Sermon: “Into the Woods” (Mark 9:14-28)

On Friday night, Liz, Emily and I went to go see older daughter Grace perform in the school play, which was the Sondheim musical, “Into the Woods.” 

Have you heard of it? Anybody seen it?  

Proud dad stuff aside – mostly – it was a great show. 

The thing about Stephen Sondheim musicals is that there’s always an ironic twist to them.  

For example, there’s one where the music starts out very sad and gets happier and happier as the show goes along.  

That sounds great, right? 

The only problem is that it begins at the end and goes on to tell the whole story in reverse order—so instead of telling us about someone triumphing over adversity, the whole thing is about how, in this case, adversity wins, with the hero of the story getting less clear about that as the show goes on, while for the audience, it gets painfully more and more clear.  

That’s Sondheim. 

So when I tell you that the show we saw last night, “Into the Woods,” is his take on classic fairy tales, well…you might guess how he would run with that.  

There are a lot of really interesting moments I could tell you about, but I’ll focus on just one idea that I took away from it. 

I want to talk a bit about what he’s getting at with this idea of “the woods.”  

Obviously, the whole idea of going “into the woods” is classic fairy tale stuff.  

Little Red Riding Hood does, of course – you probably remember that story.  

But a bunch of other characters also do – Cinderella, Jack of Beanstalk fame, a baker and his wife. 

Each of them harbors some version of a very human wish: for example: a wish for love, for an end to their poverty, or for a child.  

And through one set of circumstances or another, each of the characters has to leave the safe, comfortable, well-known world of the village and go into the dark, confusing, and perhaps dangerous woods to realize their wish.  

A lot of stories go like this, right? 

This is where the twist comes in.  

Because slowly but surely, the characters all get what they’ve wished for, which is great.  

Great happiness ensues.   

There’s only one problem.  

It’s just the end of Act I.  

And this is where the story gets much deeper. 

Because when Act II begins, some time has gone by. 

Several months…maybe a year.  

It isn’t too long after all the main characters’ wishes have come true…and yet already, one by one, they realize that they haven’t stopped wishing.  

Wishing doesn’t end.  

New hopes pull at our hearts.  

Restlessness can set in, sometimes quite abruptly and earlier than we might ever expect.

New challenges need facing.  

For Sondheim, love and happiness are more elusive than fairy tales suggest, and true loyalty and friendship harder to come by and far more surprising than we could ever believe…until we find ourselves in the woods.  

The average fairy tale is far too neat when it comes to the messiness of life.  

When it comes to the human predicament, he’s not going to let even a fairy tale pull its punches.  

As he sees it, life doesn’t send us out “into the woods” just once, or only by our own choice.  

One way or another, we find ourselves out there many times.  

You get the idea.  

You can also understand why some audiences find this pretty gloomy.  

But if you ask me, I don’t think Sondheim is trying to be gloomy. 

He’s just unusually honest about the things that can make life so hard and so beautiful.  

If we wonder why attributes like wisdom, character, and solidarity are not only so important, but also somewhat more rare than they ought to be, and so hard won, even for the best of us – well, Sondheim would gesture toward the woods.  

The truths we find out there never fail to surprise us.  

II.

 Our Gospel reading this morning is the story of a healing.  

It comes from Mark’s gospel. 

In fact, it’s the story right after Jesus comes down from the mountain where he is transfigured before Peter and two of the others—when the narrative begins to point toward Jerusalem and Holy Week.  

The other disciples have been busy in his absence, trying to offer healing and preaching in the same spirit as Jesus, but without much success.  

As far as the preaching goes, they are getting shouted down by the skeptics. 

Their lack of success in healing a boy who has been possessed by a demon surely is not helping to convince anyone, either.  

The whole scene seems tense and chaotic.  

What really makes this story different than so many other accounts of exorcisms and healings are the words of the boy’s father. 

Jesus arrives and takes in what’s happening, and at first, his response has a kind of “o ye of little faith” quality. 

This is directed at the father but isn’t meant just for him, by any means.  

The father pleads with him, saying “If you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”  

Jesus responds, “ ‘If you can’? Everything is possible for one who believes.” 

But then the father says something that nobody else has said to Jesus before.  

He says, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

“I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief.” 

He comes before Jesus in profound desperation, and yet also with total honesty.  

Because the messiness of life has sent him into the woods. 

The obvious answers have not solved his problems. 

His son isn’t just a sick kid—his son is sick in a way that would have scared other kids, and not just them. 

He’s sick in a way that would have prompted neighbors to keep their distance, that would have drained the resources and tested the resilience of a family, maybe even broken a marriage.  

The gospel writer Mark makes clear that it’s been this way for years.  

Who wouldn’t find themselves wishing for something else at some point? 

How could you blame someone else for wishing? 

They’ve been wandering in the woods, confronting all these sad realities for years.  

That’s just to say that, by this point, the easy pieties and wishful thinking are long gone.  

What’s left is utter honesty.  

What’s left is that, when the father comes to Jesus, he still says “us”: “take pity on us,” he says, “help us.” 

Whoever else has fallen away, and however it is that came to pass, he has not fallen away.  

Wherever they need to go in hope of healing, he’ll find a way to get them there.  

Because, by God, somehow, he still believes in that. 

Against the long litany of all the things that father has learned he can’t believe in…must not believe in…there’s one thing he mostly still does—mostly, he still believes that with God, all things are possible.  

The woods have taken so much away.  

But somehow, by and large, they have left him with that.  

And he’s not afraid to name the truth that his heart is full of both. 

That’s the testimony that he steps up and lays right at the feet of Jesus.  

And Jesus immediately turns to the boy and heals him.  

III.

There are a lot of ways to talk about faith.  

Throughout its history, the church has reflected at length about what faith oughtto be, and it has gone on to describe that in a range of ways, each of which names something important for us to hold onto. 

Our Scripture this morning comes at this differently.  

It’s saying that faith is what has the power to abide when all the easier pieties and the lesser loves end up falling away. 

It’s what keeps going when we’ve long since abandoned any worldly notion of perfection.

It’s what we learn when life sends us out into the woods.  

On the further shore of our initial disillusionment, there is the call to seek a life beyond illusion, and in the believing and the unbelieving, the learning and the loving, to know first-hand the healing of God.  

May it be so. 

Amen.

Easter: A Church-meh User’s Guide

Why is Easter called “the most important day in the Christian calendar”?

Easter celebrates the central miracle in the Christian story: that Jesus, the man from Nazareth, died on the cross and yet rose again three days later, because he was not just a man, but also “the Christ” (which is Greek for “anointed one”), the Son of God.

Easter is the day when this occurred, and when his followers truly began to understand the truth about who he was for the first time.

What if that seems a little “woo woo” to me?

 It’s hard to be a Christian without some kind of relationship to Easter.

I don’t mean that judgmentally, but in the more specific sense that Easter is the warrant for a lot of key claims about Christian life and values.

For example, if we are moved by the idea that Jesus calls us to be peacemakers, maybe that’s because we just really, really like peace.

But if we understand peacemaking as some sort of broader duty, rather than as just a personal preference or a strategy of some kind for getting what we really want, we need to understand how peacemaking operates as a “should.”   For Christian tradition, Easter is the backing for that sort of “should.”

In response to such questions, it’s how Christians have been taught to answer, “Because God said so.” Easter is why we believe it’s actually God who said it: because Jesus is not dead, but risen…the very Son of God.

No offense, but I’m not really working on that level with this stuff. Can’t I just enjoy the flowers and the trumpets and the ladies in their hats?

Of course! No matter what your faith looks like or “how much you have” (which is an expression I don’t like at all), you should feel free to be part of a church service, and never feel guilty about enjoying what you enjoy about it.

Even so, give a tip of your bunny ears to the symbolism of joy and new life expressed in so many ways on Easter.

