But [the young man in the white robe said to the women], "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." Mark 16:6-7

It is good to see you all here today. You all got the invitation, and you have arrived in time for the celebration; we were counting on you – it wouldn’t be a party without you!

“What invitation?” you may be saying; “No one invited me to come to this service this morning, it’s just what I do every year at Easter;”  OR “It was a beautiful spring morning and I just felt like getting out of the house, and decided that it might be interesting to go to church this morning;” OR “Well, a friend did invite me and suggested that I might want to check out that pretty stone church at the top of the hill, but I’m not really sure why I am here;” OR “The worship in this community of faith is the center and the touchstone of my life, and I am here whenever I am able to be.”

You may find yourself identifying with one or more of those statements – or with none of them - but the truth is, God invited you here –
each and every one of you – to come and celebrate the most important event and spiritual reality in Christian faith. Whatever moved you or motivated you to come today was God’s way of inviting you to come to the party that celebrates the victory of life over death –
the resurrection of Jesus from death to new life.

Do any of you like surprise parties? They’re always a bit tricky, aren’t they? You never know if you are going to pull it off: getting all the guests to arrive early and hide in a back room or a closet, keeping the party a surprise from the guest of honor, sometimes tying yourself up in knots trying to create a reason for the person to be out of the house while the party is being set up or stopping by
a venue they don’t usually go to.

Sometimes surprise parties work well, and are lots of fun, but sometimes they don’t work so well. My siblings and I gave my parents a surprise party for their fortieth wedding anniversary; they were truly surprised, but my mother was so taken aback she couldn’t get her breath for a minute or two, and we were afraid that our happy surprise might turn into a trip to the emergency room!

And then there are people who hate surprises; they want to be able to plan and prepare for as much of life as possible; or maybe large groups of people are hard for them to deal with and surprise parties are just not their idea of fun.

Surprises can be tricky, precisely because they come out of the blue, and they catch you unaware, and unready. That’s what happened to the women who went early Sunday morning to the tomb with spices to anoint Jesus’ body for burial – they were surprised. They had been at the Crucifixion; they had seen with their own eyes the torture, suffering and death of their friend and rabbi
at the efficient hands of the Roman army.

They had helped place Jesus’ body in the tomb, the burial cave hastily offered by Jesus’ follower Joseph of Arimathea; they had watched as the soldiers rolled the stone across the entrance to the tomb, but then hurried on their way, anxious to get home before the sundown beginning of the Sabbath, on which day no work could be done – not even anointing the dead for burial.

All of these events were a surprise to the women, and to the rest of Jesus’ friends and disciples. The idea that their friend and teacher, the one they were sure was the Messiah, God’s representative on earth, the one on whom they had pinned all their hopes  and dreams was now dead was a shocking, horrible surprise.

How could it have all gone so wrong?  How could they have gotten it all so wrong? But life is sometimes like that, isn’t it? In fact, life is often like that; the hopes and dreams we have, the plans we make, the desires of our hearts can turn to dust – in an instant or over a life time, leaving us saying: “What happened?”

That’s where the women were – emotionally and spiritually – on that Sunday morning; feeling like their world had come to an end,
and the best they could do was finish what had been left over from Friday, so they went to the tomb to add the embalming spices to Jesus’ burial cloths.

Once they got there they were even more shocked and surprised: the stone sealing the entrance to the tomb had been moved,
and as they looked inside a figure appearing as a young man dressed in white (an angel perhaps) spoke to them, telling them not to be alarmed or astonished that Jesus was not there. He had been raised – “Go ahead, see for yourselves, the tomb is empty. But there is a message for you: Jesus will meet you in Galilee, just as he promised you; you will see him there. Take this message to the other disciples.”

This was a shock and a surprise, indeed  - and the women were frightened and fled from the tomb, and said nothing to anyone.They got so caught up in the surprise of the moment that the actual message was pushed aside – a confusing mix of fear, shock, self-doubt about what they had seen and heard and felt, like having the wind knocked out of them, the experience at the empty tomb took their breath away.

Well, that not the way we usually think of the end of the story; in the other three versions of the Gospel – in Matthew, Luke and John –  Jesus appears to the women; to the Twelve (his core leadership team); to other disciples, as well. But not here in Mark; the best scholarship says that the next bit of the account is missing, the end of the scroll in the most ancient manuscript having been worn away, broken off, and that later scribes tried to write two brief summations of their understanding of Jesus’ resurrection.

But we have the story as it stands, and the surprise and shock of it registers with us, still – if we listen with the ears of our hearts.

The tomb is empty, Jesus is not here, he is going ahead of you to Galilee and will see you there. Galilee was the place it all began for the disciples – it’s where they first met Jesus, where he gathered them together – calling them from their homes and their jobs to take on a new way of life, to consider a new possibility of God’s meaning and purpose; it’s where Jesus launched his public ministry
and mission, and now they were being sent back to where they had started, but with a difference.

Jesus was raised from the dead; the events of Good Friday, and everything that had led up to it, had been undone; the power of God’s life had trumped the power of death; from here on out everything would be different. Going back to Galilee was not starting over, not going back in defeat, but taking the message home and knowing that the Risen Christ would meet them there, that in the places they lived and worked Jesus and the power of resurrection would be there.

That is an astonishing thing – the power of death has been broken; God has entered human life in the person of Jesus and has taken on all of our human experience, including death and sin and failure, and left it in the grave.

God has raised Jesus to new life, the life that he was trying to explain to the disciples all along, the life that they and we caught glimpses of in his teaching and healing and deeds of power.  This new life – this resurrection life, this Easter life which began that early Sunday morning when Jesus rose – means that death is not the end; there is more to the story of human life and our lives than death and sadness and brokenness.

We have been made by God, part of his creation that he blessed and called good, made for the purpose and intent of life and relationship with God, here in this life and for all eternity. God’s loving purpose for us and for all creation is that we shall not be lost or destroyed, but that in God we shall find our deepest life, our greatest meaning, the fulfillment of our humanity and the blessing of God’s own divine life within us.  Jesus went to the Cross and the grave ahead of us, breaking the bonds of death, paving the way, opening the door into God’s new life for us.

There is much to be said about resurrection, the Risen Christ, the love of God that never fails for each one of us – but maybe it is best that Mark’s Gospel breaks off where it does; it gives us the opportunity for each one of us to tell the end of the story as we know and experience it, to write the account of Jesus’ resurrection in each one of our lives, to proclaim the Gospel according to you.

And isn’t that a surprise? That God would call you and me into partnership with him, into his inner circle to write the last chapter of the Gospel, of the Good News? But that is exactly what God does, because each one of us here this morning is loved and cherished by God and is invited by him to discover and learn God’s purposesand gifts in this new life for yourselves – for yourselves and for the sake of the world around you.

Jesus has shown the way; he is risen and bids you to meet him in the midst of your own life, in Galilee, to live the power and presence and life-giving love of God each and every day. That is a life and a love worth celebrating!  Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Easter Day: The Sunday of the Resurrection
April 8, 2012

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