SERMON PREACHED BY
THE REVEREND DR. HAROLD T. LEWIS, RECTOR
CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH,
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
EASTER DAY 2008

 

 

"They have taken my Lord away and I do not know where they have laid him." (John 20:13)

Every year we bring to the celebration of Easter a somewhat less than helpful view of Resurrection morning, a perspective that prevents us from entering into the events of that first Easter as it must have been experienced by the disciples and the faithful women. Our problem is that from the vantage point of living two thousand years after the event, we know the end of the story; we know the happy ending. By the time we hear the Gospel message, we have already sung "Welcome, happy morning!" and "Jesus Christ is risen today!" Jesus' rising from the Tomb is a given, a fait accompli, so listening to the Gospel is like listening to a history lesson, a reassuring reminder of what we already know and believe.

 

We cannot understand the significance of Easter if we don't first grasp the fact that the furthest thing from the mind of Jesus' followers was Resurrection. To them, Good Friday (which was not yet called that, obviously) was the final curtain! Jesus was dead, taken from their midst forever, and with him the assurance of new life and new hope that he had promised. His followers were disappointed, despondent, dejected, depressed. The disciples reacted by holing up in the Upper Room, probably drowning their sorrows with wine left over from the Last Supper. The faithful, task-oriented women, however, out of respect for their late leader, went to the Tomb to anoint his body. They procured the necessary spices, and made their way to the place that Joseph of Arimathea had provided for their Lord's burial. But they were not prepared for what they would see --- and what they would not see. St. John tells us that Mary Magdalene came to the Tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from it. She didn't say to herself or to the other women who were probably with her, "Not to worry; he is risen from the dead." No, she was shocked and frightened, and ran and told two of the disciples "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him."

 

Later on, when she gets back to the tomb, still visibly upset, two angels, apparently guarding the place where Jesus had been, ask her why she is weeping. And, as people in shock often do, she merely repeats her complaint: "They have taken my Lord away, and I do not know where they have laid him." She bumps into a man she assumes to be the gardener, whom she all but accuses of being a grave-robber, and in a variation of her little speech, she says, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." The gardener, of course, turns out to be the Risen Christ, whom she recognizes when he calls her by her name. Then reality dawns, Mary regroups, and like the woman at the well, is able to get on with the business of evangelism.

 

Mary Magdalene had had a special relationship with Jesus (although not as special as Dan Brown would have us believe in The DaVinci Code). Jesus had freed her from being possessed by seven devils [Lk. 8:23]. Her memories of that relationship would sustain her, even in death. She had seen to his burial, and maybe wanted to say a few words to him in the Tomb, words, perhaps, she hadn't gotten around to telling him before his death. That would have given her some comfort, a comforting moment of which she was deprived because he simply wasn't there. Someone had stood in the way of her relationship to Jesus. "They have taken my Lord away, and I do not know where they have laid him." Mary had a certain understanding of Jesus, based on her experience, and she didn't want that to be changed, even by death. Even when she learned later that Jesus had risen from the dead, she found out that she still couldn't just pick up where she had left off.

 

My sisters and brothers in Christ, are we like Mary Magdalene? Do we have our favorite idea or concept of what Jesus should be like, which we hold onto for dear life, dreading that it could possibly be changed? Some people cherished a Jesus enshrined in the old Book of Common Prayer. And when the "thees" and "thous" were removed, they believed their Jesus had gone with them. "They have taken my Lord away," they said, "and we do not know where they have laid him," adding perhaps, "Vouchsafe, O God, to bring him back!" Some people believed in an Episcopal Church made up exclusively of the landed gentry who graciously employed Jesus as their private chaplain. They secretly believed that everybody who should be an Episcopalian already was! When Presiding Bishop John Hines, at the General Convention in 1967, declared that ministry --- and (gasp!) evangelism ---- to the poor would be taken seriously, some people thought the church was going to hell in a handbasket, and as they clutched their purses, they mumbled, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know they have laid him."

 

Some people thought the Lord was permanently A.W.O.L. from the church when women were ordained. I am reminded of a priest, who might be politely described as "rotund" or "corpulent." A staunch traditionalist, dead set against the idea of the ordination of women, he had visceral reactions to the idea of women in vestments. "My goodness," he said to Barbara Harris, "suppose a woman priest became pregnant? What would she look like?" The future bishop responded, "About like you!" The "They have taken away my Lord" chorus could be heard fortissimo when a gay bishop was ordained. When I saw the bishop of Haiti last week, he had just returned from the House of Bishops meeting, and lamented the fact that so many of his brethren had absented themselves from that gathering, evidence, he believed, that they are not willing to accept diversity in the church.

 

But belief that Jesus has been wrested from our midst is not solely an Episcopalian disease. Did we not see evidence of the same phenomenon this past week? Many Americans whose view of Jesus had not changed significantly from the gentle, "meek and mild" Sunday School version of our Savior and who could not fathom a Jesus critical of government and who understands himself not as a chaplain to the status quo but as a liberator of the oppressed, listened to the selected homiletical sound bytes of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and proclaimed "They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him." To them, the Jesus thus taken away was an innocuous Jesus who could never be angry (obviously they had not read the account of the overturning of the moneychangers' table in the Temple). To them, the Jesus thus taken away was their effete Jesus who could not be a political animal (obviously they had not understood the significance of the Good Friday readings in which Jesus' life, ministry and his words challenge both the political and the religious authorities of his day). Mr. Obama's critique and exegesis of his former pastor's words, however, did far more than put inflammatory and divisive comments into context; his masterful speech will go down in history as the most cogent, insightful and comprehensive commentary on race relations in America since the Civil War. We know not what will become of his candidacy, but win, lose or draw, Barack Obama will always be remembered for expressing unbridled hope --- dare we call it a resurrection hope --- for America in his words: "This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected."

 

Mary Magdalene was on a nostalgia trip. When she heard Jesus call her name, and she answered with the affectionate greeting, "Rabbouni," ("My teacher!") we can imagine her dashing through the lilies holding out her arms, and expecting a warm embrace. But Jesus stops her in her tracks, with the seemingly harsh words, "Do not cling to me." What he was telling Mary Magdalene, and us, is that Resurrection changes things. It forces us to eschew the familiar and welcome, even embrace the unfamiliar. The Easter message is that we can find our way out of darkness only by moving ahead, moving ahead with a Jesus who does not subscribe to the seven deadly words of the church, "We have always done it that way," but who instead tells us, in plain Aramaic, "Behold, I make all things new."

 

And nor did Jesus start making things new when he rose from the dead. This was the man, lest we forget, who cavorted with tax collectors, harlots and sinners, who was rude to respected leaders, and who scolded his own disciples while he praised the faith of heathen Roman soldiers. During his earthly life, you couldn't put Jesus in a box; in his death, you could not keep him in his tomb. And in his resurrected life, he is loose in the world, with the power to raise us up from whatever is keeping us down.

 

So my message this morning to all of you gathered in this hallowed place on this queen of feasts --- be you catechetical Catholics, pragmatic Presbyterians, methodical Methodists or even home-grown epigrammatic Episcopalians, is that Jesus has not been taken away from us. In his glorious Resurrection, he has been placed in our very midst, where he invites us to be his hands and feet in the building up of his Kingdom.

 

Let us pray:

Christ is risen, we are risen! Shed upon us heavenly grace,

Rain and dew and gleams of glory from the brightness of thy face;

That with hearts in heaven dwelling, we on earth may fruitful be,

And by angel hands be gathered, and be ever, Lord, with thee. AMEN.

[The Hymnal 1982, 191]