Do you remember, I think it was back in the 90s, a clothing line came out and it was called No Fear? I don’t know if it is even still around. I always loved that tagline because no fear were the first words out of an angel's mouth and Jesus' mouth. Those were the first post resurrection words that should signify how followers of Jesus live their lives. Right now, the time in which we live is called a post 9/11 environment.  Historians say every age has an ID tag and the age in which we live is going to be tagged the age of anxiety. When you think of all the instability in the world and the environment right now and everything that is going on, maybe you will understand where historians are coming up with that tag. Here are some of the factors that create that. Gas prices, I filled up yesterday, and I noticed that diesel fuel is over $4 a gallon, - what this means for shipping in America. How can you have at the same time loss of jobs and inflation? This is in a climate that really scared me this week when I heard Greenspan say this is the worst economic environment in America since 1945, since before I was born. A couple of weeks ago, did you hear that our government said our water, our drinking water might not be safe, that there are drugs and other kinds of stuff in our water? Delta Airlines just announced this week that they have 58,000 employees and they have offered to buy out 30,000 of them.  Foreclosures on homes. Banking. It is scary right now, the banks that are in trouble. The Feds keep cutting interest rates. How far can they cut interest rates? And every time they cut an interest rate, it devalues the dollar. What other kind of things, what kind of factors right now play into anxiety and fear? What do you think? What have I left out? Mental health issues. On top of having some kind of mental health thing going on and then you get the bill from what your insurance doesn’t pay and it puts you back into the psych unit. Healthcare. It is incredible. What else? Government corruption; everywhere, isn’t it? One governor went out and the new one coming in said, "Yeah, I’ve messed up too." What else? What am I leaving out? Higher taxes. At the same time this escalating debt, not only of individuals, but national debt, an unbalanced national budget. What else? The presidential race can create some anxiety. War. The Iraq war and maybe Iran war. Anything we are leaving out? Here is one: how many parents have children that have to go to college yet? My son will be out four years. Tuition has gone up $8,000 a year at the school that he has graduated from. What else? Kid violence and stuff in schools. We have to have armed guards right now in our churches. Amazing kind of environment we live in. The problem with fear and anxiety is that it literally robs us of life. About four times a week, I walk my dog in the cemetery across the street from me. For me, the cemetery is such a reflective place for it reminds me that I am going to be there sooner than I think. What it all comes down to is that we have this dash between two dates and it’s what we do in that dash and how precious and little bit of time we have. Fear and anxiety robs us of the little bit of time we have.

As Christians, in light of the resurrection, how do we deal with this fear and anxiety in a post 9/11 environment? There are four different accounts of the resurrection in scripture. We are going to Matthew 28. In this account we are told that the two Marys went to the tomb on Easter morning. What do you expect when you go to a tomb? You are in a cemetery. Death - you are in a situation where there is no life outcome. When they got there, the tomb had been opened and there was an angel. I am going to begin reading in verse five. We are only going to read verses 5-7 and it is amazing what we get out of these few verses. "The angel said to the women, 'do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: 'he has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him,' now I have told you." What is so significant is God always does what God promises. His promise might be delayed, but it will not be denied. Pray with me. "Father, we have not come here to honor a tradition, but to truly discover in deeper ways the power of the resurrection in our lives. Through this reality, teach us to number our days that we may present to You a heart of wisdom. We pray this in Jesus' name, Amen."

In these simple three verses, I see four actions of faith that Christians should take to counter anxiety and fear. Here is the first: don’t allow fear to control your actions and decision-making processes. Life is a choice, it’s not predetermined. You and I chose our life situation. God put it this way in the book of Deuteronomy. He said, "I set before you choices. You can choose life or death, blessings or curse." Life is a choice for all of us, it is not predetermined. God said, "Choose this day life that you and your children might live." To experience life, you have to take risks. I was amazed as I was researching this message, the number of people who quit flying after 9/11. One American who is probably the most famous for never flying is John Madden. Remember, the football coach and then he used to broadcast Monday Night Football. They refitted a bus for him and called it the Madden Mobile. He would do one Monday night Seattle football game, bus all the way across the country and then the next week do Miami and then go to Boston. Can you imagine people who are controlled by fear? Let’s talk about flying, how it limits their life and influence that God can have through their life. I am on a plane about every other week. I just got home the night before last from flying someplace and I know the potential hazards of flying. Yes, in 1995, I was on a United Airlines flight coming from Chicago to Dayton when part of the door blew off and those little masks came down. I am one of the few people who has breathed through one of those masks and am alive to tell about it. We went into a 40-second dive. You can imagine what it feels like on a roller coaster for 40 seconds dropping. We got back to Chicago and after they got another plane to bring people back to Dayton, they gave folks a choice. Do you want to bus back to Dayton or plane back to Dayton? I thought, "I want to get back to Dayton as soon as I can." I got back on the plane, but three fourths of the people got on buses. That wasn’t the only incident. Remember two years ago when we were getting ready to take off from Darfur and the engine of our Russian jet blew up. We all know of the marginal maintenance on Russian planes, but we sometimes choose to get on those Russian planes. If you allow yourself to be controlled by your fears, you will never experience the power of what God wants to do in your life.