Most of us know the powers of diminishment and death. Whatever their specific forms in our lives (and there are many), these powers are all too familiar and all too real. Brokenness is a thing, whether it is personal or collective, ethical or political, cultural or environmental.

Easter is saying that, despite what might first appear, these powers that break us do not have the final word.

It’s saying we shouldn’t be fooled into despair and inaction.

It’s hope is that, once we begin to see the power of resurrection, or imagine the possibility of new life, our confidence in its power will grow even stronger.

So why has Christmas become bigger than Easter?

Gift-giving.

But we shouldn’t be snarky. I think Christmas has developed practices that anyone can take part in, and which hold a lot of meaning. There are so many ways to say “I love you” at Christmas, and so many people who ache to know that they are loved. There is tremendous power in that, and Christmas brings it out in us.

Jellybeans really can’t compete with that.

But new life surely could.

In that spirit, sometimes I wonder what it might be like if Easter developed its own practices of giving.

What if on Easter, the people closest to us had the right to request one gift from us–one way in which our life together might be made new?

For every sixteen year old who took it as an opportunity to ask for her own car, I have to believe that many more families would ask for things like more time together, or for dad to take better care of his health, or for a little more commitment to joy in their daily living together.

Those things are often deeply holy in their own way — and certainly they become so when behaviors that seemed “impossible to bring up, much less change” turn out to be neither. Faith often grows in soil just like that.

To me, there’s a whole lot of Easter in it, too.

Great Mills High School and the Logic of Misogyny

This week’s tragic school shooting in Maryland offers an interesting lesson in what Cornell philosopher Kate Manne has described as “the logic of misogyny,” in her powerful new book, Down Girl (2018), a careful analysis of the language and thought-structures of patriarchy.

Manne makes a central distinction between sexism, which she understands as “the branch of patriarchal ideology that justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal social order,” and misogyny, which she argues is “a system that polices and enforces its governing norms and expectations.”

Misogyny encompasses a range of behaviors, from physical violence to various kinds of social pressure (often internal as well as external). Sexism is more typically expressed as the scientific or quasi-scientific essentializing of gender norms under the banner of biology.

That distinction is already a fruitful one, for it gives a framework to understand how, for example, Austin Rollins, the shooter in Maryland, and his subsequent portrayal by police as “a lovesick teen,” are distinct but still related moves. Killing a classmate when a “relationship” is over? (The quotes are here because it’s still somewhat unclear just what that means in this case.) According to Manne’s framework, this is misogyny. Calling the murderer a “love-sick teen”? That seems closer to sexism, with his deliberate violence almost a kind of coming-of-age helplessness he was powerless to control.

Manne also notes a puzzling phenomenon she terms “himpathy,” the often shockingly sympathetic portrayal of male perpetrators, often despite even the most violent behaviors (cold-blooded murders, rapes) and the most definitive evidence (eyewitnesses, video).  Again, Rollins’ in school killing as an expression of “lovesickness” is a case in point.  It also need not be so extreme. “Himpathy” reframes even less lethal misogynistic behaviors into shell-games of agency and self-control, complicating in subtle ways our ability to make moral judgments.

For example, “himpathy” often masquerades as a broad-minded appeal to fairness. It  teaches us to seek some proper balance between the punishment a male “deserves” given “all he’s been through” (often because “whatever really happened, now he’s become a victim in all this, too”) versus the justice a woman “deserves” for having suffered at his hands.

“Himpathy” is generous in its offer of context for the perpetrator, making the issue bigger than just “the crime,” per se, and the story therefore not reducible to any bottom line of clear facts or concrete legal definitions of when and how laws were broken.

By making constant appeal to the broader justice to be seen in the light of that context, “himpathy” proposes even that, “given all the facts,” particular punishments (jail time, a recorded felony conviction, sex offender registration, or mere expulsion from school) should not apply for the perpetrator — because, well, he’s more than just a perpetrator. And “fairness” demands that this ought to matter.

Thanks to “himpathy,” the false equivalence of their respective forms of “deserving justice” obscures that it’s her actions (not his), and his ordeal (not hers) that often end up on trial.

