Easter Planning

They had planned it all so carefully. How could they not have planned it all so carefully – the women didn’t have anything else to do on that grim, gray Sabbath. And going over in their minds exactly what they had to do as soon as the sun went down prevented them from going over anything else in their minds. Thoughts of spices – Which to buy? How many pounds? And which oils would they need? – crowded out the sounds and the smells of the betrayal and the beatings and the blood. Thoughts of which vendors might be open when the Sabbath had passed helped to push out the memories of those Roman soldiers playing a pavement game for Jesus’ robe while Jesus himself hung painfully exposed and drowning in his own weight. Thoughts and plans gave them a sense of purpose, gave them enough rhythm to keep their broken hearts beating, kept them just busy enough that there was hardly any chance that they would remember the stillness – that horrifying stillness – just after Jesus breathed his last…and just before his mother cried out as if a sword had pierced her own soul too. They had planned so carefully. It was just what they did as women, as disciples. It was just what they did to keep the tears away.

And so when the sun set they were off, walking quickly to the market, faces wrapped in their shawls to avoid pestering questions and pity-filled glances. They bought what they needed, not even needing to haggle over the price, as the man who sold them the spices was doubly generous, charging them very little and also never, not once, meeting their eyes, or asking how they were, or saying that he was sorry. Thank God. They had no time for sorry, no time to think about how they were. They had a plan, the Marys and Salome. They had a plan and nowhere in that plan did it say, “Now the women who loved Jesus, who gave up everything to follow him, who knew the ring of his laugh and the power of his presence, now these women fall to pieces.” No, there was no time, no room for that. They had work to do.            

They didn’t sleep that night. How could they, with all of their plans whipping around in their minds. When the solid blackness outside their windows finally began to soften to gray, they arose, dressed, and, without a word, hoisted all of their purchases onto their shoulders and began to walk, step by step, to the tomb. Along the way, they worried with each other about the one part of the plan that they had not been able to work out: the stone. There was that giant disc of a stone rolled into a slot to cover the open doorway. It was mammoth, heavy enough to keep out animals…and, they feared, three slight women. But there was nothing to be done about it; they would just have to figure it out when they got there.

By the time they arrived at the tomb, the sun had just begun to kiss the tips of the grass with silver light. The place looked so different than it had on Friday afternoon. The hot, dry dust had stilled, the air felt cool and damp, and the world was entirely hushed. And the stone, the giant stumbling block of the stone, had been rolled back already, the entrance to the tomb stood open, quiet and inviting. Without a word, they set down their packs and stepped into the cool chamber, so new and clean...and so empty. No body. No blood. No plan. Just a young man, sitting in a white robe and speaking to them, “Do not be amazed; you are looking for Jesus. But he has risen. Look at the floor, you see that he is no longer here. He is already gone, gone ahead to the Galilee. Women, go, and tell his disciples what you have seen and heard here.”

They look at the young man, dazzling in his white cloth and white smile. They look at the floor, bare except for a linen shroud tossed aside into the corner, and look at each other with wide eyes. Then they look at their carefully planned purchases sitting in packs outside the door, and they realize their mistake. For all of their thinking, all of their organizing yesterday in the darkness of the Sabbath, they had forgotten something critical. They forgot that Jesus had told them that this would happen – that he would be killed, and that he would be raised on the third day. In all of their planning, they had never once imagined that he might actually have been speaking the truth. They had never planned that they might not find him here, and so they have brought entirely the wrong thing. They have brought only their sorrow when they should have brought their hope. They have brought spices to anoint the dead when they should have brought walking shoes to follow the living, to run after the risen Jesus wherever he would lead them.

I wonder if this is part of why they ran away. Maybe it was not so much because the young man scared them; after all, in this story there is no appearance like lightning, no rumble of earthquake. No, there was just this – just a man telling them that Jesus had risen, and the simple truth that they were utterly unprepared for that. They had had no idea what had been coming. Jesus had actually been raised from the dead. He was actually the Messiah, the anointed one of God. The world had actually changed. He was risen; the resurrection was true! And trembling and astonishment came upon the women, and they fled, and they said not a thing to anyone, because this truth was simply terrifying.

Now we know that the women must have said something eventually – the Gospel of Mark was written down, after all, by a community of disciples whose whole lives had changed because of the resurrection. Mark even provides us with some alternate endings to his book, sort of the director’s cut of the Gospel, where Jesus appears to the disciples and tells them how to live their faith in this post-resurrection world. But the oldest ending of Mark is this one, where the women are shaken to their core and run away. Which means that the oldest editions of Mark’s Gospel thought that this ending had something to teach us, something to show us that could help us to live out our own lives more fully and more faithfully.

