And that was when it started happening…signs in store windows and on cars…We Believe, they stated.  We believe they uttered.  We believe they cried!  And when the team made it out of Toledo, then  ran it through Columbus, only to find themselves headed to the championship game, well, Upper Sandusky fairly erupted with belief.  We Believe shouted signs made of bed sheets, plastered to garage doors.  We Believe bellowed soaped up car windows and storefronts.  We Believe roared a town supporting a scrappy group of young men and their heroic leader.  
 
   Well, it’s Easter Sunday and you didn’t come to North Salem this morning to hear a re-cap of the Rams basketball season.  We gather on Easter Sunday with a deep need to believe.  We come in from a world that offers little optimism and perhaps less hope.  A world where children die every day from diseases easily preventable by a $2 vaccine.  A world where mothers stand in long lines to receive a minimal amount of food with which to feed their children.  And this is not just in some far off country or some big city, this is down the road a bit, at our own food pantry. We assemble this morning in a world where death tolls mount daily…from war, from street violence, from starvation, from AIDS, from genocide. We want to believe…no, we have to believe that there is more to the story of life than this.  That somehow, someway, this will not be the last word…that death will not have the final say.  
 
   Jesus’ disciples needed to believe.  More than anything they needed to believe.  After all, they had left everything and invested their entire lives, their whole selves into following this man, this Jesus.  They had left fishing businesses and families and all of what they thought would become of their lives to follow Jesus.  Because Jesus was supposed to be the Messiah…he was supposed to be the savior. But along the way there had been confusing teaching from Jesus and actions that would contradict what you might expect from a ruler. Things that made it hard, perhaps, to believe. 
 
   Throughout his ministry Jesus had turned the world upside down.  Jesus ate with the outcast.  Jesus sat with the sinners.  He shielded those people society would condemn.  This Jesus wasn’t just any ordinary leader and he certainly wasn’t what was expected as messiah and savior.  Why would the savior take the time to turn to the hemorrhaging woman, a woman the community would shun and declare worthless…why would the messiah turn to her with compassion, call her daughter…heal her…sending her on her way with renewed faith and in peace?  Why would the savior take the time to go to the home of Jairus and restore his young daughter to life?  
 
   After awhile we might have thought that the disciples would have grown accustomed to this humble leader, that they might have come to expect that they would find him, not with the leaders of the community, but with those the community refused to accept.  With the woman who lavishly washed his feet with her hair or the one standing at the well, looking for the water of life.  
 
   But this was Jesus…with a message that was unexpected and often unwelcome by the leaders of the day.  This was Jesus they were following, who chose not to ingratiate himself with the power structures of the time but to remind those who followed him that they would become more like him by becoming like a child.  
 
   It was hard for this scrappy group of disciples to believe in such a Savior.  So often they missed the point…but they kept at it.  They fed thousands and water walked and stumbled and grumbled because, like us, they needed to believe.  

    And on this day, on this morning,  they especially needed to believe.  Jesus had been executed, and they were his followers.  No wonder they were hiding away, locked in some upper room, afraid to show their faces.  No wonder Jesus had to be buried, not by the disciples who had been by his side for these three years, but by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who only believed in secret.  
 
   Yet, needing to believe, two of the disciples ran to the tomb…they ran to the tomb.  They didn’t cautiously make their way there.  When Mary Magdalene went to them with the news that the stone had been removed from the entrance to the tomb, the race to the tomb was on.  The writer of John’s gospel says that they were running together but the other disciple finally pulled away and outran Peter.  They needed to believe.  They needed to see that Jesus had been raised from the dead.  And the text says that seeing the wrappings there in that empty tomb, they went in, they saw and they believed.  Then they returned to their homes.  
 
   But Mary…Mary also needed to believe.  Weeping there in the garden, Mary finds herself desperate to know what has happened to Jesus.  At once needing to find his body…and hoping she will not.  When Jesus does come to her, she does not recognize him.  Maybe in her grief her understanding was obscured, or maybe it was simply incomprehensible to her that this person she had witnessed dying a horrible death could be standing in front of her.  But there he was, and when he called her by name she knew him.
 
   Sisters and brothers in Christ, we gather this morning, and we too, need to believe.  All of us, each of us, need to believe.  The truth is, that following Jesus often takes us to places we would rather not go.  Places where we are sometimes confused by Jesus’ teachings,  places where the questions outpace the answers. Places where we run toward the good news and places where we can only sit and weep.  There will be times when we are like Peter and the other disciple…when we are confronted with the evidence that Jesus lives…that Jesus is who he said he is.  That Jesus…who loves those we find unlovable, who cares for those we would rather not think about, who tells us that when we think we are the greatest, we are really the least…that this Jesus is also the one risen from the dead.  And like the disciples we will sometimes take that news and go back to our homes.  
 
   But there will be other times when we will respond like Upper Sandusky responded to an unlikely victor…we will shout and share the news that death does not have final say, that on this day and always Jesus lives!  And we will be like Mary Magdalene, telling the others, that despite all the darkness of that Friday, despite all the uncertainty, we believe. We believe because in the Body of Christ at work in the world, in the bread and the wine, in the word proclaimed in word and song….we too have seen the LORD and We Believe! Alleluia! Christ is Risen!  Christ is Risen indeed!  Alleluia! Alleluia!