Most of you know that I was a lawyer before I became a minister.  I was a Wall Street lawyer for exactly two weeks.  I practiced law with a firm in New York City, Shearman & Sterling, for nearly four years, and when I first got there they were still on Wall Street.  But two weeks after I got there, the offices moved to mid-town Manhattan.  This is actually the reason I became a minister, because the law firm moved and they didn’t tell me their new address.  No, I’m just joking, but for the first two weeks I was there, their offices were still on Wall Street.  And it was an interesting time to be on Wall Street.  For one thing, in that fall of 1987, in October, the stock market, the Dow Jones, crashed almost, some of you remember, it dropped more in one day percentage-wise than on any other day in history.  The Dow dropped 508 points, about 20 percent of its value, I believe, a bigger percentage than any day during the Depression.  It would be like the Dow dropping over 2,000 points today, in one day. 

And I remember walking past the New York Stock Exchange.  You could just feel the worry and tension in the air, the anxiety.  What’s going to happen to the stock market, what’s going to happen to the economy?  We feel some of that right now.  And I remember a man who walked up and down Wall Street carrying a sign that added to the anxiety.  The sign said, “The End is Near.”  But then one day another man showed up, carrying a very different sign.  His sign said, “The Beginning is Near.”  And I went over and asked him, “What do you mean the beginning is near?”  And he said, “It’s never the end.  It’s never the end.  It’s always possible to have a new beginning.  Something different, something new is sure to come along.” 

I’ve tried never to forget this message.  The beginning is near.  Just when you think it may be the end, what it really may be is the beginning.  I heard about an older woman, a widow, who went to live in an independent living home.  And the first day she was there they just happened to be having a party.  Well, she had a wonderful time.  She hadn’t been sure at first that she would like it there, but she liked the place, she was making new friends.  She even noticed a man sitting across the room, she couldn’t take her eyes off of him.  And he seemed to be looking at her, too.  So she went over and said, “Oh please forgive me if I made you feel uncomfortable by staring at you all evening.  I just couldn’t help myself.  You see, you look just like my fifth husband.”  And the man said, “Your fifth husband!  How many husbands have you had?”  And with a little twinkle in her eye, the woman said, “Four.”  And the two of them were married shortly thereafter.  He did, as it turned out, look a whole lot like her fifth husband.  Not the end, it may be that the beginning, is near. 

Whenever you think it’s over, whenever you think it may be the end, when people tell you it’s the end, when the signs all say that the end is near.  I remember a friend of ours in Washington, PA told me that when he first moved there, years ago, he was driving one day south out of town on route 18, and there’s a little town with the name Prosperity down that way.  Have you ever been to Prosperity, Pennsylvania, down in Washington County?  And our friend was driving in that direction, when he saw that they were working on the road.  And pretty soon he came to a sign that said, “The road to Prosperity is closed,” because they were working on the road.  And just beyond that sign, there was another sign that said, “The road to the cemetery is open.”  The road to prosperity is closed, for you it may seem like the road to prosperity is closed, while the road to the cemetery is open. 

It must have been an awfully long and lonely road that was open to the cemetery that morning for Mary Magdalene, walking toward the tomb where they had laid him.  It was early, it was still dark, and sometimes there can be a darkness that just kind of creeps into your soul, that invades your spirit and destroys your hope.  You don’t even know where it came from exactly, or how you ended up in this place.  Only a few days before, Mary never would have thought she would spend this day in a cemetery.  Only a few days before, it all seemed possible, everything this man Jesus might want to do, restore the fortunes of Israel, transform the lives of those who were his followers, bring power down out of heaven to bless and nurture and strengthen all who might call upon the name of the Lord.  But now, here she was on her way to the cemetery.  Now, what was she supposed to do?  Where was she supposed to go? 

We might wonder the same thing ourselves sometimes.  How did we end up here?  What are we supposed to do now?  We thought we had things all figured out.  We thought we were in pretty good health, for example.  We thought our spouse had a good long number of years left to live.  We thought that was the job we would retire from.  We thought we had enough money set aside.  We thought nothing could ever happen to children or grandchildren.  We thought those things that happen to other people could never happen to us.  We thought we had things pretty well figured out, only it seems that we made a slight miscalculation, and we have ended up on the road to the cemetery, perhaps even a literal cemetery, but certainly a figurative one, a cemetery of the soul, a cemetery where we’ve come to bury all our hopes and dreams. 

