For those of us who still think vaguely of laser disks or even turntables when we decide to buy some music, there is a whole other world out there called i-Tunes. By means of this Internet-based service, anyone, anywhere can pick out whatever song he or she likes, pay with a few keystrokes, and there you are. No fuss, no muss, for the consumer is in charge!

Perhaps it should be no surprise that in a post-modern and skeptical age, religious beliefs seem to be headed very much the same way. According to the latest figures, 8 in 10 Americans indicate they believe in “Heaven,” (whatever they understand that to be), so that’s probably the Church’s most popular download. But when it comes to the Empty Tomb and the bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ - how many would you guess are presently buying that particular tune? Just 26%. In the resurrection of the Body, barely one in four people believe. Why, even reincarnation polls 30%! So, for the first time this Easter, it appears that more Americans hold to the notion that we’re just cycling through one lifetime after another, than believe that Jesus Christ is Risen - and that one day we too will rise, made like him to be with him.

Therefore I make the claim that the Church’s faith in the Resurrection is fast becoming a fringe belief. It is simply too much for the rational mainstream to swallow. And, if we risk being reasonable for a moment, this should not be hard for us to understand. Here in the Church we speak of the Empty Tomb and Life Eternal - but away from the lilies and echoes of joyful Alleluias, Resurrection - Jesus’ or anybody’s - does not square with anything we know or have experienced about physical human life on earth. Now, that we may one day become disembodied souls who fly up and somehow glom eternally onto God - this could win a mainstream following among those who like the idea of one day “going to Heaven,” but Resurrection is quite another matter. For starters, no one has ever seen it happen. And it may help us, this Easter Sunday, to recognize that no one saw it happen that first Easter Sunday morning, either. Rather they came upon an empty grave.

And we note that the emptiness of the Tomb did not give Mary a reason to celebrate. She was not singing, “up from the grave he arose!” She was still living in Good Friday, the place where Jesus was denied mercy, where he was wounded and died. Death was what Mary had experienced, eyewitnessed, and so she went to the tomb with a heavy heart and eyes reddened by tears. She was still in shock, but maybe at the grave she could at least get some closure. The disappearance of Jesus’ body is a ghastly surprise to her: Friday now seems blacker than ever. They, terrible they, have stolen his body. How will she find closure now?

Like Mary, we have at times found plenty to cry about. In many ways we live on the edge of Easter, because frankly we also are accustomed to the disappointment and shock brought into our lives by illness, trauma and death. We may not like living in the shadow of Good Friday, but we adjust to it. Most of us keep company with pain and regret. Just ask the wife betrayed her husband, the husband, embittered by his wife, the teenager wounded by the deafness of her parents, the parents, distraught at the intentional cruelty of their teen. Many of us are accustomed to disappointment with others, with ourselves. Too many of us get through our days by keeping busy, looking forward to an occasional break from a tiresome routine that leaves us surly with family, annoyed with everybody and nobody in particular. Small wonder we find Resurrection a strange and unknown frontier, and prefer instead to grope our way forward as if the dawn of Easter can not quite be counted upon.

Have you ever wondered why Mary is so slow to catch on to the dawning of Easter? Well, Easter, as it turns out, does not occur with the sudden obviousness of an indoor Easter-egg hunt, where the gate goes up and we’re off to the races. Easter is not like that. Easter comes like the sunrise, with its first rays looking less like radiant sun and more like something somewhat-less dark. Mary’s eyes need time to adjust. So at first does not recognize the man who asks her why she is crying. She has a lot to cry about. Friday is all over her. She wails at him “they have taken away my Lord!”

It is not the Empty Tomb that brings Mary good news. No, it’s the moment when Jesus speaks her name that she wakes up, that she begins to rise. Notice that she does not say, “Oh, Jesus! You are risen indeed. Now I get it!” In fact, I’m not sure any of us “get it.” What she knows is that Jesus has spoken her name - that maybe Good Friday is not all there is.

But this news of hers is not easily believed. In fact, she’d find it was not even all that welcome, as the story goes. Mary was offering a view of unexplored territory, and we humans tend not to like going beyond the known. Hundreds of years ago, the greatest navigators in the world came from the little nation of Portugal, and every one of them agreed - you do not sail beyond the Cape of Storms. Near the southern-most point of the continent of Africa, the Cape of Storms was the outer boundary of the Atlantic and the known world. Its waters were rough, its weather treacherous, and the people who lived along its shores even worse - running aground there meant being hunted, they said, most probably eaten - and meeting a fate worse than drowning.

This was the edge, so feared and so final that legends sprang up about it: one told by Portuguese poets featured a voracious monster that lurked there, which they called Adamastor . Eager to prey upon any crews crazy enough to attempt passage, Adamastor was reputed to be “grotesque, with heavy jowls and sunken, hollow eyes, having a mouth coal-black but for teeth yellow with decay.” Others reported visions of a phantom ship, a lost Dutch man-o-war, cursed to be forever beaten by the waters off the Cape without ever rounding it. To see the specter of The Flying Dutchman, as the ship came to be called, was considered a portent of death.

But then about 500 years ago, a sea captain named Bartholomew Dias performed the unthinkable: he rounded the Cape, went beyond the edge, and became the first European to sail into the smooth, tranquil waters of the Indian Ocean. To celebrate this bold voyage, the Portuguese monarchy renamed this former haunt of ghosts and monsters do Cabo da Boa Esperanca - the Cape of Good Hope, as it is still called today.

Like Portuguese sailors and poets of old, we who live on the edge of Easter are confronted by a serious risk: a failure of nerve and imagination. Because what we have is abundant evidence of Good Friday. We grieve what the past has taken from us. We trade away the abundance of the present to marinate in fears of what the future will bring. Someone tells us that the Tomb was empty, and we experience the same puzzlement they did that first Easter Sunday. What does that mean? What is beyond the edge?

But as he spoke Mary’s name, I believe Jesus also spoke your name, my name. Easter actually begins when we hear our name, spoken in love, on Jesus’ lips, and we have to rely on nerve and imagination to conceive what it could mean that he is alive and able to speak to each of us. That, sisters and brothers, may be the greatest miracle of Easter - not just what transpired between Jesus and his Father in the dark hours before dawn, but the very moment when each of us encounters the living Lord. For he is not in the grave - he is Risen!

This is the hope on which we found our fringe-belief, our bold claim that dares go beyond the edge of the known world. Our evidence of the Empty Tomb is this: that we have heard him call our name, that when we pass through storms and breaking waves, he is there with us, the one whose anchor holds, the God-man who calms the seas.

And when they ask us what proof we have of the Resurrection, we can answer: what proof does anyone have they are loved? So his place is not among the dead; we don’t look for him there. Jesus’ place is among the living, and every time he comes among us, we become more like him. That’s what it means to sail beyond the edge, and become the dawning day called Easter.

Thanks be to God.