John 20:1-18
Ordinary 2
First Presbyterian Church Clarksville, AR
Dr. Robert Wm Lowry
I am not a marathoner (shocking I know!), but those marathoners I know tell me that there is a point in the race when your body hits a wall and you have to make the mental and emotional decision to keep going those last few miles.
When our spirits are held in the grip of loss, I wager that we all reach something like that runner’s wall; a moment when sadness and mourning confront us with a decision.
By the third day, after the brutality of the crucifixion was becoming a memory, albeit a vivid and painful one, each of Jesus’ followers had certainly hit that emotional wall. The sense of loss they must have felt in the wake of having their familiar and present friend taken from their midst has to have drawn from the depths of their spirits the last measure of energy-physical, emotional, or spiritual- that they had.
It is not surprising that by that third day, when we join the events in this text from John, the crowd of friends rallying from their exhausted mourning and attending the tomb has been reduced to one.
Mary Magdalene.
Ever faithful Mary.
She had no doubt hit the wall but rallied one more time.
In my mind’s eye, I see her walking up to the tomb in a slouch; her shoulders slumped under the weight of exhaustion and sorrow, her brow lowered to the ground, he arms heavy at her sides. She went to ensure that everything was as it should be; that the tomb was undisturbed and the body of her friend in its resting place where it would be, well, forever.
Even the most casual and occasional Christian knows what happens next.
The stone is moved.
Mary rushes to tell the others.
The disciples rush to the tomb.
The body is gone.
The clothes are folded.
The disciples are confused.
Everyone leaves.
Everyone but Mary who stands and weeps.
She was the first to arrive and the last to leave.
Dutiful, faithful Mary cannot bring herself to leave just yet.
When the others are gone, as if to triple check that the body was really not there, Mary peers into the tomb one more time. This time though, rather than the empty hollow with the folded grave clothes, Mary sees two angels sitting where her friend had been laid.
The angels speak to Mary asking why she is crying, an odd thing to ask in a cemetery, and in response that good, faithful, trusting, loving woman said, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”
I am hardly the first and I will certainly not be the last preacher to observe that to some degree we in the church all stand in Mary’s shoes today.
We too attend the tomb of a friend.
We too are exhausted from loss.
We too are looking for something that seems to have vanished.
Our church is dead.
Not dying.
Dead.
The church so many of us knew as children and even through much of adulthood;
the church where money was not a problem;
the church where other activities yielded to the church program calendar;
the church where the logic of faith in a God shaped by 2000 years of western theology was the standard definition of faith;
the church where the building was a symbol of the strength and roots of the community;
the church where evangelism meant reminding people that going to church is just what you do.
That church is dead.
Whether it was ever truly real or not, it is dead.
And lest that not be clear enough, let me put it this way.
Not only is the church in general dead, this church is dead.
First Presbyterian Church of Clarksville is dead.
At least the First Presbyterian that needed this imposing edifice, these towering stained glass windows, that glorious stained glass dome, and 40,000 square feet of building space in which to do ministry.
That church is no more.
Whether we like it or not, we too stand outside the tomb of a loved one searching for a body that is no longer there. So it is not at all surprising that woven into the fabric of our congregation right now is a sense of exhausted mourning.
Like Mary looking for the body of her familiar Lord, we stand with heavy hearts crying out, “They have taken away my church, and I do not know where they have laid it.”
If those words are hard to hear, know that they are equally hard to say.
I miss that kind of church.
I went to seminary to serve that kind of church.
When I quit my career and went to seminary, please believe me that it was not to spend every waking moment of my vocational life hoping the bills would get paid, the payroll met, that someone will show up for the planned church event, that the roof will not leak, and the membership stay content enough that you don’t spend the week putting out fires rather than doing the work of the church.
Preachers and parishioners are just alike. We miss our fallen friend. We follow Mary’s lead and keep taking one more peek inside the tomb just to be sure that the familiar body is not still there.
We do our best to hang around and keep an eye out hoping- just hoping- that the body will reappear; that the church we knew will be reborn; that all of this anxiety and loss will be but a dream gone bad.
And do you know what?
That’s ok.
It is ok to linger or, to use a good word from our Pentecostal brothers and sisters, to tarry a while outside the tomb. It is ok to dwell in our mourning for a while and not just let go of the past as though it never mattered.
