Easter Sunday, April 9th, 2023 - "Seeking: Who are You Looking For?"
First United Presbyterian Church
“Seeking: Who Are You Looking For?”
Rev. Amy Morgan
April 9, 2023
Jeremiah 31:1-6
At that time, says the Lord, I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they shall be my people.
2 Thus says the Lord:
The people who survived the sword
found grace in the wilderness;
when Israel sought for rest,
3 the Lord appeared to him from far away.
I have loved you with an everlasting love;
therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.
4 Again I will build you, and you shall be built,
O virgin Israel!
Again you shall take your tambourines,
and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers.
5 Again you shall plant vineyards
on the mountains of Samaria;
the planters shall plant,
and shall enjoy the fruit.
6 For there shall be a day when sentinels will call
in the hill country of Ephraim:
‘Come, let us go up to Zion,
to the Lord our God.’
John 20:1-18
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’ 3Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb. 4The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10Then the disciples returned to their homes.
11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; 12and 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. 13They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ 14When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ 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.’ 16Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher). 17Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” ’ 18Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
The gospel of John can basically be summed up in 4 words: come, see, believe, and tell. From the call of the first disciples to the story of the raising of Lazarus, we hear the refrain in this gospel: “Come and see.” From the mystical prologue to this gospel to its penultimate story about a doubtful disciple, we hear the encouragement to believe more than 85 times. Throughout the gospel, Jesus preambles his teachings with the phrase, “very truly, I tell you,” but in the story of the resurrection, he sends Mary to go and tell the disciples what she has come to see and believe.
Come. See. Believe. And Tell. These four words feature prominently in John’s depiction of the resurrection, and they shape the whole narrative of the good news of Jesus Christ.
The resurrection story in John begins in the dark. Mary Magdalene walks alone in a graveyard. She comes to the tomb of Jesus.
Mary goes to a place no one desires to go. For Jesus-followers, the invitation to come is an invitation to go into those places most of us spend a good deal of time and effort avoiding. When Jesus’s disciples are called to come and follow him, when Jesus is told to come and see where Lazarus is buried, these are invitations to live in dangerous and uncertain ways, to move toward grief and suffering, to walk in darkness and loneliness and fear. This is not an easy invitation to accept. This is not an attractive invitation.
So why would one accept it? Well, Mary, because she was willing to go to that place no one desired to go, was the first to witness the empty tomb, and the first to encounter the risen Christ. The disciples were still snoozing, or hiding, or fretting over what they were going to do now that their leader had been executed. Peter, James, John, even “the disciple whom Jesus loved” – none of them had the courage or commitment or whatever it is they may have needed to go walking in the dark, alone, in a cemetery.
So if you ever encounter the argument that women aren’t called to lead in the church or in any other place in society because they are the gentler and more timid of the sexes, you can just lift up the 20th chapter of John for some 2,000-year-old proof that that is a load of donkey manure. Mary, and only Mary, goes walking, alone, in the dark, in a graveyard, for Jesus. The dudes only show up later, and they aren’t super-keen to go in and check out the tomb. And they hightail it out of there so quickly that they miss the main event. Now, I’m not trying to set up a battle of the sexes here or knock on anyone or exclude anyone. But the Bible can demolish damaging stereotypes just as easily as it can be used to establish them. This is not the main point of today’s sermon, just your bonus side-track of the day.
Okay, so getting back to our story. Mary comes to the tomb, and because she comes there, she sees what no one else has seen. First, she sees that the stone has been rolled away. Then there is this flurry of activity: Mary running to the disciples; two disciples in a footrace to the tomb; Peter goes into the tomb, then the other disciple goes into the tomb; then they both run home.
And then, everything slows down. Mary weeps outside the tomb, she bends over in her grief, and she looks up and into the tomb, and through tear-clouded eyes she sees what the other two disciples missed: angels among us; angels waiting to herald good news; angels attending this place of sorrow and mystery and hope. In their haste, the other two disciples glanced at the discarded grave clothes and assumed the tomb was empty. But, in fact, the tomb was populated with holiness, alive with sacred possibility. I’ve a mind to believe the angels were there all along, but the disciples were in too big a hurry, too caught up in their own fear and panic and confusion, to be able to see them. It makes sense to me that if angels were hanging out in the tomb of Jesus, it was because they were there to welcome his awakening to the resurrected life, just as they had been there at his earthly birth.
Mary came to the tomb, alone and in the dark, and in her grief, in her commitment to finding Jesus, she was greeted by angels. And then, her life really gets turned around. Literally.
In the next few sentences, Mary turns, sees Jesus, who she thinks is the gardener, and then, presumably, turns back toward the angels. Because when Jesus says her name, she turns around again. I get a little dizzy reading this part of the story.
And I think that is the point. Mary is turned around and around by the wonder and mystery and surprise of the resurrection. It is a dizzying experience. So much so, that she falls at Jesus’s feet. Probably in worship and awe. But maybe also just because this experience puts her so off-kilter.
Mary goes where no one else wants to go. And then she sees things that literally make her head spin.
And then, she believes. She addresses Jesus as Rabbouni, which some manuscripts helpfully translate from Aramaic to Greek as “Teacher.” But in Aramaic, and in some early manuscripts of John’s gospel, this is translated as “Lord.” In either case, the term is possessive. Mary is claiming Jesus as her teacher, her Lord. And when she reports back to the disciples, her announcement is, “I have seen the Lord.” Mary comes and sees, and she believes in the resurrection of her teacher and her Lord, the Jesus she walked and talked with, the Jesus she saw crucified. She believes, she trusts, that he lives and breathes, that he continues to have authority in her life and the lives of his followers.