Heads, patriarchy wins; tails, we lose.

 

Palm Sunday For People Getting Dragged Against Their Will

What is Palm Sunday?

Palm Sunday is the Sunday before Easter, and it commemorates Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem in the days before his death at the hands of the city’s Roman occupiers.

What’s the big deal?

A little history is helpful here.

A triumphant entry by God’s anointed rescuer had been imagined in the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) hundreds of years before Jesus.  It was anticipated as a moment of liberation for the Hebrew people, and the beginning of God’s reign of righteousness and peace, ultimately for all Creation. Jesus is boldly claiming to be the one his people have been waiting for.

What if I don’t believe in Jesus?

There’s still a lot going on in the story. For example, scholars debate whether Jesus knew he would be killed for such a public display of defiance. Certainly, he would have recognized the risks, to some extent.

But there are important questions in the story for everyone to ponder. Which truths in our lives call us to take risks? How far would we be willing to go in order to speak truth to power? Is there a line (or are there multiple lines) for us? Are we satisfied with lives that let others do our truth-speaking for us? Those are just a few.

You’ve said that Palm Sunday might be Christianity’s “most edgy” holiday. What’s that mean?

It’s edgy for Christians because it names how easily triumph can become triumphalism, or as one scholar has put it, how quickly a crowd can become a mob.

Most Christians recognize that throughout history, the Church as an institution has not always stood on the right side of justice or stood up for the dignity of all people. Christians can be quick to identify with Jesus as an outsider who stood for those things, but all too easily, we can fall into seeing others as sacred enemies — as “Romans” who need and deserve to be resisted, if not punished — in the name of justice and dignity for “us.”

But Palm Sunday is not about cheering the triumph of Jesus in any simple way. It’s also very much about recognizing ourselves in the crowd, as people who cheer his arrival on Sunday and then cheer his execution by the next Friday. Are there ways that we are more about winning than transforming the world? That’s a key question of Palm Sunday.

Why isn’t it a day that’s shrouded in black and built around quiet reflection, or asking forgiveness from those we have wronged, then?

Part of me thinks that would be amazing, actually.

But I think Palm Sunday still gets to be a triumphant, joyous day. It marks the triumph of the God we don’t expect or somehow get to vindictively deploy over the powers and rules of the world at its worst. Jesus wasn’t the warrior-king that many people were looking for — his understanding of liberation was a lot bigger than simply throwing the Romans out of his native land. The Old Testament had always said that, too.

His point was not that he should be the one sitting in the palace, running things. His point was that from the beginning, the world had been called to be a different kind of place.

Further, since the world wasn’t as it was supposed to be, it needed to be shepherded in the right direction, particularly by a people with a different set of values. Jesus saw that the world, left to its own devices, seemed to teach the wrong things. He believed that God, especially working in and through imperfect, but faithful people, would change that.

Palm Sunday was a symbolic reclaiming of the nation’s capital in the name of those values, and as a call to people of good will to get busy remaking the world.

It’s a call we need to follow more than ever.

“Ruth: Gold-digger or One True Love?” (Ruth 3)

In the early years of the nineteenth century, the Congregationalists of Connecticut had a short-lived dream of Christianizing the entire globe in a single generation.

That dream came about because of the arrival of a young Hawaiian native, later known as Henry, who had signed onto a Connecticut whaling ship when it had stopped for resupply on his island. Little did the ship’s crew realize that they had arrived during a lull in vicious internal wars by different island factions—the kind that made a ticket to anywhere else something very much worth thinking about, and which Henry acted upon.

Maybe it’s no surprise then that Henry stayed with the ship until its voyage concluded in New Haven and was in no hurry to return home.

He was taken care of by a series of students, then boarded with the families of several local pastors, and was converted to Christianity. His story was a matter of great interest throughout Connecticut, New England, and New York.

But he was only the first young “heathen” man – that was their term – to visit Connecticut, and soon it became clear that others were arriving, too, not only from Hawaii, but from all kinds of places.

