Sermon: Fertile Ground for Resurrection

The wilderness will sing joyously,
    the desert will celebrate and flower—
Like the crocus in spring, bursting into blossom,
    a symphony of song and color.
Mountain glories of Lebanon—a gift.
    The majesty of Carmel and Sharon—gifts.
The people will see the resplendent glory of God, fully on display.
    
Strengthen the weak hands
    and make firm the wobbly knees.
Say to those who are fearful,
    “Courage! Take heart!
Here is your God, right here,
    on the way to put things right
And redress all wrongs.”

Mark 16:1-11
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
Now after he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went out and told those who had been with him, while they were mourning and weeping. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.

– – –

Easter is one of my favorite church days, and it’s not just because of the flower cross and the soaring hymns and the pews filled with beloved faces and new friends–although it is, partly, all of that. It’s that we don’t make it to this day without traversing some of the most profoundly difficult experiences and emotions that life has to offer us: loss, betrayal, abandonment, suffering, heartbreak. Easter is a celebration that feels genuine because it comes in the wake of so much that is hard. All of us, if we’ve lived long enough, have experienced hard. And if you’ve experienced hard, if you’ve experienced loss, then you know what makes Easter special, and real. 

It’s so interesting to me that in two of the gospels, Mark and Luke, the first disciples to realize that Jesus has been raised are not believed when they tell the others. In Luke, it’s a crowd of women who first hear the good news, only to have their story dismissed as an “idle tale” by the male disciples. And in Mark, as we heard earlier, it’s Mary Magdalene who sees Jesus and then is not believed by the rest of the disciples. This likely has something to do with the fact that in the patriarchal society of first century Palestine, as too often still today, women were not considered reliable witnesses.

But I think it also has to do with the fact that you are much more likely to believe in resurrection if you have previously experienced it yourself: that reigniting of hope and possibility after a period of prolonged struggle, deep pain, or deadened feeling. And Mark’s gospel reminds us that that is exactly the case with Mary Magdalene: Jesus had previously “cast seven demons” out from her, or as we would call it today, helped her to come out on the other side of some kind of mental illness. Mary Magdalene already knew resurrection was possible because she had lived it; and so she is fertile ground for believing in this resurrection.

Resurrection is at the heart of our faith. Because God, our God, is constantly working to bring forth new life out of loss and devastation–our own and the world’s. That is who God is: the One who tells us, with this story but also with thousands of more ordinary stories, every day, that death is not the end of the story; Love is. So that even when things are at their worst, even when we are surrounded by death and destruction and despair in our lives or in the headlines and we, like the disciples at the foot of the cross or in the cold and lonely garden that morning cannot imagine going on, cannot fathom what comes next, God is already there, preparing the soil for new life, inviting us into resurrection, inviting us to trust, inviting us to become part of growing what comes next. 

About two and a half years ago, I broke my foot kicking a karate target at my kid’s karate class. It’s a little embarrassing. THe break healed, but then I had bursitis afterwards: inflammation at the fracture site. And I didn’t know what I would do, because I couldn’t run anymore; and if you’re a runner, you will know this feeling: running was not just my exercise, it was my place for sanity, and for moving my body, and for working on sermons, even. And I couldn’t do it anymore. So in desperation, I turned to swimming, which I had not done for exercise in probably…fifteen years? Swimming was supposed to tide me over until I could run again, but today I still have the bursitis, so I still cannot run. And swimming, particularly outdoors at Walden Pond, or with the wonderful community that I’ve found at the Boys and Girls Club pool, has become my new sanity: the place where I pray for you all, and think about sermons, the place where I take a mental break, or just have fun and be silly as an adult. I’ve grown stronger, and I’ve met new friends, and we share the joy of outdoor swimming with more folks who now join us every week. As I preached a month or so ago, there is so much good that has come from that fracture, so much good that continues to come even though I still have pain. It’s an ordinary example of resurrection.

But resurrection is also true on a more profound scale.

I think of the story shared by one of the students in the Tufts Prison Initiative who came to speak at a College Behind Bars event at Park Avenue a few months ago. Kevin, we’ll call him, shared that he had begun the program while serving a multi-decade sentence for ending the life of a young man we’ll call Jerome.

