Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons

Teaching the teacher

Rev. Dean Snyder Luke 24:13-25

Anyone else feel a little anxious this week in spite of yourself when you were standing in a crowd at a Metro stop or waiting to get into the ballpark? Anyone else in spite of yourself look suspiciously at people wearing back packs? Anyone else feel self-conscious because you were wearing a backpack?

We had Foundry members at the Boston Marathon last Monday. A mother and daughter from Foundry were there to cheer on their sister and aunt who was running in the marathon. She ran faster than she expected to, so they had left the finish line and were in a taxi on the way back to the hotel when they heard the sirens and knew something had happened.

The mother said that she could not help think about the role of randomness and chance in life.

The thing about Boston is that we have not yet recovered from Newtown.

What do these meaningless acts of violence mean? I don’t know what to call them. Sick? Psychotic? Evil? How do we even name them?

It is odd when we are relieved that an explosion in a fertilizer factory in Texas that killed 14 and injured 200 was caused not by terrorism but only by human negligence. The factory had not been inspected for two years.

How do we think about Boston and Newtown and the Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting, and the VA Tech shootings and the Amish schoolgirls’ shootings and 9-11 and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and endless violence in Israel and the list goes on and on? What does all this violence tell us about human nature … who we are as human beings? What does it tell us, if anything, about God? What does it tell us about the way we need to live our lives in a violent and dangerous world?

All this raises lots of questions and real questions, if we are honest: real everyday kinds of questions, about how we treat others, especially strangers and people who look differently or act differently or believe differently. What kind of world do we live in?

I want to go back to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus.

All this Easter season we are studying an Easter account found only in the Gospel of Luke. It is about two of Jesus’ disciples who are walking from Jerusalem to a little town named Emmaus seven miles away.

They are disheartened and confused because of Jesus’ crucifixion.

A stranger joins them on their walk to Emmaus. It is Jesus but they do not recognize him.

Jesus asks them what they are talking about.

They tell him their story … the story of following Jesus for three years believing that he was a messiah sent from God to bring a new kingdom of justice and inclusion to Israel but how instead he had been crucified and their hopes had been dashed.

Not knowing it was Jesus they tell Jesus how much he has disappointed them.

Isn’t that almost what we are feeling this week after the Boston Marathon and only four months after the Newtown shootings?

Disappointed because we had hoped that the Newtown would at least lead to some kind of gun control. The bill defeated in the Senate wasn’t that big a step … it would have only expanded background checks and banned assault weapons and high capacity magazines … but even it could not pass Congress in spite of most Americans wanting it.

We are still such a violent world, still such a violent people.

Jesus is still crucified daily.

What are we to make of all this violence?

Here is the New Testament story: God sent Jesus into the world to teach us and show us how to live with one another even though God well knew that Jesus might be crucified … probably would be crucified.

The way I put this sometimes is to say that God did not childproof the Garden of Eden. God created us with human freedom … the freedom to love each other or destroy each other. The freedom to live loving and productive lives … the freedom to destroy ourselves. The freedom to help or hurt each other.

God created us with radical freedom and then sent Jesus to show us how to live knowing that Jesus might well be rejected and scorned and crucified because God was confident that we had the capacity to learn from the cross … that we have the capacity to learn from our own violence how to live together with justice and inclusion and peace.

This is at its core the essential meaning of resurrection and Easter. We can do the worst imaginable to God and yet God will not give up on us because God has confidence in us that we can learn to live together in love.

God is not naïve. God knows that it may take millenniums. God knows that it may take not just one revelation, not just one religion, but six or seven or more, that it may take not just religion but science and medicine and ways of understanding ourselves that we have not discovered yet.

But God is confident that humanity can and will learn from our pain how to live together decently and lovingly and justly and peacefully.

When the disciples on the road to Emmaus had told Jesus, not having recognized who he was, how much he had disappointed them, Jesus said to them: “O how foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe…”

I’ve been studying the Greek text this week and this is the way I think what Jesus said to the disciples might be translated: “O how clueless you are and how quick to be defeated …”

God believes we can learn how to live together the way Jesus showed us how to live. The resurrection is God saying to us – you have done an awful thing but you can become better because of this. You had hoped Jesus would be the one to redeem Israel, but I hope you can be the ones to redeem the world.