And it takes a while to get out of that kind of cemetery, to get out of that kind of an atmosphere and mindset.  It takes Mary a little while to understand what’s going on here.  She sees the empty tomb, but she doesn’t get it.  She looks at these two angels and even hears their voices, but she’s not really seeing, not really listening.  She even sees Jesus, and hears his voice, but she thinks this must be the gardener who has carried off the body of Jesus.  She still thinks she’s looking for a dead body; there must be a dead body around here somewhere.   But something finally breaks through.  It is the voice of the Master calling her by name. 

I heard about a woman by the name of Elizabeth Barrett, perhaps you’ve heard of her, she was going to marry a man her parents did not approve of.  The Barretts of Wimpole Street were of a certain high social standing, and her father was something of a tyrant, and they forbade her to marry this man.  But secretly, they got engaged, and were married.  Because Elizabeth saw in this man something her parents did not see, something they could not see, they would not see.  His name was Robert Browning, and so her name became Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and they were both poets, and together they thrived and wrote some of the most inspiring poetry the English-speaking world has ever known.  She’s the one who wrote, “How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways.  I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.”  One morning Elizabeth wrote a few lines of verse for her husband and slipped them into his pocket after breakfast, then ran upstairs.  He didn’t notice until later that day, he found it and read these lines: “The face of all the world has changed for me, since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul.”  The face of all the world has changed for me, since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul.” 

I guess my question for myself today, and my question for you, is: Has the world changed at all because of the meaning of this day, the power of this day, the power of the resurrection that lives within you?  Like Mary at the tomb, have you heard the footsteps of Jesus approaching you?  Have you felt the love of Jesus lay hold upon you?  Have you heard the voice of Jesus calling to you by name?  Do you have what you need to dig in just a little deeper when the going gets tough, to stare just a little longer into the face of what may seem to be impossible, and go on, and start over if necessary, and with the strength of God, actually do what is impossible?  Because of this day, you have the power in you to withstand anything the devil or the world might throw at you, to overcome anything, endure anything.  Jesus has placed this power within you, he has set loose his love in you, set loose his life in you, so that you might live.  When Jesus, risen to new life, looks you in the eye as he did Mary, and calls to you by name, what will you do?  How will you respond? 

I suppose we all feel a little like Winston Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, who, at the age of 42, came home from Parliament one day and wrote a letter to his son saying that in all probability two-thirds of his life was over, and he did not intend to spend what was left of it beating his head against a wall in politics, being abused and misunderstood; he was just tired of it all.  And so he quit.  He quit Parliament, he quit everything, and within three years he was dead.  Thank goodness, he did not pass this on to his son.  Someone once said that, “The problem with the world is that the good people quit being good before the bad people quit being bad.”  And Winston Churchill seemed to determine early on that he was never going to quit.  “We shall fight them on the beaches [he said in England’s darkest hour], we shall fight them on the landing strips, we shall fight them in the fields and in the hills and in the streets.  We shall never surrender.”  It may look like what is near is the end, but what really is near may be just the beginning, the beginning of something new. 

George H. W. Bush, when he was Vice President, traveled to what was then the Soviet Union for the funeral of Leonid Brezhnev, its former President.  And there in the Kremlin, where a whole nation was built for a time around a system of atheism.  Churches were destroyed or turned into museums of atheism.  Once you reached the end there, they believed, you truly had reached the end.  And at the heart of all this, the Kremlin, the leader of all this for a time, Leonid Brezhnev, was placed in the grave.  And yet George Bush recalls that just before they closed the casket, Mrs. Brezhnev came over and reached down and made a sign of the cross on her husband’s chest. 

It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor in Germany who stood up to Hitler and was put in prison.  Just a few days before the end of the war, the prisoners could hear the gunfire of the Allies off in the distance, the Gestapo mercilessly took him out and executed him, by order of Adolph Hitler himself.  And as he was leaving his prison cell for what he knew would be the last time, Bonhoeffer turned and said to the other prisoners, “This is the end, but for me it is the beginning.” 

Now if he can say this, and in such a moment, perhaps we can, too.  Perhaps we can look into that tomb, whatever that tomb might represent for you, however things might not have turned out for you, whatever dreams might seem to have been defeated and destroyed, we can look into that tomb and believe, believe in this new life that Jesus offers, believe in this, and experience this, and live this.  This is the end?  No!  No!  For me, for you, it is the beginning!