Again and again I am called upon to minister to people in the catharsis of grief, tragedy and pain. I must tell you that I do not know what a person would do or could do in the face of the sorrows of this world without a belief in the resurrection hope and the resurrection promises. I do not subscribe to the point of view about life that Eugene O'Neill, the playwright, advanced in his rather autobiographical play titled Long Day's Journey into Night. What he said was that we are born into the brightest light we will ever know and, from that point on, the shadows begin to gather. The shadows deepen as we move further and further into life until finally we come to total darkness and into that total darkness we slip. That's not the Christian view of life. "Light and life to all He brings, risen with healing in His wings."

The second word I want to lift up is the word ...

II. Confidence!

Our Lord is always going before us. "Jesus is going ahead of you into Galilee. You will see Him there." The fact that He goes before us, preparing the way, gives us great confidence. When the son of William Sloan Coffin, a distinguished American preacher, was killed in an automobile accident, Coffin preached a sermon with this title: My Son Beat Me to the Grave.

How could he preach such a sermon in that context? I can tell you how. He was and is confident in the resurrection. Our Lord goes ahead of us, and promises that we shall see Him there. In fact, we are promised in the Bible that we shall see Him face-to-face. He stands with us and goes ahead of us in our suffering. He has gone before us in death and the Resurrection assures us of victory. If you study the Bible with care, the case can be made that God is a "Go-Ahead-God."

When Moses and the children of Israel faced the trackless waste of the desert wilderness, God went before them by day in a pillar of cloud and by night He stayed among them with a flaming fire.

Through years of faithfulness and unfaithfulness, through good times and exile and wars and calamities of every kind that one can only imagine, God always went before His people wherever they were, whatever their needs, dispatching His prophets among them to tell them the truth and consequences of disobedience.

God had gone before the women rushing to the tomb to roll the stone away. God is always and forever going before us, not only to prepare the way, but to sustain us in the way in which we should walk.

With His resurrection, the mission of the church was about to begin. He had gathered twelve disciples. One of them, the one who betrayed Him, had hung himself by now; another had denied Him with an oath. But now He was risen from the dead and going before His disciples to Galilee, where they were to meet Him. How can we doubt one who is always preparing the way and providing for our every need in life and in the life to come?

One of the most poignant moments I ever experience as a minister is when I stand by a grave side when a veteran of military service is being accorded the final salute. There is a volley of shots and then "Taps" is played. Some months back, a soldier made an unusual request in writing to the military: