In last week’s sermon, you may recall that I bragged about how highly compatible my bride of 30 years and I are.  And while this remains ever true, we do have different taste in many things.  For example, one being movies.  Now, Dianna likes the ubiquitous chick flick, and I do some of them, and I like male stereotypical action pics, but not all of them (since I basically am a peacenik who would rather as we said in the 60’s “make love and not war”).  But our differences go deeper than that.  Her idea of a movie is going to a movie palace such as The Rave, and sitting in stadium seating, enjoying super-duper sound and DLP technology on a very large wall-to-wall screen.  For her, that makes a movie going experience special and way better than TV.  Heck, she doesn’t even have to have a large popcorn and soda like other folks, and that saves me about 12 bucks or something like that.  I, on the other hand, enjoy going to artsy films, such as the ones shown at the offbeat bohemian Market Street Cinema.  If you have not been there in a while they have small theaters with old seats but that is OK because there is no one sitting in front of you anyway, and small screens which are reminiscent of hanging a sheet on the wall of the living room and loading up the 8mm projector.  They are the only theater in town that sells adult beverages, but my guess is these might help make some of the movies more tolerable.  There are some interesting people at these movies, and some of the movies look like they are shot in someone’s garage on a very low budget.  In fact my video of our trip to Utah is better than some of the movies there, and it is funnier too, because it stars my family.Now there are all kinds of good film that plays at the Market Street, and of course some of them are not so hot. But hey, that is true at The Rave as well, and you get socked for about $9.50 to see a stinker there. I have seen movies so bad at The Rave that I should have called the department of human services adult protection division to report abuse.  I have had my intelligence insulted so much I had flashbacks to the Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meetings.  I have seen movies that I would have given another $9.50 to let me out of.  I do like movies at The Rave, but I really also like the Market Street, it has character – and charactersDianna and I recently went to see an interesting movie there called The Genius Club (and to my book club buddies out there, no, it was not about us). Now to be honest, I slept through the first half of the movie; it was like watching paint dry.  Reading the phone book would have been more interesting. But somewhere along the way I woke up and it became a real absorbing movie.  The story is about a lunatic madman who has placed a nuclear bomb 10 blocks from the White House. He enlists the President of the United States and a group of geniuses (please don’t confuse the two) to try to solve the world’s biggest problems in one night. If they fail, the world will come to an end. The group attempts to solve this set of significant issues: world hunger, war, cancer, terrorism, rush hour traffic, jerks, and finally the meaning of life. By morning, the group finds redemption in themselves and quite possibly in the world. It was when the conversation turned to God that I became very interested. All the characters in the movie had IQ’s over 200, and career wise they represented everything from a pizza delivery skate boarding dude played by Stephen Baldwin (who at 42 is way too old to be a skating dude), to a former lawyer who was now a seminarian at Dallas Theological Seminary.  I won’t spoil it for you, but the chances of finding this movie anywhere now that it is off the Market Street are about as good as me voting Repub, uh, well you know. The movie was in the end about two big questions that we almost never ask ourselves: Who am I? And what is the meaning of life?Well, I don’t know about you, but I very seldom stop to think about either question a whole lot. I guess I do from time to time reassess who I am and what my calling is in life.  And that has been redefined and refined from time to time, and honestly even now I am in a significant time of personal growth and renewal.  But the second question, “what is the meaning of life,” is one that most of us do not contemplate very often.  Most of us while commuting to work start thinking, “man this song stinks, I am going to turn off the radio to contemplate the meaning of life for a few minutes.”  I just don’t do that, and I will bet that you don’t as well. However, I do know people that do contemplate the meaning of life every single day. Most of them are folks who are sitting in the intensive care waiting room at the hospital, or clinging to life on a cancer unit or in perhaps in a hospice.   During these intense times we call real life, we stop this roller coaster we are all on long enough to think about these things.  But even at these junctures, most of us acquiesce to answers that have been given to us by someone else– we usually default to religious reasons, sometimes very simple religious ones.  By doing so, we let others interpret our experience for us.  And what is quicker than religion to interpret events and assign meaning that we are evidently incapable of discerning ourselves in our own lives.  WebMD has been popular, maybe I should invent WebMDiv (MDiv=Master of Divinity degree) so that people can just look up the answers they need for their spiritual symptoms. In life’s biggest challenges we can be amazingly one-dimensional.  I was with a group of people last Sunday night who described the sermon in a church that several in the group attended as simply this: one, you are lost; two, you will go to hell; three, you do not have much time before all this shakes down; and four, you better sign on with Jesus to escape damnation.  