Here is the question that I think this shorter ending of Mark asks: what are you and I planning for? Are we planning for a world in which Christ is palpable and present, or are we planning for a world where he feels mostly absent? Do we expect to find Christ risen and thriving and moving ahead of us, or do we imagine that actually, he might be dead? When we leave this church building tonight, do we expect to find traces of his presence everywhere, shining imprints of where he has been, blessings he has bestowed, healings he has offered? Or do we imagine that at some point the glory of this night will wear off, that when the incense has washed out of our clothes and the traces of wax have been peeled off of our fingertips, we will once again find ourselves looking at an empty world where Christ has little to do with our day-to-day living?       

You can see why it makes so much sense that the women ran away afraid. Because the idea that something real happened in that tomb, the idea that something that true, that powerful, that generous had happened was – at first, at least – a little more than they could handle, just as the idea that something that true, that real, and that generous is present in our own lives can also be more than we can handle. Sometimes it’s just easier to plan as if Christ won’t be there. You know what this feels like. We’ve all done it. We wake up, stretch, breathe in, and imagine our day as if our own power and planning can make the whole thing happen. We work hard to accept that there are just some things we have to handle on our own. We pray, of course, and invite God to abide in our busy minds, but when he doesn’t always show up at the time or in the way that we want him too, we aren’t entirely surprised. We accept; we sit in the darkness of our own lives and fill up our minds and hearts with thoughts and plans that help us to feel like we can actually be in control, that our thoughts and plans are actually the most important thing that we do.

But these holy women remind you and me not to sell ourselves – or our God – so short. There is grace to be had in this world. We reaffirm this every time we take communion, every time we welcome a new sister in Christ like we welcomed little Stephanie this evening. This is the truth – the tomb is empty, and the world is full. So let’s be ready. Let’s bring our walking shoes, bring our hopes and our expectations; let’s plan on finding Christ when we are in this place and when we leave this place, let’s look for where he might lead us, where he might have gone before us, the ways he has invited us to follow him. Let’s plan to find Christ in our lives and in our society, and then let’s be sure to bring the right stuff with us to follow him – our hearts and souls and minds, our love, our hope, our new life in him.  

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

The Great Vigil of Easter, April 7, 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Doing Good Friday

It had been a long Lent. By the time the people gathered together in the church on Good Friday, they were ready. They had been made ready by weeks of prayer and fasting, by weeks of self-examination and denial, by weeks of scripture and sermons that had finally, finally, led them to this place – to the tiny garden on the side of a hill where Jesus sat in the darkness among an ominous tangle of olive trees. It was here, in this garden, that the people finally were able to pick up the Passion, to hear the story that was the culmination of their long Lenten journey.

But it was more than just the mere telling of the Passion that these people hungered for. Because these were not just any people, and this was not just any Lent. This was Lent in Leipzig in 1724, and these people had gathered for Vespers in the Lutheran Church of St. Nicholas to hear the new St. John Passion of Johann Sebastian Bach. They hadn’t heard any instrumental music in church since the season of Lent had begun, and for these people, who were used to a weekly diet of carefully crafted cantatas, the time when they were forced to abstain from these orchestral delights always felt terribly bleak and barren. 1724 was Bach’s very first Lenten season in Leipzig, so there must have been more than a little curiosity about what this feisty and brilliant composer might offer the congregation this year. Had they gotten their money’s worth? Would this new Passion work? – and by that I mean, would Bach’s setting of the St. John Passion help them to truly join Jesus in that garden, to enter fully – mind, body, and soul – into this story that they had waited so long to hear?

It is clear from listening to the St. John Passion that Bach knew exactly what the people expected of him and of this particular piece. The Bach scholar Michael Marissen has written that Bach’s role in Leipzig is best described as a kind of “musical preacher,” and it is this preaching, this active and very personal engagement with the Passion, that is so compelling in the St. John. Bach not only set the entire Passion according to St. John (in German, of course), he also carefully placed other poetic texts within the narrative to help connect the listener to the action. Bach’s goal, clearly, was not just for you to hear the story but for you to get inside it, to live it – to imagine what it was like in the garden or at Gabbatha or on Golgotha, and to experience an emotional and a spiritual response to what happened there. The whole point of the Passion was to feel something – to feel the cries of Crucifixion from the crowd, to feel the tenderness as Jesus gave Mary and the disciple John into each other’s care, and – most importantly – to feel how our own wretched brokenness made this sacrifice necessary in the first place.

