Jesus said to [Mary], "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?" 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.” Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Rabbouni!”  John 20:15-16

Here we are; it’s finally Easter, about as late in the year as it can be – after such a long, cold winter, and a chilly and rainy spring. One benefit to Easter being so late has been that so many of the bulbs and flowering trees are in full bloom. Our gardens are glorious and bursting with new life, a very welcome sight.

There are lots of places in the Bible where we here about gardens, especially in the beginning - the Garden of Eden, where God is pictured as the gardener.

In our Gospel reading this morning we’re in the midst of a garden – the garden containing the tomb where Jesus’ crucified body was buried. His friend and follower Mary – from the village of Magdala – has gone to the tomb to grieve, to mourn at the place of Jesus’ burial. When she arrives at the tomb she sees that the large stone which had sealed up the entrance to the tomb has been removed.

On seeing that, Mary runs off to tell some of the other disciples who come at once to see what has happened. They look around, they see the linen wrappings that had been Jesus’ shroud, and then they leave, but Mary remains behind, still crying, still grieving.

She encounters angels who ask her why she’s crying and she answers in a direct way, she doesn’t pull any punches: “They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him.” As far as Mary knows grave robbers, or soldiers or some other authorities, or even the ubiquitous “they” (on whom we’d like to blame all tragedy and wrong-doing) – they have taken away the body of the person on whom she had staked her life and her hopes and dreams, and now she can’t even mourn him in peace; how much more wrong can things get?

So when someone else says to her “Woman, why are you weeping?  Whom are you looking for?” it is almost too much to bear; can’t these people just leave her alone? Why is this gardener interfering and bothering her? And so Mary speaks boldly out of her pain and frustration: “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”

We all know what that is like – when life has come crashing down around us and we are doing the best we can to cope, but eventually someone says or does something that pushes us over the edge, and we speak what’s on our minds without a filter or a veneer of good manners - the other person’s reaction be damned.  It’s at this point that we reach a level of reality and truth about ourselves and our situation that we might not have been able to see otherwise, even if it isn’t always a pretty sight.

This is where Mary is – and then come that voice she knows so well: “Mary.” And she recognizes Jesus, all in a flash; she knows him – her teacher, her rabbi, her friend and mentor, the one who has taught her so much about God, the one who has taught her to hope for God’s glory and blessing and new order in life. Mary recognizes Jesus not by seeing him, but by hearing his voice, by hearing him call her by name.

Jesus’ physicality has been raised and transformed into a new reality, one that is as strange to Mary as it is to us, but the love and care that Mary experienced in her relationship with Jesus is still there. In fact, it is even deeper than it was, because now Jesus has gone though death and the grave and has risen victorious over those destructive forces.

If Mary hadn’t stayed behind in the garden after Peter and the other disciple had left, if Mary hadn’t been willing to sit with her grief and sorrow, she might have missed seeing Jesus, but instead, she is the first to see and speak to the risen Christ, and she then takes the message of this new resurrection life back to the rest of Jesus’ friends and followers.

We need to be like Mary; we need to be willing to sit in the rough and painful places, we need to be open to our own sorrow and grief and the sadness of the world, if we are going to be able to meet and talk with Jesus. It is so easy to go from one event to the next, from one difficulty to the next, from one disappointment to another – telling ourselves that we need to be brave and practical and calm – without ever taking the time to admit our sorrow, our brokenness, our neediness. So often we think we have to come to God with only the best we can offer, that we have to have our lives all neatened up and squared away before God will deign to listen to us or work with us.

But that is not true – as Mary’s experience tells us.

God wants us whether we are good or not, whether we are needy or not, whether or not we’ve got life, the universe and everything all figured out. Jesus calls us – just as he called Mary – to look beyond our grief and sorrow and disappointment and death. Jesus calls us to discover and accept the new life that God is offering us.

That doesn’t mean that life with Jesus will be perfect or pain-free; human nature and free will and an evolving world will continue to create upheaval and difficulty and even death. But with Jesus we know that we are on a path where death is not the end, where what we can see and touch and taste and hear are only the beginnings of life and entry-places into God’s reality.

The resurrection of Jesus on Easter morning tells us that God is greater than death, greater than sin, greater than anything that binds us or weighs us down. God wants to give us life – abundant, joyous life – life in the here and now that is filled with God’s purpose and glory, and life with God eternally whenever our time on earth has ended.

This is all possible because in the person of Jesus God has taken on all of our human experience, including sin and death and failure – and God has triumphed over all of that in Christ’s resurrection. That is what we celebrate this day. That is why we can respond with joy when we hear Jesus speak our name – intimately, tenderly, with affection and care – just as he spoke Mary’s name that first Easter morning.

