From the Pulpit:

I Have Seen the Lord!

Last night, at the Great Vigil of Easter, I preached about memory, and as I prepared that sermon I was flooded with memories of Easters past. One year my mother and her best friend Betsy Fogg for some unknown reason thought it would be a good idea to put seven restless kids into the back of a station wagon – nobody had heard of a seat belt back then -- and take us to a cabin in a state park in West Virginia, no dads invited, where it proceeded to pour buckets of rain all weekend, the high point of which was hunting for Easter eggs in deep, slick mud.

I remember the year my children got the brown rabbit, who lived several more years that our vet said a rabbit could live despite the fact that my mother in law swore we never fed him. He was a good rabbit. Arthur was his name.

And the year I was a real stickler about the tackiness of plastic eggs and declared we would only have real hard boiled ones. We dyed them and left them in the breakfast room for the bunny to hide, and the bunny came in the night and hid them in the yard. But I was awakened right as the sun was rising by a lot of scuffling in the garden, and it was not the bunny but rather our 100-pound black lab, Fang, making a joyful feast of hard boiled eggs. The children were surprised to find candy-filled plastic eggs when they woke up.

I remember the children’s choir at our church always singing the Mozart Alleluia, which now holds a sacred place in my heart, and my little boys flowering the cross with daffodils from our front yard. And I remember poignantly our last Easter at that church. John Bennet was moving to Austin the next day. I would follow when school was out, and that Easter Sunday I felt utterly bereft and couldn’t believe that I’d ever feel at home in a church again. We’d been at St. Mark’s nearly every Sunday for twenty-five years. I was wrong. I am home.

My Easter memories are precious, and precious too are the new memories that are in the making. I hope you will share with me some of yours.

Christmas and Easter are the two occasions in our church year when we can expect to offer hospitality to people who aren’t with us every Sunday. Some of our guests today are visiting from other towns. Some may have been dragged here at least partially against their will. Some might admit that they are feeling a stirring in their souls that they don’t quite know how to describe. And others are here in spite of the fact that something happened in church, once or a number of times that made them swear they’d never step foot in a church again. So no matter who you are today, and no matter who or what brought you to church, welcome. You are our guest of honor today. And it is especially to you that I am preaching.

Preaching. Now that’s a loaded word. I remember when I was in seminary. At that point all my children were in college and consequently fairly interested in how their mom was doing in graduate school, and one of them asked what my favorite course was and I said it was homiletics, which is preaching. There was silence on the other end of the phone and then he said, Well, duh! I imagine he was remembering all the times that I had wagged a finger at him, warning him about the dire consequences of his actions or one way or another – at least this is how he would have seen it – trying to make sure he had less fun than he was planning on. That’s a lot of people’s idea about church, too. It’s a place where you have to wear uncomfortable clothes and you sit still for a long time while they make you feel guilty. I’d like an opportunity to dispel that notion of church, and today is the perfect day to do it.

A friend of mine posted on Facebook a couple of days ago this question: Does the Resurrection really matter? I mean, even if Jesus had stayed dead, wouldn’t his life and teachings be just as important? There’s a rich theological discussion going on now bumped right up against  the hope that the dry cleaners  were able to get the grass stains out of her little girls’ dresses.

Yes, the Resurrection really matters. If Jesus had not been raised I don’t think his story would have been told for more than a few generations.  Lots of remarkable people have lived – teachers and healers and outrageously kind people, but unless they wrote books or somebody wrote about them, their memory would die with their grandchildren.

But Jesus did not stay dead, and this story and, even more importantly, the meaning of this story has informed the lives of hundred of millions of people for over two thousand years.

It’s a hard story to swallow for a lot of people maybe because at the heart of it, it is a deep mystery. We don’t get to see the Resurrection itself, just the before and the after. And the transformation takes place somewhere in the thirty-six hours or so between the sealing of the tomb and Mary’s arrival on Sunday morning. And it’s not just Jesus’ transformation. We are radically transformed as well. But I’m going to stop myself here.

Maybe Jesus wasn’t transformed. Maybe we weren’t either. Maybe the Resurrection was God’s way of showing us Jesus’ true nature and ours as well. Maybe it took nothing less than raising him from the dead, letting him walk around with his friends for forty days, eating, fishing, teaching, forgiving and then rising up to heaven before their eyes in order to get across to them the enormity of it all, the enormity of God’s love for us the enormity of what it means for us to be the incarnation of God’s love for the world.

The disciples were not remarkable people. Jesus did not pick them because they were fine, upstanding citizens. They were pretty much illiterate hard-working young men, but he saw faithfulness in their hearts, well, all of them except Judas. Most of us are not remarkable people, although because of the world we live in most of us are literate. Mary Magdalene is as enigmatic a person as just about anybody in the Bible. All we know about her is that she was healed of demons and that she was devoted to Jesus and that he loved her. Nowhere in scripture does it say she was a prostitute. That got made up by a patriarchy that was threatened by a woman being one of Jesus’ closest disciples. There are all kinds of stories, even before The DaVinci Code that say she was Jesus’ wife, but they are just that, stories.

In the gospel of John we get an intimate portrait of her transformation. She alone is walking to the tomb. You can feel her leaden heart, her shattered spirit as she approaches in the pre-dawn darkness. Her natural conclusion is that the body has been stolen, so she runs back to the disciples to get some muscle. Peter and the beloved disciple race to the empty tomb and come to pretty much the same conclusion. Right now nobody is recalling Jesus telling them he would be raised. Such an outrageous prediction wouldn’t have meant anything to them.

But after the boys leave to go home Mary lingers and weeps for her loss. First the angels speak to her, and John’s listeners would have a mental image of the two angels that guard the Garden of Eden and the two cherubim that sit at either end of the Ark of the Tabernacle. They would have known that this empty tomb is now the Holy of Holies.

And then there is the gardener. The irony here is delightful. Remember the king who was not a king who really was a king? Well now it is the gardener who is not a gardener who is the true gardener God the creator incarnate in a scarred body. And Jesus speaks her name. That is the moment of Mary’s transformation and our own. This is real.

Death has been conquered, Jesus’ death and Mary’s death and our death. The evil of the world has been defeated by love, and it is that love that has overshadowed us just as the Holy Spirit overshadowed the young Virgin Mary at the Annunciation.  Toward the end of today’s gospel, after Mary somehow pulled away from the presence of Jesus and obeyed his word to go and tell the disciples, she steps into the room where they are hiding, paralyzed by fear, and she tells them, “I have seen the Lord.”

That is what we are here for today. Not an explanation of an event that only God and Jesus were privy to, not a doctrinal statement that bishops can agree on, not orthodoxy, whatever that means, not a laundry list of our good deeds or our wise words or our piety, which we practice overtly  so that others will see how pious we are.

We are here to be confronted by the risen Christ, to see that he is alive, that life is more than our breathing days and hours. We are here to say, “I have seen the Lord,” and he is most assuredly here with us because we are the body of Christ, the vessels of his teachings, his healings, his rising, and his incarnation.

We are here not only to hear an outrageous story but to live that outrageous story, to have the audacity to claim that we are ordained to be Christ to the world. I have seen the Lord today, and he is sitting in the pews of this church. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Thanks be to God.

Amen.