Come, see, believe. And then Jesus instructs Mary to tell. It’s fascinating that he doesn’t instruct her to tell the disciples that he is alive, to report the fact of his resurrection. Instead, he wants her to tell them where he is going. What is important for his followers to hear is not that the tomb is empty, that Jesus is alive, but that Jesus is on the move, he is going places.
Come and see. Believe and tell. These are the components of a life following Jesus. From beginning to end.
We are invited to come and go to those places no one else wants to go. Those places that are dark and lonely and frightening. Those places that are filled with grief and pain and suffering. Those places of uncertainty and mystery.
And not all of those places look like a graveyard. For some of us, those places might be a hospital room or a homeless shelter, a prison or a halfway house. For some of us, those places might look like an Alcoholics Anonymous gathering, or a therapist’s office, or just sitting with the quiet of our own troubled minds. We can find ourselves in the darkness and alone even in a room filled with people and noise. We can be terrified and uncertain walking into a conversation over coffee with someone we’ve had a trouble history with. We can experience grief and pain revisiting places where we once had joyful experiences with people we’ve loved and lost. We can find suffering in the halls of privilege and mystery in the ordinary taste of bread and juice.
We are invited to come into places that set us on edge and push us out of our comfortable realities. And these places can be physical, emotional, intellectual, ideological. These places may look different for each one of us, and these places may change throughout our lives.
But these places we are invited to go, these places where we go looking for Jesus, will lead us to see things that will turn our lives around. We will see things that other people are missing. We will see the heralds of good news even in places of death. We will see Jesus in forms we don’t immediately recognize – like the gardener, or the check-out clerk, the bus driver, or the line cook. We will be turned around, again and again, by simple-yet-profound questions, like “why are you weeping?” and “who are you looking for?” Our heads will spin at the unexpected sound of our names on familiar lips, by the experience of being fully known and deeply loved. When we come and follow Jesus, when we go looking for him in those places no one else wants to go, we will see things no one else sees, and it will turn our lives upside down.
And then, we might believe in the power of God in Jesus Christ. Then, we might believe that in Jesus Christ, death does not get the final word, in our lives or anyone else’s. Then, we might come to believe in a resurrection that is both physical and symbolic, true and full of grace and truth, full of light and life, now and always. Then, we might come to believe in Christ’s authority in our lives and in the lives of all his followers.
I have said many times that belief is not blind acceptance of dogma or intellectual agreement to a set of propositions. Belief is trust, and that trust is grounded in relationship and experience. I trust my own experience, most of the time. But I also have relationships based in trust, and so I also can trust the experiences of those people.
What that means for the church community, then, is that we believe, we trust, the experiences of new life we each have known; and we also believe, we trust, the experiences of new life our siblings in Christ have known. As we read and study the stories of our ancestors in scripture, we also grow to believe and trust in their experiences. And what that adds up to is belief, trust, in the one who brings life out of death, again and again, the one who teaches and guides us, the one who loves us unconditionally. That trust leads us to claim Jesus as our own – our teacher, our leader. That is belief: claiming Jesus as our own because we trust in him, we trust in our experiences of him in our lives and the lives of others we trust and in the stories we hold sacred.
And once we believe like that, we are called to tell others. Not to tell them who Jesus is or what he did for us. We’re called to tell people where Jesus is going, where we can expect to see him showing up.
I’ve never found it particularly compelling, and actually have felt a little like a used car salesperson, to tell people about how great Jesus is. I can tell people all day how loving and kind Jesus is, how he worked all kinds of miracles, and how he loves everybody, and how he has done such great things for me and for all of us. In the end, some people are sold on that, but most are looking for something that will really take them places. Telling people about Jesus really ought to be more like telling someone about a fantastic trip you’re planning to take, sharing with them all the exciting and interesting places you’ll go and amazing things you’ll see. Maybe you even tell them about the parts of the trip that make you nervous or uncertain, the parts that might even be a little dangerous. But you’re excited to share where you’re going. And then, when you unexpectedly invite them to come along, there’s a good chance they will find that invitation alluring.
So we’re called to tell people where Jesus is going, which is maybe not always easy for us to do, because we maybe don’t think we know. We know that the tomb is empty, he’s not there anymore. Scripture tells us he ascended to God. And if we picture that to be someplace up in the clouds, totally removed from the world and its troubles, that’s a tough place to describe. But if we remember that the mission of Jesus was to bring the reign of God to earth, then Jesus is closer and closer all the time.
Jesus is on the move, not up in the heavens, but here on earth, continuing his mission to restore the relationships between God, creation, and humanity. And that’s where we experience him. That’s where we see him going – closer and closer to the world’s brokenness, closer and closer to our broken hearts.
So it all comes around full-circle. We are invited to come, with Jesus, to those broken places – in ourselves and in the world – where no one else wants to go. We are blessed to see angels among us; angels waiting to herald good news; angels attending places of sorrow and mystery and hope. We are blessed to see Jesus in unexpected forms and hear our name on his lips. We are blessed to have our lives turned around by what we see. We believe, we trust, in the resurrection power of God in Jesus Christ, in that power that has brought life out of death in our lives and in the lives of those we trust and in the stories we hold sacred. And we are called to tell others that Jesus is on the move, he is with God, active in the power of the Holy Spirit, and continuing his mission to complete the reign on God on earth. And then the cycle continues when others are invited to come and see, believe and tell.
Come. See. Believe. Tell. It turns out maybe faith isn’t that complicated after all. Four words may be all we need to know.
To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.
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