Marcus Borg tells the story of a 3-year old girl. She was the firstborn and only child in her family, but now her mother was pregnant again and the little girl was very excited about having a new brother. Within a few hours of the parents bringing the new baby boy home from the hospital the girl made a request: she wanted to be alone with her new brother in his room with the door shut. Her insistence about being alone with the baby with the door shut made her parents a bit uneasy, but then they remembered that they had installed an intercom system in anticipation of the baby’s arrival, so they realized they could let their daughter do this and if they heard the slightest indication that anything strange was happening they could be in the baby’s room in an instant.

So they let the little girl go into the baby’s room and shut the door and then they raced to the intercom listening station. They heard their daughter’s footsteps moving across the baby’s room, imagined her standing over the baby’s crib and then they heard her say to her three-day-old brother, “Tell me about God – I’ve almost forgotten.”

“Tell me about God – I’ve almost forgotten.” Easter tells us about God and Easter also tells us about us. Because that 3-year old girl remembered what we sometimes forget – that we come from God and that we return to God and that the journey in-between is always a journey in God and with God.

Matthew’s Gospel report of that first Easter is clear enough. The tomb is empty. An angel whose appearance is “like lightning” is sitting on the stone that sealed the tomb. He says, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.”

Matthew tells us that the guards who saw everything – the angel, the empty tomb – these guards go to the authorities and are bribed to tell a different story, that the disciples had stolen the body away. The guards, who had the opportunity to be freed by the truth, are instead bound in a lie. The money that might have offered them some measure of freedom instead binds them to the old reality, the old falsehood that man and not God is in charge.

And so it is with us. Sometimes, I suspect, we think that the life that God wants for us is going to be a lot less fun than the life we plan for ourselves and that being bored is the price of being redeemed. You know the idea: when you’re young you sow your wild oats, have a good time, and then, if you’ve calculated your remaining time as efficiently as possible, you can live just long enough as a boring and redeemed person to make God forget what an absolute selfish jerk you were for most of your life. So God will overlook all that and send you on to heaven, where, presumably, you can be bored for all eternity.

But, that 3-year-old and that 3-day-old know something that we’ve forgotten, that a life with God is a rich and good and surprising life; that life lived in God offers wonderful times, great insights and dear relationships of all kinds, wealth and purpose and meaning and truth beyond what we can seize or create for ourselves. This is the life we begin to live together ruled by God as disciples in this community of disciples, a life I realize I’m very lucky to be a part of.

The season of Easter is 50 days, while the season of Lent is only 40 days, because our joy must always exceed our repentance. In the season of Easter, we begin our journey to Galilee, where Christ has gone on before us. We’re not exactly sure where our Galilee is or what it holds, but we know that God in Christ is there and he wants a life for us that is good and surprising and true, and that’s good enough to get us started. And we’re lucky that we have new babies here at Saint Nicholas practically all the time, because if we get confused, we can always ask them: “Tell me about God – I’ve almost forgotten.”

Pastor Greg