There is nothing else but this, which is our reality as Christians.  There is nothing else to our faith but the obligatory conforming to a heavy yoke created by the institutions of religion, all seasoned with a healthy dose of fear and guilt.  I think about that particular sermon on this Easter morning, I know it is being preached everywhere today as well, and I truly wonder if it is that simple, if that is what being an Easter people is all about.  Is that the meaning of our faith? Can the meaning of life be reduced to a simple formula, one size fitting all?  If that sermon plays anywhere, it ought play today on this Easter Sunday, right?  I have heard the “simple gospel” of fire insurance all my life; it is part of my religious heritage. It was not until I got to college that I knew that there was anything else to the message of Jesus, and maybe especially the message of the resurrection.You see, the truth is that Marx was right when he said that religion was the opiate of the masses. The tougher life gets and the more ambiguous the street we live on, the more we long for a place called certainty and the more reductionistic we become in our quest for the meaning of life.  It becomes necessary for us to yield to simple religious platitudes as a way of escaping our plight, at least on an emotional level.  We recoil from our angst with an oversimplification of our reality.   It is at that point that our religion becomes the ultimate coping mechanism for the absurdities of life.  We want simple because we are on complexity overload.  We cannot sort out the information that we have to integrate into our life story any other way.  Because at these times the words of the writer of Ecclesiastes make frightfully too much sense to us:Everything is meaningless,” says the Teacher, “completely meaningless!”  What do people get for all their hard work under the sun?  Generations come and generations go, but the earth never changes. The sun rises and the sun sets, then hurries around to rise again. The wind blows south, and then turns north. Around and around it goes, blowing in circles. Rivers run into the sea, but the sea is never full. Then the water returns again to the rivers and flows out again to the sea. Everything is wearisome beyond description. No matter how much we see, we are never satisfied. No matter how much we hear, we are not content. History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new.  Sometimes people say, “Here is something new!” But actually it is old; nothing is ever truly new. We don’t remember what happened in the past, and in future generations, no one will remember what we are doing now. I soon discovered that God has dealt a tragic existence to the human race. I observed everything going on under the sun, and really, it is all meaningless—like chasing the wind. What is wrong cannot be made right. What is missing cannot be recovered. I said to myself, “Look, I am wiser than any of the kings who ruled in Jerusalem before me. I have greater wisdom and knowledge than any of them.”  So I set out to learn everything from wisdom to madness and folly. But I learned firsthand that pursuing all this is like chasing the wind. The greater my wisdom, the greater my grief. To increase knowledge only increases sorrow. It is easy to recoil from the folly that is much of life, because life as it is lived on the surface doesn’t make a lot of sense. We stumble through life at times and we fail to learn from our experiences because it pains us to do so. Despite our feelings of inadequacy, despite the fact that most of us believe on an innate level that we are “no damn good” as a species, and despite the fact that we need a way out of our predicament; we are concerned with the meaning of life.  What makes one stop and think about the meaning of life?  Who has time for any introspection when we can go and get all the answer we need of the shelf. Well, I can tell you what cause us to consider the meaning of life and it does it every single time without fail: death.  Death, the great mortal enemy of us all.  It is the meaning of death that causes us to consider the meaning of life. I would boldly suggest to you this morning that the resurrection of Christ is about much more than fire insurance, it is about more than the meaning of death, it is about the meaning of life. And not just after it is over on terra firma, but in the here and now, in the present Kingdom of God.   If you are fire insurance Christian, then Good Friday is your day.  That was the day we chose to see Christ’s sacrifice as vicarious and substitutionary.  Friday is about death, about Christ getting himself killed and in some sense us getting nailed with him. But that was Friday. But the apostle Paul wisely said, “if we are reconciled to God through the death of his son, how much more then being reconciled are we being saved by his life” (Romans 5:10).  That is right, by his life.   Being an Easter people is being about life.  It is about being saved by the very life of Christ, it is the ultimate answer to the question what is the meaning of life. Do you see this?  We live looking for meaning and not finding it because our religion is about the meaning of death, not the meaning of life.  We live as though we are already dead men and women, and whatever our faith means to us it has always been about that, first, last and always.  Faith then becomes nothing more than a future event for those of us who need to get a handle on our own mortality. It becomes nothing more than consolation for the great tragedy that is life.  When our religion is about the meaning of death, then all our efforts are at minimizing our losses.  