“Therefore, My Beloved” John 20:1-18; I Corinthians 15:19-26, 58 The Reverend Joanna M. Adams Morningside Presbyterian Church Atlanta, GA April 8, 2007

“Therefore, My Beloved”
John 20:1-18; I Corinthians 15:19-26, 58
The Reverend Joanna M. Adams
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Atlanta, GA
April 8, 2007

Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.
I Corinthians 15:58

For starters, I moved back to Atlanta from Chicago three years ago to avoid Easter weather that chills the body to the bone. The church I served there sometimes had to hold its Easter Egg Hunt in the Fellowship Hall, with yellow straw scattered across the linoleum as a substitute for green grass. Often, wooly caps with flaps over the ears doubled as Easter bonnets. T.S. Eliot once began a poem with the line, “April is the cruelest month.” Now even we Atlantans know why! Yesterday, 65 children searched for Easter eggs in the green grass and shrubs on Morningside’s front lawn, but it was hard to pick up those eggs with mitten-covered fingers!

But today is Sunday, the Day of Resurrection, and we have bundled up, braved the cold, and here we are together, eager to hear the glad proclamation that Christ has been raised from the dead. And not only he, but we and all of creation are beneficiaries of this, the most mighty of the mighty acts of God. Paul puts it this way, “For as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ”. First, Christ and then those who belong to him, and then comes the end, when he has put all enemies under his feet, every ruler and every authority and power which works against the gracious, sovereign will of God. “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” (I Corinthians:15)

The Scriptures personify the forces of evil and death and give that personification a name. Sometimes he is called Satan, sometimes he is called the devil, but always he is working against the forces of life and hope.

Recently, a friend of ours sent a letter in which she recounted a story attributed to C.S. Lewis. It seems that one day, the devil was training three young apprentices. The devil asked his students, “Tell me the lie we should use to guarantee humanity’s downfall.”
The first replied, “We should tell the human creatures that there is no God.”
“Wrong,” the devil answered. “That lie won’t work because humans will look around and see all the beauty and goodness in the world and they will know it’s a lie.
The second one said, “We should tell them there is no evil, no force that works against God.”
“Wrong again,” says the devil. “They will look around and they will see evil and ugliness in the world and know that is a lie.”
The third one smiled and said, “I know. We should tell them that they have plenty of time.”
“Yes!” says the devil. “That is the best lie of all.”

If you are smart enough to be in church on Easter morning, then you are not going to be hoodwinked by the lies of the apprentices of the devil. You and I know that life is laced with goodness and beauty: the music of Brahms, the sweetness of a kiss, the inspiration of a brave man or woman working to change the world.

As for the reality of evil, we’ve got that too. We see everywhere the consequences of unrivaled greed, the abuse of power, the lack of respect for the truth, the needless suffering on the part of so many because of the indifference of a few. We see it. We are not stupid.
And really Mr. Devil, what cabbage truck do you think we fell off of that we would deny the power of death? We get it! We keep up with the ways of the world. We hear everyday of the bombings in Baghdad and the casualties of war, both soldier and civilian. We know about the scourge of famine, the reality of global warming, the epidemic of AIDS.

We know about death. We know it up close and personal. We have lost people that we love. Some of us have stared death down ourselves a time or two. All of us have suffered thousands of little deaths. Friendships have faded. What we assumed would be lifetime relationships have died. We suffer thousands of little deaths before we die.

Death is real. The precariousness of existence is undeniable, and none but the most naïve believe that we have all the time in the world. You cannot fool us, Mr. Satan, and you absolutely cannot help us with any of the important questions. For example, after the stars have faded from the heavens, will there still be light? You don’t know, because you are the prince of darkness. After death has done all it has to do, will the force of life prevail? You don’t know that either. Only God has the answers to those questions.

“We who must die demand a miracle,” wrote the poet W.H. Auden. “Nothing can save us that is possible. We who must die demand a miracle.” (“For the Time Being”) We who have made our way thus far through the chill of life’s obvious realities want to know: Is the grave the end? Is there light that shines in the darkness that the darkness will not overcome?

We who must die demand a miracle, and on Easter Sunday, God delivers.

Mary Magdalene was not expecting a miracle when she went to the tomb “early on that first day of the week, while it was still dark.” She went to pay her respects and to weep as much as she felt like weeping without anyone’s seeing her. You know how it is when someone you love very much has died. You have to hold up during the service and afterwards, when everyone’s bringing in food to the house. But at some point, you have to find the time to be by yourself. You go to the cemetery with a pocketful of tissues and a lifetime of memories. You need to cry by yourself, as much as you need to cry, until there are no more tears to cry.

That’s what Mary planned to do, but when she arrived at the burial place, she discovered the stone had been removed from the mouth of the tomb. She assumed that someone had stolen the body, and she ran to share the news with two of Jesus’ disciples. They returned to the grave with her. One went inside, the other did not. Both saw the linen wrappings. One of the two disciples who was there believed that Jesus overcame death on the basis of the empty tomb and that stack of folded burial cloths. ( For 99% of the human race, that is not quite enough.) We are not told what Peter thought, but we are told that neither of the disciples understood what had happened. Do you know what they did? They both went home, presumably to eat breakfast and to scratch their heads.

Only Mary stayed to shed the tears in which her heart was drowning. Finally, she mustered her courage and looked in the tomb. Much to her astonishment, she saw two angels sitting where the body would have been, one at the head and one at the foot. They asked her why she was crying. She choked out something about the body having been taken away. Then she turned and saw someone standing near her. In the greatest case of mistaken identity in human history, she thought it was the gardener. It was Jesus, raised from the dead. Only after he had spoken her name did she realize who he was. “Mary,” he said. It is at this magnificent moment that Easter really begins. He said “Mary,” and she knew who he was, her beloved Lord, who had life in him again. She knew who he was. She knew who she was too. From that moment on, she would be a resurrection person who could love in hope and act in love. She had been there when they crucified her Lord, and now she was there to see that he had been raised from the dead.

This is the miracle of Easter, and I do not use the word “miracle” lightly. I use it deliberately. A miracle is an occurrence that contradicts the natural order of things. There is nothing natural about what happened in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea that morning. I love springtime, and I am glad that Easter is set for the first Sunday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox, which ensures that in our part of the world at least, Easter usually occurs at the same time the dogwoods are blossoming and the bumble bees are bumbling. But there is nothing remotely natural about the resurrection. (1) We plant seeds, and they grow. We spy a cocoon, and expect a butterfly to appear, but we do not expect a dead man to be raised. My father died, and I went to the cemetery. I sat and grieved, but I did not expect to see him again, “on this side of the grave.” (2)

Jesus was not immortal; no one is. What Mary witnessed and what our faith confesses is the resurrection, which was due solely to the intervening action of Almighty God.

Distinguished theologian, Douglas John Hall, writes, “Resurrection is the ultimate declaration of God’s grace… it is not . . .natural. It is not. . .automatic. It is wholly dependent upon the faithfulness, forbearance, and love of God. . . For that reason-only that!- I am able, usually, to sleep at night, to continue playing the piano and writing . . . words, and take my aging body more or less for granted…the only thing of which I can be at all confident when I think about my own “not being” is that God will be.” Hall goes on to say that he does not understand how God will be pleased to bring him from the dead, as God brought Christ from the dead,” (Hebrews 13:20 but that he stands “under that affirmation.” (3)
So did Paul, as he concluded his magnificent treatise on the resurrection in Corinthians. “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast…” Stand under the affirmation that “death has lost its sting,” that even as all died in Adam, so all will be raised in Christ.” There is no reason to lose hope, no reason to fear death, no reason not to play the piano, no reason to sit on your hands and do nothing about the suffering and the loneliness and the injustice in the world.

After this matter of his identity had been resolved, Jesus said to Mary, “Do not hold me.” I bet you are thinking she had wrapped her arms around his knees or around his neck. But I don’t think that’s what Jesus meant. I think he meant to say something like this: “I know you want to keep me with you, but I have to finish my work, which is to take every single one of us and the world itself into the heart of God.” (4) Remember how he said, “In my Father’s house are many mansions. I am going there to prepare a place for you, and if I go and prepare a place for you I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” (John 14:2-3) That was the job that he had to do, and he couldn’t do it if she kept holding him.(5) He had his job to do, and she had her job to do. She was the one who was to tell the others he was alive. She and they would continue the work that he had begun. She and they would be the evidence that there is a light that shines in the darkness that cannot be overcome. The resurrection cannot be proven; it can only be practiced. What happened between the burial and the resurrection, only God and Jesus know, and they are not sharing the details. The way we know resurrection is to see it lived and to live it ourselves.

I’ll tell you something you may already know. The Easter sermon is not the easiest thing in the world for preachers. It’s the biggest day of the year. Many people come to church who do not ordinarily come to church. Each year I work hard on a new sermon. I want to have a message that is fresh and alive. I will never forget how, after my first Easter sermon, almost 30 years ago, my mother, now gone, said to me, “Jo, I can tell you believe in the resurrection. That’s the main thing, and you helped us all today.” It was the best thing anyone had ever said to me.

So, I was working hard on my Easter sermon last week- reading and taking notes, and about every five minutes, the signal on my computer would let me know I had a new e-mail message. I would get up and look at the message, then sit back down, trying to get into a holy mood again and write the sermon. There would come the beep again. One message was from the chair of the Environmental Action Committee asking me about funding for 2007. Another person wanted to know where the welcome brochures were so we could pass them out on Sunday. Someone else wanted me to know the architectural plans for the installation of the new elevator were on the way. I would read and respond and wonder, “Will I ever be able to write my sermon? Please Lord, give it to me now.” Then it dawned on me that my friends at Morningside were writing the Easter sermon! As Clarence Jordan contended, “The proof of Easter is not a rolled away stone but a carried away church.”

The word “therefore” appears in the Bible more than 1,000 times. God has written the word therefore across every single page of your life. No matter what condition you are in, no matter what you are worried about, there is always hope. There is always a witness to be made, always resurrection work to do.

We are here today because Mary did what she was supposed to do, which was to announce to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”. You tell them too, by the way you live: Christ is risen! Alleluia!

(1) Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Unnatural Truth,” March 20-27, 1996, p.325.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Douglas John Hall, Why Christian? Fortress Press, 1998, p. 174.
(4) Taylor.
(5) Taylor.