And so the ministers of the Congregational churches began to imagine what might happen if these young men were not only converted, but then trained as missionaries and returned home to serve.

The possibilities seemed enormous. Funds were raised. Celebrities endorsed. Faculty were hired.

Eventually, buildings for a school were acquired upstate, in the town of Cornwall, which is in Litchfield County.

But after auspicious beginnings and ongoing coverage in the newspapers, tragedy struck.

A local mob attacked, and burned down the school.

You see, some of the heathen boys had taken the idea of Christian brotherhood too far.

“In Christ, you are no longer Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free,” it says in Paul’s letter to the Galatians.

Perhaps with that in mind, the boys had struck up friendships, and then potentially romantic interests, with some of the local girls of Cornwall.

Christianity, it seems, was one thing; racial mixing was quite another.

And so that was the end of that.

I’m thinking of that story today because it can be easy to forget how brave, in its way, Ruth’s visit to the threshing room floor to be with Boaz really was.

Remember: she is a woman in a time when women were viewed as having few, if any rights—and on top of that, she is a woman who comes from another place, where people worship another deity, and she has no one of any standing to protect her, much less vouch for her character, or her purity.

She comes in tow of her “mother-in-law Naomi,” but it’s “mother-in-law” in quotation marks because Ruth’s husband is dead, and Naomi’s husband is dead, and there are no children, and they had been living out there in Ruth’s country, so any notion of the letter of the law protecting anyone from anything was a non-starter.

And yet, as we noted last week, things are not so bad now that they’re in Bethlehem.

Life isn’t easy. But good things are happening.

In particular, Ruth receives generous treatment at the hands of Boaz, a wealthy, well-meaning landowner who was perhaps a cousin of her late husband’s family.

Boaz, it seems, is just one of those pay-it-forward kind of people. He’s been moved by Ruth’s loyalty to her mother-in-law, and he treats her not only with generosity, but even more remarkably, he offers her tremendous face-to-face respect.

And in that, of course, he sets the tone for how she will be treated by the community at large.

Ruth is the consummate outsider–a childless, destitute woman of another ethnic tradition. By contrast, Boaz is the consummate insider: a figure of great respect, a man, wealthy, in the prime of life, and religiously observant.

A cynic might say that in going to him on the threshing room floor, then, Ruth has nothing to lose, while Boaz has everything to lose—and perhaps that’s true.

On the other hand, the difference in their power abides with them in the darkness of that night, and come the morning, had Boaz decided to act as if nothing had happened—and simply ignored Ruth—well, there would have been no court of appeals for Ruth to turn to.

If by chance she became pregnant, the minute she began to show, they would have run her straight out of town for good.

Ruth would have known that all too well. And so it is brave that she goes.

Why does she?

She goes because in a world where so often, power and privilege come with the right to tell the story the way it suits the powerful few, Ruth is bold enough, loyal enough, and caring enough to imagine a different story.

As someone who gave up the protections of her own tribe to come to be with a foreign people and to see herself under the watchful eye of a foreign god, Ruth is uniquely well-positioned to see some things about tribes.

Specifically, she sees with remarkable clarity that tribes and their customs—their stories, their roles and responsibilities—offer a measure protection and predictability in a confusing world.   Thank God they do.

But Ruth also sees that those roles can prove confining, and that all stories have their limitations, and that being one of the privileged insiders means coming to see the world in a certain way…and feeling free to ignore the people and the situations that don’t fit into that worldview.

Now, there is more to Boaz than that. She sees that.

But she also knows that despite whatever chemistry there is between them, if she sits out on the front porch waiting for Boaz to show up with a dozen roses, she will be waiting a long time.

Boaz does not seem to know any stories like that. He does not seem to see the world that quite that way.

In a deeper sense, that’s just it: Boaz cannot wholly know just how his own lenses have shaped how he has come to see the world.

And so Ruth dreams of a new prescription, a different kind of story, not only for herself, but for Boaz, and Naomi, and for all of them.

