Seventy years ago this week, our True Father met Jesus. He accepted Jesus’ calling and this shaped his life and it has shaped many lives. Someday it will remake the world.

What is your response when you meet Jesus? By the gospel accounts, the response of the first people to meet the resurrected Jesus was a combination of fear, joy and reporting to others. That reporting is the evangel, the good news: Jesus is risen, death is overcome. Maybe you will say, I never met Jesus. But you have, if you understand what it means to meet Jesus.

To meet Jesus is to experience resurrection, the passage from death to life, by the power of love. And it happens everyday.

So when Mary said, "he is risen, he is not in the tomb, he is alive," she was the first one to give the Christian witness. She just shared the truth of her experience. All Christian witnessing since then has been essentially a repetition of her action: the tomb is empty -- death has been defeated -- Jesus has resurrected. It was not a doctrine or theology. It was an experience.

What was her experience? How must she have felt? We can understand this from the accounts of those first women who met him. First there is incredible shock and, the scriptures say, fear. Someone who was dead is now alive. How can that be? How disorienting! How did the father of the prodigal son feel, when his son returned? He was overjoyed, shouting, "he was dead and now is alive." Everything is changed. Reality has changed; what was final is no longer final!

Death brings with it a feeling of absoluteness. That is the difference between death and sleep. With sleep, you come back. With death you don’t come back. The survivors have to accept things, to adjust to a loss. But in the case of Easter Sunday, there was a sudden change in what was understood to be reality. The door is open, the stone is gone. This is the experience of resurrection, from loss to gain, from closure to openness, from end to beginning, from death to life. Resurrection means that there is no closure, no end, no loss, no death.

The wheel of life is a characteristic of the natural order. We have to look at the whole cycle of birth, death and new birth. Spring is the time when the dead earth comes alive again. This happens in the natural world physically, and it happens to us spiritually. So loss, death, defeat, despair are not evil because they are not permanent; they are part of the natural cycle of life. We can learn from despair, we can learn from defeat, we learn from challenges. It’s a case of the passage from the original creation to the new creation, from the old to the new, from the old generation to the new generation.

There are different kinds of death. Most importantly, there is the ultimate spiritual death due to the fall, our bondage to Satan’s lineage. We have two levels of release from this. First is through the cross and resurrection of Jesus. This is spiritual liberation, but our body is still in bondage. Second is the holy wine ceremony and marriage blessing. This is physical liberation. Both these levels come from beyond us, from God’s "in-breaking" into our lives, and they are given to know by grace and are appropriated through faith.

The release from other kinds of spiritual death is within our ability; they are a matter of our choice. They are rooted in our power to grow to perfection spiritually. These types of death are to become stagnant, to fail to learn from life, to play the same mental emotional tape over and over again. This death is to be closed instead of open -- to what life has to offer, to what others have to offer.

The worst is to be closed to your own calling. I’m not a big Dolly Parton fan, but I was moved by a passage in her autobiography, titled Dolly. There, Dolly Parton says, "My high school was small. So during a graduation event, each of us got a chance to stand up and announce our plans for the future. ‘I’m going to junior college,’ one boy would say. ‘I’m getting married and moving to Maryville,’ a girl would follow. When my turn came, I said, ‘I’m going to Nashville to be a star.’ The entire place erupted in laughter. I was stunned. Somehow though, that laughter instilled in me an even greater determination to realize my dream. I might have crumbled under the weight of the hardships that were to come had it not been for the response of the crowd that day."

There is the death inflicted by unrighteous governments, the oppression of bureaucracy in the negation of the value of the individual. Do we have to let ourselves become its victims? We fall prey to it when we treat the person at the other end of the line or the other side of the counter, representing the bureaucracy, as a machine. We have the option to breakthrough to their personhood. They can always do something to move you further along But you need to respect the system they are part of, at least enough to break down the barrier of the counter, the regulation.

There is the death inflicted by racism. This is another way that we negate each other’s personhood. To deal with this, one approach is to do things together, such as sports. I consider myself lucky because I attended a high school that was 60% black, in Oakland, California. I heard rumors about the school, about gang fights and such. But I went there and had a great time. I even had a crush on an African-American classmate. I was too shy to say a word to her. But the best arena in which to break down the racial divide was gym. We’d all change into our gym clothes, and shower and change back after gym. And we all loved sports; it was the period of the day that everyone, black or white, most looked forward to. There, in the locker room, in the showers, it was all the same. It was as if the racial or cultural barriers were removed with our clothes.

The ultimate place to turn the death of racism into life is in exchange marriage -- marriage what someone of another race. It is to intentionally relate to someone from a race that is foreign to you.

Then there is the death inflicted by dead religion, inflicted by formalism, superstition, enslavement to ritual and rules for their own sake, worshiping the letter of the law and denying the spirit of the law. This can be most difficult. Religion can be the most liberating and the most suffocating of human realities.

