The Only Time is Now

John 20:1-18

Easter, Year A

There’s a moment that comes when one first wakes up. When that line between night and day, awake and asleep, light and dark is completely blurred of distinction. When you seem to be hovering between the previous night’s dreams, be they good or bad, and the challenges you know await you the moment that your mind makes the transition from one to the other. Before nocturnal meanderings of the previous evening are blown away like sand across the coastline, scattered by a harsh midday zephyr, and the concrete realness of the present moment fully takes hold. In that moment, there is a singular and almost unassailable feeling of the peace that is found in nothingness. When you know that God and all God’s angels are in their holy home, your children are still safe and snuggled up in their beds, your partner’s warmth is still radiating into yours, the sheets are the perfect temperature, the air, still. It is in that holiness of nothingness that one feels most at peace with themselves and the whole of the cosmos. When one’s soul, one’s body, one’s mind, one’s personhood is unencumbered by the stream of challenges that will surely be coming your way the moment your feet hit the slippers and you find yourself trying to get the coffee maker turned on with a few distractions as possible. Now, I’m not talking about the time that you might give yourself in the quiet of the morning before others are woken up, for surely, if you are like me, your internal calendar is already clicking away with whatever you have in your day, (meeting at 10:30, move laundry to dryer, make kids’ lunches, makes kids’ breakfasts, pick out kids’ outfits, wake up kids’, you get the idea). Those are all somethings. Those are all existing in the ether of your brain. Those all have some kind of time component to them. Those will all come in due time. But for a moment, in the first moment, like that first moment right before Eden saw play, like that first moment before God’s spun the whirling planets, before the polarity of atoms and encircling electrons, before all of that was a peaceful, quiet blissful nothing, the reality of which we get to experience once a day in the stillness.

In my mind, I picture the person of Mary of Magdala traversing that chasm between the night and the day as she made her way from wherever she had spent the night before to the tomb. And in my imaginings of the scant description we have in the passage for this morning, I return to the rural North Carolina of my youth picture the mists that rise over pastures, the sounds of early morning birds chirping, the ever present scents of pine needles and tar alighted on the breeze, the warmth of the sun beginning to melt away the previous night’s chill. Yet, it would seem that little if any of that mattered to Mary as she made her solemn pilgrimage to the tomb where she presumes she will have the unenviable task of continuing the preparations of the dead. And you have to wonder as she made her way there if the weight of all the previous week, the previous year, the previous three had finally cascaded down on top of her. Was it as if she had been holding it together for the others, trying to appear strong in the face of devastation so that others could keep it together as well? Was she finally alone and in the quiet where she could allow her thoughts, memories, sadness really begin to make their way past the carefully guarded continence of her face and the real and actual tears of one in mourning might finally fall and let some of that sadness out? Moreover, I wonder if as she arrived at the tomb, did she see it from far off, see the stone rolled away, see the blackness of nothingness in the void where the previous evening there was the body of her beloved and the child of God? Did she have time to process it all? Or, was it as if she turned a corner and there it was in all its open and empty glory with little to even suggest that only last night there had been a body and the stagnant, heavy air that comes with death? I tend to think it was the latter because almost immediately, we are told that she runs off to get back to the disciples and tell them what she has seen and from here forward, there is a growing intensity about the day’s events. Peter, never one to pass up the opportunity to run headlong into the unknown, tears off himself into the streets of Jerusalem racing, as we come to find out that he and the “disciple that Jesus loved” try to outrun one another to the tomb with, we are told three times, the disciple that Jesus loved arriving first at the tomb but being too timid, too scared of what he might see to actually go in. And going into the tomb, we are told that Peter sees the wrappings that just the previous night had been covering the body of the dead, with the cloth that had covered Jesus’s head lying by itself. Moreover, we hear that the disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, upon seeing all this, believed. And the two disciples having witnessed all this, having stood in the tomb, having verified its emptiness, having verified the lack-of-body-ness to the space, decide to head back home and that’s the last we hear from them. And our attention is then refocused back on Mary, the beloved of Jesus, whose sorrow over the loss of her beloved, has finally spilled over and she simply cannot contain her feelings of bereavement coupled with the strangeness of finding the tomb to be empty. And one is forced to wonder, because, again, we really don’t get a lot of the inner thoughts and contours of the minds off all these folks, if this was really the last straw for her. She had been present for so much over the course of Jesus’ three year ministry—words and healings, bread broken, bread shared, watching her beloved give sight to the blind and life to the one previously thought dead. She had ventured with him as he entered Jerusalem as a conquering ruler. She had stood aghast as the crowds in a whipped up frenzy cried for his execution. She had ached with the pain that can only be felt when you watch someone you love be hurt. She had stood as close to the foot of the cross as her beloved had cried out into the bleak vortex of the confusion of it all demanding to know why God had forsaken him, only to make peace with it declaring that it was finished. She had helped prepare his body. She had watched them place the stone in front of the tomb. She had felt the cold chill that runs through you when you know that death has gotten the final word. And just when she has maybe started to accept all this, as we all must do at some point in our lives, she comes to the empty tomb, a sheer nothingness that seems to be a rending in the fabric of the universe and she loses any semblance of security in the coming moment, any pretense of strength and in her aloneness all of it comes pouring out in tears, so much so that she cannot see even what is right in front of her. Until in her blurry, bleary sight she peers into the tomb to see two angels where before there had been a body and they ask her why she is so overcome with emotions. “They have taken away my Lord and I don’t know where he is,” she must have stammered out before turning so quickly that she almost walks right into someone, who again asks her why she is crying. And, assuming him to be someone who is supposed to be there, again offers her story of loss and confusion offering to take the body if it is too much trouble for others to take care of it. And in that moment, we are all Mary, staring off into the struggles, the challenges, the brokenness, that hatred, the void. And then she hears it, “Mary.” With all the love and compassion and hope and concern that one can possibly pour into a single utterance. “Mary.” And just like that light and love and possibility and promise and God and divinity and goodness and blessedness and holiness all explode around her and what had felt like a dead and dying planet in a dead and dying universe spinning off into oblivion is replaced in an instant by all that is good and right and perfect about God’s creation. And death was overcome by life and love and light and it was safe to dream dreams again. It was ok to have visions of a better tomorrow. It was ok to experience life and to experience it in all its abundance. It was ok. And it still is.

