Mary: A Witness to Self-Revelation
Posted by Webmaster on July 26, 2009 under Sermons | 
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[This sermon was written and delivered on July 26, 2009, by Preacher Alex Wilson.]
There’s a couple who has been married for over 60 years. For the past few years, they have suffered together through a humiliating disease that has robbed them of their vitality: she has now forgotten who her husband is. The pain is overwhelming for him, how can he allow himself to grieve a life lived, but be so present to the rest of his family?
There’s a couple about to bring their child to baptism. Suddenly, the intensity of the commitments being made on their child’s behalf becomes overwhelming and they are unsure if they can live up to what the world expects of them. How can they be present for their child as it grows and matures in Christ?
There is a man waiting in his doctor’s office. He has had some mixed medical results and is awaiting the final answer. Within moments, he hears what he dreads: “You’re HIV positive.” How can he be emotionally available to the life ahead of him while living a stigmatized existence full of life-prolonging drugs and pain?
The one thing that unites all of us to these situations is self-revelation. We are all connected to one another and in this connection, the darkness we feel in these moments is overwhelming. For Mary this morning, the violence of the world has just been sent out and realized on Jesus. Now the Saviour of the world is lying cold, and bruised in the darkness of his earthen tomb. The light is gone, the apostles are scattered, scared, and Mary is left wondering- how do I live into this moment and grieve a love that has been taken from me? This wasn’t supposed to end this way! Mary’s witness calls us to ask, “In the chaos of a post crucifixion world, how do we recognize the sacred among us?”
As Christians, we believe that through baptism there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God found in Christ Jesus – not even death. However, even in the face of separation, that statement can be easier said than lived: in the final moments of the rite of Christian burial as we commend our brother or sister to the loving arms of our maker – known as the commendation – in that moment, we are struck with the reminder of just how final this moment is for our eyes: the souls of our loved ones are gone – resting within God’s loving bosom until the coming of Christ.
However, the story does not end there.
As humans, we are pathologically set up for connection, set up to be close to the things that mean the most to us. Even in death, we still need to be close to those we love- even if it’s just a plot of grass, an urn of ashes, or the cold stone of their tomb. Mary, knowing no other way to console her loss, comes back to the tomb to be close to her love, her savior, to find some closure to all the violence. Instead of finding a tranquil place to grieve her loss in the darkness of that early morning, Mary finds an empty tomb reminiscent of her longing soul as it looked down at the discarded wrappings where she had just witnessed Christ’s body laid after his death.
Such a loss or dejected feeling as experienced by Mary is not something new for many of us in the church today. All too often, we can empathize with Mary in her grief at the loss of a great love, the still point in her life.
Working within the maze we understand, as the polity of the Anglican Communion can be a cautious experience of balancing equilibriums. Yet time and again, we are reminded just how connected we remain in our divergence. Through the Apostles creed, we are linked to the church universal, connecting our worship to the host of humanity, yesterday, today, and yet to come. However, no matter where in the Anglican world we find ourselves, I often feel like we say the same words – but hear it differently. In this place, we know and affirm the love of God as it permeates all things, male, or female, and everything in between. We openly recognize the legitimacy of the ordination and consecration of female priests and bishops, but even that came with many years of discussion and some pain. This understanding of our mutual way of life within the Anglican Church in Canada is a non negotiable: this is who we are, but that does not apply worldwide. We only need to go south of the border to find a few dioceses that still refuse to ordain women, or recognize the sacred and God-given love held between two men, or two women. The polarization of the communion becomes more and more apparent as those who disagree with our expression of Anglicanism choose to assert their at-times violent and hurtful self-proclaimed orthodox visions of faith to a world confused by the existence of two interconnected voices.
This must have been what it felt like to be the disciples after Christ’s death: polarized, scared, unsure, treading into a world that had at times chosen to forget the importance and centrality of our witness. Like Mary, we try and go back to the origins of our faith – to get as close as possible to Christ in the darkened tomb. We appeal to the instruments of communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primates council, covenant-working groups, dioceses and listening groups, and yet, everytime we come to the empty tomb and always hear the same question “ Woman, why do you weep?”
We stand in the shadow of that great stone tomb, thinking, wishing, and hoping the worst is over – but we know it isn’t. The world around us is a place that has chosen to grow weary of our message and our place in an ordered society. We live in one of the larger thriving urban cities in North America, known the world over as a destination city for not only beauty and personal wealth, but also stability of lifestyle. However, with every successive Canadian census more and more of our neighbors are identifying themselves religiously as “other” or “none.”
