness – we have not been looking where we lost it, have we? Haven’t we have lost Easter in the small things? Haven’t we limited Easter to the great things, while most of our lives are filled with the small day-to-day things?

Isaiah describes, for a people in exile, what their day-to-day lives will be like when they go home:

God will destroy . . . the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces.

This is not just a view of heaven, although it is that, it is a promise for Earth. We miss hearing that part of it, we miss seeing that part of it and our lives are poorer and we can’t find our keys. You and I tend to lose Easter, each year, in the dark alleys of our present experiences, and so we fail to see and cherish the small and sacred details of life.

The news that the women were supposed to pass along to the disciples was not addressed to the occupants of a graveyard. Nor was it news about what would happen someday. Here’s what he didn’t say, the angel didn’t say “when the trumpets sound, when the heavens part, when taxes go down in New Jersey, then you shall see Christ.”

No, he said he is going ahead of you to Galilee, there you will see him, just as he told you, right now, in the present, today. Galilee was where they lived, where they started, far from the bright lights of Jerusalem.

Right here and now, in our Galilee, in our Clover Hill, as we wrestle with all of our fears and hopes and anxieties and dreams and contradictions and complications and problems and blessings, right here and now we can live in this world as new and transformed people. Easter is not about what did happen or what will one day happen, Easter is about what is happening right now.

Nothing was said, not a single word, on that first Easter about immortality or the world to come, you can look all you want and you don’t find even a hint of it.

But everything was said about the new possibilities for their lives, then and there, in the middle of their sorrows. They were able, in the then and there, and today we are able, in the here and now, to trust without fear, to hope without embarrassment and to love without anxiety, to find the keys to life.

Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. We have gathered, this Easter, under continuing clouds of war and economic uncertainty, many of us in this room are discouraged and dismayed at the state of the world and of our nation and our communities. Tragedies and terrors have become a daily part of our news and conversations, and the simple faith that we learned as children seems impractical.

And, in the face of all of that, we are called to lives of forgiveness and kindness, loyalty and affection, hope and enthusiasm and you think, “In a world such as this? Get real Jack.”

Well, Easter says these words are real and the rest is false.

Easter says that our promises and relationships and compassion – the things that are the qualities of God – are the qualities that we are created for.

Easter says that the only reality in this world or any world is the heavenly reality.

We need Easter, right now and right here, and right where we have lost it is where we need to be looking for it. Look in the dark and dismal corners of your life today, look where the light is not good and you will find it and be found by it.

And it will bring back to your life what it always brings to the lives of God’s people, a restored perspective on what is important and what is not, what is of value and what is too costly.

Tomorrow morning it is time to go back to Galilee and so many of us dread that thought because we think we know what we will find there because we know what we left there.

But we’ve got it all wrong. Yes we’re going to Galilee, but we can go to a Galilee that we’ve never known before!

We can go to the places where we live, work, study and play and discover that Christ is waiting there for us, and so we can discover holy possibilities in our daily lives that can make our days and hours abundant with hope, faith, love, trust and victory. We need to look for those possibilities right where we lost them: at our work, in our homes and in the quiet, dark corners of our lives where we have allowed fear and greed and hate to take root and grow.

Is it easy to be discouraged? Of course it is, we’ve all known discouragement and we need each other to help keep things in perspective, we need each other to do the work of God and dry the tears that fall, we need each other to remind us to pop our popcorn and enjoy these lives God has given us, regardless of the circumstances.

There is an old story about Martin Luther, when he was under attack for his criticisms of the Church and he moped around for three days and then his wife came downstairs, dressed in black, as if for a funeral. Luther asked her “Who’s dead?” she answered quite matter-of-factly, “God.”

Luther said, “What do you mean? God cannot die.”

“Well,” she replied, “the way you’ve been acting, I was certain God was dead!”

So how are we acting? Are we acting as if God is alive?

Great and holy things happened on the first Easter. Great and holy things will happen when our time here is finished and we have entered into the Eternal Easter. But far more importantly, small and holy things are happening in each of our lives, every single day, and if we are not noticing Easter in our lives we need to look and find it in our daily routines and our closest relationships. And you know what? That is probably where we lost it, isn’t it?

Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here.