Easter faith is about feeling the fear, but acting on faith. I love what it says here in Matthew 28:8, "So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples." Their whole disposition and energy level changed. How do you like that paradox? Afraid yet filled with joy. There has been a survey of the things that people are most afraid of and seventy percent of people responded that one of their greatest fears is public speaking. Can any of you relate to that? Does anyone want to come up here and finish this for me? I’d love to give you an opportunity to conquer your fear. Remember, I am an introvert. I failed oral communications in high school because I froze two minutes into the thing and couldn’t finish it and just went back to my seat. What would have happened in my life if I allowed myself to be controlled by my fear and made my decisions on the basis of my fear instead of acting on my faith? How much more limited would God’s purpose be through my life? This week I flew to Iowa where two days ago, on Holy Thursday, I spoke at a college in Iowa. I was talking about Darfur to these college students. So, if I was afraid to fly and if I was afraid to speak... do not allow fear to control your decision-making process or actions. If you allow fear to determine your decisions and actions, you will literally lose your life. People stay in destructive, abusive relationships and marriages because of fear. People stay in dead-end jobs because they are afraid of the commitment it will take to start over in the pursuit of a higher calling. Hope is the belief in a positive outcome and committing to the resulting actions to achieve that outcome. That’s what the Easter message is all about. God always has the last word. So don’t let fear control your decisions or your actions.

Here is the second action of faith I see in these three verses: recognize the holy ground you are standing on. Come and see the place where he lay - a tomb, a grave, a cemetery. The despair, the cemeteries and the death, those are the places where God does his best work. You don’t need to be in a different circumstance, you don’t need different surroundings, you don’t need a different family, you don’t need different breaks. You are right in the place where God is. Where ever you are, God is. Expectations are everything. If you are in despair and you expect the consequences and results to be despair, you are going to get despair. The Bible says that whatever a person thinks within themselves, so they become. The women’s expectation was death. That’s where God does his best work. Wherever you are - God is. Recognize the holy ground on which you stand.

One of my favorite stories in the Old Testament is the story of Jacob. Jacob laid down one night to sleep and had this dream. I am learning, as I get older, to pay attention to my dreams because most of the time when God spoke in the Bible, it was through dreams. In Jacob's dream, God spoke to Jacob and told him about the incredible blessing that was going to come through his life. God said to Jacob, "I am going to bless you on the ground where you are laying." You are in the right place, at the right time, wherever you are - God is. You are saying to me right now, "But, Mike, you don’t get it. I am in the pits." Remember when Joseph was thrown into a pit and sold into slavery. But the Lord was with Joseph the word says, and so he became a successful man. God was in the pit with him. You say, "Mike, I am going through the fire." Remember the three friends of Daniel who were thrown into the furnace of fire, but there appeared a fourth one like the Son of Man - guess who that was? Wherever you are standing, whatever situation you might find yourself in right now, God is there also. Recognize the holy ground on which you are standing. God does his best work in cemeteries.

Here is the third action of faith I see in this passage: serve God’s purpose in others. Look at the first part of verse 7, "Then go quickly and tell his disciples: he has risen from the dead." Never is the presence of the resurrected Christ more visible or evident than when you are serving his purpose in the least of these, when you are serving other people. One of the questions I want to ask right now, because again we are not here to just give a nod to a tradition, we are here to re-ask the questions: What am I doing with the resurrection today? Where am I in my journey today with the resurrected Christ? How am I actively serving Jesus' purpose in the world today? That’s where we experience Christ. One of the consequences of being age 56 is that you lose fillings. So, I was heading out of the house Monday morning, chewing gum and you know how you are chewing gum and think, "What is that hard thing in the piece of gum?" I immediately called my dentist and he was gracious and took me by 11:30. I love to go to my dentist, Mark Bentley, because he is always passionate to tell me about what he is doing on mission trips. He takes four mission trips a year to Jamaica with our group. That's four weeks out of the year. They do about 400 dental procedures a week in Jamaica. If there are any dentists in the room, he says he needs another dentist to go with him the next time so that they don’t have to pull so many teeth and they can fill more teeth. With his own money, his own resources, he has bought portable units where without electricity you can do drilling and all those kind of things that dentists need to do. He pays for his own assistants to fly there and do this kind of work with him. A lot of times, we think that ministers are those people who are paid to do ministry. No, everyone who says yes to the risen Jesus Christ with their skills, with their profession, everything, the whole package that God has given you is for the purpose of serving Jesus’ mission in the world. Another one of my favorite doctors is gynecologist, Dr. Steve Guy. Steve Guy has coordinated all of our medical mission teams to Jamaica on many, many trips. He is there also four times a year. He has also gone with me to Darfur. I always take a doctor along to deal with any bullet wounds or whatever we may come up with. Never do you experience more the presence of the resurrected Christ, but when we are serving his purpose in the least of these. We don’t find him sitting in chairs in churches. This is what God said through the apostle Paul, this is how God will reveal the truth of the resurrection in the world, it is how Christ will be made visible in you. Colossians says, "Christ in you is the hope of the world." All of you know that my big passion in this church is Sudan. One of the pains this year was to know that the whole crop in Darfur only met half the need because of pests and lack of rainfall this year. This past Tuesday night, your board of this church approved the release of $192,000. We've put no additional money into agriculture since 2005 and it has grown to feed 65,000. The $192,000 will cover 2,000 more families so it will feed 11,000 more people. We have to ask ourselves if we are authentic followers of Jesus, how are we serving God’s purpose in others.

