Easter Sunday 2005

John 20:1-18

Elizabeth Macaulay

Is there a one of us who has been able to deny the power and presence of death in these past days?

We have lived through the legal tug of war being played over the life of Terri Shiavo. We have heard of bullets ending the lives of ten on a reservation in this, our state. We have asked the questions of ourselves: what would we do? What do we want our beloveds to do? We have been unable to look away from the power and presence of death.

Author Annie Dillard has said that a writer, to be really good at what she does, needs to write as thought she knows she is dying.

Well, we need to write the stories of our lives, you and I, as though we know we are dying. Because of course, things unfold into the ways of death every day that we live.

Loved ones, relationships, dreams and our own sweet bodies. We unfold into the way of death.

So what has Easter to say about all that? There are lessons in this morning’s gospel story that are foundational for we who seek to live our stories with integrity, vibrancy and depth.

First lesson?

We need to take the time to be present to our losses.

Mary Magdalene had been battered by grief. She was raw yet from the week just spent. A week when she saw her teacher and Lord hailed as a king, denied by his disciples, and hung on a cross to die as a common criminal. She who had been possessed by demons and shunned by polite society for so much of her life had been healed by Jesus and brought into community by Jesus and loved by Jesus and she had had to see that beloved man broken before her eyes.

She was battered by grief. And she knew that she had to take the time to be present to it. She sought time in the early morning to be alone and open to the power of what it was she had experienced.

Have you ever felt the crazy disconnect of knowing great loss in your life while the world zips by around you and you wonder how the world can keep on keeping on when your heart is breaking? We have lost the sense we used to have that to mourn is hard work, work that ought to be honored.

In years gone by, a person marked by loss would wear black for a year. The community would know that hard soul work was going on, and the mourner was understood to be fragile.

Our culture has tried to convince us that time to grieve is somehow unseemly, unnecessary. And we act as though we agree.

Mary Magdalene knew better.

And so she arrived at the tomb. And saw there a sight that had to pierce her heart to the core. Having already witnessed such disrespect for the man who meant life for her, she saw the signs of what looked to be a grave robbing. This final insult to her Lord had to be so very heart breaking.

What she did next is the second thing we might take to our hearts this Easter:

She turned to others. She knew that the grief was too much for her to take in and so she turned and told the story to others and so she was not alone in the terror of her grief.

She had learned, she who had been cast out of community, what it is to be enfolded in a people who have a vision. She had learned from Jesus that the disciples, in living the teachings of Jesus, were her community of care, people called to love her as they loved their very selves. And she allowed them to be present to her in her time of need.

This church in which we worship this morning is intentionally turning to the roots of the Jesus movement. We are encouraging each person who comes to this place to find a community of people with whom they can share their story and their vision and their struggles and delights. We call these discipleship empowering gatherings small groups. There is information in your bulletin about them. We offer them because we believe that not a one of us can go through life alone. It is too hard. Too beautiful. Too rich not to share with others.

So, Mary reached out.

She reached out, and even as she did, she allowed herself to go deeper. After the disciples have come to witness what she has told them and leave her at the tomb, Mary summons the courage to bend over and look into the unknown interior of the tomb.

We each have those times in our life, do we not? Times when the answers we thought were so very pat no longer work. Times when our assumptions and understandings are strewn around us like the unwrapped grave clothes of Jesus. Times when we feel so very lost and afraid and we cling with all we have to the ought-to-have-beens of the past and yet and yet ---

somehow we summon the courage it takes to look into the depths of life, into the depths of ourselves, and seek there honesty in seeking the answers the holy longs for us to bring to birth.

And, in the gut wrenching hard work that is learning life, Jesus is present – when we are convinced that there is nothing beyond the echo and emptiness of death, Jesus is present.

Fifteen of us are enjoying a thought-provoking series called “Living the Questions” on Wednesday nights. The series consists of interviews with theologians as they reflect upon topics such as evil and grace, the person of Jesus and the promise of the church.

One of the interviews shared this story:

There was a retreat held for clergy persons. Men and women who can often be cloaked in their leadership role had chosen to be present for a time apart with colleagues. This can take courage, since the first and second teachings I just shared with you: be present to your griefs and find a community to share with can be particularly challenging for clergy who preach a great line but are sometimes not so great at walking the talk.

So. At the beginning of the retreat, the facilitator told the group that through the course of their time apart, she wanted them to be willing to come together at the end of the retreat and share a name from scripture. The name would not be their given name, but would be the name they believe speaks of their soul identity.

The participants had time in group and lots of time in silence to meditate upon which name they would share to speak their truth in the group.

At the end of the retreat, the clergy folk came together for a time of sharing. They created a circle, and one by one, they sat in the middle of the circle and shared the name they felt was their soul name, and why it was that name was so strong in them.

One by one they shared, until there was only one person left. A young man, relatively new in the ministry. He took the chair and was silent. The group became uncomfortable until finally the facilitator asked him to share the name that spoke strongly to him.

He said this:

I worked hard on this. I prayed and I read and I thought and I tried to come up with a name of great strength. But there is no name that is stronger than the one I have carried since my birth. My father gave it to me and it has been used each day and it is so strong that there is no other choice.

And then he was silent again.

Again, after a time of waiting, the facilitator asked:

“What is your name?”

“My name”, he said, is ‘Not Good Enough””

The intake of breath in the room was palpable. The group sat in silence as the man began to weep.

It was, the narrator said, like a group of lifesavers forced to watch a drowning man.

They sat until, it seemed, the Holy Spirit entered the room and moved them as one to move to the man and lay hands on him, bearing witness to the pain that he had shared with them.

And then, seemingly in holy unison, they began to speak the words sent from heaven at the baptism of Jesus:

“This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

The next day, as the facilitator encountered the man loading his car in the parking lot, she asked him if he thought the experience would have an effect on his life.

He told her of the weight that had been. Of the self-condemnation and the tapes and the pain of years and years and years of bearing the name given him by his earthly father.

And, he shared the sense he now had of the lightness of his soul experienced through the speaking of his baptismal name: that of the beloved of God.

And he shared that while he knew that the old tapes would be fierce in their chatter in his head, he would remember keenly each time he dipped his hand into the baptismal font to baptize an infant that the name of the child – as well as his own - was “beloved of God”.

Mary Magdalene is able to be present to the power of Jesus when he calls her by name.

May it be so for us each, particularly when we feel as though we are immobilized by the pain of our lives. We are, each one, called by name.

So. We notice our pain, we find a community to share life with, we trust in the presence of the Holy present with us always, and lastly – at least for THIS sermon –

We embolden ourselves to live fully the gift of our lives. We share the good news of the power of life over death every chance that we get.

Jack Pantaleo is a gay man who has lived the pain of living in this culture that names him many things. He shares this reflection, written after a time when he knew grief with particular intensity:

“In the life of Christ, we encounter the ultimate sacrifice…what an extraordinary sacrifice that was! Yet it was not the ultimate sacrifice, for if Jesus had stopped there, he would be remembered only as another nice teacher who spoke about love.

Let’s face it: death had been done before. Anyone can die. Jesus revolutionized creation because he had the nerve it took not to remain dead. Christ went beyond sacrificing his life. He sacrificed his death. He voluntarily let go of the comfort of death and fought to rise above the grave.

The hardest thing we can do is not to die, but to live, and to live abundantly in joy.” (Jack Pantaleo, The Other Side, vol. 28, no. 2)

Do we have the nerve it takes to live abundantly in joy?

Oh my Easter people. In the midst of death we are given such life!

Let us live the resurrection.

Amen