I want to quote Pat Robertson this morning. Actually I want to quote him and try to find something positive in what he said. Stay with me here.

This week Pat Robertson blamed the Boston bombing and the Texas fertilizer factory explosion on our nation’s growing acceptance of gays and liberals. The exact quote is “God has seen this in the moral fabric of this country and has responded with three straight days of violence as a warning against our acceptance of these gays/liberals.”

OK, let’s be perfectly clear that I am not agreeing with what Pat Robertson said. Matter of fact I watch what Pat Robertson says regularly in order to remind myself that it is possible for preachers to go on preaching too long, well after their brains have stopped working right.

Robertson, of course, assumes wrongly that God was responsible for these bombings. And he assumes wrongly that God hates gays and liberals.

But I want to give Pat Robertson credit for this. He is asking the question of whether we can learn anything about the way we are living from all of this violence. His answer is wring but he may be asking the right question. He is asking whether these acts of violence mean that there is something wrong in our culture and our way of thinking and our way of relating to each other. He is asking whether these acts of violence mean there are ways we need to change.

It is not enough to say that there are sick or disturbed individuals who do horrific things in our world. We need to ask what in us as individuals and as a culture feeds this violence.

God believes there is nothing so awful that happens in the world that we cannot learn from it. There is nothing so God-awful that –if we look it in the face and feel the pain of it—that we can grow as a result of it.

It may not happen in one lifetime. But each of us has an assignment … an assignment on behalf of eternity. Our assignment is to move the world forward at least one tiny step, one inch, one centimeter, in at least one way in our lifetime.

There are infinite possibilities about how we can do this. It may be through politics, it may be through the way we raise our children, it may be through the way we relate to a difficult relative or co-worker or neighbor, it may be by a great act of heroism, it may be by a simple act of sacrifice.

Maybe the Boston bombing has not affected you much. Maybe you have not found yourself being anxious in crowds or nervous around backpacks.

But if you have been affected there are one of two ways to respond … We can let this makes us a more fearful, suspicious people. We can be more careful around strangers. We can put better burglar alarms in our homes. We can stop running in marathons and five Ks.

Or we can ask how we can move the world a centimeter closer to peace … we can decide to support our youth trip to Turkey to learn about Muslem-Christian understanding, we can come hear Marian Wright Edlemann talk next Sunday about working for gun control, we can reach out to an angry teenager and invite them to talk, invite them to church.

Did we think peace and justice would come easily or quickly or magically? Then we are foolish … clueless. Do we think it will never come? Then we are slow of heart and quick to lose courage. Then we have less confidence in ourselves than the resurrected Christ has.

Our assignment is to move the world closer to the Kingdom of God … one lifetime … one centimeter … in one way.

Christ Incognito

Rev. Dean Snyder Luke 24:13-19

Luke tells an Easter story in his gospel that no other gospel writer tells. It is a story about telling stories and about a meal that is itself a story. It is a story about the relationship between resurrection and telling our stories, and the relationship between telling our story and understanding our story as part of a larger, eternal story.

We are talking and thinking about Luke’s unique Easter story all of this Easter season until May 19 Confirmation Sunday. I would encourage you to mediate on this story in your personal life for these next weeks – it is Luke 24:13-35. I’d encourage you to find a few minutes to reread Luke 24:13-35 every day and to take a few minutes to think about it and to absorb it.

It was the first Easter and two of Jesus’ disciples were traveling –walking—on the road from Jerusalem where crucifixion and Easter had happened to Emmaus a little town seven miles away. One of the disciples’ name was Cleopas. Luke does not tell us the name of the other disciple.

The disciples were upset and puzzled by the events of the past week. On Palm Sunday Jesus had entered Jerusalem like a king, like a messiah. Monday he had overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple … the act of a revolutionary.

But Friday he had been crucified, dashing the hopes of his disciples and followers who thought he would bring a kingdom of justice and inclusion to Israel.

Then to make things worse Sunday morning some of the women who were part of the community of the followers of Jesus started telling strange stories about Jesus having risen from the dead.