In these three simple verses there are four actions of faith. Here’s the fourth action: keep a forward focus. Look at the second half of verse 7, "He is going ahead of you to Galilee. There you will see him." You will never experience the resurrected Christ if you are looking back. I don’t care if you are 80 or 90. It gets dangerous, when I hear people say, "Well, we are not used to doing it that way." Or, if you start talking about the good old days. Give me a call and we will schedule your funeral for next week. "He is going before you. There you will see him." There is a danger when looking back. There is a story in the Bible about Lot and his wife. Lot had this vision where God said leave everything that is familiar because if you stay in the familiar, if you stay in the past, it will literally rot and be consumed. Nothing in the past lives. Lot gathered his family, they were heading out of town, he was focused on God’s promise of the future - but his wife looked back. When she looked back, she turned into a pillar of salt. Now what does that mean? When you are longing for the security and normalcy of the past, it literally sucks the life out of you and when the life is sucked out of you, all that is left is calcium and salt. That’s it, you become a pile of salt, a pile of death when you long for the security and normalcy of the past. Hebrews 11:1 says, "Faith is being sure of what we hope for." It's in front of us, it's not back.

Here's another thing: don't get stuck in the present. People of faith get into trouble all the time when they think they have it figured out and they think they know how to do it. You put it on cruise control and as soon as you put it on cruise control, you stop right where you are and Jesus is so far ahead of you, you don’t even see him anymore, you don’t know where he is going and you forget where you are.  

We didn’t come here to sing songs and say it is Easter. We have come here to deal with serious questions. What are you doing right now with the resurrection? Where are you in your Jesus journey? Some of you might have stopped and you didn’t even realize you've stopped. It’s easy to get distracted with work and children and all of that kind of stuff, but you've stopped. Others of us have been spectators, we have been observing, but never made the commitment to really start. There are many others who really think they have it down. They are not followers of Jesus, they are students of Jesus who passionately read everything and study everything but they have never made a commitment to do this journey. Wherever you are right now, there is no way that you can ever experience the resurrected Jesus Christ until you make an all-out commitment that you will follow without condition or reservation. For me, I still remember it was fall 1969, I was a freshman standing in front of the library at the University of Cincinnati and I said, "Jesus, I don’t even really understand who you are, but here is what I say to you: I am yours. I will go anywhere you want me to go. I will do anything you want me to do. No take backs. Cross my heart and hope to die." I still don’t fully understand who he is. It’s not about intellectual certainty or cognitive explanation. I still pray, "Lord, take my life before I could ever embarrass you, my family, anything publicly. No matter what I go through, doubt, agnosticism, wherever I am, I can’t take this back. I am yours for the rest of my life." In fact, all my kids are home and last night we were eating pizza in a restaurant and my son just happened to mention about me going to Darfur this year. My wife went, "What?" "Well, it goes back before I even knew you, Honey, in front of the library at the University of Cincinnati when I made that pledge, 'I will go anywhere you want me to go. I will do anything you want me to do.'"

That is the call. That is the demand of Easter. You either say no to everything or yes to the unknown commitment of following Jesus for the rest of your life. I don’t know where you are, but I am going to have a prayer and if this prayer expresses where you are right now in your life, let this prayer be your prayer. "Lord Jesus, You know there are many questions I still have and there is probably no better way to deal with intellectual issues around a resurrection than to say, "I believe, help my unbelief" but it is not based on that. Take me as I am, put me to work, use me. I am Yours, with all of the complexities of who I am and who I'm not, for the rest of my life and all of eternity. I will do whatever You ask me to do and I will go wherever You ask me to go. I will order my life and my priorities by Your word. I pray this in Your name - the incredible name, Savior, Master, Jesus, Lord. Amen.