Sunday March 23, Easter Day, the Sunday of the Ressurrection

He SAid These Things To Her

By The Rev’d Dawn M. Frankfurt

Glory to the Holy and Undivided Trinity; God who is Three in One and One in Three; Who is beyond us, among us, within us; Who was, and is, and is to come, world without end. Amen.

My brother is a criminal defense attorney in Denver. When he defends a client there are three possible outcomes. They can be found guilty, or innocent, or they can make a plea bargain. Once somebody is charged with something, we have laws determining what the outcome can be.

Things aren’t like that with God. In the first place, God is a whole lot bigger than our laws, in fact, bigger than anything we can imagine. God is not limited by what we know. We come to our limits of imagination long before we even begin to discover all that there is to know about God.

See, when Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, she was, as most of us tend to do, she was thinking within the limits of human possibility. She came to the place where she knew Jesus had been buried. She saw that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance to the tomb. If she had come to the tomb and found the stone in front of it as it had been, would she have had any reason to think that Jesus was not still inside? If the stone was still there, she could have come there and gone on doing just what she expected she would do. She’d cry over the loss of her friend and Lord. She’d cry over the many hopes and dreams she’d had when she was with him – now gone. She would pray. With so many questions for God, she would lift her troubled thoughts to God.

The thing about Mary was that she never imagined the possibility that Jesus would no longer be inside the tomb. Not really, anyway – until she came face-to-face with the emptiness of that crypt. Except where thieves and bandits were involved, nothing like bodies-going-missing ever happened. She immediately assumed that this was what had happened to Jesus. She ran to get the others.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she remembered, Jesus had said some things to her – in her sorrow she was confused – what had he meant? The possible scenarios, according to the way Mary knew things, were this:

1. The stone had not been moved and Jesus was still in the tomb.

2. The stone had been moved and someone had come and taken the body of Jesus away.

What other possibilities were there? Really. What else was there?

We have a limited repertoire of possibilities like that when we face obstacles, you know. The bigger the problem or the scarier the situation – usually the more blind we are to options and potential. When things are unsure and frightening, we hold ever more tightly to what we know, to the familiar. We can’t seem to remember that God has the answer.

When the problem is big, it’s a lot harder to get creative. It is hard to step out in faith. When the outcome has a whole bunch weighing on it, your thought process is more cautions and it limits what seems possible. Consider this: A woman had been the parish secretary for more than 25 years. She was only a year or two away from retirement when the rector announced that he would be moving on. In the process of the parish looking at themselves, doing self-assessment and beginning to write their parish profile, the church began to uncover a devastating problem. A large amount of money which should have been in the parish’s bank accounts wasn’t there. Nearly one million dollars. An investigation ensued. Eventually the beloved secretary was confronted.

She tearfully admitted what she had been doing for so many years. She also said her son had a terrible gambling problem. This was the kid everybody remembered being the “life of the party” in youth group, he had always been in attendance, and he was one of the most popular kids when he was in high school. She was desperate to find a way to keep her son safe from people who uttered threats.

If you’re caught embezzling money, what possible consequences do you face? The loss of your job. Criminal conviction. Bankruptcy of all kinds. It seems a finite list of possible outcomes – all grim. But didn’t we just establish a few minutes ago that God is not finite?

Sometimes we have problems which are so scary, huge, unexpected, or terrible, that we cannot imagine an outcome we can live with. The church secretary had a problem like that. Every answer she could compute felt wrong. She didn’t want any of the possible consequences. She was exposed, friendless and penniless. She stood at the precipice full of shame, desperation, and fear. Where did she have to turn? Where could she go?

If we think back over our lives, we can probably think of some situation where we were seized with fear on every side. Every possible next step was dreadful. Which choices does the relative of a terminally ill person want to make when getting better isn’t possible? What seems like a pleasant next possible step when a marriage is over? Divorce? Staying in misery? There don’t seem to be any right choices.

At times like this, you may feel that your life is something like a shattered ceramic pot. I’m sure the church secretary felt that way. She was ruined. Her son’s future appeared to be ruined. Where was the hope?

Maybe today you come to church with as many fragments of your life, the ceramic pot, as you can gather together in your hands. Today you might feel that your life, represented by the pot, is simply chipped. Maybe it is cracked with a piece missing. Possibly even shattered with no idea if all of the pieces are there or not.

Look at that pot – no matter what condition it is in – and hold it in the palm of your hands. Lift it just like it is and bring it to God. Show God the chips, the cracks and the broken places. Nothing is too broken to bring to God. Tell God about the pieces you can’t fit together. With a broken pot in your hands, the only place to turn, the ONLY place to turn is to God. God’s got you. God won’t leave. If you come here hurting or searching today, this is where you will find help. No other place.

God came here for you. God came into the world for you. What happened at the cross was for you. From the beginning of time, God had salvation for you. In Christ you were made right with God. You. You were made right with God. It’s personal. God came to meet you here. He called you here personally. God loves you. God wants you to know that you have a place to turn. When choices are bleak, you have a place to go.

Mary could only imagine two things. Either Jesus was dead and in the tomb, or his body had been stolen. When the disciples returned to their homes, Mary remained weeping at the tomb when angels appeared to her. “Woman,” they said, “why are you weeping?” She thought Christ was gone. She despaired of hope. She couldn’t see a good possible answer. And Christ came to her. “Woman, why are you weeping?” He said these things to her. When she recognized that it was Jesus coming to her, she realized that God had provided another way. When there seemed to be nothing, when all hope seemed lost, God found a way.

God finds a way. God finds ways we can’t imagine. The best possible ways. Ways that heal and make everything whole. Trust in God. Trust God to provide the way. When Mary saw God before her providing the way, healing and wholeness – real wholeness – came into the world. God is alive! God came here for you.

Hold the broken pieces of your life, hold them out to God. Get the most broken piece, the one it hurts to look at, the one that seems pulverized into dust. Give this to God. Give it and trust God. Listen to your heart. Hear God calling you. Keep trusting. Keep listening to God. Hand it over. Listen. Trust. God will find a way. You can’t see it, but God will find a way. God rose again from the dead after three days. God is going to make everything all right. You can trust in that. God came back to Mary at the tomb and spoke to her. God came here today to speak to you. It wasn’t an accident or an old family tradition that brought you here today. You came looking.

God’s got you. God is not leaving. God finds a way. Trust God. God finds the way you didn’t know was there. You have to trust. A way will be revealed to you, and with Mary you will begin to say, “I have seen the Lord,” and you will know healing and wholeness. Jesus said these things to her. And he is saying them to YOU.