Because it did matter.
It does matter.
The legacy of the church matters.
The legacy of THIS church matters.
The legacy of the church that nurtured generations,
witnessed to the gospel in its own time and its own way,
baptized babies, cared for children, nurtured adults, and shepherded the dying into the arms of promise.
That church mattered.
And things that matter in our lives deserve, when lost, the honesty of our sadness.
There is something holy about tarrying for a time while we live with our mourning.
According to the text while Mary stood tarrying in her sadness, angels attended her.
“Mary stood outside near the tomb crying. As she cried, she bent down to look into the tomb. She saw two angels dressed in white, seated where the body of Jesus had been, one at the head and one at the foot. The angels asked her, ‘Woman, why are you crying?’ She replied, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they’ve put him.’”
The disciples saw something in the tomb, but according to the John the angels only appear to and speak to Mary. There is something about her mourning that is honored by their unique presence with her.
There she is in her holy tarrying looking for the body of the one she lost.
Was Mary’s story written with the logic of our contemporary culture, it would end there.
Our culture has for the last three centuries more and more bought into the notion that life and death are bookends and the only volumes worth reading are those in between. There is no reason, the world’s logic goes, to posit what is before birth because that is not real life nor is there reason to look beyond death because there is nothing there to see.
In fact, there is something about Mary’s tarrying at the tomb that reflects that modern logic of death. So it only makes sense for her to stay there looking for a dead body because that is all there is to be found.
Dead is dead after all, right?
If there is anything for Mary to find, it is nothing more than the gradually decaying corpse of the one she had lost.
And by extension, the same would be true for us. Dead is dead. Whether an individual or an institution, once death comes calling there is nothing to be done but let memory fade into the distance as we cling to what familiar may remain.
If we are honest with one another, I think we have to admit that much of our anxiety about the moment in our congregation- about the shifting ground beneath the foundations of the church in general and in this place- is due to the fact that we all, to one degree or another, buy what the world is selling.
We buy the idea that dead is dead and there is nothing for us but to stand at an empty tomb and cry out, “They have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they have laid him.”
Like faithful Mary we tarry, we mourn, and we search.
Hers would be a sad story if it ended there.
Ours would be as well.
’They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’
The end?
Not quite.
“As soon as she said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there.”
Mary’s story does not end with her lament and neither does ours because Mary and we are part of a different story; a story that follows a different logic; a different reality; a different promise. We are part of a story where the bookend of death is toppled, stones at tombs are rolled away, the logic of the world is exposed for the fraud that it is, and death takes a permanent holiday!
Right there in her mournful tarrying, Mary meets the risen Christ.
Not the resuscitated corpse of the Jesus she knew, but the new creation that is the resurrected Lord.
That is Mary’s story.
It is the story of the living faithfulness of God. In what more fundamental way does God reveal God’s faithfulness to us than by showing up in our lives in the person and promise of the risen Christ?
Mary’s story does not end with the cold reality of death because that ending is the lie; the truth is not death but life! Life is the promise of the faithfulness of God.
And as disciples of Jesus Christ, we are defined by that promise;
the promise of resurrection; of new creation; of the rejection of the finality of death in all its forms and the institution of divine promise in the fabric of human history.
the promise that when death comes calling, we see Jesus; we see life; we see new creation; we see the hope that comes only from being grafted into the miracle of the Jesus story.
the promise that though we dwell for a season in our mourning, we know that God shall wipe away every tear from our eyes and we shall weep and mourn no more.
That is the promise of our forever in the faithfulness of God.
But until that time-that time of heavenly promise- comes to fruition; while we still stand outside the tomb; when we cry out in our mourning; when we give voice to our loss; when we echo Mary’s words, “they have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they have laid him,” we too turn around and see Jesus standing there!
Right there in our moment of deepest need; our moment of mighty grief; or season of deep and abiding mourning, we turn and see none other than our resurrected Lord.
And when that happens, when like Mary we turn and encounter Jesus, when we look up with our tear soaked eyes and gaze upon the one true Lord…we often don’t recognize him at first.
The last half of John 20:14 is one of the most wonderfully ironic turns in all of scripture.
Mary who has shown such deep faith, such longing to see Jesus, such commitment to find the one who is lost, turns around and sees him face to face and doesn’t recognize him.
If the stakes of the moment were not so high, it would almost be funny.