We live in a time in which folks are frantically, sometimes, furiously trying to find something in which to ground their lives. Frantically, furiously searching for the thing that is going to make everything else fall properly into place. Stores will surely sell you something with that in mind. Our leaders will tell you that they can make that happen. Our minds reassure us that after that next hurdle, that next checkmark, that next promotion or child or degree or job, then it will all fall into place and you can experience peace. There is always something just along the horizon that will do this for you. We know that those pursuits are foolhardy and destined for failure. We know that there is no thing, no purchase, no achievement, no goal that will bring us the peace that we all crave. But the life abundant isn’t found in a thing or many things. It isn’t found in our earthly possessions, or any accidental qualities that we might possess or our own merit. It is found in the emptiness of a tomb where before only death had reigned. It is found in the light that pierces that darkness that the darkness can never, ever overcome. It is found in the one who says, “Mary” and in the simplicity of that utterance beats back the forces of hell and destruction that seek to tear us down. We can confidently move into our next moment knowing and believing that God is already there working on the resurrection of the world, the reconciliation of all of us back to God, of proclaiming the constant, irresistible, unstoppable, unending call to all the children to come back home and be at peace. And outside these walls in a whole world desperate to hear that message. Desperate to know that someone, anyone care. Desperate to know that this life with all its challenges, struggles, difficulties is not all there is. Desperate to have hope. And that’s where we come in.

Friends, siblings in Christ, this is the most important thing that you can take from today. The hope found in the next moment is not ever reliant on the success of this one. All we have in this life, in this existence, in this cosmos, is this moment with all the opportunity for newness and to cast aside the brokenness of the previous moment and start a new movement that will bring a whole new world, a whole new creation, a whole new thing, none of which can ever truly be contained just as what happened that moment in the tomb can never be wholly contained in that moment. For in a singular moment some two thousand years ago began a revolution. A revolution of love. A love flowing freely between God and people, between God and creation. A revolution that has a’lit the world for two millennia with the promise that peace can always arise from even the most violent moments. A promise that hope always arises out of despair. A promise that love can always, always, always transcend hatred, and we are, as we have always been, the children of light, bathed in the love of God. What was started some two millennia ago, in an unremarkable country, in an unremarkable part of the world, little more than a region the size of a postage stamp on the edge of the mighty Roman Empire, what was started there continues to challenge and change the world today. We gather in the midst of all that denies life and with Christians from around the world on this day we declare with one voice that hatred and malice and disease and even death are never given the last word, can never triumph over the the spirit of Christ, that emerged from that empty tomb on Easter morning and continues to emerge in each of us that raises our hands and declares, "here I am, send me!" We are those people. We are the people we have been waiting for. We are the small group of committed followers of Jesus who are here to change the world, because it's the only thing that ever has. Changes never come from mass movements of thousands or millions or billions. They come from the guy who stands in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square. They come from the ones who knelt in prayer as the hoses sprayed and the dogs attacked. They come from the nameless who stand in the face of the junta and declare, "¡No mas!" They come from those who walk in the footsteps of the risen One and who preach Christ and him crucified. Those are the ones who change the course of human history, those are the ones on whose shoulders we stand when we become the hands and feet of the risen Christ. Those are the ones who light leads the way, though the path be rocky, and stormy, and dark. Those are the ones who have been reborn in Christ. And so are we. We must never shy away from that calling. We must never avert our eyes and ears from the one who cries out in anguish and pain. We must never be silent when the time has come to raise our voice. We must be Christ for a world that desperately needs and is more ready than anytime in my life to experience the healing power of Christ again and anew. That is rebirth, that is redemption, that is resurrection. Alleluia, amen.