Let me give you an example. At the beginning of the Passion, when Jesus is being questioned by the high priests, one of the servants strikes Jesus with his hand after an answer that he deems to be disrespectful. Here Bach pauses the action and interjects a chorale, a hymn. At the beginning of this chorale, the choir is indignant, singing, “Who was it who hit you this way, Lord? Who treated you so badly – you haven’t done anything wrong!” But then the singers realize the painful answer: they are to blame – “It is I, I and my many, many sins, who have caused this misery for you.” The singers, and, by proxy, the congregation, can no longer simply stand outside the story looking in. With this one masterful stroke, Bach has placed the people on the inside. They are now a part of the action, they are a part of the cause; they are truly viewing the story from the inside out. And so faced with their facts of their own complicity in the suffering of Jesus, how can they not feel something?

Even if you didn’t hear the Bach St. John Passion performed here last weekend or study it with us over the past five weeks in our Sunday forums, even if you’ve never heard of this piece in your life, I’m guessing that you can imagine what this deep emotional connection to the Passion text feels like. Because this is exactly what we experience here on Good Friday, in this liturgy. We enter into this bleak and barren space, stripped of anything that sets it apart as holy, we watch the sacred ministers prostrate themselves before the altar, we hear ancient texts set to ancient tunes – all of which is intended to position us squarely within the events of this day, to help us find our place here, and tie us to that first Good Friday thousands of years ago. We have just knelt in silence as we reached back through the centuries to that horrible empty moment when Jesus Christ, our Lord and our God, breathed out all of the air in his battered lungs and was still. In a few moments we will take the last few steps of our Lenten journey as we walk to the very foot of the cross, bend ourselves before the holy weight that hangs upon it, and kiss the feet of the figure who took it up for all of humankind.

More than almost any other service of the church year, the liturgies of Good Friday are intended to make us not just think about something but feel something. When we look at the wounds and the bruises that this suffering servant has borne for us, we are invited to feel something. When we cry out with the psalmist, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” we are invited to feel something. When we live the long, dusty walk to the cross; when we hear the mocking, the scourging, the shame; when we wonder if there is any sorrow like our sorrow; we should feel something.

But if we go out of this church on this day satisfied with the fact that we have felt something, we leave this liturgy unfulfilled. If this day is for us just about feeling sad, or empty, or overwhelmed and humbled, then we have left something out. Good Friday cannot just be about the way we feel; it cannot be just for us, because our Lord’s sacrifice was not just for you and me and for the faithful few who remained at the foot of the Cross, but for the whole world. Today must also, then, be about those who are out there and how we connect with them. Good Friday cannot be just about what we feel; it must also be about what we do.

What will we do? What will we do in response to this Good Friday? As we hear about the prisoner Jesus, mocked and tortured by his captors, what will we do for prisoners here in our country, or for prisoners of conscience around the globe? As we hear about a religious community divided against itself, what will we do for the Church here and in the world? As we hear about a Roman government corrupted by cruelty and unchecked power, what will we do for our own government to help it maintain an open heart to the world and to its own people? As we hear about an angry mob of powerless and manipulated people, what we will do for the oppressed around the world? What will we do for those who are persecuted for their faith? What will we do for those who have no faith, who are betrayers or who are betrayed, who suffer loss and mourn? What does Good Friday encourage us to do in response to how it makes us feel?

This question, and our response to this question, is at the heart of this holy day. Good Friday, of course, does offer us a powerful emotional experience, but the power of this is day is not just that it allows you and me to imagine what it was like on Golgotha in the first century on the first day of Passover but that, in the words of the author of Hebrews, this day “provokes us to love and good deeds.” Our emotional response to the story of Christ’s Passion can actually strengthen our ministry if the way we feel on this day breaks our hearts open to love more freely and more fully – to love God and our neighbors as ourselves, and to love one another as Christ has loved us – by doing acts of service and mercy in his name.

This may feel like a tall order. There is so much that can be done – where do we start? Well, starting where Bach did is always a good idea. Bach began each new composition by writing “Jesu juva” at the top of the score – Jesus help me. Jesus, help us to feel something in this liturgy today, and help us to imagine how you might use that feeling to accomplish something in us. On this Good Friday, help us to be moved, not just emotionally, but moved out into the world to strengthen the Church, to feed the hungry, to heal the brokenhearted. From your cross, from the tomb, Jesus, help us. And to God alone be the glory.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

Good Friday, April 6, 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The Garden Tomb

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

The food at the Ambassador Hotel in Jerusalem is adequate, but not more than adequate.  And if I am going to travel all the way to the Holy Land – as 22 of us from Saint Mark’s did about six months ago – I am going to find food that is better than adequate.  On our journey we maintained a pretty full itinerary, so there was not a lot of time to search out good food, but I did my best; poking my way through the winding alleys of the Old City, taking the train to the Mehane Yehuda Market and consulting online reviews to find the best places to eat.  I’m happy to report that I found some memorable meals in Jerusalem, as well as some good Israeli wines!