After that ironic turn, Jesus and Mary repeat the brief conversation she had with the angels. As if to drive home the point that what Mary is looking for cannot be found because it is no more, the writer of John’s gospel repeats that scene of concern and lament.
She is looking for the body.
But there is no body.
Still, her heart is so set on finding what she knew, that when she finds what she needs she cannot recognize it right in front of her.
Like we so often are, Mary is blinded by her single-minded determination to cling to what she once knew and loved; her eyes closed to the now and set instead on what had been.
Finally, when Jesus calls her by name, she recognizes him and turns, greets him, and the text implies that she reaches out to touch him. But Jesus says to her, “Don’t hold on to me.” He knows that although she recognizes him, she still holds onto some hope that he might be the same Jesus who lay in the tomb, hung on the cross, journeyed with and taught them.
Before she can go and tell what she has seen, she first has to let go.
That is the last we see or hear from Mary Magdalene. The rest of John’s account is about the disciples. She may have been with them or may not.
We don’t know.
All that we do know about her is that by the end of her encounter with the risen Christ, she is no longer standing at the tomb and no longer looking for what she had lost.
The Jesus she knew was gone, but the Jesus who knew her lived on; a new creation. Mary learned that day, first hand, about the power of resurrection. It was, after all, not the lost body of Jesus but a resurrected Lord she proclaimed when she left and went to see the disciples.
It was a new day. A new reality. A new faith born in Mary.
And none of it would have been possible without the love that drew her to the tomb that morning or the courage that let her leave.
We, as a community, stand in her shoes this morning.
The only reason any of us are here in this place is that we have some love for this church. Whether that love is built on a lifelong legacy of nurture and memory or a new found sense of community and belonging. Like the love that rallied Mary to visit the tomb of her friend, love for what this place has meant, continues to mean, and may mean in the future brings us here.
And like Mary, we have spent a lot of energy in recent months and years looking for something that we love that was lost; a bygone day, a long lost friend, a church that once was but no longer is.
“They have taken away our church, and we do not know where they have laid it.”
More importantly, like Mary at the tomb, I think the risen Christ is here with us in this moment and through this season.
You all know me well enough by now to know that I am not a terribly sentimental man and I do not throw around sentimental theological language often. Little gets under my skin as much as what I often feel is the loosey-goosey attribution of good motives to God for the happenstance of good fortune in the world.
Still, I truly believe that the opportunity presented to us for this new ministry and the work we are doing here; bearing witness to a new kind of community; living into a new way of being church; and setting our sights on the possibilities of the future is nothing short of the work of the Holy Spirit in our midst and the promise of resurrection alive in our church and in us.
If I did not believe in my heart that God is truly calling us together in this work, I wouldn’t be here doing it. This is too hard on all of us to do it for any reason short of our love for the common object of our devotion; the God of promise who is known to us in the risen Christ.
It would be an hyperbole for me to say that the future of this church rests on our willingness to accept any particular form of leadership or any single structure of ministry. It is the rarest of moments when God so limits our way that there is but one path forward into faithfulness.
However, it is no overstatement to say that providence has blessed us with a set of circumstances that give us options and opportunities for creativity and renewal not often available to churches like ours. And although there is much to keep us standing with Mary at the tomb mourning what is no more; lamenting empty pews and empty coffers; letting our memories linger on days gone by and remembering with fondness the virtue and faithfulness of a church that was, there is much much more to send us out, like Mary, into the future proclaiming the hope found only in resurrection. The work we are doing in and through this new ministry partnership is proclamation; it is our declaration to the world, the church, even ourselves that we are a people not ready to buy what the world is selling; a people whose ministry is far from done; a people who are ready to live into the hope of a risen Lord and let God do a new thing in this place.
The church we knew may be dead, but because we are in Christ and Christ is with us, the dead will never die but become a new creation.
Like Mary, it is love that draws us here and love that echoes in our lament for what once was and, whether we like it or not, will never be again.
So, like Mary, let that love be the thing that gives us ears to hear God’s call to the future so we too will have the faith and the hope to leave the tomb of death and live into the promise of resurrection greeting God’s new day with rejoicing shouting, “He is risen! He is risen, indeed!”
And with him, “We are risen! We are risen, indeed!”
In the name of the risen Christ who lives for us all and makes ALL things new.
Amen.
