Coming Home, Letting Go
a sermon given by the Rev. Claire Phillips-Thoryn
on Easter Sunday, April 8, 2007
at The First Parish in Lincoln
Click here to listen to this sermon
First Reading: A Homecoming by Wendell Berry
One faith is bondage. Two
are free. In the trust
of old love, cultivation shows
a dark graceful wilderness
at its heart. Wild
in that wilderness, we roam
the distances of our faith,
safe beyond the bounds
of what we know. O love,
open. Show me
my country. Take me home.
Second Reading – John 20: 11-18
Before I read from scripture, let me give you the context. On the third day after the crucifixion, Mary Magdalene goes to visit Jesus’ tomb. It is early in the morning and still dark outside when she gets there. To her surprise and dismay she finds the stone has been rolled away from the entrance and the tomb is empty. She tells Simon Peter and another disciple, but they just shake their head at the empty tomb with the linen wrappings strewn on the floor, and leave her to her tears. The book of John continues in chapter 20, verses 11-18:
..Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” 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.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
The stone has got to be rolled back from the tomb again and again every year. And I guess we have to shovel the snow from our driveways again and again every year, even in April. It’s a perplexing experiment, writing about Easter during April snowshowers. The usual context of spring requires some translation. But then again, Easter always needs some translation. It’s such an odd, fantastic, crazy, mixed-up story. The dead come alive! Hope is reborn! Translating the mysterious messages of the Bible into messages for the modern world can be confusing. Something is always lost in the translation. It reminds me of how the advertising slogan “Come Alive with Pepsi!” changed when translated into German: “Come Alive Out of the Grave with Pepsi!” and in one Slavic country, “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the Grave!” 1
In this morning’s scripture reading, Mary Magdalene has found herself in the early morning darkness, in front of an empty tomb. The only explanation she can find is that his grave has been desecrated by grave-robbers. She tries to share her pain with two of the disciples, but they just look silently and helplessly at the empty grave, and leave her alone in her sorrow. They went home too early. Because as Mary stands there sobbing, angels appear, and then—Jesus appears. But it is dark, and her eyes are clouded with tears, so she does not recognize him. She thinks he is a gardener, whose job is to tend the graveyard. She is distraught, and begs him to tell her where Jesus’ body may have been taken. With one word he cuts through her agitation and her grief. He says her name. “Mary!” he says. He has come home.
But he has not come home to stay. He hasn’t decided to put down roots and become domesticated. Jesus has just come back to say goodbye. A dark graceful wilderness tugs at his heart.
And so, when Mary moves to embrace him, Jesus backs away. Noli me tangere, he says, do not touch me, do not hold on to me. He will not be bound. He will not be held down, to one place, one time, one people, he refuses to be held to one interpretation, to one life. Wild in that wilderness, he roams.
In the books by C. S. Lewis titled The Chronicles of Narnia, the powerful lion named Aslan is a Jesus-figure, who comes to save the magical land of Narnia. When the English children first hear of Aslan, they don’t know what to expect. The child Susan asks:
“…Is he—quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
“That you will, dearie, and make no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver, “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”
“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “…Who said anything about being safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
He isn’t safe. But he is good. Lion or human, he is wild and free. He cannot be bound into one image or one faith alone.
The words of Jesus to Mary Magdalene were often translated as “Do not touch me” but as our biblical scholarship and understanding of ancient languages grows, we are better able to translate his words. “Do not hold on to me,” he warns. One biblical commentary writes, “Jesus’ prohibition to Mary thus actually contains the good news of Easter. Do not hold on to me, but let me be free so that I can give you the fullness of what I have to offer.”2 In so many ways, we try to pin Jesus down, hold on to him and make him who we want him to be. Savior or human. Messiah or fool. Spirit or flesh. Leader or bandit. Pastoral counselor or apocolyptic prophet. He is all and none of these things. One faith is bondage. Two—or three, or three thousand—that is free. We find freedom when we “roam the distances of our faith, safe beyond the bounds of what we know.”