It had gotten all too weird for Cleopas and his friend, and they had taken off for the town of Emmaus seven miles away just to get some space, some room in their lives, time and space to ask “what next?” after three years of following someone who was going to change the world but who had disappointed them.

There is a sentence in Luke’s unique Easter story I’d like to invite you to focus on today. It is found in Luke 24:15-16. The sentence says: “While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.”

So the question is why after following for him for three years, after hearing him speak and teach endless times, after eating meals with him and sleeping in the same house, after traveling the dusty roads of Israel with him, after all this then why did these two disciples not recognize the resurrected Jesus? Why were their eyes kept form recognizing him? What kept their eyes from recognizing him?

And what might this tell us about our own relationship with the resurrected Jesus? What can we learn for our own spiritual journeys from these disciples’ experience?

First, why were their eyes kept from recognizing him?

There are a number of possibilities, I suppose.

Jesus could have looked different. He could have died on Friday looking one way and could have risen Sunday looking like somebody else. I’ve always sort of hoped that I myself would be resurrected looking like Brad Pitt or Denzel Washington.

Their eyes could have been kept from recognizing him because he was unrecognizable.

It is true that in the Easter accounts the people who encountered the risen Jesus did tend to recognize him by his voice and by his actions rather than his psychical being.

But the Bible insists that it was really Jesus who was resurrected –it was not some ghost of Jesus, not some specter, not some hologram.

You remember Thomas, the doubting apostle. Thomas, the doubter, was absent the first time Jesus appeared to his disciples in the upper room, and he refused to believe Jesus was risen unless he could see him with his own eyes and he could feel the wounds in his body with his own hands.

The next time Jesus appeared to the disciples Thomas was there and he told Thomas to put his fingers in his wounds and feel them, and one of the points of this story is that it was really the crucified Jesus who rose on Easter. It was not a ghost, it was not a specter, it was not a hologram. It was the real Jesus, the whole person of Jesus.

No, the problem wasn’t that Jesus didn’t look like Jesus.

A much more likely possibility is that their eyes were kept from recognizing him because their minds could not grasp the possibility of resurrection.

We tend to think that it is hard to believe what we cannot see. But it is also true that it is hard to see what we cannot believe.

It is hard to see what we cannot believe.

We say seeing is believing, but we could also say that believing is seeing.

If we believe that something is dead and gone and over, it will be difficult to see it.

So it is much more likely that the disciples did not recognize the resurrected Jesus because they assumed Jesus was in a tomb somewhere dead and gone and over.

Their eyes were kept from recognizing Jesus because of the limits of their imagination, the limitations of their faith, their unbelief of what is possible. It is true for many of us that our imagination, our limitations of faith, our unbelief of what is possible keeps us from recognizing the resurrected Jesus in our world today.

Frederick Buechner suggests one more reason why the disciples on the road to Emmaus may not have recognized Jesus.

Fred Buechner says that they may have not been able to recognize the risen Jesus “because even when he was alive they had never really recognized him.”

Because even when he was alive they “had seen him not as he actually was but only as they had wanted him to be: a hero who could give them a lot of easy answers to all of life’s hardest questions, questions about love and pain and goodness and death. “

And it is true that when you read the gospels, the disciples misunderstood Jesus all of the time. Jesus spoke of eternity and they took what he said to be about next week. Jesus talked about transformation of the world and they took what he said to be about the next election cycle. Jesus spoke about radically changing the way that humanity thinks about women and children and men and nations and money and justice and they took him to be talking about heaven, not the world in which we live.

The disciples on the road to Emmaus demonstrate their limitations of understanding who Jesus is when they try to tell this stranger about Jesus and the events of the past week. “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” they said about the crucified Jesus. We had hoped that he was the one who would bring freedom and justice to our nation, to our place, to our little corner of the world. But clearly he has disappointed us. He did nothing but die.

Buechner thinks that part of the irony of the story is that the disciples on the road to Emmaus did not recognize the risen Jesus because they never really knew Jesus in the first place. Their understanding of Jesus was too small, their Jesus was too puny, they were too self-interested in getting what they wanted here and now and did not recognize the One who was not just messiah of Israel here and now but messiah of the universe for all eternity . .. the one who would not just redeem their little piece of the world but the one who would redeem the universe – planets and stars and galaxies.