So often, we speak of faith as a kind of patience – as a way of enduring with hope that things will be made right in God’s time.

Some of religion’s toughest critics have called faith an “illusion” or the “opiate of the masses,” precisely because it can so easily be misused as a way to keep things safe, tidy, and predictable—which is the way that all tribes like the world to be.

But this morning’s Scripture reminds us that, sometimes, God’s time is now.

At its best, our faith is a constant reminder that the world we see is not all the world there is, and that the path toward human wholeness is a path of engagement and encounter.

Whatever our stories may be, all Creation is part of God’s story – and that the role God has asked us to play is a role far greater, and far richer, than the expectations of any human tribe.

God’s love is unfailing and unchanging. But at its heart lies the promise of new possibilities for all of us.

You and I know that over the last few weeks, the world had reverted to many of its own – our own – most destructive and most tribal impulses.

In the last few days, the officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri has raised over a quarter of a quarter of a million dollars on the Internet. Sad to say, this is not a reflection of our nation’s commitment to due process – the comments left by visitors on the website are, frankly, a cesspool of every conceivable prejudice, and their glee is unmistakable.

Never has our need to imagine and work for new stories, and a broader understanding of fairness, been more urgent.

Sometimes, I worry that the only thing white Americans actually like about living in a pluralistic society are Mexican food and jazz music.

And if, from time to time, it so happens that we inhabit the same space, even so, let’s not pretend for a moment that we live in the same world.

Except that, as faith reminds us, we do.

We live in God’s world.

And if our tribes tell us how it is that we might coexist, and get along enough to live side by side, God’s word points to something much harder and more profound: it says that we are to learn how to live together.

We are to learn how to be part of one another’s stories, and to seek a new prescription for the lenses of our tribes.

That’s what Ruth did. In a world where people would have been all too ready to label her a shameless gold-digger, she was brave enough to act as Boaz’s one true love, and to rewrite their stories.

What can you and I do to rewrite the stories of who we are and what we owe our neighbors?

How can we come to see the things our own lenses may distort or even hide?

These are the questions of Ruth, and Ferguson, and even the Heathen School in nearby Cornwall—the questions of every era of American history, and every community. Port Chester and Stamford, Bridgeport and Greenwich.

Let’s ask those questions with hope and humility, remembering that it was the Congregationalists of Connecticut who, two hundred years ago, built a school for boys from all over the world, hoping to share the saving love of Jesus Christ.

And let’s remember that it was other Congregationalists of Connecticut who burned that school to the ground.

But let’s ask the questions.

And may the story of Ruth and Boaz remind us that new answers and new stories are always possible, if only we find the courage to help write them.

Amen.

An Easter Sermon: “Do Not Cling To Me”

Recently, I learned that there is a semi-official name for that area at the airport just on the other side of security – that spot where you can put your shoes and your belt back on, your keys back in your pocket, and your phone back in your hand.

It’s called the “recombobulation area.”

I hope that is true, because that’s exactly what it is.

And I mention this because there is something recombobulating – recombobulatory? – about Easter Sunday.

The energy, the festivity, the reemergence of bright colors, the pulse of new life in old, familiar hymns, the flowers along the road which always seem to blossom right on cue – these things all add up, and it is hard not to feel lifted by it, even pulled back together again.

The world is re-emerging, recombobulating, and maybe so are we. On Easter, we agree that, at the very least, we will take re-emerging under advisement.

And so, on Easter morning, we eat chocolate for breakfast and hope the cat won’t make a mess of that awful plastic grass, we throw on something colorful from the back of the closet, and we head out the door to church, hoping that Easter’s age old messages of hope and of life abundant and life eternal are all true.

You can’t help but wonder what the disciples, the alumni ofthat very first Easter, would make of it all.

Now I don’t know about you, but I find it hard enough to understand the appeal of Peeps all by myself without imagining trying to explain it to Saint Peter.

But more than that, I wonder how it would sit with the disciples, particularly because this day that so many of us find so deeply recombobulating was, for them, just the opposite.

