On behalf of myself and my community, we wish you all a very Happy Easter and we thank you for coming to help us celebrate and praise the Lord for this great, great gift.

In Luke= s gospel when the women go to the grave the angel says to them: A Why are you looking for the living among the dead?@ That was the first proclamation of the resurrection. The women then told the apostles and the apostles had a hard time believing that such a tortured death could have the result of someone living. Even though it was quite exciting and a very positive message. He’s alive! And we see in the continued encounters of Jesus with the apostles he has to convince them that he is alive. They do get the message and then we know especially in the life of Paul the fundamental point of their preaching was Jesus is alive. In the Acts of the Apostles and even in the Apocalypse Jesus is call the Living One. Words really imitating the Old Testament that God is considered the Living God.

The first and powerful message of Easter is that Jesus is alive! It is the accomplishment of God= s redemptive love that brings salvation to the whole world first and foremost Jesus is the first fruits. Then the second message is that because he= s alive it= s possible for all of us to be an Easter people. An alleluia people. Alive! Of course this life is not simply to come back from the dead, it is a new life, it is a transformed life that has power with Jesus over death and he dies no more.

It= s important for us to reflect on how do we really take in the fact that we participate in the resurrection. Paul tells us in the epistle to this Mass, that it was in our Baptism. When you were baptized, we joined in Jesus= death and his resurrection. To be plunged into his death means that we have died to sin. Plunged into his resurrected life means that we raise to new life in him. Of course, everybody is going, where is it?

The life of Leanne Payne, who is an Episcopal woman, who does healing ministry for people having difficulty with sexual integration in their lives. She has been doing this for over 30 years and is quite effective. She knows the power of the Redeemer King and the lives of those who believe. Once witnessed her own experience of how she began to realize that the resurrected life was in her.

The first time was when she was about 14 or 15. Her father had died when she was 3 and her mother was a very believing Christian and prayed faithfully and took her to church. One time she was in a Protestant church and the community was praying for the gifts of the Spirit and she was just inundated with the presence of the Spirit for the first time in her life. She began to realize that God could be in her. She had no one to mentor her or teach her anything so she always tried to recapture that experience because it was so peaceful and so uplifting and she felt so joyous for a whole week. Every time she went to pray she tried to make it happen again, of course, it never works that way.

As she got older she began not to pray as fervently or as much and kind of drifted away a little bit from the Lord. However, not seriously. Then she read C. S. Lewis, in one of his books in which he was talking about prayer and he said, it= s important to keep your attention on Jesus not on your experience of him. At that moment she decided to recommit herself to Jesus and told Jesus: "I will do whatever you want, whenever you tell me, through Scripture, because she was faithful with reflecting on Scriptures, "that will be my path." So she began to grow. Until she couldn’t understand why she didn’t get angry at people. Her mother was a very calm person and very charitable. So she didn’t learn anything about getting angry from her mother. So she tried to be deliberately mad at people and it would always just fall apart. Until the Lord placed someone across her path who lied to her, hurt her, and caused all kinds of problems to her. Then she felt rising in her not just anger, but hatred. Surprised that this feeling could be in her. So she prayed very fervently and asked the Lord to help her. She heard the Lord tell her to forgive the person. When she forgave that person she sensed that Jesus was in her forgiving that person through her. She began to see something different about the meaning of how we participate in the resurrected Jesus.

That wasn’t the end. She is in a ministry which deals with people who throw themselves at the feet of the devil. But before that she was working as a psychiatrist in an institution, in a ward of about 100 men and there were some who were even insane with their perversions. One day she encountered the devil. No matter what she did her thoughts were just oppressive. So she prayed and she happened to read the life of St. Catherine of Sienna and she saw the passage that said Catherine went up to her quiet prayer room to pray. When she went there all of a sudden she was attacked by the devil. So she complained to the Lord, "Look, I came here to pray and waste time with you and look what happens.@ So the Lord said to her: A Did you want this kind of disturbance? Do you agree with it?@ She said: A No!@ He said: A Then you know I am with you." That passage kind of gave her a complete conviction that to participate with Christ is to have Christ in us which is really the fulfillment of Scripture and Jesus= prayer at the Last Supper: A Father, that they may be in me and I in them.@ From that day on she never really lost the sense of the presence of Christ in her life. In her ministry she often calls upon it because she does a lot of work of healing.

The real question is do we praise and thank the Lord when we see how graciously good God is in the great gift of redemption starting with Jesus as the first fruits. The union of God and man is now one, in Christ, fully and that we participate in that by degrees until we are complete and die and rise with Christ. But just as I can tell whether you are alive by pinching you, and you say A ouch!@ well there are also signs to say whether or not Christ is alive in you. If a new life is vibrant in you your prayer life shifts. You act more like you are a child of God and you are freer in your prayer to God the Father. It also means that you show that you have a love for God and your neighbor and it also shows that you are not so passive in living the Christian life but that you= re active. That you want to promote not only spiritual life for yourself, but you want other to come to know and to discover the power, the peace, the joy, the transformation that Jesus has come to give us.