***

Which raises the question for us – we who are Jesus’ disciples today, on our own roads to Emmaus – confused about our lives about the world we live in today – not understanding very well what is really happening – fearful about our futures.

Have we really recognized Jesus in the first place? Are we missing Jesus in our world today because we never really understood him in the first place?

And the answer biblically is, without a doubt, yes. We do not really get Jesus even today.

God in Christ is about something larger than any of us who are his followers have been able to fully grasp at any point in time or place.

We –no one of us, none of us—get Jesus really or fully. We have not fully grasped him yet.

Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Methodist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, charismatic, Buddhist/Christian, seminary professor, missionary, clergy, lay, bishop, pope – none of us have fully understood him yet.

His agenda and intention is larger than our imaginations.

Have you ever noticed that the people most surprised by what God in Christ is doing in the world lately tend to be the Christians?

What the next generation most heralds as evidence of Christ’s continued presence in the world is what the majority of Christians of the last generation condemned as anti-Christ.

I listen to a lot of sermon podcasts. I listen to sermons from all kinds of churches including fundamentalist churches and Pentecostal churches. I am amazed how often fundamentalist churches these days are claiming Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement as evidence of Christ’s active presence in our world.

Has everyone forgotten that the majority of Christian churches – white and black—condemned the civil rights movement at the time? I doubt that you could have found one fundamentalist church at the time that did not condemn integration as anti-Christ.

Listen to the sermons today and you might think that Dr. King was a fundamentalist who went to Bob Jones University rather than Boston University School of Theology.

What the next generation most heralds as evidence of Christ’s continued presence in the world is what the majority of Christians of the last generation condemned as anti-Christ.

We have not really understood God’s story yet. The story is bigger still than we have even begun to imagine.

So we need to keep listening. Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus we need to keep listening to Jesus tell his story.

God’s story did not end when they sewed the back cover on the Bible.

One of the ways we listen to the resurrected Christ is by listening to each other.

History was changed when some few white people and African-American people started listening to each other 50 years ago and because they started listening, they started telling each other the truth about their experience and aspirations.

A few years ago I read a fascinating book that has disturbed me ever since I read it,. It was written by Jason Sokol and it is entitled There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975.

They were so convinced that they understood African-Americans. The entire political, economic and social system was engineered to make sure African-American would seem to tell them what they wanted to hear. They heard what they wanted to hear but very, very few really listened.

And the moral is not that Southern whites were bad but that it is amazing hard for any of us to really listen to one another.

This is true of all of us – conservative liberal, traditionalist, progressive.

I was at a meeting not long ago where a straight, white, male almost my age was trying to talk about what it felt like to be white and male and straight in the society in which we live today. His sharing was not well received.

I walked form the meeting with a female friend of mine who tore into him after the meeting for presuming that he, as a privileged, straight, white male, presumed he had any personal experience to contribute.

I, of course, just kept my mouth shut because I am a coward.

None of us can afford to write off any of us off. None of us can assume we understand the other without having to listen. None of us can recognize the resurrected Christ in our world unless we are listening to whoever is the other for us.

Cleopas and another disciple were on the road to Emmaus, and a stranger came near and went with them. The stranger was Jesus, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.

May our eyes and ears and minds and hearts be opened.

Why Emmaus?

Rev. Dean Snyder Luke 24:13-35

Luke tells an Easter story in his gospel that no other gospel writer tells. It is a story about telling stories and about a meal that is itself not just a meal but a story. It is a story about the relationship between resurrection and telling our stories and telling our story and understanding our story as part of a larger, eternal story.

We are going to be talking and thinking about Luke’s unique Easter story all of this Easter season until May 19 Confirmation Sunday. I would encourage you to mediate on this story in your personal life for these next six weeks – it is Luke 24:13-35. I’d encourage you to find a few minutes to reread Luke 24:13-35 every day and to take a few minutes to think about it and to absorb it.

While we are studying Luke’s story about telling stories we will be having a story-teller’s workshop led by Pastor Theresa and then a story-telling showcase which you can read about in the Focus.

