The Easter Uprising, they still call it. On the Monday after Easter 1916, Irish nationalists Patrick Pearse, James Connally, Michael Collins and others led a revolt against British rule. They captured 14 buildings in Dublin and tried to force the British to cede sovereignty back to the Irish. They failed in short order, as the British forces fought back in ways that surprised the uprisers. But the failed rebels soon became heroes, and the Republic of Ireland eventually came into being, even if a united Ireland is still an unfulfilled dream.

The political slogan "Easter Uprising" is not coincidental to the time of year the revolt was waged. It points to something deeper in the faith experience of Irish Christians. What happened to Jesus that great gettin' up mornin' long ago that has the earth movin' under our feet to this day? No thing and no one is safe from that divine seismic earthquake that spit up Jesus from a garden tomb. Every force of death quakes in its wake. If death couldn't keep that good man down, then there's nothing grave about this world in the end.

God is in the uprising business. God turns things rightside up that are unjustly upside down. God lightens the gravity of this world by raising Jesus into a new and thin-aired world of God's making. And God promises that this uprising power will leave no stone unturned in the graveyards of our lives-whether we're talking bodies or spirits.

I can't believe she's dead, he said to me. Byron Davis was sitting in the church parlor just minutes before we were to process into the sanctuary for the funeral service of his beloved wife, Gladys. When you've been together for over 60 years, you know something about what the Bible means when it says that husband and wife become one flesh. It doesn't happen on the wedding night; it happens over many nights and many years. You get to where you know each other by heart. You can hardly imagine yourself without your partner. You don't want to. I asked Byron what it was like without her now. He said he still rolls over in the middle of the night when he hears a noise or something stirring and calls out her name. He is surprised when she doesn't answer.

Preachers and undertakers are both well acquainted with death. People will talk to us about it freely. But I think they talk to preachers about it because they know we have to preach Easter sermons every year and figure we might not be just more familiar with death than everyone else, but we might have some deeper sense of life beyond it. We are not just undertakers; we are uprisers, too. What Byron and all the rest of us need preachers for is not just to get adjusted to the reality of death, but to begin to live as though death is only penultimate, not ultimate, the second- to-last word. What we all want to know is whether all the living and loving we have done will amount to something more than death.

St. Paul agrees. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, he says, we are of all people the most to be pitied. But since Christ has been raised from the dead as the firstfruits, we have reason to believe that we who are planted in the same field and come from the same seed as he will follow him in due time. Made like him, like him we rise, the hymn says. All our hope, though, hinges on whether Christ himself was actually raised from the dead. If there is to be an Easter uprising for us, there must have been first an Easter uprising for him. Easter is first of all, therefore, the uprising of Christ from the dead.

Controversy has surrounded the movie, The Passion of the Christ, for more than one reason. But chief among them is the charge that it portrays the Jews as being responsible for the death of Jesus. Some Christians are bothered that Jews raise the matter, because they say the movie simply says what the Bible says, that the Jews incited the Romans to crucify him, thus unjustly killing the innocent Son of God. In one sense that is true: Jewish leaders did do Jesus in. But-let me say this one last time-so did the Romans. And so did the disciples who either betrayed him or deserted him. And so did you and I. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Well, of course. I had something to do with it, and so did you. We are all guilty of his death. So to get embroiled in a blame game misses the bigger point: death is the enemy of us all that God set out to conquer in Jesus. As Paul put it, The last enemy that will be destroyed is death.

Woody Allen wittily said, I don't mind dying; I just don't want to be there when it happens. And we know what he means. We arrange our lives against death. We live in denial most of the time. Like the town in Colorado that tried to do away with all signs that read "Dead End." They wanted to change them to "No Outlet," to avoid the negativity, don't you know?! One resident said this at the town meeting: We just moved into a condo right outside where there's a "dead-end" sign. . Every time you come, you have to go by this sign, and it just isn't pleasant.¹

Well, right. Death isn't pleasant. The Passion movie only reminds us that Jesus' death is about as unpleasant as it gets: the flogging, the beating, the mocking, the spitting, the nailing, the bleeding, and the dying. No wonder the film was rated R!

