3/23/08                                                                                         John 20:1-18  

“DO YOU SEE THE LORD? ARE YOU LOOKING?”

Rev. James Singleton

“But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb.” It may seem odd that the first response that the first Easter elicited from Mary Magdalene was not one of joy or relief, but one of sadness and weeping. She wasn’t weeping because her Lord was inside the tomb, she was weeping because he wasn’t inside the tomb! She had come to the tomb early that Sunday morning to pay her respects one last time to the man who had meant so much to her life. 

Whatever her life was before she met Jesus, it was nothing compared to what her life became after she met Jesus. He made her feel like somebody special. He made her believe that God cared for her; that God loved her; that God forgave her and that God would always be there for her. When she was with him, she felt beautiful; she felt important; her life was complete.

And then they killed him. How could she ever face life without him?  Life suddenly took on a frightful aspect. She felt alone, she felt abandoned, and she felt frightened. If only she could go back to the way things were—before all of the changes. So she comes to the tomb wherein he lay to pay her respects one last time and to dream of the way it use to be. 
 

But when she arrives, she sees something that rocks her world—the stone that sealed the tomb wherein her Lord was buried is rolled aside and when she looks in, he is not there! Running to the disciples, not in excitement, but in desperation, she tells them what later she would say to someone she presumes to be the gardener who asks her why she is crying, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”

She is weeping because she wants Jesus’ dead body back! She is weeping because she no longer knows where Jesus is. If he’s not in the tomb, if he’s not sealed up in yesterday’s tragedy—then where is he?

Mary is locked up in the past. She can only think of Jesus in terms of what was. She cannot think in terms of what is or what can yet be.

Poet Dylan Thomas once wrote: “Men at forty close doors more slowly.” It is not only men at forty; it is women and men of all ages who are reluctant to close the door on the past.

Think of the last time you had difficulty letting go of the past and accepting something new. I would dare say that most of the depressions and anxieties that people suffer in life are a result of regretting changes that have taken place because we believe that the way we were was better than the way we are or will be. And so we fret and worry about the present and future—a lot 

When things are settled and routine, we feel the closeness of the Lord. But when life changes, when we lose the old job, when the stable relationship becomes unstable, when sickness replaces health, when what was so clear gives way to confusion, when who we were is no longer exactly who we are—that’s when we feel like we have lost our Lord. God has abandoned us. We want to go back to the time before the door closed on the old life.

Church members want church the way it use to be, before changes, when everything was familiar and routine. They are convinced that their Lord is missing from their church.

Widows and Widowers long for the time when they still had their loved ones by their side each night and can’t imagine their life ever again being good and feel like death has taken away their Lord.

Students go the college and hear thoughts that challenge the way they have understood their world, understood their faith and suddenly they are perplexed and lost and don’t know who they are or who God is. It feels like some professor has stolen their Lord.

The point is that life changes and when it changes it throws us for a loop. Before change comes into our lives we know the lay of the land, we understand where the boundaries are, we know what direction we are headed. Before change, we feel in control, we feel sure, we believe the Lord is with us.

But after change, we find ourselves in a strange and foreign land and we no longer know exactly where we are or where we are headed. We no longer feel secure and safe. When life changes, it feels like our Lord has suddenly been stolen from us and we don’t know where he is.

Mary is weeping because her Lord is no longer entombed! She is so locked in the past that she doesn’t even recognize him when he comes to her as the risen Lord and asks her why she is weeping.  She thinks he is the gardener! It never crosses her mind that it could be her Lord. Never in her wildest imagination did she believe that the new and the strange could be a place where her Lord would be found in new and exciting ways.

It was not until Jesus said to her, “Mary!” that her eyes and faith were awakened. And then he goes on to tell her, “Do not hold on to me.” What a strange thing to say to her. But when you think about it, that’s exactly what she is doing. She is holding on to the way he was, to the way things wer 

She is trying to imprison him by holding on to only what she believes is possible. To release Jesus is to allow him to go into our future and do new things. It is to believe that the old ways, old life, old status quo that we so desperately hold onto can be let go of and that God can do something new with us yet. 

Faith demands that we open our eyes to see the new possibilities that the resurrected Lord can lead us toward. In fact, the most powerful evidence we have of the resurrection of Jesus is not found in the past but in the unexpected new life we discover when we open our eyes upon the present.

A woman I know woke up one morning and there was her husband, dead beside her in the bed. She was crushed, vowing she would remain a widow, alone for the rest of her life. She felt like death had not only taken her husband but it had taken her life and her God in the process. She stopped coming to church because she didn’t believe life could ever be good again 

 Then one spring day I got a call from her. “Guess what? I’m in love again. Is it possible for me to be in love again?” I did her wedding and at the ceremony she wanted me to read a resurrection passage of Scripture. She found the Lord in the unexpected place of change.

A woman left her job to care for her sick mother. She felt anger and sadness at having to alter her lifestyle for a mother she never did get along with that well. She and her mom baked cookies together. They would take those cookies to the church for funeral dinners, to neighborhood families with children, to friends who were experiencing hard times. A funny thing happened. In the process of baking hundreds of dozens of cookies while talking, sharing, laughing and crying together, she and her mom found a depth to their relationship they never had before. Resurrection was found in the change

Rev. Callie Smith tells about a man in her congregation who is losing his wife to Alzheimer’s. He misses the way it used to be with her. He visits her nursing home every day, and then he and some other regular visitors get together with a cooler of Mountain Dew in the gazebo just outside the front door of the nursing home 

They laugh and carry on, and you can tell by watching them that they have a good time together. When other visitors pass, they call out: “Hey, come have a drink!” Rev. Smith comments, “It almost sounds like they are saying, ‘Hey, even here we’re laughing. Even here we’re enjoying each other and the day. Even here, God is doing something new and good.’”

·        Easter calls us to step into the unwanted changes that life brings with faith and hope.

·        Easter calls us to not be afraid of living with change, not be afraid of what lies around the next bend, the next day, the next stage in life.

·        Easter calls us to the faith that Jesus is not entombed in the way things use to be—Jesus is alive and free and we will find him in the unexpected places of everyday struggle; everyday heartbreak; everyday burdens bringing something unexpectedly fresh and alive to us.

Easter is the only Christian holiday that is set according to the moon. In the church’s ancient wisdom, it was decided that it should always fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. Why this complicated formula for Easter? So that Easter always coincides with the springing of the New Year. The Easter message is a call to believe that the gray, dull, cold days of old winter will give way to warm, sunny days of spring 

As the buds that were encased in ice and snow just weeks ago will grow into blossoms, so will our own lives. But new blossoms in our lives come from change and the belief that something good will come out of change because Christ the Lord is risen.

·        To expect a sealed tomb and find an empty one;

·        To hunt for the past and discover the future;

·        To seek a corpse and encounter new life—that is Easter.

Mary’s last words were, “I have seen the Lord.”  She has gone from weeping to seeing, from holding onto the past to beholding the miracles of the present, from reluctantly closing the door of yesterday to discovering opened doors to new tomorrows 

Do you see the Lord? Are you looking for him in your present or are you simply lamenting the past? Do you believe Christ is alive and doing new things, or are you still holding on to him by remembering the things he use to do before the changes came?  

It can be a tall order to believe that God will take whatever difficult, confusing, frightening thing a new day holds and make it good. Yet, God gives us resurrection promise—the promise that Jesus’ new life is coming into our old lives.  

As the great hymn proclaims, “Christ the Lord is risen today!” Look for him. He’s here. He’s alive. And if you just don’t try to hold on to what was, you will be amazed at what will yet be.              

 AMEN.