The Ambassador Hotel sits uphill from the Old City of Jerusalem along the Nablus Road.  And on my fast and furious expeditions to find food, and the nearest liquor store, I regularly made my way down this road, past the far swankier American Colony Hotel, the British cathedral, and then past a little sign on a street that turned off to the left as I walked downhill: a street named after Conrad Shick, and a sign pointing to The Garden Tomb.  This tomb is the alternative site to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher – the traditional site of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, where pilgrims line up for hours (as we did) to get a chance to stoop low and visit the strange supposed burial place of Jesus – which really hardly resembles a tomb at all, and which requires more than a little imagination to connect with the image of Jesus’ death and burial, which were supposed to take place on a hill outside the city wall, since, there is no evidence that you are on a hill, and you are well inside the current walls of the city.  Nevertheless, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher has been recognized as the likely place of Jesus’ burial at least since the 4^th century, and if it marks the place of his burial, then it is also the kind of Ground Zero of his resurrection: the site of the original Easter

The Garden Tomb, by contrast, has been identified as a possible site only since the 19^th century.  And it tends to have a certain currency with people from Protestant churches, who may feel a bit put off by the chanting monks, the flickering candles, and the burning incense over at the Holy Sepulcher.

A curious pilgrim, open to possibilities, with no ax to grind, with only two competing sites to compare, could easily visit both the Holy Sepulcher and the Garden Tomb on a visit to Jerusalem, especially if his hotel was just up the road from them both, and he had to pass one on his way to get to the other.  But I had meals to scope out, and restaurant menus to inspect; my sorties down the Nablus Road led me right past the turn-off to the Garden Tomb for five days in a row.  But I never even flinched as I went in search of olives and cheeses, and Halvah, and other delicious things – and wine.  And, of course, we’d already been to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher – if you’ve seen one Messiah’s tomb, I figured, you’ve seen ‘em all.  As I say, a clearer head might have decided that if you have traveled half way around the world to visit holy sites, and two different places contend to be the holiest of them all, what’s the harm in visiting both of them?  But I had pistachios, and pomegranates to track down and taste.   I’d already cast my lot with the ancients at the Holy Sepulcher – why muddy the waters?

To many people, the mere fact that there is more than one potential spot where Jesus may have been buried, more than one possible Ground Zero of the Resurrection, provides ample evidence of the foolishness of the faith that so many others have placed in Jesus, lo these many centuries.  If we cannot even locate with any measure of certainty the very places where his Cross stood, where his Body lay, and where disciples discovered an empty tomb on that first Easter morning, does that not cast some significant doubt on the stories themselves?  Here was a man who claimed to be the Messiah, the Son of the living God, whose life was given, the scriptures tell us, for the salvation of the whole world.  Could it have been so impossible to mark the spot of his burial, to remember where it was that the empty tomb was located?  Wouldn’t someone have placed a pile of rocks there?  Or planted tree?  Or drawn a map?

The suspicion is that these things did not happen as the scriptures report them; that if a man named Jesus of Nazareth was crucified outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago, and if his body was placed in a tomb, then the dusty remains of his flesh and bones are lying there now; that the reason we cannot say for certain where the empty tomb of the risen Christ is to be found, is because there is no such thing: no such thing as the empty tomb, no such thing as the Christ, the anointed of God, and no such thing as the Resurrection.

But there is plenty of delicious food to be found in Jerusalem.  And I highly recommend the fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice from street vendors, and I can give you a recommendation for a really good restaurant just outside the Jaffa Gate of the Old City.  But I digress.

Maybe there is another reason that the precise location of the empty tomb of Jesus is in some doubt.  Maybe this question of where exactly Jesus rose from the dead need not undermine faith, but could strengthen it.  Maybe God has not unfolded his plans in such a way as to be successfully litigated with forensic evidence, but has, instead, been at work in subtler, more personal ways.  Maybe it’s a good thing that we don’t know with absolute certainty where the empty tomb of Jesus is, since knowing, or thinking you know, seems to provide Christians with something to fight over, as much as anything else.  And maybe it’s somewhat unimportant to know which of the two contending sites in Jerusalem is the real empty tomb of Jesus.

