“When 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).” ~
John 20:14-16
The other day, I was walking
through the halls of First English. I came to the narthex and noticed the
colors of the large stained glass windows cascading onto the wall. I had
seen this effect on many numerous occasions, but that day I decided to stare up
at the window. I meditated on the Victory Lamb that is at the center of
the stained glass motif. This lamb is marching triumphantly, with a crown
adorning his head and a flag resting in the crook of his arm. Of course,
this lamb represents Jesus Christ, the sacrificial lamb who died for the sake
of the world and who was raised by God in order to crush the powers of sin and
death.
I had just finished the book Pastrix:
The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint, by Nadia Bolz-Weber,
when I took my walk through the hallways. In one of the chapters, she
describes a time she preached in front of 10,000 people at an Easter worship
service in Colorado. She was preaching on the resurrection text from
John’s gospel. During her sermon she proclaimed, “Easter is not a
story about new dresses and flowers and spiffiness. Really, it’s a story
about flesh and dirt and bodies and confusion, and it’s about the way God never
seems to adhere to our expectations of what a proper God would do… Jesus didn’t
look very impressive at Easter, not in the churchy sense, and certainly not if
Mary Magdalene mistook him for a gardener.”
During my meditation on the
Victory Lamb, I started to think how we beautify the resurrection. On
Easter Sunday, the brass communion and altar ware are used again during the
liturgy at FE. Crisp, white paraments and lilies adorn the chancel,
altar, walls, pulpit, and cross. We put out extra candles to light up the
worship space. We play triumphant, loud music. Many of us might dress in
our “Sunday’s best” to attend this worship service. Easter is the day to
celebrate the beauty, glory and joy of God’s triumph over the sin and
death.
Nevertheless, our baptisms
into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ do not exempt us from the
imperfections of this world. We are still called to engage
with a world that is filled with faithlessness, messiness, chaos, ugliness,
deficiencies, weakness, you name it. Some of these things we might even
find within our own lives. Just because we are transformed does not make
us perfect. We have not been made new in Christ to be perfect. We
have been made new to walk the path of the cross. The cross was a symbol
of punishment, shame and death. Granted, we will (most likely) not face
the degradation of crucifixion. However, we will face those imperfections
and we will be called to enter into them. We are called to meet people in
their needs; to not pass judgments but to be the presence of Christ; and to
proclaim that God gives life, forgiveness and salvation. As Christians,
we are “in this world but not of it”… but we are still in it. We are
still among all the people of God’s creation. We are still in the midst
of sin, darkness, and death. God will be with us to lift us out of our
own darkness and sin – we have been assured of life, forgiveness, and salvation
in our baptisms. But then we are sent into this world – amidst the chaos,
darkness, sin, messiness – to bring the light, life and grace of God in Christ
to all. Let us remember this mission as enter into the holy season of
Easter.
In the Name of Christ – Pastor Maureen