Jesus has bridged the gap between heaven and earth, between God and us; and so God is in our midst, in our hearts, in this world God has made and for which Christ died and rose again. And for this we say thank you, and offer God our praise and love and loyalty and faithfulness.

Let us pray.

Lord Christ, you took on our darkest hour in your death, and now you give to us all the glory of heaven and new life; open our ears to hear your voice speaking our name and let us respond with joy and gladness as we walk the path of faith and resurrection life with you.  In your name, Jesus, our Savior, Redeemer and Friend, we pray.  Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
Easter Day
April 24, 2011

“Blessed is the one who comes in the Name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?”   Matthew 21:9-10

Who is the biggest star that you can think of?  Who is the person that you would fall all over yourself to be able to snap a photo of if you could be there when he or she stepped out of the limo and onto the red carpet?

A singer? An actor? A sports hero? Maybe Peyton Manning or LeBron James or Lindsay Vonn? Anne Hathaway or Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp or Natalie Portman or Daniel Radcliffe? How about Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber or the Jonas Brothers or Lady Gaga?

Whoever your favorite star is, think about what it would be like to be close enough that you could have his or her picture on your cell phone. Even if you’ve never been to one of those red carpet events, we all have a pretty good sense of what they are like – excitement, anticipation, noise, cheers, cameras flashing as the crowd tries to match the fabulousness of the occasion.

That’s what the first Palm Sunday was like – Jesus’ triumphal entry in Jerusalem.

Jesus rode that donkey down from the Mount of Olives, across the mile and a half of the Kidron Valley and up to the eastern gate in the city wall, the disciples close around him like the security detail for a political leader or a rock star. As they went they gathered more and more people, and the group became a parade, and then this parade surged into Jerusalem, already stuffed with visitors and tourists for the Passover holiday.

Tensions were running high as the Roman troops were on alert in case any Jewish patriot should try to take advantage of the religious fervor of the holiday in an attempt to create a political or military uprising – as we’ve seen so recently in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

And as Jesus rode through the streets up to the Temple itself the parade became a crowd, perhaps even a flash mob with people calling out Hosanna! – a term of adulation and praise, but also meaning “Save us” or “Help us, I pray”. The group, which became a parade, which became a crowd teetered on the edge of becoming a mob that day – but hopes were high that maybe, at last, God’s Messiah, God’s king and warrior and rock star would do for the people what they could not do for themselves – would do what only God could do.

No wonder the word spread like fire – Jesus the rabbi and healer, the one who spoke so penetratingly and persuasively and intimately about God was headed for the Temple. It seemed like all Jerusalem wanted to be there to see and hear whatever was to be seen and heard. They shouted “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” – a line from Psalm 118, one of the great Passover psalms from the entrance liturgy into the Temple, recalling God’s deliverance of the people from bondage in Egypt and from exile in Babylon. The crowd was upping the ante – God would once again act decisively in their midst and on their behalf; the sky seemed to be the limit.

And who would you have been on that first Palm Sunday, at that triumphal entry?

Would you have been one of the disciples, sticking close to Jesus, feeling protective of him, but also bathing in the glory that seemed to be coming his way? Would you have joined the parade early on, while they were crossing the Kidron Valley, eager to see what Jesus was going to do, whether he might gather enough strength to stick it to the Romans? Would you have been part of the crowd, pushing and jostling to see the famous rabbi from up north, the one people said was a prophet? Were you a Roman soldier, nervously surveying the crowd, your hand at the ready on your sword handle? Were you one of the Temple priests, informed by a messenger that the troublesome teacher from Galilee was on his way and had the whole city with him?

We each would have had a place in those events, we could not have gone unaffected by what was happening in Jerusalem. Like the disciples and the followers and the crowd we might well have shouted “Hosanna!” and offered Jesus our loyalty and support – come what may.

But here, today, from our vantage point, we know what happened next; we know the crowd became a mob later in the week, and we know loyalty was the furthest thing from their minds. And here, today, right now, we are in the crack, in the hinge between the exaltation of Palm Sunday and the anger and betrayal of Jesus’ passion.

And actually, this is where most of us live – in that hinge or crack or gap between professing our loyalty to Jesus and actually living it day-to-day. We offer God our prayer and our praises and our best intentions, and then we fail to live up to what we have professed when faith becomes too hard or too inconvenient or too public.

Back in the 1960s John Lennon created a huge media flap when he said at a press conference that the Beatles (undoubtedly the best known rock group there ever was) – when he said that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. We should not be surprised – because Jesus does not want fans, he wants followers. And that’s hard.

