| Rector’s
Sermon
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| e. e. cummings — remember him? — wrote a poem in his strange lowercase style that reads,
Cummings characterizes death as a sin, as “evil and legal.” We could debate that, but as we think about the death of Jesus, “evil and legal” surely comes to mind as it might have been on the mind of Mary Magdalene early that next Sunday morning. Nor was Jesus’ dying particularly “fine,” but however brutal and unjust, Jesus was still alive at his crucifixion, and there were some who harbored hope that as God’s Messiah he would come down from the cross, he would survive that humiliation and thus prove all of those accolades he had received on Palm Sunday on his triumphal entry into Jerusalem were deserved. But God did not save him from the consequences of the cross, and the disciples, Mary Magdalene in particular, were left with the evil, albeit legal, conclusion of Christ’s death. Not to dwell on it, but Christ’s death was legal in that Pontius Pilate had the authority to have Jesus executed simply because Jesus represented a threat to Roman order. Even by Jewish law Jesus was guilty of blasphemy, claiming to be or having claimed of him to be God’s son, a charge punishable by death. Jesus was caught in a lethal mix of politics and religion (that sounds familiar), and for all of Mary Magdalene’s hopes and dreams Jesus’ dying and death were soul wrenching. I have no idea if e.e. cummings had ever read St. Paul’s letters, but Paul characterizes death as an enemy. Again, Mary Magdalene must have felt that keenly as she came to the tomb to anoint the body of her dearest friend who had been separated from her. When she arrives at the tomb there are a number of divine signs that something miraculous has happened. Mary can’t see those signs for what they are. She can’t interpret them except through the lens of Christ’s death. A huge stone rolled away. Angels talking to her. Jesus himself standing there, speaking to her, and yet she cannot recognize him, she cannot see these signs for what they are. Death is too powerful, too “evil and legal,” for her to see God’s loving hand at work in this terrible despair. But then Jesus calls her by name. I think I’m beginning to understand Mary a little better. I’ve always been impressed with God’s greatness. I’ve always been intrigued with the enormity of the Universe, and, parenthetically, I find the billions upon billions of years of Earth’s formation much more impressive, if not more realistic, than a literal reading of the Book of Genesis. But that’s another sermon. I always thought it was the big miracles, or at least the flashiest, that justified my Christian faith, perhaps even put me on the winning side. (Yes, the New York Giants did defeat the New England Patriots for the Super Bowl.) But the real miracle is that for all God is, for all God has created, for all God is responsible for, God knows my name. And the real miracle for Mary Magdalene was that Jesus, in his resurrection, is just as tender, just as personal in his divinity as he was in his humanity. When she recognizes Jesus it wasn’t that Mary’s God had become too small, it was that for all the wonder that God is, she was included. And that made all the difference. In one of her sermons, Barbara Brown Taylor writes this about those early Christians, among whom I would certainly include Mary Magdalene: In our baptisms we say that we have been buried with Christ in his death in order to be raised with him in his resurrection. I believe we are not only talking about something that happens at the end of life, but right at the very beginning and all throughout our lifetimes. It’s an invitation that is called “faith”—faith that no matter what, no matter when, no matter how, no matter why, Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead and lives in us, breathing for us when we cannot breathe, befriending us when we have no friends, calling us by name when we have forgotten who we are, walking with us in whatever valley of the shadow of death we find ourselves and in whatever circumstance of desperation threatens to overwhelm us. But we don’t take to it naturally, or at least some of us don’t. I remember C. S. Lewis describing himself as the most reluctant convert in all of England. I also remember his despair when Joy Davidman Grisham died, a woman he married later in life after an intellectually exhilarating and entirely platonic, transatlantic correspondence. Lewis married Joy after she had moved to England with her two sons so that she would not have to be deported. But as they became closer and closer friends, they fell in love. By then Lewis had become the most popular spokesperson for Christianity in the English-speaking world. But Joy Davidman had cancer when she married Lewis and when she was in the hospital (as described in a PBS special on Lewis) Lewis turned to a former student who had become a priest, whose name was Peter Bide: Peter Bide comes to the hospital and Lewis asks if this priest who has some reputation for possessing a healing gift would place his hands upon Joy and pray that she be healed. Peter Bide does this. And he lays his hand upon Lewis who in turn prays that he will get the pain that Joy is suffering. The pain is ferocious. And of course Joy is expected to die within a day or two. She doesn’t. In fact, she starts to get better. Within a few months, X-rays show that her pelvis has grown back. The bone has regenerated. Doctors cannot explain it. Lewis put his life and his faith on the line. He was willing to take her pain into himself so that she could be healed. Lewis was dying in Christ in order to share in his Resurrection. A few years later Joy did die, but Lewis described those few years together as “feasting on love.” And then three years after Joy died, Clive Staples Lewis died, a man whose faith had led him to be buried with Christ and then had known what it meant to be raised with Christ. That same faith is what brings us here this morning. The miracle of the Resurrection is huge, but we’re looking for it to be personal, to touch us somewhere, somehow, where it hurts. Unless we thought the same God who raised Jesus from the dead knows us by name, then it’s just like standing on the sidelines watching someone else get the prize. But the prize is ours—all of ours: the knowledge that for all we are, for all we are not, for all our doubts and failures as well as our successes and thanksgivings, we are known by our names and “marked as Christ’s own forever.” The air we breathe this morning is Christ’s breath. The food we eat is Christ’s body and blood. He has died and been raised, and we have died and been raised. Alleluia.
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