“At the Intersection of Love and Loss: Easter”

John 20:1-18

April 21, 2019

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS

“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw…”

It’s a story that reaches right out and grabs you….right from the beginning. This tale of “resurrection madness” as pastor Ted Loder calls it, is one that still pull and tugs at us...even centuries later. [1]

We fumble towards understanding - grasping onto the bits and pieces of the story that make sense….only to find the whole thing crumbling apart as we try to wrap our heads around all of the parts that make no sense at all.

At times, we give up on making sense of it at all. Instead we let the reality of Easter wash over us in hymns, images, emotions, rituals, experiences.

Some years we turn away, our hearts and minds unable to grapple with Resurrection.

No matter how we respond, the story stands. Peering out at us from the pages from these ancient texts. Our ancestors whispering and sometimes shouting at us from a long ago place and time.

“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw…”

There’s so much we don’t know about that first Easter morning. If you tried to put together a storyboard of what exactly happened, you’d quickly give up in frustration. The accounts from our various gospels certainly aren’t in agreement. It’s unclear how many people were there, where it happened, whether Jesus appeared somehow or was just missing. In some versions the women run and share the news of what they’ve seen - in others they are silent. There may have been earthquakes, soldiers falling down, or angels bearing silent witness. There is fear and joy and weeping and disbelief.

One of the only consistencies between the different versions is this: the Resurrected Christ appeared first to the women. Which is exactly what you would expect from one who came to turn the world upside down….privileging those who had been pushed aside by the patriarchy, amplifying the voices of those the world tried to silence.

And so, each year, when we come around to these texts again, it’s only natural to notice the particularities of each gospel. I don’t know about you, but I find myself incredibly thankful that the stories can’t be harmonized. It seems to me that Resurrection is not something to be understood as much as experienced. And the fact that the stories don’t line up neatly is a reminder that it’s not the facts that matter here...the important stuff….what keeps us coming back year after year, are the deeper truths that lurk just below the surface.

The particularities of the Gospel of John are these:

• Jesus is laid to rest in a garden
• Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus’s dearest friends, is alone when she comes to the garden first thing in the morning
• Upon finding the stone missing, she runs to find the other disciples, because she initially thinks someone has taken him away
• There is an awkward foot race between Peter and the Beloved Disciple (we don’t know his name) as they each try to get to the tomb first. It seems to me this is probably not the right time for a competition over anything, but I digress. The footrace stands.
• Eventually, after much jockeying over who will be the first one to get into the empty tomb, Simon Peter goes in and sees the burial shroud resting on the ground...no body to be found anywhere.
• Finally, they come to understand what has come to pass. We are told that “they believe” and leave to go home.
• Apparently they just leave Mary standing there, crying. I told you their behavior was a bit awkward.
• And so now we have a second part of the story. Mary, who had come to the tomb early in the morning to do what women always did - care for the body - is left crying, alone, outside the tomb.
• Only not alone! The other disciples have left, but through her tears, Mary sees two angels sitting inside the tomb. Were they there a few moments ago when the men were in the tomb? Did they somehow miss them? We aren’t told.
• Mary continues to weep because she is worried about the body of her friend, which seems to have been stolen. Suddenly, another character appears. Mary assumes he is the gardener and she implores him to help her find her friend’s body.
• The gardener calls her by name and suddenly she understands its not the gardener at all. It’s Jesus, her teacher! He cautions her not to hold on to him because what she is seeing is just temporary. He’s not here to stay. He’s going on to God.
• Mary leaves the garden and runs to find the other disciples, preaching the first Easter sermon, “I have seen the Lord!”

It is a particularity of John’s gospel that there are really two accounts smushed together. Peter and the Beloved Disciple jockeying for the favored place in history as they try to see who “gets it” first is one story. And Mary standing outside the tomb, weeping quietly is another story.

When the two are told together, it makes for a powerful text about the expansiveness of Christ’s resurrection. It turns out that Resurrection is for everyone….those who push in front of one another to get there first and those who bear silent, still witness. The active and the quiet. The weeping and the running. The awkward and the appropriate. The jubilant and the heartbroken. All are invited to bear witness to the newness God brings. Alleluia!

It is also a particularity of John’s gospel that the whole thing takes place in a garden. Jesus prays in a garden. Jesus is executed in a garden. Jesus is buried in a garden. And so we are invited to remember other gardens in our holy texts. The garden at the beginning of the world in Genesis….and the garden at the end of the world in Revelation. Christ stands in the midst of the garden, holding all of this together. Birth and death. Beginning and end. Time and space beyond time. Alleluia!