When someone tells you they know for a fact who Jesus was and what he stood for, tell them about Margaret Starbird’s revelation. Margaret Starbird is a well-known Catholic theologian and religion scholar. When she first read the new studies that posited a different end to the Christian story—Jesus not dying, but marrying and having children—she was shocked. She prayed for God to give her a sign, a direction, for her biblical studies. “Starbird said at that moment, she opened her Bible to a random page; it was the break between the Old and New Testaments. And there she read what she perceived to be her first direct revelation: the inscription “The New Testament: A Revised Edition.” 3 We don’t know the true story—everything we have to read about Jesus is a revised edition, an oral history told and retold and finally written down in different versions in ancient languages. Depending on the translation, we hear “Come Alive With Jesus!”—or is it “Jesus brings your ancestors back from the Grave!” No wonder Jesus says—“Don’t touch me! Don’t hold on to me!”
The humor writer David Sedaris has an essay where he is in a French class in France, with many other non-native French speakers from different countries. One of his classmates grew up in a Muslim country, and she asks what Easter is all about—in the same way you or I might ask what the Muslim holiday of Ramadan is all about. So the class tries to answer her question, in struggling French. Some of the responses include:
“It is a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus…”
“He call his self Jesus and then he die one day on two…morsels of…lumber.”
“He die one day and then he go above of my head to live with your father.”
“He weared of himself the long hair and after he die, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples.”
“He nice, the Jesus.”
Lost in translation! He nice, the Jesus. He is good. But he is not safe, and he cannot be held back into one faith, or easily translated from one person to another, or chained within the bounds of what we know.
When Mary first looks at Jesus, she doesn’t see him. She sees a gardener. This story in many ways mirrors the story of Eden. In a garden, a woman and a man. A divine gardener. The woman has made some mistakes. But those mistakes don’t matter anymore. She is back in the garden, in the presence of the gardener, she is loved, she is trusted. Do not hold on to me, says the gardener-turned-Jesus. You cannot stay in the garden forever. There will still be times of darkness and sorrow, there will still be tears and suffering. “We are an Easter people, living in a Good Friday world.”4 But “in the trust of old love, cultivation shows a dark graceful wilderness at its heart.” We can cultivate this garden, we can sow hope and faith and joy and courage. The wilderness will be beautiful and strange, the wilderness will be our home. The stone has got to be rolled back from the tomb again and again every year. It is up to us to be the resurrection, to be the change we wish to see in the world.
In this crazy, mixed-up story we call Easter, a guy named Jesus came back home when no one thought he would be seen again. A homecoming. But he didn’t want to be held down. We have to let him go, our preconceptions, our assumptions. They are lost in translation. I know this Easter story is a little wacky. But Emily Dickinson once said, “A little Madness in the Spring / Is wholesome even for the King.” You may find that the madness of the Easter story can help you roam the wilderness, beyond the bounds of what you know. The Easter story of the book of John asks us: Are there people or places in your life that you need to let go? Where have you heard, even in a whisper from beyond the grave: “Do not hold on to me. I love you, but let me go.” Have you come to the empty tomb, like Simon Peter and the other disciple, but run away too soon to see how the story will turn out? As we walk this story with Mary Magdalene, where in your life are you called to come home, to stick around, to see the story out? And where in your life are you asked to let go, to see a loss as a chance for resurrection?
We ask ourselves these questions. Finally, we might ask ourselves if there are old, narrow understandings of Jesus we have been lumbering about with, beliefs that hold us back and hold him down. “Do not hold on to me,” he said. And so, on Easter we let our white-knuckled grip on him go. He’s gone. One preacher has said:
“We cannot nail him down. We tried once, but he got loose, and ever since then he has been walking and talking, bringing the presence of God into our midst, the spirit of God into our lives. If we cannot say who he is in twenty-five words or less, it is because he is our window on the undefinable, unfathomable I AM, and we cannot sum him up any easier than we can sum up the one who sent him.5
Undefinable. Unfathomable. Untranslatable.
…Wild
in that wilderness, we roam
the distances of our faith,
safe beyond the bounds
of what we know.
He leaves, and we are left, shading our eyes in the sun. We turn to each other. What comes next?
To the tomb, we say, O love, open. And we roll back the stone, again and again.
To God we say, Show me my country. Help me grow. Help me let go. Help me to live, and to love.
And then we turn to each other and
softly,
joyfully,
we say—O love,
Take me home.Amen.