If there is any day that is more filled with hope than Easter, I don’t know what it is. Easter is about hope. Pastors hope their church will be full on Easter. Mothers hope their families will be together and children hope the Easter bunny will deliver plenty of candy. Everyone comes to Easter worship with the hope that spring is on the way. Easter is filled with hope because we are people of hope. We hope early and often throughout our lives.

We hope for a bottle in the night and a dry diaper. We hope to get a good grade or get picked for the team. We hope the boy will call or our parents won’t find out. We hope we get into the right college or we get a good job. If we had time enough to interview everyone today, we’d have long lists of things we hope for. Just about everything would show up on the list, even I suspect, hope for a new heart.

I have a friend who hoped for a new heart and he got one. He received what more than 2000 people in this country will receive this year, a donated, transplanted, new heart. What previous generations would consider miraculous is now done often and is performed so successfully that the majority of transplant recipients survive five years.  Now that my friend has his new heart, he feels fully alive again. He’s not waiting around to die. The new heart gave him a new spirit. He thought he was nearly dead; now he’s fully alive.

If I have one hope for you today it is for a new heart. This is what Easter is about, both the first Easter and every Easter that has followed. Easter revives the heart. It gives us a different type of hope. Instead of hoping for something, we have hope in something. We have hope in a resurrected Savior, hope in eternal life. When we have this new heart, we are fully alive, our senses are heightened, our joy is realized, and our soul is vibrant. I hope the new heart Easter offers will put a new spirit in you.

This is what happened on the first Easter morning. At the empty tomb, they received a new heart and a new spirit.  All of the gospel accounts agree. What felt like a dead end on Friday became a new beginning on Easter. What was perceived as hope destroyed was actually more than they had ever hoped for.  But the first Easter didn’t begin in hope.

At the first light of Easter morning, the women head to the tomb, numb. This is what happens when you lose a loved one. When you’re not falling apart, you’re numb. You pull yourself together and then, go through the paces. You make the arrangements with the mortuary. You call family and friends. You write the obituary. You fulfill your responsibility. This is what the women are doing but they have the additional burden of doing this without hope. 

On Friday, when Jesus was crucified, all of their hopes for a new way of life were gone. Their hope for restoring the kingdom of Israel died as Jesus died.  These were tangible hopes, hope for things to change.  Under the domination of Rome, they were so politically oppressed they had little say in their lives. They were economically exploited, taxed to the point of poverty. In Jesus, they had hoped for a new life, hoped for freedom, hoped for the basic necessitates of life and economic well-being. When Jesus died, their hearts were broken, their hopes stolen from them.

When they get to the tomb, they find the stone rolled away. While this seems like a big piece of the Easter story to us and to the other gospel writers, for Luke it isn’t important. They enter the tomb unalarmed and are simply perplexed when the body of Jesus is missing. It is only when angel messengers approach them they show emotions. They are terrified. The two messengers interpret their experience “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” (Luke 24: 5b-6) It was the third day. He wasn’t at the tomb. They remembered and that was enough.  "They remembered his words" (Luke 24:8) and it was enough. At the empty tomb, they received a new heart and a new spirit.

It is a very different Easter story than the gospel of Matthew where they nearly run into Jesus. It is a very different story than John’s when Mary mistakes the resurrected Jesus for the gardener. For Luke, the first hope in resurrection comes in remembering. Remembering what Jesus had said to them, remembering what he promised them, they believed. They have a new heart and a new hope, not for a new way of living but hope in a new way of living, not hope for a restored life but in resurrected life. To have a new heart and a new spirit, they just had to remember.

If I place myself at the empty tomb, I don’t think this would be enough for me. I’ll admit this to you. Had I been there on that first Easter, looking at a violated grave, remembering the words of Jesus wouldn’t be enough. And it wasn’t enough for the disciples. When the women return and tell the disciples what they believe, the men don’t believe. In fact, it seemed to them “an idle tale,” empty talk, a silly story, “a foolish yarn.” Pick your translation. All of them make it out to be the gossip of women. Peter is the only one that even checks out their claim. He goes to the tomb. “…stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.” (Luke 24:12). You don’t hold Easter services around Peter’s response, scratching his head, trying to figure it out.  Later in the day, on the road to Emmaus, Jesus says that the men were “slow of heart to believe” (Luke 24:25).  I think that would have been me, if I’d been there, looking into the tomb with Peter. When it comes to Easter, women lead the way because they understand that you can’t look for the living among the dead.

That statement was true then and it is true now. Go to any cemetery in town. Pick one. You can chose one of the tiny family cemeteries that you can find throughout our Geist community or you could go to Crown Hill, our city’s historic cemetery. You can look for James Whitcomb Riley and John Dillinger, you can search for Benjamin Harrison and Eli Lilly. You’ll find their graves but you won’t find them there, alive. You can’t find evidence of resurrection in a cemetery. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” (Luke 24:5b).

It is why so many of us are “slow of heart to believe.” We look for evidence of resurrection among the dead. We look in the wrong place. Clearly, resurrection is found among the living. It is found in the countless transformed lives throughout the centuries. It is found in the first disciples who, though “slow of heart to believe”, believed so strongly in the resurrection that they changed the world. If Easter wasn’t true, if Jesus’ life ended with his crucifixion, he would have been forgotten like the thousands of Jews crucified by the Romans in a bloody century of executions. But he is not forgotten; he is remembered, again and again, Easter after Easter, from the first to the present. Nothing, nor no one, can dispute this power of Easter for it is written solidly in history and is affirmed by more than two billion witnesses today.  This gives us hope, not for something but in something, it gives us hope in a resurrected Savior, hope in eternal life.

In the end, tests of faith are less important than our testimonies of faith. I am as convinced as the Disciples and others in a Risen Savior because I see him active in our world. I encounter him in the lives of faithful Christians and the church, year after year, century after century, loving God with all of their heart and loving their neighbor as they loved themselves. I encounter my Risen Lord in you, when you love as Jesus loved. When resurrection is believed in, God plants within you a new heart and a new spirit and nothing can hold it back, not even death!   

If we are people of hope, what is it that you hope for? If we hope early and hope often, if we hope for bottles and diapers, for grades and teams, for job and mates and children, if we are people of hope, as you sit in this service today, in what do you place your hope?

Do you hope for health, for love, for happiness, for money, for recognition? All that we hope for eventually fades, except for our hope in life eternal. Our real hope comes in living for Christ each day, loving as he loved and knowing that our love in him is eternal. Hope in…lives well beyond the grave. I cannot imagine living any other way.

Because I cannot imagine living any other way, this is my hope for you. I hope that this Easter God puts within you a new heart and a new spirit, gives you a way of living and dying that you might have Hope in Easter and can shout with me, “Christ has Risen! And so shall we! Hallelujah; Hallelujah and Amen!”