It is also a particularity of John’s gospel that this is not the first resurrection account. If you turn back to John 11, you’ll see we’ve already had a resurrection in this gospel. Jesus’s dear friend Lazarus died and was dead for four days before Jesus came and resurrected him. We are reminded of this earlier resurrection when we hear that Mary was standing outside Jesus’s tomb weeping….just like Mary of Bethany stood with Jesus outside her brother Lazarus’s home and wept. And just as Mary Magdalene saw the resurrected Christ through her tears, Jesus, too, wept and prayed and bore witness to God’s great love that extends even beyond death as he saw his liberated friend walk out of a tomb. Alleluia!

The particularities of John’s gospel point us towards an expansive promise of resurrection that goes way beyond a one-and-done magic trick unique to the story of Jesus of Nazareth. One of the reasons I’ve never been too obsessed with hard facts when it comes to Jesus’s resurrection is that I don’t think this one story is the point. The point is not that this one man rose from the dead, however you understand that. The point is that this particular story points to a wider truth: that God is in the business of Resurrection. Always and everywhere. Alleluia!

Resurrection is not a one-time thing. It’s not about understanding what happened to Jesus of Nazareth. It’s about following Christ’s gaze to the bigger story….that we are loved by an unending love bigger than we can understand. That the power of that love cannot and will not let us go. That all of those painful parts of being human...the inconveniences, the hurts, the loss, the despair, the agony….they are only part of the story.

God exists beyond the pain, the hurt, the loss….God walks with us through the messiness and terror of our lives, holding us together when we are falling apart. Propping us up when we tumble to the ground….or maybe just cradling us gently while we rest. Always, always, always whispering our names...reminding us of who we are and whose we are. Calling us into and out of and beyond ourselves. Connecting us to one another through the power of resurrection love. A love so big that even death cannot stop it.

A love so scandalous that is causes us to catch our breaths, burst into tears, burst into song as we proclaim the unstoppable hope of Easter morning. Alleluia! Christ is risen. Christ is risen, indeed. Alleluia!

We may not quite be able to wrap our heads around it, but no matter. Mary was confused, too.

But there, at the intersection of love and loss, Christ dwells.

Whether we are jostling with our friends to show off or barely holding it together while we stand next to the grave of a loved one, Christ meets us there. Christ comes to us, calling us by name. Calling us into and out of and beyond ourselves. Standing there where love and loss are intertwined. Standing there - unwavering -  beyond death, beyond understanding, beyond the illusion of our separateness.

Standing there holding it all together.

With us. For us. In us. Beyond us.

Even now. May it be so.

Alleluia. Christ is risen. Christ is risen, indeed. Alleluia!

[1] https://comelearnrest.com/2015/04/06/resurrection/

“Jesus Saves”

2 Corinthians 5: 16-21

April 7, 2019

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS

If we put 100 Christians together in a room and asked them what Christianity is all about, we would get more than 100 answers. Christianity is a pretty big place, after all.One answer I am fairly confident we would hear is some version of this one: Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins.

Whew! There is a LOT to unpack in that sentence, isn’t there? Some of the other things we might hear under the surface of that statement are….

• salvation is about going to heaven after we die
• Like a sacrificial lamb, Jesus’s blood covers our sins
• God needed to be paid a ransom for our sins in order to save us from hell

….and probably a lot of other assumptions, too.

This is certainly the way I learned about Christianity as a child. I learned that we humans were sinful and that our sins would make us go to hell after we died….EXCEPT(!) Jesus had come and, through his death, he took on everyone’s sins, and his sacrifice cleared our sins, enabling us to go to heaven, saving us.

I am guessing this is familiar to a lot of you, right? I know, from talking with many of you over the years, that for some of you this understanding of Jesus simply doesn’t work for you anymore….that you find it to be problematic.

What I didn’t know for a long time was that this is NOT the only way to understand the phrase “Jesus saves.” It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that there were other ways to understand salvation, other ways to understand the crucifixion, other ways to understand Resurrection. One of the things I appreciate about being a part of the United Church of Christ is that there is no requirement that we will all believe the same things. “Belonging” in the UCC isn’t about what we believe, it’s about our commitment to be travelers together as we seek to follow Jesus.