Jesus overcame the death inflicted by racism when he met the Samaritan woman. He overcame the death inflicted by sexism when he forgave the prostitute and stood up to the men who were about to stone her. To overcome the death inflicted by blind religiosity and oppressive government, Jesus had to go to the cross, to give his life. His resurrection liberates us from these types of death.

There is the death inflicted by despair, defeat, depression, broken relationships. The resurrection tells me that defeat will become victory, depression will become joy, broken relationships will be healed. As President of UTS, I am rebuilding relations with many alumni -- mostly personal relationships that I’ve let lapse over the years, people I chose not to value, persons I chose not to know. I am getting to know them now; I am discovering the value of each person.

We can do the same with a spouse, with a child, with a parent. I am building my relationship with a sister to whom I was never really close before in my life, as I was rushing here and there, "looking for something I just couldn’t find." I find myself rebuilding my relationship with my father. It’s like uncovering a plant that was hidden by leaves you failed to rake last fall. It’s still alive, and it responds wonderfully to air and sunlight. Don’t let the relationship stay hidden under the leaves, where it will die, unnoticed.

We go through many passages in life, and in each we have to give up something in order to receive something new. The stagnant church, or any organization, is the one that will not shut down old programs or committees and just keeps adding new ones. It’s like eating and not eliminating waste. It’s like going to college but wanting to stay in high school at the same time. A man cannot be a bachelor and married at the same time. That’s called adultery. To achieve the married status, one must give up being a bachelor. To become new, you have to give up the old. As Jesus said, new wine requires new wineskins. A new culture requires a new structure.

Some time ago I read about the way monkeys are trapped in India. A hole is drilled in a coconut and rice is poured inside it. Monkeys like rice very much. A monkey will come along, stick a paw into the coconut, grab a fistful of rice, and then be unable to pull its paw back through the hole. He is trapped by his own greed. All he would have to do is to turn loose of the rice and he would be free. But he can’t bring himself to do that. There are higher life forms than the monkey that fall for the same trap. Many people can’t get free to be all they could be because they are clutching in their hands some lesser good.

When I was involved in team life, I wanted to stay as a team member and not become a team leader. I went through many such passages in life. In each, I clung to the comfortable, the familiar, the secure. Here at UTS, I want to stay within my comfort zone, my level of competence, and not go out and take on greater challenges. Right now, my challenge is to raise $9,000,000 over the next five years. This is to achieve the excellence we expect and deserve. I have to go beyond my comfort zone, give up what I once was and become a new person. Life is constant growth.

To reach the next stage, we have to leave behind the comfortable and secure life we had before. Maybe some new UTS students are in that situation. You left your church leadership post in your own country, with your own language and culture, and now you have no position in a different country with a different language and culture.

We have to find God’s hand in it. The way of True Parents’ leadership is to change your position constantly, until you find a place you really don’t like. Then you stay there until you find God in it. He wants you to live with God only. He wants your life to narrow down until there are no external supports, no landmarks, no guides, and you have no place to go but to God.

I want to illustrate this with words from Arnold Palmer about golf. Golf is a parable for life, so I’ve adjusted the terms appropriately. "When [bad things] happen, the trick is to stay serene. The whole secret [is to] keep patient and know in your heart that sooner or later you will be back on top… I approach each new day as a glorious opportunity to get going again. The mental approach that [life] requires is a peculiar and complicated mixture of abiding confidence and patient resignation, of intense concentration and total relaxation. It is not easy to explain -- it is almost something that has to exist deep down in your unconscious mind." Our True Father said, in the Chung Seong Gyeong, "You don’t need to think about attending God. Think about attending your original mind."

When you find God, you see life everywhere. Every little thing is full of potential. For Roger Maris, it was a flock of geese. For those who don’t know the context for this, Roger Maris broke the Major League record for home runs in 1962 with 61 homers in a season. Few knew how he suffered from the pressure, even losing his hair. Maris held up a game in Detroit late in the season. He stepped back from the plate to watch a flock of geese pass over the right-field seats.

This was highly unusual: a whole game, played before thousands, stopped when one man wanted to watch some geese. Refreshed, Maris stepped back to the plate and hit the next pitch into the right-field seats just below the spot the geese had passed moments earlier. Years later, asked about the incident, Maris said, "I can still see those geese. Watching them was so peaceful."

When the women met the resurrected Jesus, their expectations were shaken, their foundations were pulled away. To some degree, they reacted with fear. Mark’s gospel even says that they didn’t say anything to anyone because they were so afraid. But other gospels tell more of the story, that they broke through, told the truth to themselves and told the truth to others, and met Jesus.

They took the leap; they accepted the resurrection, the transition from death to life. Jesus went from death to life, and they were challenged to make the same transition in themselves. They went from death to life, then they could meet Jesus on the other side. When we go from death to life, from everyday death to everyday life, we can meet the resurrected Jesus, the pioneer of resurrection, on the other side.

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