Vilas Memorial Window, Grace Episcopal Church

 I was fortunate as a college professor that I taught at small liberal arts college where the number of students in my courses never exceeded 30. This was back before the age of smart phones and our department had a camera that some of my colleagues used on the first day of class to take photos of their students so they could put faces to names more quickly.

In my own experience, I learned that if I called the roll for two weeks, by the end of that time, I would know the students’ names by heart. Of course, they made it easier for me because they always sat in the same seat in the room. It would often happen that I would encounter a student on the sidewalk or in the library two or three years after I’d had them in class. I could recall where they sat in the room, what their final grade was, but often their name would be a complete mystery. Usually, several nights later I would suddenly wake up and there it was, on my lips, the name of that student.

The same thing happens at church, of course. If you’ve visited a few times, it’s likely I’m going to remember your face—but unless I see your name written out, it will take quite some time for me to remember it. There are also some people who come regularly whose name I don’t know—often, it’s because they want to remain invisible, or unnoticed. And then there’s the phenomenon of me walking into a restaurant or grocery store out of uniform, and encountering someone from church or someone I know from some other official capacity. They’ll take a second look, a puzzled expression comes on their face, and finally, I will end the suspense. Without a collar, it’s as if I’m in disguise (well, to be honest, sometimes I am in disguise).

While there are some places, and some groups, where we want to remain anonymous, there are also times when, as the theme song to the 1980s sitcom Cheers, put it: “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.”

That moment in John’s gospel where Jesus calls Mary Magdalene by name is intimate, dramatic, and revelatory. It’s a moment captured in the image on today’s service bulletin, courtesy of a last-minute request I made to our Communications Coordinator, Peggy Frain, a photo of one of the panels from the Vilas Window which is to my right.

But let’s step back a moment and explore this wonderful story in greater detail. The Gospel of John is wonderful, perplexing, challenging, at times, infuriating. It provides us so much imagery, so many ideas, tantalizing nuggets of information that it’s easy to get caught up in the detail and over interpret, or read too much into relatively minor points. Still, there is so much here—first, unlike in the other gospels where Mary Magdalene is accompanied by other women, and they have a set purpose in mind, anointing Jesus’ body with burial spices, in John, Mary comes alone, and for no particular purpose (Nicodemus took care of the embalming earlier).

In the other gospels, the women come at the break of day, here Mary comes at night—which reminds us of other nights in the gospel, the night early on when Nicodemus came to Jesus; the night a few days earlier, when Judas left Jesus and the others on his mission of betrayal; the night or darkness, throughout the gospel that stands in contrast to the light of Christ. We might infer that Mary herself is coming in the night, because she doesn’t know the light…

Then there’s the footrace between Peter and the beloved disciple, a race one by the other disciple, but he waits, and lets Peter enter first. There is the careful detail describing how the linen grave clothes are arranged, and the observation that the beloved disciple sees and believes, though what precisely he believes isn’t clear.

But back to Mary. After Peter and the Beloved Disciple go home after their morning run, probably stopping for coffee along the way, Mary stays behind in the garden, overwhelmed by grief. Probably, she’s still struggling to understand what’s happened, not quite believing that the tomb is empty. For the first time, she decides to look inside for herself, perhaps wondering what the other disciples had seen when they entered. Instead of grave clothes, she sees two angels who ask her, “Woman, why are you weeping?”

Mary’s response is partly bewilderment, partly a declaration of faith. While she can’t make sense of the scene in front of her, by refering to Jesus as her Lord, she proclaims her belief that, all evidence to the contrary, Jesus is (or was) the Son of God.

In the middle of her encounter with the angels, Mary senses another presence behind her and turns. John puts it succinctly, and lets we the readers in on the secret before Mary figures it out: “…saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus.” We know it’s Jesus, and John writes it in such a way that we want to know how or when Mary will figure it out.

Jesus calls her by name and the eyes of her soul are opened. She recognizes him and calls him, “Rabbouni” Teacher. It’s a poignant, powerful moment, and it’s not just about Mary finally figuring out who Jesus is. Rather, when he calls her by name, he tells her who she is, and their relationship is restored and deepened. Mary is known and loved by Jesus and when he calls her by name, she enters into that love and knowledge.

We live in a world in which our lives are played out for the world to see. We share intimate details and photos of ourselves on facebook or instagram; we are connected to people across the globe via twitter and engage in debate and controversy with people we’ve never met face to face. Our personal details are mined for our political and shopping preferences and our efforts to maintain personal privacy rarely succeed.

