Easter Sunday 2007
Alive!
John 20: 1-18
Rev. Elizabeth Macaulay
I have been pastor of this church for three plus years now. I began here the last Sunday in June in 2003.
The second Sunday I was here was a Sunday on which we celebrated
communion together. Now that is a big
deal, both for church and for pastor, because joining together at the table of
Jesus is one of the most important practices we share. It matters greatly. So on the first Sunday I was to lead us
through that sacrament, I was nervous. I
wanted it to be perfect. (It’s an
affliction of mine) The space in the sanctuary itself was beautiful, as it
always is. There were plants all around
and two big trees, one on either side of the altar. All was right.
As I went to begin the prayer over the meal, I noticed a movement in
the back of the sanctuary, right where the glass doors are between the way back
of the sanctuary and the main sanctuary.
It was a quick movement, at floor level, and while my brain noticed it,
I continued to lead the Great Thanksgiving.
The movement came again, and it became clear to me that the movement was
a squirrel. Lose. Running around the back of
the sanctuary.
Hmmm, I thought. Well, what to
do about this? All the
while leading the prayer. I
decided that I would know soon enough if the squirrel decided it was time to
come to worship, because people would let me know.
Well, the squirrel DID want to come into worship. That thing came barreling down the left side
of the sanctuary. People responded as it
streaked by. No screaming, since we are
well trained about proper worship behavior, but there was plenty of body
language to testify that having a squirrel on the loose was not an altogether
comfortable thing in church.
It turns out the squirrel had a destination in mind because he came
straight up onto the altar and LEAPT into one of the fake trees flanking
it. And the way he threw his body
through the air and the power with which it encountered the shelter of that
tree, sensing that at last there was something familiar and safe in
which to find refuge…. that is what Easter feels like to me.
Like the hope-fueled leap of the squirrel.
After all the anxiety and fear and emotional anguish that is sparked when fear is big and hope is mangled, the leap of
heart that comes with the possibility of new life is full-body bliss.
On that first Easter morning we know that Mary and the followers of
Jesus had been through the stretch of giving themselves to his teachings and
presence. They had eaten meals and
walked roads and prayed with and worried about and chosen to follow a carpenter
from
Jesus had not only sparked in them an imagination for life lived in
such a way where neighbors are loved as self and power is practiced in mutual
community. Jesus had sparked in the
powers of the day a great fear. Because
his teachings threatened the ways they held and practiced power, the temple and
the state conspired to execute him on a cross.
So the grief of the disciples was immense.
Not only did they mourn the death of a man they called teacher and
friend.
They mourned too the death of the vision he cast: a vision of blessings in the midst of a world
strangled by woes.
Can you imagine the state of their hearts?
So Mary and the other disciples approach the tomb knowing the power of
grief. Knowing the
need to be present to it. And knowing the ways of fear. What is life like while dealing with such
loss? Any of us who have known the sting
of losing a loved one or a dream know the feeling of intense grief. It is raw.
And greeted as they were by the inexplicable – the tomb filled not with
the testimony of death but with the witness of profound mystery and power – the
disciples, we are told, leave the place and return to their homes, to the
familiar. To the safe.
But Mary remains. And what Mary
does is testimony and lesson for we who are confronted by the dark fear
provoked by anguish.
Mary remains in it. And she goes
beyond merely marking the emptiness. She
stoops to look inside the tomb. Rather
than dodge the pain or deny the pain or pretty up the pain, Mary stoops to look
inside that tomb, that place of darkness where the life of her heart resides.
And there she sees, not the emptiness of a desecrated tomb, but the
presence of holiness in the form of angels.
Angels who bear witness to her distress. And she is companioned by her beloved Jesus,
present with her, even though in her profound grief she cannot recognize him
until he calls her by name.
And then he tells her that she must not hold to him, but let him go, in
order that his life and hers may be the larger for the loosing.
Oh my brothers and sisters is there a one of us here who does not need
to live this promise of new life?
We hold onto so much that keeps us from it –
Regrets and guilt and grief and should-haves and layers upon layers of
pain that we don’t want to acknowledge but they, they acknowledge us. Because they cling to us like barnacles. Picture Jacob Marley from “A Christmas Carol”
and the weight of the chains he dragged behind him.
Dickens knew the power of remorse unloosed.
We know it too. It contorts our
souls in the form of addictions and shame.
But hear the good news of Easter:
We share the promise given through the gift of Jesus. We are promised that God so loved the world
that he sent his only Son in order that all who believe in him will not live
lives of quiet desperation and death, but lives that point toward the power
that resurrection IS. NOW. We’re called to live it not in some far-off
heaven but NOW. In the
fullness of our living.
The power of this choosing to live the gift of love in Christ Jesus is
immense in its power. It makes all the
difference.
I talked a while ago with a dear friend. This friend has struggled for years with very
real remorse about the way he had chose to parent his
children. He had worked long and hard
hours and the stresses of his job took much of his heart away from home. And he
mourned that terribly, now that his children are grown. He has prayed about this a lot, and has had
many conversations with God about forgiveness.
He told me that a few weeks ago, he experienced something that was
profoundly different. It took him a few
days to realize the change.
What was different and odd and new in his life was this. He realized that he has awakened many times
in the past few days when the first thought he had upon waking was not what a
rotten person he was.
Instead, he woke to an appreciation of the sound of the birds and the
promise of the day to come.
He told me that in realizing that shift, the absence of self slicing
upon waking, he became aware of how his own sense of his own badness had ruled
so many of his thoughts. It was like a
bad tooth, he told me, something he couldn’t stop himself from exploring and
fixating on.
But lately, my friend is experimenting with giving energy to living
into the forgiveness that is held out to him.
And he is willing to see that he did nothing in his parenting out of
cruelty. He just hadn’t thought about
what he was or wasn’t doing. And his
constant revisiting of what he did or did not do cannot change the past.
And he realized this. His
holding onto his huge sense of remorse had become in some sort of crazy way a
crutch for him. His constant friend it
was. His reason for not unfolding into
the great beauty that God had created him to embrace.
And he realized that holding onto his sense of his own badness was in
some core sense arrogant. Because if God
sent Jesus who taught mercy and forgiveness and God watched that same Jesus be
crucified by fear and if God would, could, forgive that and grace those who had
wounded Jesus so grievously with the power of the resurrection, who was he to
say what God was capable of?
He came to believe that “Blessed are the poor in spirit” was a
beatitude that had life for him. Because
he knew that his poverty to spirit meant that he knew God was God and he was
not and that God is a God of forgiveness and life.
He is alive again! My friend is
alive!
And he many not leap through the air like a squirrel in search of a
tree, but he knows that kind of joy because he is free, he is, to live into the
gospel of reconciliation and celebration that is the birthright of his faith.
Listen. We all carry our griefs. We let
people down. We let ourselves down. We know this.
As a people of the resurrection we are called to claim this and know
that in the owning of our grief and the letting go of the things we must loose,
we are called to live into God’s vision for us.
Alive.
Fully alive!
Amen