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| Three voices for Easter |
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(Please email questions or responses) April 4, 2010 Acts 10: 34-43; John 20: 1-18 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen.  I would imagine that there are many folks here this morning who can relate to Mary Magdalene’s words after she saw the empty tomb as the rays of sunlight were just about to break over the horizon. “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid him,” she told Peter and John as they remained in hiding after Jesus’ death a few days earlier. It’s not bad enough that they killed him. Now they have stolen his body. Mary’s deep grief has been pierced anew. She does not yet sense that what has happened here is something totally different. It’s not that we have come upon an empty tomb as Mary did so much as that we come upon empty spaces in our lives and we look around and wonder whatever happened to God. They have taken the Lord away and we have no idea where God is. We have no sense that there is any hope to be found in the midst of this. We know that sense of loss, of abandonment that Mary felt at dawn that morning. All we can do is find someone with whom we can share our lament. For Mary, it was going back to tell Peter and John. For us, it might be gathering with family or friends, hoping they can support us in the midst of our troubles. Mary’s voice is one of three voices in today’s readings that I’ve been listening to as I think about this Easter, this day when we sing joyous songs about God’s triumph over death, about the ultimate victory of good over evil. Nice music, nice words, but it does not take long to wander back into the realities of life that are not always as pretty as the flowers arrayed around here this morning or the daffodils blooming just outside our windows. There are days when life feels more like those bare branches you can see on the trees up the hill. We don’t sense the potential for those gray branches to burst forth with new life. Mary’s voice catches that tone of anxiety. Then there is Peter’s voice as he is talking to a Roman officer named Cornelius. Peter’s voice today is much more confident that the skeptical voice we heard from him on Easter morning . He is crossing some big barriers in this conversation with Cornelius. And there is Jesus’ voice as he talks to Mary. I’ll give Jesus the last word a bit later on. But first, let’s stay with Mary’s anxiety for a while. She was still in grief over the death of her teacher, her friend, the one who was showing her a whole new way to live. It was a brutal death and it seemed to put an end to all sorts of dreams for his followers. Now she could not even grieve him properly. His body was gone. Let me tell you about Fred and Susan. You may recognize a bit of yourself in their story. A few years ago, they were doing quite well. They both had jobs. Their two children were off to college. They enjoyed great family vacations together, often at this time of year, during spring break. And then the economy began to sputter. One day, Fred came home from work and told Susan he was worried. His company was beginning to cut back. He had been there a long time, so he thought he’d be okay. But the atmosphere at work was getting pretty tense. His workload was increasing. A few weeks later, it was Susan who came home looking grim. Her company had just announced cutbacks. Her job was gone. She would have to start looking for something else. Within a month, Fred’s job was gone as well. Soon, they were pulling on their savings to pay for their mortgage. Their oldest son was about to graduate from college, but there were no jobs in sight for him either. The stress was building – and then Fred had a heart attack. He had managed to carry over his health insurance from work, but they were paying the full cost out of their savings. Now the co-pays on his medical bills were draining the rest of their savings. They worried they could lose their house. What they knew they had already lost was any sense that God had a role to play in their lives. As far as they could tell, God had left the room. They were on their own – and it was not going well. There was nothing left to sustain their spirits. Their tomb was empty. There are people here this morning who have seen their own economic dreams killed in the past few years. Or if not your dreams, those of your children or of your family members. We have prayed often for those seeking work, those swimming upstream against the economic currents. There are so many places where we wind up in grief as life throws us more than seems fair. Maybe it was a death of someone close to us. Maybe it was a battle with cancer. Maybe it is the emotional turmoil that comes with depression or anxiety. We each have our own places where we look into an empty space and echo Mary’s words. They have taken the Lord away and we have no idea where God is. We have no sense that there is any hope to be found in the midst of this. That’s where Peter enters our story. Ah, Peter. He is the impetuous one, skeptical of Jesus when he first encounters him, deeply devoted to him along the way, only to deny that he knows Jesus when the tide has turned against the little band of Jesus’ followers. Then he emerges as one of the leaders of the Jewish sect that evolves into the early Christian community. When Mary told Peter and John that Jesus’ body was missing, they raced to the tomb and when they went inside, they confirmed what Mary had told them. The body was gone. But they still did not understand what had happened. So fast forward a few years to the story we heard from that book in the Bible known as the Acts of the Apostles, the account of the earliest Christian communities. Peter has been pretty focused on working with people in the Jewish community. His counterpart Paul was the one who was reaching out to the Gentiles – those who were not Jewish. Then Peter had a dream that opened him to the idea of including the Gentiles in his world and he was off to see Cornelius, a Roman military official of all things. Cornelius wanted to know about this Jesus. Peter starts by telling Cornelius and all in his household that Peter now understood that God’s grace is not limited to any one group of people, that God shows no partiality. Peter reminded this Roman officer that followers of Jesus consider him to be Lord of all - that means Jesus is Lord, not Caesar. He talks about the good Jesus did, freeing people from the evil forces that surrounded them. He recalls Jesus’ execution on a cross, but more importantly for Cornelius – and for us – Jesus breaking the chains of death, walking once again with his followers, breaking bread with them and showing the way of forgiveness. On that Sunday morning looking into the empty tomb, Peter could not figure out exactly what happened. But as the days went on, he understood. Death did not have the last word for Jesus. No matter how bad things had seemed to Jesus’ band of followers, hope had come alive once again in their lives because they experienced Jesus among them once again. Now Peter and the rest were staking their lives on this claim not just of Jesus’ message, but on the power of a life that can overcome death. The connecting fiber was once again Mary Magdalene, as John tells the story. This close friend of Jesus came back to the tomb again, even after Peter and John walked away shaking their heads in disbelief at this latest turn of events. She looks in the tomb again and the same words come out of her mouth: “They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him.” She sees a gardener nearby and thinks maybe he knows something about what had happened to the body of Jesus. Just an ordinary guy, out there early in the morning tending to the earth. No bolts of lightning. No trumpets. No choirs singing “Christ the Lord Has Risen Today.” Just someone who seemed to be going about the mundane tasks of life. But when this man spoke her name – “Mary” – she knew. She knew in an instant that hope had not died, that the dream was not dead, that something extraordinary had just happened to her … and to the world. Her first instinct was to reach out and hug Jesus. This is where Jesus gets the last word in our story today. “Do not hold on to me,” Jesus tells Mary. “Do not hold on to me.” I am not your private possession. I am not just someone you can cling to in the midst of uncertain times. I am much more than that. Yes, the resurrection is the story of good triumphing over evil. Yes, it is the ultimate message of hope. Yes, it is the promise held out to us that whatever turmoil surrounds us, whatever is breaking our hearts, whatever anxieties we have, that we are not alone. Over and over in the experiences people have with God in the Bible, they tell of their sense that God has called them by name. “Mary,” Jesus said. When the transformed Jesus called her by name, her life was transformed as well. She was not alone. But neither could she linger in the garden, just holding on to the one who meant so much to her. She had to share the good news. She went out to preach the first Easter sermon – it was only five words: “I have seen the Lord.” When we gather here today, we gather because in some fashion, at some point in our lives, we had a sense that God was there for us. Today is a reminder to us as a community of people who follow Jesus that in the midst of the worst life can throw at us, God's love is there for us and in that love is our hope. I can’t snap my fingers and make Fred and Susan reclaim their sense of Gods love and our hope. None of us can do that for others. But on this day, we get a glimpse at that possibility. It’s a glimpse experienced in a garden. It’s a glimpse we get in the midst of how others care about us, about in how we get transported by the beauty of the world or the creativity of music or the quiet stillness when we realize we really are not alone. Yes, they may have taken the Lord away and we may have no idea where God is. But on any given day, we may get that sense once again that God is with us. We watch the green emerge again on the branches. We experience the joy that comes with people celebrating life together. We want to cling to the good moments, but what we really need to do is just what Mary did, just what Peter and John did. We need to take the moments of hope in our lives, nourish our spirits and then go out and transform the world by letting God’s love shows through in the way we live. Christ has risen. He has risen indeed. Alleluia! |