Rev. Cari Pattison

Woodstock Reformed Church

Easter Sunday!

April 9, 2023

“Resurrection Still Happens”

John 20:1-18

1Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” 

3Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. 4The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10Then the disciples returned to their homes.

11But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; 12and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. 13They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” 14When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” 16Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). 17Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.‘” 18Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

***

The story is told of a Trappist monastery where the monks all take a vow of silence.

Only once a year, on Easter Sunday- after many months spent in prayer and contemplation, study and work, would each monk be permitted to speak a sentence.

Often the statements are jewels of poetry, many weeks in the making. Or revelations about God and faith.

But this one brother, when it came his turn during his first year as a monk, stood up and said to all the others in the refectory- “Food cold.”

The next Easter when it came time for his turn, this same monk stood up, and said, “Bed hard.”

And when it came to his third year, his third chance to speak aloud some vision of his heart, all the monks waited in hopes that this struggling brother would have something more profound to say than the two years prior. Surely he had grown spiritually in his 3 years at the monastery!

But the monk simply stood up and said, “I quit.”

To which the senior abbot said, “Well, I’m not surprised. Ever since you’ve gotten here you’ve done nothing but complain!”

***

I wonder what’s on your heart this Easter, as we come together today.

Hopefully you have good food and a comfortable bed, but I wonder if you were given a chance to speak from the silent still truth of your soul, what would you say?

Do you come to this Day of Resurrection with celebration? Glad to be with family and friends, savoring the sunshine and fragrant flowers and familiar hymns? Eagerly anticipating the egg hunt and Easter brunch that await?

If so, welcome! We’re glad you’re here. Thank you for sharing your joy with us.

Or do you come to this Day, blinded by the glare of pastel colors and bored with the Allelulias? Maybe you even cringe a bit at all this singing and bell-ringing and religious bravado. You came because someone else made you get out of bed and now here you are. And this whole resurrection thing makes you uneasy. At best it’s a tired metaphor, and at worst it’s one more empty churchy promise that certainly doesn’t feel true in your life right now. You can relate to that disillusioned monk, who said, “I quit.”

If that’s you- also welcome. We’re glad you’re here. Thank you for sharing your honest presence with us.

And maybe for others of you- you’re somewhere in the middle. Tired from cooking or staying up stuffing eggs, lonely for loved ones who can’t be here in the pew next to you, maybe visiting our church for the first time, and wondering with curiosity- what will Easter hold for me this year?

If that’s you- welcome. We’re glad you’re here. Thank you for sharing your openness with us.

To each of you- welcome to Resurrection Sunday. Thank you for showing up exactly as you are, where you are, to join in this day of new beginnings. I believe that wherever you find yourself this morning, there’s a gift for you in today’s text.

***

Our text begins early, on the first day of the week. While it was still dark.

Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb, because where else do you go, when it’s dark and all seems dead? When your worst fears appear to come true. Where else do you go when the one you love has left, and only a decomposing body remains?

Mary Magdalene, you may recall, was one of Jesus’ friends and students. She followed him in his teaching and ministry, and she may not be who you think she is.

Many rumors have ciruculated about her over the years, but the only descriptions we get of Mary Magdalene are that she went with Jesus and his disciples from town to town, listening to the teachings, and in fact helped support them financially with treasure from her own purse. We’re told she was “delivered from seven demons,” which could’ve been anything from a mental or emotional affliction, to an addiction, to some spiritual torment that only Jesus could heal.

***

Mary comes to the tomb. The first day of the week, while it was still dark.

Because where else do you go when all seems lost? If she can’t get Jesus back, at least she can talk with him and be near him- even if it’s just his lifeless body.

And yet even this will be denied her, as Mary peers into the tomb- with the stone mysteriously rolled away- and finds nothing there. She runs to tell the other disciples, “They have take him away and we do not know where they have put him!”

After all the torture of the trial and crucifixion, now the Roman rulers have dealt Jesus’ friends an even lower blow, and taken his body? They can’t even properly mourn him?

She runs to tell Peter and John, and then they run to the tomb to see for themselves. And there’s all this running and telling and looking and puzzling over those folded grave cloths. Because why would you stop and undo all the burial cloths and leave it all there like refolded wrapping paper?

None of it makes sense. Because sometimes in the moment of despair, nothing makes sense and it’s all a blur. So while the men are running races and competing to be the fastest and most favored by Jesus, Mary just weeps, gutted by the grief.

***

Do you know this feeling?

When the one you loved and cared for suffered greatly, and you were powerless to help?

When the one you counted on to stay with you, is suddenly gone?

Do you know the feeling of sitting next to buried hopes, and dead dreams?

In the middle of her tears, Mary turns to the tomb, to take a better look.

And inside she sees something she didn’t see before.

Peter and John didn’t see them either:

Two angels in white, asking her why she weeps.

Why didn’t she see the angels sooner?

I love what N.T. Wright says- “Sometimes it’s only through tears, that we can see angels. And when we do, they tell us things like ‘Don’t be afraid,’ ‘Hang on,’ ‘Something good is coming.’”

These two angels don’t do anything other than inquire about Mary’s tears, and she tells them the same devastating news she told the men- “They have taken my Lord and I do not know where they have put him!”

How many in this world know what it is to have a job taken away, their health and strength taken away, their spouse taken away, their dignity or home taken away?

***

And then Mary turns around.