It was the first Easter and two of Jesus’ disciples were traveling –walking—on the road from Jerusalem where crucifixion and Easter had happened to Emmaus a little town seven miles away.

Two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Luke tells us that one of the disciple’s name was Cleopas, so they were probably not part of the group of 12 disciples who seemed to be Jesus’ inner circle.

Luke earlier in his gospel --and he is the only gospel writer to tell us this—Luke tells us that Jesus had not just 12 disciples but another larger group of disciples that they called the 70. So Jesus really had three sets of disciples – there were Peter, James, and John who Jesus took with him places where he did not take the rest of the 12. There were the 12 and then there were the 70.

Cleopas and the other unnamed disciples were probably part of the seventy – the larger group who were followers of Jesus. They were disciples but not part of the inner circles.

On Easter Sunday afternoon they had decided to take a walk to Emmaus.

The question we want to ask this morning is why Emmaus?

Why on Easter Sunday did they decide to take a walk to Emmaus?

Emmaus is not mentioned anywhere else in the Bible. Archeologists have not been able to figure out where it was located. They have not been able to identify any ruins. Why Emmaus?

Frederick Buechner says because Emmaus was “no place in particular really.” He says, the only reason Cleopas and the other disciple went there was that because it was some seven miles distant from a situation that had become unbearable.

Cleopas and the other disciple had just been through Good Friday which had not felt so good at the time. Jesus whom they had believed was the promised messiah, the promised king, who would restore Israel to a land of independence and freedom and respect again had instead been crucified. They had given three years of their lives to the vision of an Israel without oppression, without poverty, without shame, without injustice. They really believed that Jesus would establish that kingdom.

Then he died on a cross instead.

And just that morning to make things even worse, some of the women who were disciples of Jesus had said that they had talked to angels at the cemetery who told them that Jesus was not dead but alive and they did not know what to make of this and it was all too much and so they had taken off for Emmaus just to be somewhere that wasn’t Jerusalem.

Fred Buechner says that there is no one of us who has not gone to Emmaus with them. Emmaus, he says, can be a trip to the movies just for the sake of seeing a movie or to a cocktail party just for the sake of the cocktails. Emmaus may be buying a new outfit or a new car or smoking more cigarettes that we really want to, or reading a second-rate novel or even writing one. Emmaus, he says, may be going to church on Sunday. Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to get away from our confusion, our disappointment, our lostness. Emmaus is where we go when we are lost where we are and we may as well go somewhere else.

There are two kinds of vacations, I’ve discovered in my life. There are vacations that you plan carefully in advance. You have a destination. You research it and have lots of things you want to do and see.

Then there are vacations when you say I don’t care where I go or what I do when I get there. Just get me out of here. Am I the only one who has had that experience?

I remember once during a difficult time in my life, I lived in Philadelphia. I had a close friend who had moved to Pittsburg. I had arranged to visit my friend for a few days. I was going to get there on a Monday morning, but I was so desperate to get out of town I could not wait until Monday morning. I took a bus Sunday evening, got into Pittsburg at 2 a.m., sat and drank coffee for a couple hours at a hamburger joint downtown filled with cab drivers, prostitutes and lost souls, I figured out how to take a bus to my friend's house about 5 a.m., fell asleep on a lawn chair on his front porch. When my friend came out in the morning to get his newspaper he found me sleeping asleep on his front porch.

It was a time in my life when I just needed to be somewhere else at least for a few days.

All of us have our Emmauses. The places we go, the things we do, where we hide, where we escape to when life lets us down, maybe even when God lets us down, or when our small g god has let us down.

When love lets us down, when vocation lets us down, when our dreams let us down, when we let ourselves down.

I am feeling bad for Rick and Kay Warrren this morning.

I admire that letter. I have respect for Rick Warren this morning. No platitudes. No pieties. No hollow reassurances. Just real pain and a plea for prayer.

Life lets us down and we can’t sugarcoat it. Sometimes it feels as if God lets us down.

And it doesn’t need to be dramatic. Sometimes it is just a sense of drifting. A loss of direction.

We all have an Emmaus where we try to escape to just to get away from a life that doesn’t seem to be working for us anymore.

Now here is the thing. On the road to Emmaus we hear footsteps behind us. It is a stranger. At least no one we recognize. And the stranger says to us, “Tell me your stories.” Tell me what has been going on in your life, in your world. Tell me what life looks like to you, what it feels like. Let me see inside your soul. Tell me your story.

And for the Cleopas and the other disciple whose name we do not know, this is the beginning of their journey to resurrection, their journey to Easter. They tell their story -- a story of confusion and lostness, and they listen to a stranger’s story, and they break bread to eat and pour wine to drink and on their road to Emmaus Easter comes to them.

Jesus meets on our road to Emmaus and listens to our story and tells us his. It is the journey towards resurrection.

SN@F Easter Service

Pastor Kevin Wright delivers a service on Easter Sunday for 2013.

Finding love in a hopeless place of death

Rev. Dean Snyder John 20:1-18

A song by a singer named Rhianna has sold seven million copies. It is one of the best-selling singles of all time. And it has reached a global audience, topping the charts in 25 countries. The song is entitled “We found love.”

The lyrics are:

We found love in a hopeless place.

We found love in a hopeless place.

We found love in a hopeless place.

We found love in a hopeless place.

Something about this repetitive theme touched the hearts of millions upon millions of people around the world.

All this Lent we have been talking about places in life that can feel hopeless … places like shame, addiction, depression, grief, powerlessness.

As we’ve talked about hopeless places, we have turned to one another and Scripture to discover how we might find hope in these hopeless places.

Our Easter affirmation is that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord –not shame, not addiction, not depression, not grief, not powerlessness. Nothing can separate us from God. No matter how burdened we feel, no matter how imprisoned we feel, no matter how hopeless we feel, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. It gets better.

Today we want to talk about the hopeless place we call death … the death of those we love, the reality of our own death.

All this Lent Pastor Dawn has been talking to people who have experienced places that can feel hopeless. This morning she is going to talk with a member of our cancer support network, Chuck Hilty.

Pastor Dawn and Chuck --

Because of the advances of medical science and research, two out of three people diagnosed with cancer now survive and live for years to come after their diagnosis. We are very grateful for the work of cancer research.

Still cancer is a scary thing. In our time it has become not only a stark reality for those who experience it but a symbol. Cancer and HIV have become symbols of our vulnerability, our insecurity … they are symbols of the truth that, as the old preachers used to say just before the altar call, none of us knows what tomorrow may bring.

Sometimes when I am lying in bed at night in the dark waiting for my melatonin to kick in, I will start feeling my body looking for lumps. If I find one I will say to myself: I wonder if this is it. So far, when I’ve gotten up the next morning, I’ve not been able to find the lump again in the light of day, thank goodness.

The lump in the night is a symbol to me of my vulnerability. The tomorrow I fear will come someday. As Richard John Neuhaus used to say before he died, the death rate is holding steady at 100 percent.

So the question I want to ask this morning is this – Is the cemetery a hopeless place? Is the columbarium a hopeless place?

The cemetery began as a hopeless place for Mary Magdalene the first Easter.

She had gotten to the cemetery before daybreak, while it was still dark. Jesus had died on Friday. Because it is against Jewish law to touch a corpse on Saturday -- the Sabbath—Jesus’ body had been dropped in a tomb, a sort of cave, and a stone had been pushed against the opening of the tomb.

Mary had come to the cemetery Sunday morning so that she would be there as soon as the sun came up and it was no longer Sabbath. She had come to tend Jesus’ body; prepare Jesus’ body --to wash it and to anoint it-- for its final burial.

When she found the tomb in the dark, she discovered that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance and that Jesus’ body was missing.

She immediately ran to fetch Jesus’ disciples Peter and John who in turn ran to the cemetery to see for themselves that Jesus’ body was gone.

The big strong disciples –the boys-- immediately took off for their homes to hide because if someone had bothered to steal Jesus’ body, it might be a sign that there still might be trouble in store for them.

So the big strong disciples –the boys-- ran off to hide, leaving Mary Magdalene alone in the cemetery.

Notice this: the Gospel of John tells us four times in a few sentences that Mary abandoned by the disciples, alone in the cemetery as day begins to break - that Mary was weeping. The Gospel of John mentions four times in a row that Mary was weeping.

Start at John 20 verse 10:

10 Then the disciples returned to their homes. 11 But Mary stood weeping [number 1] outside the tomb. As she wept [number 2], she bent over to look into the tomb; 12 and 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. 13 They said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping[number 3]?" She said to them, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." 14 When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? [number 4]

Four times in a few short verses John tells us Mary Magdalene was weeping.

Mary was in a hopeless place.

The interesting thing that I never quite stopped to think about before is why she was weeping. She was weeping because her savior and lord had died, yes, but she was specifically weeping because someone had taken Jesus body away and she could not find it.

"They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him," she said.

She was weeping because she could not find his body. She could not find what was left of Jesus.

Why is losing Jesus’ body a cause for such weeping? Why is finding his body so important?

Because the very last thing we can do for someone we love is to see their body to its final resting place. It is the very last thing we can do for the one we love to express our love. It is our final act of love.

Until we have seen our loved one’s remains to their final resting place, something remains unresolved, unfinished.

The seminary professor Thomas Long, who preached here a couple of Julys ago, has written a book about the modern funeral. He worries that our funerals and memorial services have become too casual, too convenient, too antiseptic.

“In a funeral we are carrying the body of a saint to the place of farewell,” he writes. “In short, we are carrying a loved one to the edge of mystery, and people should be encouraged to stick around to the end, to book passage all the way. If the body is to be buried, go to the grave and stay there until the body is in the ground. If the body is to be burned, go to the crematorium and witness the burning.”

We should see with our own eyes the earthly remains of our loved ones put to their final resting place. It is the last earthly act of love and respect we can do.

Mary Magdalene could not find Jesus’ body. She could not wash it. She could not anoint it. She could not love Jesus one last time.

Mary was in a hopeless place.

Here is the Easter story -- In her hopeless place Mary Magdalene meets the resurrected Christ.

The resurrected Christ tells Mary two things. He tells her the only path to hope when we are in the hopeless place called death.

First, the resurrected Christ says to her: “Do not hold on to me for I have not yet ascended to the Father.”

Do not hold on to me. Do not hold on to my body. Do not hold onto the past me. Do not hold on to the past. For I am ascending into tomorrow. Let me go.

Do not hold on to me, “But [second] go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.' "

Do not hold on to me but go and minister to the disciples, to the boys hiding in their basements. Tell them it is not over. Help them … Help the boys.

If we are to find hope in the cemetery, every death is a letting go and a commissioning … an ordination.

Every death is a letting go of the love we knew … the love we were blessed and privileged to know … and it is an commissioning, an ordination, to go and minister to others and to minister lovingly to them.

It doesn’t say this in the Bible but I am convinced that it was Mary Magdalene who turned the boys into men who transformed the world. I believe it was Mary Magdalene, the first preacher, the first witness to the resurrection, the first ordained minister, who turned the disciples into apostles.

In the face of death, this is the only path to hope … to take the love we have known and to resurrect it into loving ministry and service to others.

Every death is a call to ministry. Every death is an ordination to minister so as to share the gift of love we have received.

Let go of the past. Take the love you have known and go help the poor boys grow up.

Every death is a call to love anew.

I suspect this is even true of our own deaths.

I suspect the task of dying is to let go of our own bodies and then to ascend to a body of eternal love.

Part of the reason I say this is because I sometimes experience people who were part of my life who have died still loving me. I sometimes experience people who have physically died still praying for me. I sometimes experience people who have died still ministering to me.

So I pray for the grace when my time comes to let go of this body to ascend to a body of eternal love. And I believe in that body I will be able to love better than I have been able to love in this body. I believe I will be able to work for justice and inclusion more effectively in that body than I have been able to in this body. I believe that I will be stronger in that body than in this body.

As I lay in bed tonight waiting for my Melatonin to kick in, I will be tempted to begin feeling my neck for lumps. For some reason I always start with my neck. I will be remembering that one day I will need to let go of this body.

When I let go of this body it will be my true ordination. I will become a real minister for the first time. So will you.

Resurrected with Christ into a body that is pure love we will be able to minister and work and serve and love as we have never been able to before.

This is my hope. This is what I believe. It gets better.