When I read this week’s text from 2 Corinthians, where Paul is talking about how we can become “new creations” through Christ, it made me think about the many, many ways I’ve heard other Christians explain the newness they’ve found through Christ. And so I’d like to just lift up some of the diversity of experience within Christianity this morning. My hope is that you might feel encouraged to grapple with what it means to you to call Jesus savior. Maybe that language feels good to you. Maybe it doesn’t. However it feels, know that we don’t all have to feel the same way. We don’t have to believe the same things in order to love each other or support one another. Thanks be to God!

Okay, so obviously books and books and books have been written about this topic over literal centuries. This brief sermon is not going to be at all comprehensive and may feel a little disjointed. Can we still dip a toe into these waters together this morning?

Great.

So….let’s start with the idea of salvation. What do we mean when we speak of salvation? Well, some folks are thinking primarily about what happens after we die. But others think about salvation as something that happens here and now. The quality of our life, before death, can change significantly when we decide form ourselves in the Way of Jesus.

For some Christians, the statement “Jesus saves” is less about what happens after death and it’s also not really about Jesus’s death, either. Some people find salvation through Jesus’s life and ministry, seeing him primarily as a model and teacher. When we try to literally follow in the footsteps of Jesus, living the way he showed and the way he taught, we can find ourselves as new creations. Our daily life on this planet may be transformed. That’s one way of understanding “Jesus saves.”

Others have said, “Yes, that’s important, but what are we supposed to do with the prominence of Jesus’s death and resurrection in our holy texts?” A big part of what makes Jesus unique are these accounts.

Some would says that, just as we learn how to live by watching Jesus live, we also learn how to die by watching Jesus die. One of the key functions of religion is to help us humans grapple with what it means to be mortal….because none of us are getting out of here alive. For some Christians, having a savior show us how to die is a powerful and important thing.

Father Richard Rohr often talks about descending religions vs ascending religions. He says Christianity is a descending religion. God “descends” to earth in the form of an infant human. Jesus “descends” to death. The work of being Christian is about getting comfortable with our mortality, llearning how to descend gracefully. Through this work, we find salvation, and Jesus is a qualified guide. That’s another way to understand “Jesus Saves.”

Now I want to shift gears a tiny bit and talk about the first part of that statement: Jesus. More specifically, I want to talk about the idea of Christ, which is not Jesus’s last name, but a title. It means “anointed one,” Messiah, savior. Although we are accustomed to thinking of Jesus and Christ as synonymous, there are some theologians who have pulled them apart a bit. Some Christians believe that the Christ-force, which is God, has existed for all eternity and has been revealed to us in numerous ways, including Jesus.

I’m going to say that again, because it’s a lot to take in: some Christians believe that the Christ-force, which is God, has existed for all eternity and has been revealed to us in numerous ways, including Jesus.

Some say that this Christ-force (God) is revealed to us in all of creation, through the ancient stories of the First Testament, and is still speaking to us even today. Jesus of Nazareth, who is imbued with the Christ-force, isn’t just a one-off. Instead, he points the way to a more universal truth which is that God is present in every thing and for all times. Because this is so very hard for us humans to believe and remember, some would say Jesus saves because he reminds us of Emmanuel: God with us. Some Christians believe this was a unique aspect of Jesus, while others see the Incarnation as a reminder of God’s presence in all creation.

For many, the idea that God is present with us here on earth….either through a presence that permeates all space and time OR through the unique person of Jesus Christ, feels very much like salvation. This sense that we are never alone, never separate from that ultimate force of Love that is for us….that’s a very comforting thought. It’s a belief that helps us transcend their fears about death because it helps us remember that God is with us even through that transition into whatever comes next. It also encourages and inspires us to try and be our best selves or seek the good in other people because if God is always present, Love is always present.

When I hear Paul’s words to the church at Corinth…. “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away, see, everything has become new!” I think about the ways I have experienced the Christ-force in my own life. I think about the Christ that I see in the birds and squirrels who hop and scurry around the bird feeder in our yard. I am reminded of the Christ that I’ve witnessed in the faces of people I love….and even in the faces of total strangers. I think about the ways that I’ve found new life even in the midst of great pain and suffering. I am reminded of how the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection give me hope that there’s always something more. And I think about Jesus’s death bearing witness to God’s solidarity for and with those who are oppressed….and how that solidarity points towards liberation for all people.

What do you hear when Paul says we are being made new? What comes to your mind when someone says “Jesus saves?” Your answer today may not be what it was five years ago, or what it will be five years from now. Your answer may feel firm and wonderous….or murky and elusive. You may be so put-off by these questions that right now isn’t even the right time for you to engage with them.

And yet….still we are able to choose to travel together in this work of being human….this work of following Jesus together. Thanks be to God for companions on the journey.