EASTER GETS PERSONAL

John 20:1-18
by the Rev. Nadine Hundertmark
March 23, 2008
South Salem Presbyterian Church

Olympic divers are judged not just on execution of the dive but on degree of difficulty. Easter Sunday and my last Sunday in the South Salem pulpit. I walk with a pounding heart to the end of this board.

On the other hand, as a wise preacher said, Easter preaching should be like the best man's toast. It's about the bride and groom, pure and simple. Woe to the best man who forgets that.

So with a little bounce, we're off -- into the dark. John's gospel starts in the predawn and I am glad that it does. Despite the beautiful flowers and sweet children in bonnets and the trumpet and alleluias, we need to go that dark place if we want Easter. The darkness, of course, is that of death. And worse. When hope turns to despair.

It's Monday last week when an old man picks up the phone and hears that his daughter won't be able to come up for Easter weekend after all, she and her husband have this party to go to Saturday night, "by the way, the kids say hi." Of course he understands.

It's Tuesday when a couple go to the hospital to sign the foster care papers for a newborn who is waiting to be brought home, and the social workers tell them, so sorry, the relatives changed their mind again.

Wednesday when someone receives bad test results from a doctor.

Thursday when a child goes out into the playground and once again, is laughed at.

It's Friday, when Mary Magdalene and a few other women saw Jesus die on the cross.

It's any day someone's hope is crucified. When betrayal kills a friendship. Broken promises destroy a marriage. It is roiling financial markets, an imploding career, terror threats, a toppling crane, our life in chaos. Sooner or later we all lose whatever it is we were counting on. Even our faith can die on us.

Mary Magdalene gets up before it is light. That's not hard to do if you've spent another night in stunned wakefulness, wondering how it all turned out so bad. As she walks down the shadowy road her mind goes back to the way it used to be. She never expected to be going to her best friend's tomb. She expected to follow him for the rest of her life.

Mary cannot help herself, she keeps going back to the days in Galilee when he opened to her a completely different way to live, healed the sick and told people with sordid histories that they were forgiven, and by the end of the day some who had not smiled in years were laughing. She remembers how he invited the poor to dinner and the rich gladly helped serve the food, and they were all telling stories, in rags and fine linen, around the same table. He told them God didn't care about religion, just kindness and mercy. He had time for everyone, Mary remembers, even people whose greed and anger and ego corroded the community - you are beloved too, he said -- and some of them got it, and joined them in the Way. Everything wasn't just possible. Everything was right there.

But all that is over. Nothing matters now. She gets to the tomb and sees that the stone has been rolled away - convinced that someone took the body, she runs to tell the others. But Peter and John's empty-tomb conversion means nothing to Mary. Even the angels she thinks she sees make it seem like a really bad joke. Even her first sight of Jesus doesn't change her bleak mood. "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him." Her first brush with resurrection and it can't shake her despair. We've been there too. Easter comes and goes and that's it.

Then Jesus does something stunning. "Mary." And she recognizes him. He calls her by name and in that intimate moment, she knows he is alive. "Teacher!" Her own dead world breaks open.

I am comforted by the fact that Mary has to be literally dragged to the conclusion that Jesus has been raised from death. I've always been comforted by the integrity of the gospels in showing how hard it is to move away from whatever deathly place we are in and get to resurrection. Only when it gets personal, when Mary hears her own name, can she get her arms around the possibility that God has more in mind.

Tuesday night I faced a packed funeral home, asked to say a few words that couldn't possibly make a difference. The only word I had been able to think of that day was "Mary". That wasn't her name, the one who was so loved and so grieved that night. But I told the crowd the story of the One who called Mary by her name. I assured the sorrowing family that he called their beloved one by name. In that is our hope.

And not just in death. What I want to tell you is that in life our hope is in the God who knows our name. Even when we escape to that far country, when we want to become a fish or

a rock *- anything but the person we are, even when we cannot for the life of us figure out what the future will look like, even then, God will not lose us.

Bob and Lee Woodruff are members of the Rye Presbyterian Church. Bob had just become evening anchor for ABC News when he went on assignment to Iraq and was horribly wounded in an explosion. In their book In an Instant, Lee Woodruff writes about the months of her husband's recovery:

"Each day I got through seemed a monumental triumph. There were days I wanted to rejoice, days I wanted to let someone else crawl into my skin and hold up my bones, days I could take a deep breath, and days I wanted to stay in bed and turn back the clock. There were and still are days I worry intensely about what this experience will mean for my children and how they will absorb it into their own lives and outlooks. There were nights when the sight of them asleep in their beds broke my heart. On other days I tried to focus on the tiny pleasures life offers - a tall hot latte with extra foam, the smell of my twins' hair after a bath, a good report for my son, the amazingly horrible way I got to learn how many people loved us. As I lay in bed, it was hard to feel any kind of ballast in my life. I didn't know if I'd ever have my man back again. I knew it would never be quite the same. 'Say goodbye to the old Bob,' his neuropsychologist at Mt. Sinai had said when we first met with her at the outpatient rehab hospital. 'Meet the new Bob.' I knew the new Bob wasn't supposed to be better or worse, just different."

Different is scary. We'll do anything we can to hold on to what we know.

Last Sunday I was driving back from the city, up the Major Deegan and I caught a glimpse of palest beige arches rising up, shimmering in the setting sun, and across the top, bright gold, in that classic type style: "Yankee Stadium". I gasped, it so closely resembled the old stadium, like a dream. There is a time for sentiment. Clinging to old familiar forms. Loving the past, cherishing what has been.

But that's not Easter. If we dare enter the Easter world, it may look the same on the outside, we may sing the same great hymns, hear the same stories as we did last Easter, join our children and hunt eggs and have a nice lunch the way we do every Easter, but what if - this year - we tried living resurrection, which is absolutely different.

"Mary!" says Jesus. And with that, death is gone. Failure is gone. The future opens up. Not just for Mary's old hopes. It's what God wants doing that counts now.

Do you hear that, South Salem church? It's not about you. Or me. It's about what God wants doing. Which is no different from what God wanted doing when Isaiah sang of a picnic on a holy mountain with finest of everything and everyone invited and every tear wiped away. No different from the salvation Jesus envisioned for the world, where love of God and neighbor make more sense than war and greed, and forgiveness feels better than holding on to old angers, and including people in is so much more soul satisfying than securing borders.

Easter is God's surprise that love is stronger than death, and that is what keeps us working for peace and justice and racial reconciliation, in spite of long odds; it's what keeps us in our own lives saying NO to fear, and embracing our own future with hope - because Christ is raised and God knows our name and wants nothing more for us than full and joyous life.

But Easter is not all trumpets and alleluias. It certainly was not for Mary, that morning. Or for Jesus. Don't cling to me, he says. Do you hear the pathos of his having to leave behind, in an essential way, a woman he dearly loves? Do you hear Mary's recognition, both joyful and profoundly sad, that Jesus lives -- but in that quiet morning light, is gone from her own life forever?

Easter is God's pure grace, the reversal of death's hold, the mystery at the center of the universe and the heart of our faith. But it is also personal. God's great love for the world revealed in a young rabbi having to leave his beloved Mary.

Without the pain of parting, ending, no new life can occur. And new life, born in courage and joy, is so much what God wants for us all.

Christ is risen. Alleluia. Amen.

* Today's children's message was from "The Runaway Bunny" by Margaret Wise Brown