When I admit my connection to a faith community, many people I meet don’t know how to react- some take disbelief, some astonishment, some joking curiosity, and still some hostility. Throw in human sexuality and it just gets messier. However, no matter the perspective people take in reaction to our commitments to this community of faith and the Anglican expression of Christianity given to us by baptism, one thing unites them all: connection through revelation. The world is dying to know what we do, how we do it, and how they can be involved. Sexuality, internal polity, mud slinging and law suits over who has the right to minister to whom and where mean nothing to the world outside these walls. Covenants, press releases and statements of conflicting Lambeth-style conferences on the true orthodox Anglican faith mean little to the everyday lives of those who walk past our buildings or come to visit us for the first time.
What does matter is connection, and witness. Connection by which we identify ourselves with those we serve and minister to, witnessing to the majesty of the sacred within them. What the world needs to hear, as Mary did in the darkness of that tomb is the voice of hope: “Woman, why do you weep?” And not the voice of panic and anxiety: “They have taken away my lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”
The world hungers for the sacred face of the Christ within each of us to become more prominent, yearns to see and touch the divine presence among us. However, as a church, we choose to lament the empty tomb, instead of the voice of our beloved speaking plainly to us just in front of our faces. Like Mary, we are asked to give something we feel is beyond our abilities, beyond our reach – we are asked to give ourselves over to an animated God who demands we not hold on to him, but enter actively into the divine love dance of the cosmos.
This morning, we are reminded of the generations who have been wrestling with the same quandary: how can we not hold on to stability and comfort, especially when we just found it again.
Like anyone, I love to reminisce about the “good old days,” but why do we? There really never was the-good-old-days to begin with. As the years go on, slowly the memories of yesterday begin to be rewritten by our subconscious mind. The same seems to apply to the church at times. When things move in a new direction, a new prayer book, inclusive theology or fresh ideas on ministry, we often run screaming back to the good old days of church and empire where things were perfect and all humanity worked in harmony and concord. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth. Peoples, lands and communities were enslaved, deported, tested on or demonized in the name of or with the blessing (either verbal or silent) of the church. The most precious commodity of this world – our children – were put in the care of a few within our church and for many the abuse is something we will never understand, their heritage and identities stripped from them because they simply didn’t fit our norms. The good old days indeed!
One thing that becomes more apparent for me about the witness of Mary Magdalene is how little will ever be the same. That Easter morning encounter ensures, demands that nothing will ever be the same. No matter how hard either the disciples or Mary try, there is no turning back: Christ has been taken from us, but is not out of sight. Our life, our relational existence with the world around us has changed forever through the death and resurrection of Christ. In them, we find life in the depths of pain; in that Easter morning, we find Christ all around us, so plain to us that we almost can’t accept it. In Mary’s encounter with the risen lord, we are reminded of just how connected we are, of just how present the sacred is around us, and yet how we are unable at times to recognize it.
This wasn’t supposed to end like this. The God of Abraham and Sarah, the god of Jonathan and David, Miriam and Phoebe would never die. God’s majesty is far deeper, broader, holds more possibility than what any person or empire could kill. But this morning, we have Mary weeping for her beloved.
What Mary’s witness relates to us today is this: how we relate to those around us shows us how we acknowledge the sacred within them. We are at the fundamental cores of our bodies the same. Each of us is made up of flesh, bone, hair, skin cells and pigments, blood, breath and memory. And yet, even when we look so deeply into the reflection of ourselves in those we meet, we often forget the sacred nature of those whom we are looking at. I often wonder why is it that we choose to treat the Asian sales person with contempt, because they struggle with our common language? Why is it that we feel only a certain subset of the population is appropriate for janitorial work, when they arrive in this country as educated as our own professionals? Why is it we will walk over a homeless person making a scene, wishing someone would do something to take care of the problem? Or why we feel that the relative comfort of our lives here in Canada means that we don’t need and should not be directly involved in the humanitarian crises in places like Darfur, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and the list goes on.
Mary’s witness to us today reminds us that the God of Abraham and Sarah, the god of Jonathan and David, Miriam and Phoebe, of yesterday, today and tomorrow is not dead and never will be. The true witness of Mary that Easter morning was to the power of a living and triumphant God, a God who resides in our midst and at every corner.
Here in this place, we are reminded everyday of just how divergent we are as a family. This is the single greatest truth for me in community: All are welcome here, whoever we are and wherever we find ourselves on our journey. This speaks for us directly to our interconnected voices. None of us would be here without the other. None of us can do this alone; our faith demands the recognition of the sacred in the other, and in ourselves to unite and knit the tapestry we call a church together.
The power of Mary’s witness is as a reminder to us that the resurrection of Christ is as present to us as our own breath, our own thoughts and steps in the world; is as present as the mystery that is our sacred identity. It is within this divine mystery that Christ chooses to make himself known to us, not as the finality of death, but as joy, light and hope. For us this morning, we are challenged to go out into the world and recognize the Christ in the other – even when we can’t bring ourselves to see it. The world outside our doors is begging to hear the words Mary first proclaimed to the apostles
“I have seen the lord!” And I would add, he is here in the faces among us!
ALLELUIA!
ALLELUIA!
ALLELUIA!
Amen!