Because the truth is that there are empty tombs in churches and in homes and in the hearts of God’s people all over the world this morning.  These are the places where Jesus’ rising matters this morning, and every morning.

It’s in our lives, our homes, our church families, after all that death and his accomplices have been at work.

It’s your child who was rushed to the hospital, whose bed you stood by and prayed by and waited by, hoping the doctors were skilled enough that a miracle wouldn’t be needed.

It’s your mother who cannot remember who you are anymore, and who looks at you with a vacant stare.

It’s your sister, your brother who received the diagnosis last week, and who now must decide whether to undergo the misery of a treatment that may or may not provide a cure.

It’s your friend who was in a freak accident and will never walk again.

It’s your beloved whose body has been wracked by the chemo and the radiation, and yet who still doesn’t know if the cancer is gone.

It’s your daughter who lost the pregnancy.

It’s your brother who has been languishing in prison.

It’s your son who refuses to admit he has a problem, refuses to go to AA, refuses to let go of his addiction.

It’s your father who finally died, and whose death and memory has left a hole in your life bigger than any you ever knew he could fill.

Death, disaster, sickness and despair are at work in your life and mine, right here, right now.  We do not need to travel to Jerusalem to find them.  And if we had to bring all that threatens and frightens and condemns us to the empty tomb in a far away place, we could never afford the additional baggage fees.

The Resurrection has not been fixed by God to a tomb in Jerusalem because you and I don’t need a Resurrection that happened once, long ago, in a faraway place.  We need a Resurrection here and now, in our lives, in the things that are killing us even now.  We don’t need to go in search of hope through the winding streets of an ancient city.  We need hope in Philadelphia this morning!

There is a tradition, reported in the scriptures, that says that when Jesus died, the tombs of the dead were opened, and the bodies of the dead were raised, and they walked around and visited their friends and families.  Far-fetched though this tradition may sound, I think it makes sense if we don’t insist on a finding a single empty tomb for Jesus.  I think the dead were making way for Jesus, who was claiming every tomb he could find as his own, and he pushed the bodies of the dead up, out of his way as he came up from their tombs, sharing a measure of his new life with them as he went.

Perhaps you think there is a tomb already prepared for you or for someone you love. Even if you don’t, the time will come when you do, when you realize that the coldness of a tomb lies as close at hand as the next sunrise, and you can’t be sure which will greet you the next morning.  This is the human experience, the reality of our lives.  Which means that the most important tomb this Easter is not either of the ones in Jerusalem that claim to be the tomb of the Savior of the world.  The most important tomb this Easter is the one you have imagined in your mind, that grabs you by the throat and leaves you struggling to catch your breath.

It may not be your own tomb.  It may be the tomb of your spouse, your partner, your parent, or your child.  It is the tomb whose chill you cannot shake, the tomb you never fail to visit in your imagination.  This tomb contains the remains of more than just a body: it holds your hope, your dream, your life in its unforgiving darkness, and although you may try to avoid it with forays into various distractions, this tomb owns your imagination like nothing else, for you are always ready for something to die in it, and to be buried for ever.

I might never see the sign that points to that tomb, the most important tomb of your imagination, the tomb that holds the end of the thing you love.  I might ignore it just as easily as I ignored the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, and so might everyone else in this church, and everywhere in the world today.  But Jesus will not ignore that tomb.  He will claim it as his own.  He moved into it three days ago, and he has been renovating.

Jesus has pushed everything that could ever die in the tomb of your imagination out of his way, and in the process he has loaned new life to the previous inhabitants of this tomb.  For nothing can die in the presence of this great life.  No tomb can be a final resting place after the Resurrection.  We don’t need to decide which tomb was Jesus’ burial place, because his burial hardly matters – only his rising matters.  And he is risen from every tomb, in every corner of the world, on every Easter, and every day till he claims all creation for himself again.

After this mass is over, like you, I will start thinking about food.  Well, I might start thinking about food before you do, but you take the point.  After church this morning, we will go our ways in search of our Easter brunches, our Easter dinners.  I already have a schedule written down: the ham goes in the oven at 2:30, I put my parents to work at 4. etc, etc.  Just as I was distracted by many things in Jerusalem, and never visited the Garden Tomb, you will be distracted soon enough, and Easter will begin to recede for another year.

But Christ is not through rising from the dead – though he has already accomplished it.  He is rising from every tomb that fills your heart and mine with dread.  Jesus is rising from the dead, indeed he is risen, and it hardly matters which tomb was his before; he has no need of it now, he is risen indeed, Alleluia!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Easter Day 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia