Whom Do You Seek - A Sermon for Easter Sunday

Scriptures

Acts 10:34-43             Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

                         I Corinthians 15:1-11                         John 20:1-18

In 2014, the New York City Rescue Mission and the Silver + Partner Ad Agency set up what had been described at the time as a “stunning social experiment”.  The point of the experiment was to demonstrate how much we block out the sight of homeless people.  In the experiment, a member of a family dressed up as a homeless person and sat on a busy street where they knew that their loved one – a husband, wife, sister, brother, mother, father – passed by every day on their way to work.  The film crew recorded video to document whether the family member passing by would recognize their loved one dressed as a homeless person.  The results were shocking, depressing, even disturbing:  in the experiment, not one – not a single solitary one – of the passers-by recognized their husband or wife or brother or sister or mother or father when dressed as homeless persons.  As much as we may love somebody, the experiment showed that if that somebody is in a context we wouldn’t expect them, especially when disguised as someone considered undesirable – a homeless person – we turn away.  And certainly those who actually are homeless, who have fallen through the gaps of our frayed social safety network, have likewise experienced the turning away of those they love.  We can take it as part of our mission to do what we can to restore at least some small portion of those losses, to provide, not only food, but connection to other human beings.

When I read about this experiment, I gained a bit more insight into Mary Magdalene’s behavior in our reading from John’s gospel.  Each of the resurrection accounts in the four gospels has its own distinctiveness, it’s own “secret sauce”, you might say.  An element of the “secret sauce” that flavors John’s gospel is the recurring character referred to as “the disciple whom Jesus loved” – who turns out at the end to be the author.   In John’s gospel, it is Mary Magdalene who goes to the tomb alone, discovers it empty, and runs to tell Peter and this “disciple whom Jesus loved” what she saw.  The two men engage in an odd sort of footrace to the tomb, the beloved disciple reaching the tomb first but afraid to venture inside, Peter reaching it second but entering it first.  This may have had to do with some sort of jockeying for position among Jesus’ closest disciples.  So they get to the tomb, see that, “yup,  it’s empty, just like Mary Magdalene said”, see the grave clothes….and go home.  And if it had been up to the guys, that would have been the Easter story….empty grave, graveclothes wrapped up, something happened but we don’t know what, have a nice day.  Thank goodness Mary Magdalene went back to the tomb with the guys, presumably at her own pace, since she’d already done quite a bit of running that morning.

The guys go home, but Mary hangs around the tomb a while, crying, and eventually poking her head in.  She sees two angels, who ask her, “Why do you cry?”  Mary tells them, “they’ve taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they’ve laid him.”  Then Jesus himself comes up behind her, and asks her the same question: “Why are you crying?  Whom are you looking for?”  Mary mistook Jesus for the gardener, and asks him, “Sir, if you’ve taken him away, please show me where you put him and I’ll take him away.”  Jesus says her name – “Mary” – and something in his voice prompted her to recognize him.  “Rabbouni” – meaning “Teacher!” – she says.   Apparently she also embraced him and held on tight, because Jesus told her, “Don’t hold onto me….but go to my brothers and tell them, “I am ascending to my father and your father, to my God and to your God.”  And Mary goes back to the disciples and tells them what she saw and heard.

As I read this story, two things struck me.  First of all is the difference in reactions to the news of the empty tomb.  In all four Gospels, the women are the first ones to reach the tomb, but only in Luke’s and John’s gospels do we read about Peter going to see the empty tomb.  In Luke’s gospel, Peter goes alone, but in John’s gospel, there’s this odd competition between Peter and the “disciple whom Jesus loved” –  John gets there first, but Peter looks inside first - and after they get to the tomb and take a peek inside, they go home.  It’s Mary Magdalene who stays, and for her faithfulness is rewarded with appearances, not only of angels, but of the Risen Christ.  But she doesn’t recognize Jesus.  There are similar accounts in other gospels; Luke tells us about the two disciples on the road to Emmaus who don’t recognize Jesus over the course of a seven-mile walk and conversation – a conversation in which the Risen Christ interpreted the meaning of his own resurrection to these two disciples - until they are at table with Jesus and he breaks the bread.   Later in John’s gospel, the disciples are fishing - unsuccessfully – and it is not until Jesus tells them where to cast their nets and they pull up a big haul of fish that they recognize Jesus. 

Would we do any better?  To me, it’s a bit ironic that so few recognized Jesus after his resurrection, because today,  Jesus is one of the most recognizable icons in our culture.  Seemingly everyone has an idea what Jesus looks like.  You know the general look – long face, white, blond or light brown hair, blue eyes, generally looks “sensitive”.  Or maybe sort of like Fabio.  Even those who don’t go near a church, even those who hate everything the church stands for, can see a painting or illustration and say, “Oh, that’s Jesus.” 