By and large, for most of them, the empty tomb was not when the light bulb about the resurrection went on. For all appearances, to most of them, the empty tomb was no miracle. It seemed more like the final insult to Jesus.

According to John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene goes out at first light to attend to the sad work of preparing Jesus’ body for burial.

But when she arrives at the tomb where his body had been hastily taken on the eve of the Sabbath, she sees that the stone before the entrance has been moved away.

She assumes the worst.

Mary runs to Peter and reports, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him,” (v. 2).

They run and go see, and sure enough, it has all the marks of a desecrated grave.

And for most of them, that was the story of Easter. At least, right then it was. It looked like not only was Jesus dead, but that even in death, he had not been left in peace.

It was a depressing coda to the collapse of all their plans, all their dreams, all the hopes they had placed in this remarkable man who was now gone.

John tells us that a few — well, one of the disciples, sees and believes.

But whatever disciples make of the stone, and the linen wrappings left behind, and the head cloth strangely, even daintily rolled up and placed to one side in the tomb, the bottom line for most of them have to the scene is simply to shake their heads and start walking home.

And Mary Magdalene seems to represent what they’re all feeling, only more so, because now that she has been the bearer of the bad news, she just totally falls apart.

She’s like someone who has a bad day at work and makes itonly as far as her car in the office parking lot before she loses it completely.

The way John’s Gospel tells it, she’s so focused on Jesus that she doesn’t even register that she’s talking to angels, and then, actually, to Jesus himself.

Jesus approaches, and she assumes he must be the gardener.

But then he calls her by name, and suddenly…she realizes. It all falls into place.

She realizes that the man she’s talking to is not the gardener, but Jesus….that he’s there before her, and that he is alive.

She seems to grasp intuitively that, if he is alive, it is not because there has been some sort of mix-up on the cross or some sort of switcheroo, or that he’s managed some sort of hair’s breadth escape from death.

He is alive because he is the Son of God, and so, as the Apostle Paul would write, his death has been swallowed up in victory.

And in a moment, there in the garden, Mary Magdalene gets all this in a flash.

And this is where the story gets really interesting.

Because if what the story was about was simply recognizing that Jesus was – is – the Christ…if the purpose was simply coming to that flash point, that light bulb moment, then John should have ended this scene right there.

But he doesn’t.

So if that isn’t the story right there, then the point must be a slightly different point.

So…yes, John says: Mary gets it. Or does she?

If we look more closely, we have to wonder.

Because instead of embracing her, or drying her tears, or reaching to take her hand—all those tender gestures we might expect—Jesus all but jumps back and snaps at her, “Do not cling to me.”

Did she rush forward to hold him? Did her face bloom with joy as she reached out to take his hands in hers? Did she moved to drink him in for just a moment? Did she fall to her knees, as if to wipe his feet with her hair all over again, in a reprise of that scene of great tenderness?

The story doesn’t say. And yet, whatever gesture provoked it, it must have taken her aback when Jesus says sharply, “Don’t cling to me.”

And it’s hard to understand even now.

Yet if there is something recombobulating in this story, not only for Mary Magdalene but for us, it is to be found in something beyond simply believing that Jesus is risen or that he is the Christ.

John wants us to understand what that means.

And just to be clear, part of that is what it does not mean:

Because the point is not that Jesus will now pick up where he left off, resuming his ministry as it was before he was so rudely interrupted.

Nor will he now unleash the angelic armies in Heaven and lead them in retaking Jerusalem, and then the world, thus turning out, after all, to be the divinely appointed general the disciples had been hoping he might be.

For a moment, when he says “don’t cling to me,” it’s tempting to think that he’s decided he doesn’t even want disciples, anymore –that he’s buying back the stock and taking the whole enterprise private again.

But the harder truth is that Jesus tells Mary Magdalene “Do not cling to me,” not because he loves her, or any of the disciples, any less, or because wants any of them to love him any less.

It’s because what their love will look like now is poised to change.