My friend Walter Draughon is pastor of the First Baptist Church in St. Petersburg, Florida. He has a keen aesthetic sense that is equaled only by his theological sensibility. When they built their sanctuary a few years ago, he insisted on an architectural policy of no sanitizing the gospel. In the narthex that leads to the sanctuary, they have stained-glass windows telling the biblical story from creation to the ministry of Jesus. Then the angular low-ceilinged rectangular foyer gives way to a high-ceilinged circular spot just before entering. The two-dimensional artwork yields to a three-dimensional bronze crucifix. You cannot enter the house of worship without first confronting the suffering and dying Savior. Once you are inside, a huge opaque rose window rises up behind the chancel, and outside it an empty cross becomes visible. The anti-Catholic sentiment of Baptists in Florida is about like it is in South Texas. Many people felt that Walter had gone too far, that resurrection ought to be the theme throughout. But bull-doggedly, the gospel-faithful pastor held his ground.

If the church cannot face death with the knowledge that resurrection is the end of the story, then how will the world ever learn? Before we can sing Christ is risen, Christ will come again; we have to sing Christ has died. Resurrection doesn't make sense without death. But praise God, death has been robbed of last rights, because Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.

So the first Easter uprising is Christ from the dead. Death has been dealt a fatal blow, a mortal wound from which it will never recover. God has released death's grip on us. God has broken the gravitational force that holds everyone down. God has punctured the power of the greatest oppressor of all and lifted Christ up.

That isn't the end of the story, though. Easter is also the uprising of Christ in the dead. Because Christ is risen from the dead, Christ can rise up in the dead and give us life.

Now, you will notice I didn't try to prove to you that Christ was raised from the dead. I could do like the Bible and tell you about the witnesses to the aftermath of his resurrection. Paul tells us Christ appeared to the apostles, and then to some 500 others at one time who go nameless. We don't know anything about that appearance, strangely. The gospels tell the story-each in its own way-of the women going to the tomb, then telling the disciples, some of whom go see the empty grave for themselves. We learn about Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene and then to the Twelve, minus Judas and Thomas, and then to Thomas. But all this is after the fact. And after that, Jesus ascends to the Father and works his presence through his Spirit alone. We get to know the power of Jesus' Easter uprising from the dead only by his Easter uprising in the dead-in us, that is.

Orthodox Jewish theologian Pinchas Lapide admits that the faith of the early Christians and the existence of the church across time can be adequately explained only by Jesus' actual resurrection from the dead. He does not think that means that Jesus is the only-begotten Son of God, but he can accept that God might have acted to begin the hoped-for final resurrection of the dead in this man. [A]s a faithful Jew, I cannot explain a historical development which, despite many errors and much confusion, has carried the central message of Israel into the world of the nations, as the result of blind happenstance, or human error, or a materialistic determinism . ... [T]he Easter faith has to be recognized as a part of divine providence.²

If it were not for the fact that God has made Christ to rise in the dead hearts of other human beings-disciples then or now-there would be little support for saying he rose from the dead himself. It is his ongoing Easter uprising in the dead, like you and me, that makes his first uprising believable. When we focus on the garden tomb and question how God might have accomplished such a deed, we are doing what the women were doing that early dawn. The angels need to say to us what they said to them: Why are you looking for the living among the dead? If we want to know the truth of Jesus' uprising, we have to find it in ourselves and in others who once were dead to God and now have been made alive. Christ was raised from the dead so that he might be raised in the dead-in you and me.

Some of you here this morning are hoping that is true, but you have not yet experienced it. You feel hopeless about your future, numb to life, and powerless to do anything about it. Maybe an addiction has a death grip on you, and no matter how much willpower you stir up, it is never enough. Maybe a relationship or the lack of one has you feeling six feet under. Someone has rejected you or made you believe you have nothing to offer worth receiving from your love. Maybe you are so deep in debt you can't crawl out or so tired of failing in your career you can hardly start again.

The maybes pile up like dirt being shoveled on your grave. Once you acknowledge your own death, though, you are in just the right position to experience the power of Easter. The open question of Jesus' open tomb is this: are you open to resurrection life yourself?

Only the dead can experience resurrection. Political uprisings, social uprisings, and personal uprisings all spring up from the uprising of Jesus Christ from the dead. But only when you are raised up does the world have a witness, does the world have reason to believe that Christ was raised up.

God is asking THIS great gettin' up mornin', Can I get a witness? Well?