Jesus wants us to be followers and disciples and workers and members of his Body – living his life, doing his works, speaking his message, taking on the job of being Jesus’ team in a world that is so much in pain and yet so ignorant of its needs. There is no popularity in this, no prestige, no wordly glory or recognition in being a Christian.

But there is a path that leads to life and wholeness and the sustaining presence of God. It takes us through many hard and difficult places, but always accompanied by the power of God and the strength of God’s goodness and mercy.

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.  Hosanna in the highest!   Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
Palm Sunday
April 17, 2011

When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." John 11:32

Church is the place where you get to tell the truth.

That may seem like a strange thing to say; of course, we’re supposed to tell the truth – that’s what the Ninth Commandment is getting at: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Our word is to be trustworthy and true – particularly in our dealings with others; the community can function in a healthy way only if we are being honest and just with one another.

But there is another kind of truth-telling, as well – it is the truth about what life is really like, what it means to be human, how things are with your soul.

Many mornings we wake up, knowing that we are not particularly happy to meet whatever the day has in store for us, but we put our game face on and head out to work or school or whatever our responsibilities are. We do the best we can at our job, or with our kids, or maybe with elderly relatives, or as a volunteer, but some days there is just no winning. And so we grit our teeth and hope we get through in one piece. Or maybe we are struggling with an illness, a personal sorrow or worry, something that seems shameful and difficult to share.

We’ve all had experiences where we’ve tried to tell another person what is going on with us, only to have it fall on deaf ears because the other person can’t take in what it is we are saying – it is too painful or too overwhelming or there seems to be no easy thing to say in response, and so the person you are talking to comes back with a platitude or an attempt at an instant solution. What that says (in effect) is: “This is too painful or difficult for me and I don’t want to listen anymore.”  And so we get the message very quickly that the way to deal with sorrow and pain and grief is to pave over it, wall it off and pretend that we are just fine.

Of course there are times and situations when we need to do just that, but eventually we need to be able to tell the truth to someone else about how we are, about what life is really like – even if that truth is told to just one other person. Church and the Christian community should be one of the best places to tell the truth about ourselves.

Far more than the secular world we have a clear-eyed view of human nature (both good and bad), of the reality of sin, and of the power of forgiveness. We also know about the fragility of life, and we can talk about death in a straight-forward way – with room to hear each other’s particular fears and sorrows.

Church is a good place to tell the truth about what life is really like because every time we gather for worship we remember that we are limited, fallible people in need of God’s forgiveness and help. And even more importantly, we affirm that God is able and willing to forgive us, redeem us and embrace us with new life, a chance at a new start. How do we know that this is so? In part we know it because of this morning’s Gospel reading.

Jesus’ good friend Lazarus has died, and Jesus goes to the village of Bethany where Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha live.
Each sister in turn says to Jesus when he arrives: If you had been here, my brother would not have died. Martha says it in an accusatory way; Mary seems more resigned – anger and sorrow are both an important response to death. As the drama of this family continues to unfold, Jesus begins to weep – for their pain, for his own loss, for Lazarus’s death, maybe even for the necessity of death itself.

This is a very long passage – all 45 verses of it – and it has lots of themes and details that we can’t really examine this morning, but we hear in this Gospel how strongly Jesus is in touch with the messiness and reality of human life. When he tells the bystanders to remove the stone from Lazarus’ tomb, Martha says to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.”

Jesus knows all about the stench in Lazarus’s tomb, and he knows about the stink and mess in our lives, and he is not put off by them.
He knows about the weight of the stone, about the dark of the tomb, about the tightness of the grave-wrappings and about the finality of death. And yet, Jesus still calls forth his friend Lazarus and restores him to life. There is nothing about illness or sin or pain or death or grief that Jesus does not know - and even so, Jesus still calls us into life. He calls us into life so that we might share God’s life with him, both now and at the end of our earthly days.

And this is truth, as well – that there is more to life than that which is bounded by death, that Jesus has lived and died and risen to new life for our sake and calls us to come forth out of whatever binds us and imprisons us. Jesus has been in that tomb, and he knows what it is like, and he stands at the entrance, calling us to come out into the light and into new life, to leave the grave clothes behind us, and to be embraced by real, true Life, a life that will never die.

Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, you lived your humanity to the full, and there is nothing about us that you do not know and understand and hold within the circle of your care.  Help us to hear your voice calling us, like Lazarus, to leave behind the weight of sorrow and burden and grief and sin, and to put our trust in you – full of goodness and light and truth and life.  Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
Fifth Sunday of Lent
April 10, 2011

Jesus said to [the woman], "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." John 4:13-14

During Lent this year we have four weeks where the Gospel readings are all from John and they all focus on an encounter that one person has with Jesus; last week it was the rabbi Nicodemus, today it is the Samaritan woman, next week we’ll hear about the blind beggar and the week after that will be Jesus’ encounter with his friend Martha.