He’s teaching her – showing her – and ultimately all of them, that they are being called to live in a new way.

Maybe it’s helpful to note that when the Gospels speak of “life,” especially “new life,” they use more than one word to describe it.

Most typical is the word, bios, which is the root of words like “biology” or “biography.” It means physical, bodily, individual life – what it is that medicine helps to heal and maintain.

But John’s Gospel uses a different word when it talks about life.

He uses the word zoe, and “zoe” refers to something larger than our physical lives – it points to life in general, and to “life” in the sense of “vitality”, as we mean, for example, when we say that someone has “come alive” or even that someone is “the life of the party.”

And the spiritual meaning of that distinction is important for John.

He’s saying that what matters is not, actually, our personal, physical lives, but that deeper sense of participating in life itself – that what matters is to come alive…not physically, per se, but spiritually.

The distinction is helpful for us this morning because what does Mary cling to?

She clings to the bios, the physical life of Jesus.

But as Jesus goes to rejoin the Father, he’s saying that what matters now is his vitality – his zoe – that sense of him that abides when someone else comes alive.

Because what’s going to matter now is not more teaching, another exorcism, another nighttime walk on the Sea of Galilee, or what have you. That was important, and it remains important. And yet, at this point, that is all bios.

What’s going to matter now is how the disciples live into and extend the redeeming work of God throughout the world. How they participate in God’s zoe.

 What matters now is that they need to join together to continue a work, a zoe, that has now grown beyond what the physical frame of one man could ever carry out.

 If God’s healing and transforming love are to reclaim the whole Creation, its power must be loosed by the committed work of a whole people.

Its vitality is found in lives that have come alive.

And so, if God calls Mary Magdalene not to cling to him, it is because he is calling her, pushing her, even compelling her to take on that next phase of God’s work.

And, of course, he is not just talking to her. He is talking to us, too.

Notably, she returns to the disciples and tells them, “I have seen the Lord.” It’s a testimony to her encounter to the risen Jesus that surprises and astonishes them, but most of all, it is testimony that prepares them for their own encounters in the following days.

Last Sunday afternoon, Grace and I were reading her children’s Bible on the porch of the Parsonage, which I am surprised and delighted to tell you was actually her idea.

And after the story of the Tower of Babel, and David and Goliath, and then Jonah and the whale, she got very excited and said, “Poppy, can we please read another fairy tale about God?”

So what is it that makes this story about Mary and the risen Jesus in the garden something more than just another fairy tale about God?

It’s only more if it prepares us for our own encounters with the risen Jesus, as Mary’s testimony did for the other disciples.

It’s only more if it calls us to join the work and life of Jesus in seeking and serving and sharing the redeeming love of God.

It’s only more if we respond to Jesus’ call to come alive.

We live in days when many seem to have forgotten that. Days when many seem to prefer the simplicity of a carefully defined structure and of a checklist of beliefs that affirm your right to belong, and even to call yourself “Christian” at all.

But I’ve always thought that Jesus was calling us to something that is much, much greater, and much, much harder, precisely because it resists structures and checklists and easy ways of proving who is inside and who is not.

Jesus is calling us to our own experiences of encounter, and Jesus is calling us to point other people, not to the truths we hold self-evident because of our encounter, but always to point them toward their own encounter, counting on their truths to meet ours, and for the way forward to be something we find together, with the grace of God.

And to meet God in the mix of it. In the zoe that supports and sustains us all.

Easter reminds us that no matter how well we think we know Jesus, no matter how deep our commitment and love may be, he is always calling us into new situations, new challenges, and new places where we might encounter him anew…places where we will find capacities within ourselves we never dreamed possible.

It is only when we do not cling to him that we come to know the life he gave his human life to offer for us all.

And so this morning we remember the lesson of Mary. The lesson of Easter. The lesson of an empty tomb and a Lord who remains to be found among his people and the work they continue in his name.

Easter is a call to live on the other side of security, recombobulated and repurposed, and finally ready to be on our way.

 Alleluia.