The soundtrack swells and the light lifts, and a voice says, “Woman, why are you weeping? Who are you looking for?”

And she thinks it’s the gardener.

Now she’s even more exasperated, “Sir, if you’ve taken his body away, just tell me where, so I can get him and bury him properly!”

Have you ever been in such a fog of grief that even the kindest words can feel confronting?

Why does she think he’s the gardener?

Did he put on the gardener’s clothes, after stripping off his burial cloths?

Was he tending the flowers, while Mary spoke to the angels?

Did she notice him pruning the hedges while she wept?

Or was it just too hard to recognize him, because sometimes God comes to us in times and ways we least expect and so yes we mistake him for the gardener?

***

It’s only when he says her name- “Mary”

That she looks up. And sees into his eyes, the one who sees her.

The one who freed her from everything that held her back.

The one who stands right there next to the tomb and says only “Tell me about your tears.” And “Tell me who you’re looking for.” And then says her name.

***

Mary thinks he is the gardener.

And she is not wrong, because in addition to being her Friend and Savior and Risen Lord, Jesus is also the gardener of a whole new creation.

The first verses of this text are meant to remind us of the first garden, in Genesis 1, the Eden wherein the animals and plants and humans and God exist together in loving work and joy and harmony- cultivating beauty and nourishment and life!

And now Jesus comes to Mary saying in essence, “Don’t hold onto me- don’t cling to the old way because I am doing a new thing that’s going to spring forth. I am making a better world and you can be part of it. Come plant and water and grow a new creation with me- a world of greater mercy and peace and justice and kindness and beauty and community and love.”

***

Friends, this Easter, what would it be like to sit by the tomb of everything you assume dead- the disappointments and disillusionment in your own life and in the world- and watch for Jesus?

What would it be like to walk amid the newly blooming daffodils and tulips, the dawning yellow forsythia and star magnolia- and listen for the master gardener? The one who says, “Tell me about your tears.” “Tell me who you’re looking for?”

God knows I have my share of griefs this year, as do we all.

But what I’m looking for more than anything, isn’t what’s buried in that grave of my grief, the people and promises that have been taken away-

At the heart of it all, and especially this Easter season- I’m looking for Jesus.

***

That’s why I still call myself a Christian, after all these years, and after seeing all the ways in which religion can justifiably get a bad name.

It’s why even while hiking the Appalachian Trail, I found myself with a bunch of other backpackers at a church in Hot Springs North Carolina on an Easter Sunday 4 years ago, even though they relegated us to the “hiker pew” in back, so we wouldn’t stink up the rest of the church with our sweat and dirt.

It’s why I think most of us are here this morning- whether we know it or not- because we’re looking for Jesus.

And we are looking for the garden.

***

So many of you are gardeners. And you know that gardening is a fundamentally an act of hope- you plant the seedlings, you sprout the little plants, and you hope for the best. You wait and you water and you fertilize and you prune, and you know that some things won’t come back next year.

In Woodstock of all places, we know this song by heart, by Joni Mitchell:

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

That universal longing for the garden.

Jana Reister…

***

And so this Resurrection Sunday, I invite you to come to the garden.

She’s the Apostle to the Apostles –

Diana Butler Bass uncovers how, due to manuscript tampering in the fourth century, the sister in the John 11 story might have actually been Mary Magdalene. The same Mary who anointed Jesus’ feet in front of all at that dinner party. Butler Bass discusses the assumptions and current debates around Mary’s identity and posits that her name – Mary Magdalene- “Mary of Magdala” - is not a reference to where she is from, but instead a title. The word Magdala in Aramaic means “tower.”

Therefore, we could more accurately call her “Mary the Tower.” Butler Bass continues, “Our faith is the faith of that woman who would become the first person to announce the resurrection. Mary the Witness, Mary the Tower, Mary the Great.”

“Go tell the others,” Jesus says. She’s the first one in the Gospels that Jesus commissions to preach. But she doesn’t actually give the exact message he tells her. She just says the only thing she can say, breathless and amazed, “I have seen the Lord!”

***

This text matters- because it speaks of a Jesus fully alive, gardening this world with us, pointing to a new creation!

Remember the stardust lyric?

11-year-old Annaliese was killed in a school bus accident a year ago in Colorado, at 11 years old. She dreamed of being an astrophysicist, and Cosmos was her favorite show, the last thing she watched before she died. Her personal hero was Neil deGrasse Tyson. He heard about Annaliese and wrote this to her mother Leandra:

“To lose Annaliese at age 11, brimming with so much cosmic ambition, will forever leave me wondering what she might have accomplished as a grown-up kid. Of course, we will never know the answer to that question.

But we do know the physics of cremation: the energy contents of her body, itself reduced to ash, actually enters Earth’s atmosphere. It ultimately escapes to space in the form of infrared energy, radiating in all directions at the speed of light filling the voids of the cosmos with her presence. At the moment I write this, Annaliese’s energy has extended a half-trillion miles into space more than 100-times the distance to Pluto. Though she will live in collective memories for all our lives, in the universe she lives for all eternity.”

Dying and rising are embedded into the very fabric of our universe!

***

So join Mary the Tower, in the garden of God’s promise:

Look for signs of resurrection all around you this spring- in nature and in the lives of the people you know.

Look for the face of the Risen Christ- even, and especially, if at first you mistake him for someone else.

And look for ways to garden with God in the cultivation of a more true and just and beautiful world.

Let us pray.