I’d encourage those of you who didn’t already toss your bulletin inserts to look in the bulletin at the color insert.   There are pictures on both sides of the paper, and I apologize in advance for the quality of the printouts; for any interested, I can email the original files.  The one side has four photographs that I took in February, 2015 at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, built over what is said to be the place where Jesus was crucified and buried – and, of course, resurrected, which is why local Christians in Jerusalem call it “The Resurrection Church”.   I was there in February 2015, and I can testify that Jesus’ body is not there.  The other side of the insert has nine depictions of Jesus.  They are all very different, and I tried to pick a wide range of images.  Some are quite old, others are quite modern.  I think the range tells us, among other things, that when we try to depict Jesus, we consciously or unconsciously end up putting quite a bit of ourselves into the picture.  For example, to our eyes, the image of the Asian Madonna and Child may look a bit jarring.  On the other hand, given that the real earthly Jesus was a middle-eastern Jew, almost certainly dark-skinned as in the Roman mosaic photo I included, born in what is now the West Bank, Palestine, our white Jesuses are just as inaccurate – and probably just as out of place and offputting in predominantly non-white cultures.  In the center is a photo of a Salvador Dali painting that in some ways captures the ethereal quality of some of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances. The images on the right side of the page are all fairly modern, and are strongly shaped by the perspective of the images’ creators.  There’s a “reward” poster of Jesus that was first printed in an American socialist publication about 100 years ago, and depicts Jesus as a low-income worker who hung out with the riff-raff of his society, and was killed by the respectable, good people of his day.  There’s a drawing called “Christ of the Breadlines” – and this is a popular motif within the Catholic Worker movement.  And then, of course, I couldn’t resist having a little fun by including a picture of Buddy Jesus from Kevin Smith’s 1999 movie Dogma. 

It is true that our sense of Jesus is shaped by our own formative experiences, our own views and life experience.  On one hand, the Christ of the Breadlines or the socialist depiction of Jesus may be anathema to some – to say nothing of “Buddy Jesus” - on the other hand, younger viewers may not resonate with the more classical depictions.    A key insight of the Quakers is that everyone has “that of God” or “that of Christ” within them.  Will that of Christ within me recognize that of Christ within you?    And will we be alert to the promptings of the Christ within each of us so that we can recognize when Christ is doing something utterly new. Or will we mistake Christ for the gardener, mistake the movement of the Holy Spirit within us for a moment of mental migraine or emotional indigestion?

The second thing that stuck me was Jesus’ instruction to Mary, after she came to recognize Jesus, “Do not hold on to me….. but go to my brothers.”  The Greek words for “don’t hold on to me”,  “mi mou aptou” are in a continuous tense, so Jesus is saying, “Don’t keep holding on to me” or “Don’t keep clinging to me.”  Jesus told her that he had not yet ascended to the Father, but that he would do so, and soon, and he wanted his followers there for the occasion.  But at that moment in the garden, Jesus was in a kind of transitional state, in flux, in development, not exactly as he had been during his earthly ministry, but not yet as he would be after he ascended to the Father.  Mary wanted to experience Jesus as she had so many times during his earthly ministry, but Jesus was telling her, gently, “don’t cling to that experience of me.  Yes, I will still be with you, but yes, I will be present with you in a different way.”  At the Last Supper in John’s gospel, Jesus had told the disciples that he would be going away, but would not leave them comfortless, that he would send the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, who would remind them of all Jesus had said and done.  Jesus was preparing Mary for this change in the way she would experience Jesus in the very near future.

“Don’t keep clinging to me.”  From our religious instruction as children in Sunday School or perhaps as teens in confirmation class, we come away from those experiences with some image or sense of Jesus in our minds.  And it’s very important that we raise our children and confirm our teens in the faith.  But there’s a pitfall that we or our children can take away a sense of Jesus that is so powerful in that moment – or others can impose a specific image of Jesus on us so strongly - that it doesn’t change as we or they grow older.  Perhaps we’ve seen pictures of bees or other small insects preserved in amber…and at any age, there’s a tendency to do the same thing with our faith, to take our mental image of Jesus at any given moment in time and freeze it in amber for the rest of our lives. Perhaps this is why Mary and the disciples on the Emmaus road and the other disciples fishing on the lake did not recognize the resurrected Jesus when they saw him, because they were still focused on how they understood him during his earthly ministry, and they needed time to wrap their minds around the transformed but ever present Risen Christ.  And perhaps this is why so many lose their faith as they mature into adulthood, because they are still trying to believe in the same Jesus they embraced as children or teens.  That is to say, they didn’t really lose faith in Jesus himself, but rather in the childish image of Jesus they had been carrying.  But maturing in Christ is a constant process of letting go of past experiences of Jesus in order to be open and present to God’s call in the present.  We can give thanks for the past and all it has taught us, and yet be open to God’s call today.