Still, in all of that, the intimacy we so often desire remains elusive. Our mobility, jobs that require our attention and focus far beyond forty hours a week, the temptations of social media, mean that our relationships are tentative, often shallow, temporary. We want to hide so much of ourselves from others, out of fear or shame.

“Mary,” Jesus said. And in that instant, the veil that separated the two of them in the garden fell away and Mary saw her Lord. He called her by name, and not only did she recognize him, she also came to understand and know herself, in relationship with Jesus, and known, and loved, by him.

The Risen Christ calls us by name, knows us by name. When we hear his voice, we begin to know ourselves and are invited into relationship with him, to become his.

The Risen Christ stands before us in the garden. The Risen Christ comes to us in bread and wine of the Eucharistic feast. The Risen Christ encounters us in the community gathered to hear the proclamation of the Word. The Risen Christ encounters us in the faces of the outcast, the homeless and hungry, the widow and orphan, in immigrants, prisoners, the LGBT community.

The Risen Christ calls us by name, inviting us into relationship with him. He invites us to bring all of our baggage, all of our wounds and scars, all of our sins and brokenness. When we hear his voice, and answer his call, we become whole and healed, loved and known by him. May the sound of his voice fill you with joy, heal your brokenness, dry your tears. May we all know the joy and love of the Risen Christ. Thanks Be to God!

One of things I love about being a priest are the strange, sometimes unsetting, often grace-filled encounters I have with people. It can happen when I’m wearing my collar, running errands before or after work. As an example, my church in South Carolina was very close to the Home Depot, and I often stopped there after work to buy supplies for a home project. Once, I was stopped by an employee in the parking lot who asked me if I would pray for him. We stopped right there, and after inquiring about what was troubling him, we shared a prayer I anointed him, and offered a blessing.

It can happen when I’m out of uniform. Continue reading →

Can you imagine what it must have been like for Jesus’ disciples as they grieved his death? They had come with him from Galilee. They thought he was the Messiah. It’s likely many, if not all of them, imagined that when they got to Jerusalem, Jesus would instigate a revolt that would lead to the Jewish people’s independence from Rome. Instead, here they were the day after he had been arrested and crucified in a public and horrific display of Rome’s power. If you read the gospels, it’s clear that the disciples themselves went in hiding. They were noticeable for their out-of-town accents and likely feared that if they were caught, they would end up like Jesus, crucified, crushed under Rome’s tyranny.

How deep was their grief and despair? Had they begun to consider what they were going to do with the rest of their lives, that is, if they safely escaped Jerusalem? Or would that come later, after the worst of the grieving was over, after they had made their way to safety, after they had begun to pick up the pieces of the lives they had left behind, months, or even years before?

I wonder if the feelings they had in those couple of days are anything like the feelings many of us have right now, as we despair over the state of our city, our state, our nation, even the world. The unrelenting barrage of negative news just keeps coming. Global Warming threatens life on our planet and we’re experiencing foretastes of it with longlasting drought in California. Violence in our world as we hear stories of the deaths of Christians in Kenya, in the Middle East, and Nigeria. War continues in so many places—Syria, Ukraine.

It’s no better closer to home. How many of us are struggling with the threatened budget cuts—to UW, for example? What about the ongoing racial disparities in our community? And then there’s the despair and grief that only or our closest friends and family know—the deaths of loved ones, serious illness, broken relationship, unemployment. The euphoria created by a Badgers victory in the Final Four is only temporary. Too soon, today, tomorrow, Tuesday, we’ll be back to the reality of our lives and world.

Some of us may be asking questions very like the ones Jesus’ disciples were asking, “What now? How do we put our lives back together? How do we go on?”

We bring those questions with us today. We bring with us the struggles and pain of our lives and our world. We are like Mary Magdalene, who came to the tomb to mourn Jesus’ death. Her world was broken, as ours is. She was lost and grieving. We don’t even know why she came to the tomb that morning. Unlike the other gospels, John doesn’t say she came to anoint Jesus for burial (In fact, that had already taken place). She came in grief, to mourn her teacher.

When she came to the tomb and found it empty, she ran back to tell the disciples. Peter and the Beloved Disciple ran back with her, probably in disbelief. They wanted to see for themselves that the tomb was empty, that Jesus’ was gone. And when they arrived and their curiosity was satisfied, they returned to the place they had been staying.

