“I have seen the Teacher” shouts Mary Magdalene.

Christ is risen,

Christ is risen indeed.

After the running,

the weeping,

the wondering,

there is an awareness – an appearance of the beloved Jesus.

She doesn’t recognizes him until he calls her name.

She tries to grab him,

hug him,

hold him, never let him go.

And Jesus says “Stop.”

He hasn’t stopped caring.

He hasn’t stopped loving.

He still wants to be near her.

But things are different now. He is not how he used to be.

And because of that, Mary is no longer who she used to be.

This is resurrection: right in front of us and yet we cannot touch it.

The reality of resurrection happens a whole lot faster for Mary of Magdala than it does for most of us. She was able to move from worry and weeping to elation and ecstasy in three days. I would never dream of telling any of the families who lost loved ones in Kenya five days ago to seek resurrection today. Or even insist that those of you who lost a parent, sibling, child, friend in the past few months be able to see resurrection. Resurrection is true but it most often takes a while, sometimes a long while, until we can see it, experience it.

Resurrection is easy to miss. It is often mixed up with Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday.The disappointment and fear, betrayal and death, tears and questions get all mixed up with the green shoots, emerging colors, elusive fresh scents, bright hope, new understandings.

The theme this year during lent was “Upside down and inside out.” We tied prayer knots, watching and feeling the fabric move inside out and upside down, even as our prayers may have felt mixed up. We also have had this (modified) catenary, strong ends with a curve hanging in the middle – for six long weeks.

If anything is upside down and inside out it is Resurrection. It seems impossible. Yet after our unending, cold winter, we see it in the long-awaited spring. Forsythia that often bloom in February are finally showing yellow. Death and darkness do not have the last word. Life is possible again – for bulbs and butterflies, seeds and eggs. And if we imagine the catenary upside down we see an arch, instead of sag, we see the possibility of strength.

But resurrection for people? It sounds like one more worn-out religious cliche, PollyAnna all dressed up for Easter. // We probably shouldn’t rush to resurrection; few of us will get there as quickly as Mary Magdalene and Jesus.

But I do believe there are ways to see resurrection, experience resurrection though it is not easy – given the fear and doom that are so prevalent in the media and sometimes even the church. It takes practice and time but we may find laughter after inconsolable weeping, hope after despair, even here in this world – that overflows with warfare, injustice, violence and death.

On my recent sabbatical I had some upside down and inside out resurrection moments while re-connecting with my grandmother, my mother and myself. We all three kept journals and I read through them to find that we all wrote about our families, our faith, our struggles with the church.

Some days reading felt like a prayer; other days it was like being in a soap opera. As the days turned to weeks, time became blurred. Was I in the 1970s with my mother and her anger at being a pastor’s wife or was I in the 1990s, a young woman in Washington, DC searching for a life path, wondering if love is possible? Looking up from the journal, I would be surprised to see my middle-aged self: wife, mother, pastor.

I had to make a conscious choice to move from soap opera to prayer and it was not easy.  It took some sage advice from wise friends to help me shift my judgments, frustrations, anger and questions (of my mother and myself) to compassion, inspiration and challenge. By choosing compassion over judgment, my mother’s story, as particular as it is, grew beyond the thoughts, struggles and dreams of one woman. In her story, I began to hear the voices of many women. By the time I got to the end of my mother’s writing, I felt as if I were reading scripture. My mother died on December 6, 1998  and yet here she was; I was practically holding her in my hands, her words made flesh.

But it is not just her words that seem alive. There is, sometimes, something more. Now that she is gone – 16 years –  there is a different kind of presence I experience with her. It is inexplicable but quite real. I became aware of it several years after her death.

I was planning a worship service. I was trying to choose hymns appropriate for a service on the theme of mystery. As a congregation, as a denomination we do not readily talk about mystery. On the whole, we are practical realists; we are not a mystical or contemplative people. How could I even begin to find music that might fit the theme? I found a book on worship that I had inherited after my mother died; she had been a pastor after all. I hoped it might give me some ideas.