 “Don’t keep clinging to me.”  Mary wasn’t to cling to her memories of Jesus in his earthly ministry, but in a sense to give Jesus permission to be present with her in a different way.  And so it is with us.  We seek relationship with the Risen Christ, and to be in a relationship is to experience change.  We may have friendships that go back to our early childhood years, but as adults we surely don’t relate to those friends as we did back then.  And so it is with our faith in Christ.  As Christians we’re in the process of becoming, as Christ works within us, so the insights and understandings of yesterday may have to give way, over and over again, to the learnings of today and tomorrow.

“Whom do you seek?”  “Don’t keep clinging to me, but go to my brothers…”   May God grant us eyes to recognize Jesus, ears to hear his call, feet to take us where he is, hands to serve, and a tongue to proclaim good news.  Amen.

Now What? (Sermon for Easter Sunrise)

Mark 16:1-8

Of course, it would be the women who would be at the tomb, those faithful followers of Jesus who were often overlooked in the Gospels, but played key, behind the scenes roles in providing hospitality for Jesus and his followers.  After Jesus was arrested, the guys flaked out – Judas had already betrayed him, Peter denied knowing him – three times! – and almost everyone else ran for the hills – though John’s gospel says that the disciple whom Jesus loved, identified with John himself, had been with the mother of Jesus at the cross.  But it was the women who, at the crucifixion, stood off at a distance, watching.  And it was the women who were coming on the first day of the week, after that awful Friday, to anoint the body of Jesus, which had hurriedly been prepared for burial, wrapped in a cloth, and laid in the tomb by Joseph of Arimathea after being taken down at the cross.  We’re given three names – Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome.  They wanted to do what they could to provide care for the remains of the teacher who had meant so much to them.

They were going to anoint the body, but they knew that between them and the body was a large rock sealing the tomb.  Joseph of Arimathea had rolled it in front of the tomb.  Their immediate concern was simple:  could three women roll a huge stone away from the tomb?  Beyond that, they had larger concerns, which could be summed up in two words:  “Now what?”  Following and providing for Jesus and his followers had been such a large part in their lives.  Now he was gone.  Now what?  At least in the back of their minds, they had to be asking themselves, “Where do we go from here?”

So they arrive at the tomb.  And they receive their first surprise of the morning – the stone has been rolled away.  What to do about that stone had been their immediate worry, and I’m sure they were grateful for its removal.  But mixed with the relief had to be some anxiety:  what would they find inside?  Might animals have come into the cave and feasted on the remains?  Had somebody stolen the body?

So, with some trepidation, they peer into the tomb, then walk in.  Thank goodness, they found no animals had entered the tomb.  On the other hand, they didn’t find Jesus’ body either.  They did find a young man in a white robe, who told them, “Don’t be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.  He has been raised; he is not here.  Look, here is the place where they laid him.  But go, tell his disciples that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”  Basically the women freaked out, and ran out of the tomb, and out of fear they said nothing to anyone.

In that moment, the moment of the freaked-out women running out of the tomb, Mark’s gospel ends.  True, many Bibles have some other verses following this, but these are thought to have been added onto the original text by later writers who basically didn’t like where Mark ended the story.  Unlike the other Gospels, Mark doesn’t tell us about any appearance of the Risen Christ.   The original text of Mark’s gospel, with its description of freaked-out women running in terror and silence, leaves us with the obvious question, which later writers tried to resolve with their added endings:  Now what? where do we go from here?  Where do we go from here?

That’s exactly the question Mark leaves us, the very question Mark wants us to ask – now what?  Where do we go from here?  While the women may have asked this question on the way to the tomb, their question actually just got a lot harder to answer.  Had they found the lifeless body of Jesus, the steps ahead could be predicted:  they would have cried, they would have anointed the body, they’d have cried some more, they’d likely have shared stories – “Remember when Jesus said…..”  “Remember when Jesus did…..”  They’d have mourned.  They’d have grieved.  But eventually, they’d have gotten on with their lives, gone back to what their lives had been before a tornado named Jesus of Nazareth swept into their lives and swept them off their feet.