It becomes the ultimate opiate to sooth our most recalcitrant fears, and to take the sting out of our inevitable pain.  Everything becomes about death and how to get out of it alive. I really can’t blame anyone for centering on the meaning of life through the backwards lens of the meaning of death.  Death is our great enemy; it has a ferocious sting to it and none of us like getting stung.  I have seen it a thousand times, literally, as I have been a witness to the human dramas of life and death on many stages through the years.  And I can tell you that you can be prepared but you are never ready.  The truth is that philosophically I am peaceful, but psychologically I am terrified.  This great dread is known one way and one way only- not through our own deaths but from the deaths of those we love.  Now I ask you, if that is the case, how can we ever think clearly about the meaning of anything when it hurts so doggone bad? Martin Heidegger, the father of German Existentialism and has impacted philosophy and theology like few others.  His concept of Angst begins with his own existential view of death.  Heidegger says the problem is that we humans are conscious of our own impending deaths. And as a result we are on an erroneous quest for meaning. He said (as simply as I can put it), philosophers have sought definitive judgments about things “out there” instead of “being there” which begins with authentic human existence.  So we can never answer the questions of “What am I” or “What does my existence mean,” the answers will never emerge.  Heidegger says that we instead have to “work out” who we are because we can never “find out” who we are.   And we do this through living in the world and not through calculative thinking but through meditative thinking (a good and understandable, OK somewhat understandable discussion of Heidegger can be found in “A Primer on Postmodernism, by Stanley Grenz, Eerdsmans Publishing, 1996). You see, the truth is we don’t just need to know the meaning of death, but we really need to know the meaning of life, and it is something different because of what happened not on Good Friday, but because of what happened on Sunday morning.  I used to say to the terminally ill hospice patients I worked with this simple bit of advice: We die only on one day in our entire life, only on one day.  Every other day, every single one of them is a living day.  And today is a living day. <spanMy sisters and brothers, today is a living day, in fact today it is the quintessential living day.  The day in which our focus shifts from a religion concerned with death to one who invites us to experience life, right now, right here, this very day.  For Jesus Christ has risen from the dead just as he said, and our great and mortal enemies have been beaten to death by a man.  And while death and the grave will lay claim to us all someday, these enemies can no longer define us, they can no longer tell us who we are, and they no longer control the meaning of our existence.  Because we are an Easter people, we no longer carry the stench of death, but the breath of life, so let’s start living like it, beginning with our faith and practice.  Because we are an Easter people we need to get rid of the meaning of death and start figuring out the meaning of life. Because we are an Easter people we can work, in fact we can only work out the meaning of life by serving a living Christ.  It doesn’t come to us any other way, not by a book, not by a sermon (not even one of mine), not by a lecture or a class, not by Sunday School or Bible study and prayer but it comes by an authentic existence where we embrace the life of Christ in our everyday service to others. Friends it is time we start serving a living Christ.  It is time to move from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. It is time that we realize what it means to be saved by his life.  It is time that we understand the Good News to be just that—that the Kingdoms of this world are becoming the Kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever, Amen.  And because he lives, we must be engaged in the world trying to make a difference in the live of others every single day.  And because he lives, we must love others first, last and always.  Because he lives we must be about the business of redeeming people who need hope.  Because he lives, we must be about a living faith that matters now, not just someday—otherwise we are consumed by the meaning of death and our faith is reduced to 3 points and a poem.   Because Jesus Christ lives, eternal life is now not just someday.  Because he lives we have to work out our salvation with fear and trembling as we seek to serve the least, the last and the lost.  It is the only way, the only way to understand in the end who we are and what we are about.  Because he lives I can face tomorrow. Because He lives, all fear is gone. Because I know he holds the future and life is worth the living, just because he lives.  But I would like to add to that verse:  because He lives, I can face not just tomorrow but today right now and the day after that and the day after that.  Because he lives, all fear is not gone, but it becomes and ally for service; because I know he holds tomorrow, but I also know more importantly I know that he holds today. And only when we make this planet a better place, and only when we share the Good News to those who need a big dose of it, and only when we affect change today, and only when Christ is alive in our hearts right here, right now, life is indeed worth the living just because and only because he lives.  And for the first time, we do to.  Starting now, on this the day of resurrection, may we live as well. If we do so, we won’t have to be a member in the Genius Club to figure out what life is really all about.  Thanks be to God! Amen!