But Mary Magdalene stayed behind, weeping, disconsolate. Peter and the Beloved Disciple had looked in the tomb; they saw the rolled up linen burial cloths. They had seen enough. Mary followed them. Only now did she peer inside the tomb, and she saw something very different. She saw two angels who asked her why she was weeping. She still couldn’t figure it out—she didn’t know who, or what, they were.

Then she turned and saw another figure, one who asked the same question of her that the angels had, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She’s still confused, she thinks it might be the gardener, so she replies to him as she had to the angels, asking where Jesus’ body had been taken. It’s only when he says her name that she recognizes him and calls him, “Rabbouni.”

The whole gospel has been building to this moment. This encounter has been foreshadowed repeatedly from the very first chapter. When Jesus called his first disciples, he bid them “Come and see.” When Nicodemus came to him by night, wanting to know more about this great teacher and worker of miracles, Jesus talked about the new life that he was offering those who followed him. In his last public appearance before his arrest and crucifixion, some Greeks came, they wished to see him. In each case, people came in search of something, wanting to see Jesus, but it’s not clear that they did; it’s not clear that they encountered him, understood his words. It’s not clear that experienced his life-giving words.

And now, in this encounter in the garden, Mary Magdalene, didn’t know who or what she saw until Jesus spoke to her, and called her by name. In that moment, with that simple word, her eyes were opened and she experienced resurrection.

Well, I suppose that settles it. Or perhaps not. The resurrection—the notion that Jesus emerged from the tomb after dying, that he lives now—lies outside of human experience. Even the gospel writers, even Paul, in the reading from I Corinthians, struggle to make sense of it, struggle to communicate what it was, what it means to their readers and to us. The stories in the gospels are confused and contradictory—was it a young man? One angel? Two? Who came to the tomb and why? And to whom did Jesus first appear?

There are actually only a few details on which the gospels agree—that women, among them Mary Magdalene, came to the tomb; that it was empty; that they received the news that Jesus had risen from the dead. And Paul, who’s writing a few decades before any of the gospels were written, doesn’t seem to know anything about the women or the empty tomb. He says the Risen Christ appeared first to Peter, then to the twelve. He goes on to list other appearances of the Risen Christ including one to himself, “and last of all as to one untimely born, he appeared to me.”

But to ask these sorts of questions, as interesting as they are, is to miss the point entirely. We are trained to be skeptics, even cynics. We want only to believe what we see with our eyes, what we can touch. We want to believe only what conforms to our worldviews, our expectations, the narrow confines of our minds. Think of our political and cultural discourse. We are full of what is called confirmation bias—fitting the evidence into our preconceived categories, expectations, and worldviews.

But the resurrection lies outside all of that. It is incomprehensible, incommensurate, inconceivable. To imagine what might have happened, to understand what Mary Magdalene might have experienced, we need to think differently, we need to have our eyes opened.

John begins his account of the last supper with the following sentence, “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” In those chapters, indeed throughout the gospel, in Jesus’ encounters with others, he offers them new life, rich abundant life, life lived in him. That’s what he means by love. Love is not just an emotion, it is a way of knowing, a way of knowing the other fully and through that knowledge, coming to know oneself. That’s what happened to Mary when Jesus called her by name and her eyes were opened.

The resurrection of Christ offers as an encounter with his love and it changes everything. When we open ourselves to Christ’s love, when we are opened by Christ’s love, we see the world in new ways; our old ways of thinking and being are shattered by the reality of the new creation and the hope.

Resurrection, the new life of Christ, new life in Christ, opens up to us a new world, a world in which we can imagine and help to bring about the reign of God proclaimed by Jesus Christ. The resurrection offers us a new way of seeing, a new way of being, where we are no longer constrained by the limits of our imagination, or by human sin and evil.

The resurrection offers us a new way of seeing ourselves—in spite of our shortcomings and struggles, in spite of our doubts and despair, when the risen Christ calls us by name we can see ourselves as he sees us—as new creatures, new beings, living in him.

The resurrection offers us a new way of seeing each other—no longer focused on the ways we’ve been hurt, the ways others have fallen short, we see them with the eyes that Jesus saw Mary, we can see each other as new beings alive in Christ.

Whatever struggles we have today, whatever our fears, doubts, whatever suffering and pain we might know—all of that might still be with us tomorrow, it probably will—but thanks to the resurrection, thanks to the Risen Christ, we know the possibility and reality of new creation. We know the world is being made new by the power of love; we know that Jesus Christ has triumphed and a new world, the reign of God is being born.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!