They didn’t find a dead Jesus, but a Risen Christ – a Risen Christ who has left the tomb – a Risen Christ who’s on the loose, who’s still at large, as the police would put it.  The young man in the white robe had told the women to tell the guys to look for Jesus in Galilee – but when they find Jesus, what will they find?  Will Jesus be angry with his disciples for abandoning him.  It’s striking  that Jesus said, “Go tell my disciples and Peter….”  Peter gets an odd shout out of sorts….was it because Peter had always been part of the inner circle of the disciples, the “rock” on which Jesus would build his church?  Or because Peter denied Jesus three times, and needed reassurance that Jesus still wanted to see him? 

Mark doesn’t give us an account of Jesus’ appearance to the disciples, but the other Gospels tell us that the resurrected Jesus was – different somehow – from their memories of Jesus of Nazareth.  John’s gospel tells us that Mary didn’t recognize Jesus, but thought he was the gardener – it wasn’t until Jesus spoke Mary’s name that Mary recognized who was speaking to her.  Luke’s gospel tell us that two disciples on the road to Emmaus didn’t recognize Jesus, even though he’d walked with them for several miles; it was only when they sat down and Jesus  broke the bread that they recognized him.   John also tells us about an encounter Jesus had with the Risen Christ while they were fishing, and it took some time to recognize him.  Matthew tells us that on the Mount of Ascension, as Jesus was about to leave them, there was doubt among the disciples.    So Jesus was back, back from the dead, and yet Jesus was somehow different from their memories of him.

Like the women at the tomb, like the disciples who received the message to go to Galilee, Jesus goes ahead of us, and calls us to meet him there.  Like the disciples, we don’t know what to expect when we get there.  We may find it hard to discern where Jesus is – where Jesus is acting in our lives, where Jesus is acting in our congregations, where Jesus is acting in our communities of Bridesburg and Port Richmond, where Jesus is acting in our country and our world.  Even when Jesus is in action, like the disciples, we may find it hard to recognize Jesus at work.   We in the church cherish our traditions, cherish those places where Jesus has met us in the past.  We give thanks for those holy places and holy moments.  But we cannot stay there, any more than Jesus wanted the women to remain at the empty tomb – as the old hymn says, “I’d stay in the garden with him, though the night around me be falling,  But he bids me go….”  But he bids me go .  I visited the Holy Land in February 2015 – Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem – and in Jerusalem I saw the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over what are supposed to be the place where Jesus was crucified and laid in the tomb.  I was among many pilgrims who touched and pressed part of my body against a slab where the body of Jesus was said to have been laid out after being taken down from the cross, who crawled into a crawl space under the altar to the place where the cross of Christ was set up.   It was the trip of a lifetime, with holy places and many moments I’ll never forget.  A few of my photos are in the bulletin insert.  But this church is also called, among the local people, “The Resurrection Church” – because Jesus’ body is no longer there.  I was there in early February 2015 and I can attest – no dead body of Jesus there.  Indeed, if I want to experience Christ, see Christ at work, I don’t have to go to the Holy Land.  We sang, “I come to the garden alone…..”, remembering Mary’s encounter with Jesus in the garden….but if I want to meet Jesus, I don’t have to travel to the Garden of Gethsemane.  Plenty of holy work, plenty of God’s work is happening right here in the ‘Burg and in Port Richmond, and maybe someday someone will have such a powerful experience of God right here that they’ll write a song, “I came into Bridesburg alone, where the dew was still on the green grass.”    The Holy Land is where Jesus taught and healed and ministered two thousand years ago.  The Holy Land is where Jesus was.  But Bridesburg and Port Richmond are where Jesus is now, where Jesus is going ahead of us, where Jesus wishes to meet us.  For us, if we know where to look and how to look, Bridesburg and Port Richmond can be holy ground – because Jesus is here.

Where do we go from here?  The women came to the tomb expecting to mourn a tragic death, and ended up being frightened half out of their wits by words about new life.  That’s how it is for us sometimes.  We find ourselves in what seems to be a hopeless situation – a family member stuck in an addiction, a marriage that’s failing or a family relationship that’s strained or broken, an inability to hold a job.  And after being beaten down enough times, we come to figure that “that’s just the way life is.”  And we go through the stages of grief – denial, bargaining, anger, depression…..and maybe reach acceptance.  But what if acceptance of hopelessness isn’t where we’re meant to end up?  What if God is still in the resurrection business?  What if, on the other side of the Good Fridays in our lives, God has an Easter sunrise planned?  Will we have eyes to see?  And how will we respond? – especially if our family member, or we ourselves, begin making constructive changes in their lives?  Will we be ready to deal with the new and improved version of our family member, or of us? How will we respond to resurrection?

Alleluia, the Lord has risen; he has risen indeed, Alleluia!  The Risen Christ goes ahead of us, inviting us to meet him where he is at work.  May we have eyes to see the Risen Christ at work, ears to hear his call, feet to meet him there, and hands to love and serve those to whom God calls us to minister.  Amen.