When Kevin first heard about the College Behind Bars program, he didn’t think it was for him. Why would he try to get an education when the next several years of his life were going to be spent in prison? Why was he going to try something new and different – not to mention challenging – if his life was a dead end? But someone convinced him to enroll. And as he began to work on his associate’s degree, still incarcerated, Jerome’s family began to take notice. “I know that most of them probably won’t forgive me, and honestly I don’t blame them. I don’t blame them at all. But I know they see what I’m doing and I know a lot of them are proud of me. [Jerome’s] uncle was one of the people who advocated for me to get out.”

For that uncle, the pain of losing his nephew will never go away. But as he watched Kevin begin to make something of himself, becoming a person who put good into the world instead of taking it away, I imagine he said something like, “I want to be a part of that. I want to take this loss that will never fully heal and give it to God and see what might happen, what we might do together.” He chose to become fertile ground for resurrection.

And so, truthfully, did Kevin, who chose to look honestly at all that he had done, all the pain he had caused, and decide that that was not the end of his story, that God was not done with him, that despite his sentence, his life was not a dead end. He works now with young men who are where he used to be, helping them to reintegrate into society and build meaningful lives, and next month he’ll graduate with his bachelors from Tufts.

– – – 

When I witness the Good Fridays of this world; when I think of what it’s like to be a parent in Iran, or Gaza and the West Bank, or in Dilley detention center right now; when I hear your stories of the small deaths or great losses you are living with; when I think about the weight of fear or anxiety or hopelessness that so many of us humans are laboring under–that is when Easter becomes one of my favorite church days. Because I know that it is not built on a cheap joy or a false hope. Easter only happens because God is present with us in those Good Fridays, sharing our deepest fears and most anguishing losses, as individuals and as the whole, looking at all of it full in the face and saying, “I know this hurts so badly, Beloved, but I promise you that it does not have to be the end. This is not the end of your story; this is not the end of our story.”

Easter tells us that even in our most shadowed, barren, lifeless seasons, resurrection is waiting for us. But like Jerome’s uncle, we must decide to participate in it. It’s happening, it’s there for the taking, but we have to decide to get involved. We must choose to become fertile ground so that gardens can grow in our wildernesses and in others’. And to do that, we have to practice recognizing resurrection. 

Mary Magdalene recognized it so clearly because she had so recently seen it in her own life. I love that that the first person to proclaim the resurrection, to preach it, really, was a woman, a woman who had been through mental illness, who was probably still living with it in some ways, and yet she chose to see so much good that God was doing in and through her and in the world. She was primed to believe that her beloved rabbi and friend was no longer dead because she knew what it felt like for an arid desert to become a lush wetland, in the words of our Hebrew Bible reading. 

But I think the other disciples – the ones who did not believe right away – had also experienced Resurrection in their lives; it was just buried too deep, too far underneath their pain and their fear for them to remember it or recognize it that morning. 

If we want to participate in what God is always and already doing in the world, so that our lives and our communities might come more fully alive, then we need to practice recognizing resurrection. So let’s try something we do from time to time here at Park Avenue. Turn to your neighbor and share a moment of resurrection in your life. Could be small, medium, or large; a place where new life showed up when you thought that there wasn’t new life to be had. And kids, you can stay and share with the adults around you; or, if you’ve been sitting too long, I need your help. I have an art project up here I need your help finishing; it’s a surprise.

[Break while people share/kids help with the surprise.]

At the beginning of Lent we made a banner of Lament. On it we wrote the things that are breaking our hearts and crushing our spirits–hard things in our own lives, in the lives of people we love, and in the lives of our fellow human beings, our neighbors near and across the globe. 

Today we turn that banner into a garden. Not by erasing those cries of lament – because many of our hurts can never be fully erased. But by choosing to help new life blossom, as we prayed earlier, among our sad and angry places and the sad and angry places of the world that cry out for justice and for true peace, we choose to participate in resurrection.

Our God is a God of resurrection. So who are we going to be? Let us be Easter people, let us serve as fertile ground for the new life God is bringing forth, even now. Amen. 

Benediction:
As you go out into the world and out into Eastertide, listen to these words adapted from Steve Garnaas-Holmes, written this morning:

Christ is risen!     This makes no sense. Only joy.
Christ is risen!     There is no explanation. Only wonder.
Christ is risen!     It isn’t necessary to understand. Only to be in awe.
Christ is risen!     Some say it’s just a story. Let it be your story.