I opened the book and out fluttered a scrap of paper. At the top was written, in my mother’s graceful script, “hymns on mystery.” The paper included titles and hymn numbers of ten “mystery” hymns from the blue hymnal. I was speechless except to breathe, “Thanks Mom.”

That was my experience but recently Cecilia told me about something that happened to her. A little back story –

When I was in college at Eastern Mennonite University, my mother was a campus pastor at Goshen College. While she loved the high energy and persistent noise of campus life, Mom, was at heart, an introvert and a contemplative. She figured some students and staff were as well. When a memorial donation was made to the college, she used it to provide a place for students to get away. She helped create the Quiet Place, a room on campus set aside for prayer and meditation, with books, resources, comfortable chairs, and soft lighting. With assistance from local artists, she helped create a beautiful, calm place for prayer.

Fast forward a decade or so. My daughter, Cecilia, was a year old when her grandmother was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. In addition to chemotherapy, fresh carrot juice and herbal intinctions, one of the main medicines that Mom said kept going for two years after her cancer diagnosis, was her beloved first grandchild. “Nana” always said Cecilia’s visits were the best healing she could receive, such was their love for each other. But Cecilia’s love could not keep her Nana alive. Mom died when Cecilia was three. Yet, as it is written in Song of Songs, “Love is as strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.”

At age 18, Cecilia became a student at Goshen College. One late night, after a difficult and stressful day, she was desperate for a change of scenery. She tearfully walked the campus, wondering where she could find consolation. At 2am, after trying several locked doors she found her way to the Quiet Place, a prayer room she barely knew existed. The door was unlocked. She turned on the light, sank into a chair and reached for something comforting to read. There on the bookshelf was a small, bound, collection of prayers by women. Through her tears, she turned to the index and was astounded to find that the first entry was written by her Nana, in 1983, thirty-one years earlier.

This was the prayer Cecilia read from her Nana:

Great God, maker of us all,

          We acknowledge that our souls are shaped for your spirit.

          We bring to you all that would alienate us from your presence.

          Have mercy on us.

We come with fear of rejection and failure

          with our mistrust of others and ourselves

          with our hurt and unwillingness to forgive

          with our confusion and uncertainty

          with our anger and frustration

          with our pride and self-sufficiency

          Have mercy on us.

Heal us and grow us into wholeness.

We listen for your word.

Speak to us in the deep places of our hearts.

 

Thank you for making us in your likeness

          with creative ability

          with capacity to give and receive love

          with the power to communicate

          with strength to forgive.

Teach us how to live love.

Keep us on tiptoe with expectancy and hope.

Grant us faith to risk new experiences

          give us courage to develop and use the gifts you’ve given us.

Thank you for the Word made flesh.

Incarnate in us the Word

that you may be revealed in us.

In the name of Yahweh

God who creates, redeems and sustain us.

When Cecilia shared this story recently we both wept. “She does that, she shows up,” I choked out. Our tears turned to grateful laughter as we wondered how a prayer written twelve years before a granddaughter was born could be present at the right time and the right place.

Resurrection. It is at the heart of our Christian faith – and it is a mystery: wild, untamable, unpredictable.

Try as we might, resurrection is not easy to take in, not simple to explain. There is certainly more than one way to experience it. In the gospel of Mark, the women find an angel announcing the empty tomb, and they are so terrified and confused they run away and according to Mark, they don’t tell anyone.

In John’s gospel, Mary tries to hold onto Jesus, keeping him close so that everything can be just as it was before death took him away.

Jesus tells Mary not to hold onto the past, to what was.

Before, Jesus was the messenger, God’s chosen one

sent to turn a world upside down and inside out,

to join love and action, healing and hope.

Now, in this new time and place, Mary is to be the messenger.

Now she is to spread the news – of new life,

of hospitality and solidarity,

of possibility and transformation.

Jesus is alive, and he cannot be touched.

He is still Jesus but now he is also Christ, the universal, in all places and in all times.

The resurrected one is there and here and everywhere.

And now we are the messengers.

And so we pray –

Keep us on tiptoe with expectancy and hope.

Thank you for the Word made flesh.

Incarnate in us the Word

that you may be revealed in us.