"Mary Tweeting Easter"

Isaiah 25: 6-9
John 20: 1-18

Before our children begin school, they learn to know to identify numbers and letters, even beginning to spell and to count. Year by year, we are taught to know how to add and subtract, multiply, divide and perform square roots, not only amassing a vocabulary but the grammatical skills to parse sentences and translate languages. Then suddenly, after having been taught this cumulative volume of knowledge, students are presented with geometry, and for several weeks a glassy stare crosses their expressions. All that they had been taught and know is locked in their understanding, but theoretical proofs, mathematical theorems and formulae are disconnected from what they have known to be problems. Day by day, each one individually comes to a new awareness, like lightbulbs being turned on, like the sun dawning after a long night, and with geometry they see reality differently, that numbers are not simply equations on a page but each can calculate the volume and mass and dimensions of their reality.

Easter morning is embracing a SPIRITUAL GEOMETRY, as each person individually wrestles with understanding, understanding both our reality and existence and faith in the unknown. Spiritual geometry is wrestling with the concepts of whether life is only an accident, the cataclysm of gases in time and space which happened to create being, the consumption of grains, proteins and carbohydrates which enabled thought and reasoning; or whether there is something, someone greater than ourselves, that our reality is only piece of God's greater reality. More than what we have been taught, more than everything we have experienced, seen and known, Easter's Resurrection is awareness and acceptance of this different reality. Life and death are in constant struggle, and intellectually we know that ultimately every living thing must die, we are mortal, creaturely.

Now there are those among us who will say, “It's Easter! This is a time for Joy and Chocolate, children in white gloves and bonnets, why speak of death. Historically, I can remember the time not so many years ago when there was nothing celebrated between Palm Sunday and Easter, when we went straight from “Oer All The Way green Palms and Blossoms Gay” and “Hosanna, Loud Hosanna” to “Jesus Christ is Risen Today Alleluia!” There was no mention of his arrest, or suffering or death or burial. Not only do suffering and death seem bigger and more frightening when we avoid them, but our acceptance of Easter becomes hollow as we build from Success to Success without struggle, without loss.

The Old Testament Book of the Prophet Isaiah builds for 24 Chapters, as God knows the people will not change, will never listen, and in the 24th Chapter God calls all the Nations together including the people of God, for judgement. But afterward, after the suffering and hardship, which is hard on God as well, in our passage this morning, God is recorded as providing this feast, this banquet on the mountain. The Biblical reality is that out of the Valley of Death we do come to Mountaintop experiences; out of suffering we come to salvation; out of death we come to new and everlasting life.

Death is the reality of an end to our existence; but also the end of ideas, the domination of anything and everything weaker, death is control over our lives and relationships and circumstances, death is avoidance that anything could have power over us. Death is our ability to isolate ourselves, to separate from every other living being until we are totally and absolutely alone in existence, everything else dead. According to the book of Genesis, In the beginning the earth was a “Tohu wavohu” literally a Waste and a Void. In entropy that is what we each seek, beyond amassing all that is possible to own, to have to know, when we have used up all our stuff, we anticipate a waste and avoidance in the void between time and space. The point of the Biblical witness is that then and only then, WHEN DEATH IS REALITY for us, does God call us to new and everlasting life.

On this the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene went before dawn to the place of the burial. Where Matthew, Mark and Luke describe her going with a group of others, going to anoint the body, even though they knew they could not reach it because of the guards and the stone, John does not identify any of that. Mary went out in the dark, before the sun's rising, to the place of the tomb, not with oils or perfumes, not with anyone or anything, she went to the place of death, so as to be swallowed up by the darkness, to sit in the absolute quiet of death's nothingness. But arriving at the tomb, she found something, some thing beyond the silent, void of death. The cold stone tomb was open. Today, Mary would have TWEETED, Mary would have BLOGGED for all the disciples to form a FLASH MOB at the tomb in the garden. But she hurriedly went and found Peter and the Beloved Disciple and told them.

They both immediately set out. John's Gospel seems fascinated with this footrace between Peter and John, between the Church and the Spiritual Community, for who would win. John's point is not that one group wins and the other loses, but that both run full out, faith and works, tradition and searching match one another, breath for breath, pace for pace. Arriving, each in turn looks in, expecting to find Proof of Death, but there is none, nor that there had been a grave robbing... for robbers would not have taken time to unwrap the cloths from the body, or to fold up the cloth from his head separately. What they do get, is that DEATH was not the final word. Instead of hearing TAPS being the final sound played over history, there is as if a REVELE calling life us to rise up to believe in something, a new and glorious day after death's void. They do not yet fully understand, there has not been time to allow what they have experienced and what they know to seep together in understanding. But what Peter and John do believe: Is death is not THE END.

Good Friday I received the most wonderful question from someone attending the Maundy Thursday Worship. He had listened as the Disciples did not understand about the Foot washing; he knew from earlier passages that they were not prepared to understand about the suffering and death on the Cross, let alone the resurrection of Easter, but what he wanted to know was whether the Disciples understood when Jesus took the Bread and said This is My Body Broken for You... And pouring the Cup said This is the New Covenant sealed in my own Blood... Did they understand? I responded to him, “Probably Not” but we also need to wonder about the meaning of these words for the Church throughout history, that these are the words of meaning for our Sacrament of Communion, and most of all, What do we understand? Do we go through the motions of the ritual of Easter, the consuming of bread and juice, or are we able to live our lives in a different reality, as a resurrected people believing God has suffered and conquered every power (including our own) to bring about closure in order to redeem everlasting life and hope and peace?

MARY stood there weeping. She is too unsettled to sit or lay down. She witnesses the angels who ask what she is doing, because they know this is not a place for weeping but for celebration! Yet Mary still does not understand.

What a wonderful description... Almighty God, the Creator who formed all of life, formed the Garden which is this planet, So whom does Mary imagine to see when looking at Jesus but “The Gardener”. Rather than attempting to explain proofs to her. Rather than trying to make her understand the Givens and the theories and Laws of the Universe, Jesus speaks her name: Mary! And she responds. In the community of faith, we each have a name, an identity of belonging. We are lifted up and embraced and witnessed for being unique and remembered.