In each case the conversation begins with Jesus and the other person speaking on very different levels and perspectives from each other.

The Samaritan woman is an outcast, even in her own society; whether her previous husbands died or they divorced her, we do not know, but she was persona non grata amongst the women of the community and so did not go to the well in the morning, as all the others did.

If people don’t want you around, you learn quickly to avoid them as best you can.

So the woman comes to draw water at noon, alone, and Jesus is taking a break from his travels through Samaritan territory.

Jesus starts the conversation, by asking her to give him a drink; already he is crossing a boundary: even though Jews and Samaritans had a common ethnic and religious history going back to the days of king David, they had each developed in different directions, with different customs, places of worship, and religious practices.

Neither Jews nor Samaritans were supposed to speak to each other, and certainly faithful and observant Jewish men were not supposed to speak to women in public places.

So Jesus blows through two boundaries at once in asking the woman for water.

And their conversation takes place on two different planes – the woman speaking at first on a very practical and material level, and Jesus answering her on a spiritual and theological level.

But it soon becomes clear that Jesus has something deep and important to offer her, even more deep and life-giving than the water in Jacob’s well which went back to the earliest days of Israelite history – a place of spiritual, as well as physical, significance.

And the woman gets it – and goes off to tell the folks in town (the very ones that she was avoiding before) that she has met the Messiah and that they should come and see for themselves.

She leaves her water jar behind - a detail reminding us that she is about spiritual business, and that the living water Jesus offers her is not a bubbling spring or stream, but a life-giving relationship with God in the here-and-now.

Jesus is the water for her spiritual thirst.

Here at All Saints’ we host five meetings of the Alcoholics Anonymous program every week, as well as several AA study groups, and the preacher at our 10 am service today is a leader of one of those groups.

AA is a fellowship of people who suffer from addiction to alcohol and want to stop drinking and get sober.

But according to AA principles this can happen only if the person acknowledges that they are powerless over alcohol and surrenders to the power of God to lead them into recovery.

The first three steps of AA are:

· Step 1 - We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable

· Step 2 - Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity

· Step 3 - Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God

The other nine steps in this twelve-step program are all about cleaning house – spiritually, emotionally and relationally – making amends where necessary, being of service to others – especially to others who want to stop drinking , and continuing to have a spiritual life, not just a one-time experience.

These principles, and the Steps that developed from them, are classic Christian teaching, handed on to Bill W., one of AA’s founders, through the ministry of the Rev. Samuel Shoemaker who was rector of Calvary Church in New York City from 1925 to 1941.

AA calls itself a spiritual program, rather than a religious one, so that questions of theology and religious difference and belief don’t get in the way of a direct reliance upon a powerful relationship with God.

A person in recovery will tell you that when they were drinking they thought they were in control, that they had the power to manage alcohol, life, the world and didn’t need anyone else to tell them what to do – including  (and perhaps especially) God.

AA considers alcoholism to be a disease that is physical, mental and spiritual – and the only hope is to place oneself in the care of God.

At root, the problem is a spiritual one: looking for meaning, fulfillment and joy from a source that can never give it, instead of looking to God – the Author and Sustainer of life.

Alcoholics are thirsty for life and meaning and connection, but are looking for it in the wrong places.

And they are not alone; it’s the human condition to place ourselves at the center of the universe, to think that we can arrange circumstances, other people, life so that we can have our own wants and needs satisfied, have our own way.

But when we do this, we miss out on a healthy and life-giving connection to God and to others.

When we turn in on ourselves we turn our backs on the light of God and all we can see is shadow – a shadow of our own making – and in that shadow nothing can grow and flourish, and we cannot see the Water of Life that is within our reach.

The Collect for today says: God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves; there is the first step – knowing that we are spiritually powerless and that we need God to act on our behalf. 

And that is what God has done in coming into human life in the person of Jesus, in taking on the sin of the world, in overcoming the power of death on the Cross, and in rising to new life.

God has taken the initiative and if we are to drink from the true and life-giving waters and be set free, body and soul, then we need to accept our own spiritual dependence and commit ourselves to God’s power and to God’s care.

When we have done this God is faithful and walks with us every step of the way on our journey of faith and life.

And so, like the Samaritan woman meeting Jesus, like the alcoholic starting to work the Steps of AA, we can know and experience and depend upon God to always be a spring welling up to eternal life.  Amen.

Victoria G. McGrath
Lent 3
March 27, 2011