If your daily errands take you to the grocery store in the middle of the day, this is what you might expect to encounter:
You will have to find a parking spot and you will need to pay attention that you don’t perpetrate any fender benders on your way into it. Once you’ve made it across the parking lot, you can expect to go through an automatic sliding door into an entrance way that will be crowded with shopping carts all accordioned together. The next thing to expect is the produce aisle with its habitat of brightly colored peppers, pyramids of cantaloupe, bunches of carrots, and bags of organic salad mix.
If you are lucky enough to get your hands on tickets to a Red Sox Game down at Fenway, here is what you might expect: You can expect to hit a lot of traffic on the way into town, so it wouldn’t hurt to give yourself some extra time. Just like at the grocery store, you’ll have to find a parking spot – but it will be harder to find here, and a lot more expensive. When you get to the stadium you – and thousands of other people, young and old – will pass through the gates, show your ticket, and make your way to your spot in the stands. Once there, you might see the pitchers warming up in the bullpen. You can expect to see the fabled green monster. Might you run into some outrageous fans who have painted their faces? Probably. WIll you hear the guys wandering through the stands yelling “Get your hot dogs here!” and see the jumbotron running life insurance ads? I bet you will. You can expect all of this and more if you are lucky enough to get tickets to a Red Sox game.
What do you expect?
Expectation has a lot to do with the way we live our lives. The grocery store and the Red Sox game illustrate two ways that expectation works. Unusual and fun events in our lives give rise to eager expectations that delight us when they actually happen in real life. What an excellent thing it is to see the wide-eyed youngsters eating it all up when the left fielder makes a spectacular catch, or the runner makes a wild bid to steal second base!
This kind of expectation is a kind of desire. We expect something, and when we get it, we are happy.
The produce aisle at the grocery store produces none of this kind of eager expectation. When we are doing normal everyday stuff, our expectation is not about desire. This more boring kind of expectation happens because of what we know about our lives. We expect the shopping carts to sit in the entrance of the grocery store because we have seen them there a million times. If we even bother to have this kind of expectation, we have it for one simple reason: we know what to expect.
But there is another thing that sometimes happens. Every so often, we expect something to happen, but the thing that actually happens to us is something altogether different.
To find an example of this, you need look no further than the story that the deacons of the United Church of Jaffrey just did a dramatic reading of – thank you O deacons!
Now I will grant you that getting up before dawn to go to the tomb of a recently executed Messiah bears scant resemblance to the act of going to a Red Sox game, or hitting the produce aisle to pick up some Broccolini. This was, no doubt, an unusual thing for Mary to do. Still, her errand was a bit like going to the grocery store in the sense that her expectations were formed by what she knew. She knew, from her life experience, that when you see someone die, that person is supposed to stay dead. So she expected to find Jesus’ dead body in the tomb. That was her expectation, because that is what she knew.
We humans are really good at this – at knowing stuff. We are so good at it, that we spend a great deal of our lives assuming that we know pretty much all there is to know about everything. These days we know so much, we even claim to have built machines that know everything too. Wow! Pretty impressive!
But wait.
The story that we just heard tells us something different. It tells us that we may think we know something, when in fact there may be more to it that we thought.
Mary thinks that dead people are supposed to stay dead. But when she gets to the tomb, she finds out that there is more to it than she thought.
The unexpected exists within the expected.
Today, as you know, is Easter Sunday.
On Easter Sunday, we, here at the United Church of Jaffrey, like to pull out all the stops and put on a special worship service.
We invite excellent musicians like Floyd Oster and Jessica Mahoney to come and work their glorious magic, and turn this humble sanctuary into a place of soaring beauty and excitement.
Yes. Easter is a big deal for us.
There are two reasons for this. The primary reason, of course, is that Easter – the day which marks the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ – is a day of deep significance in our lives as people of faith, and so gathering to respect this moment, and understand its significance in our lives, is an important thing for us to do as a faith community.
The second reason we make a big deal out of Easter, is because more people tend to come to the Easter Service than come to our regular Sunday services. Our Easter service, then, is an opportunity to show off a little bit. To do something special. We can enjoy it ourselves, and we can hope that anyone who is visiting might enjoy it too. Who knows, maybe one or two might like it enough to try coming again, on another Sunday.
Who knows?
I’m not much of an Evangelist, but allow me to observe, as a gentle form of evangelism, that if, during these days of uncertainty, you did decide to take a chance, and come back to our church on some less circumstantial Sunday, you would, I venture to say, be doing your heart and spirit a good turn. You would find, in the United Church of Jaffrey, a small community, that is gracious and loving, in the manner of our teacher; a people who, walking in his path, insist on the universal application of respect and justice to all God’s children. Before this monumental ambition we remain humble servants, dedicated to growing our faith through acts of love, not just to the few, but to all. If that sounds good to you, or you would at least like to give it a try, we would – every one of us – welcome you into our midst with all our hearts.
The Easter story we just heard is the story as it is told in the Gospel of John.
Some other folks show up briefly, but the main characters in this story are Mary and Jesus – and, significantly – if the story is told from any individual’s perspective, it is decidedly as seen through Mary’s eyes.
Jesus, as you may know, had 12 disciples – all of whom were men. These men followed him faithfully – well at least all but one – during his Galilean ministry, but when Jesus was tried, crucified and buried, none of them showed up to honor him. It was Mary, a woman, who showed up. Indeed, innumerable sermons have been given, and a great deal of scholarly work has been dedicated to the fact that, in all four of the gospels, the first ones who came to the tomb were women.
In a rigidly patriarchal society, these women valiantly acted out their faith – their truth.
To honor the great faithfulness of Christ’s female followers, our scripture, this morning, was read for us, exclusively, by women.
Even so, let it be known that in this place, when we follow our great teacher, we too set aside the social expectations of who should speak, or who should have power, in favor of honoring all the unexpected beauty of all of God’s children.
Other than the evidence we get in the gospels, nothing is known about Mary Magdalene. In the 8th Chapter of Luke’s gospel we are introduced to her as
Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out,
She is mentioned by name 11 more times in the gospels – more than almost any of the disciples. Among these appearances: three are notable for us today – Mary Magdelene, the gospels tell us, was present at Christ’s death, his burial, and – as today’s story shows – at his resurrection.
So, if, as all this suggests, Mary was such an active part of Christ’s following, why was she so surprised and distraught when she got to the tomb? Jesus had told his people on at least three occasions, that he would be crucified and would rise again on the third day! Wasn’t Mary expecting this?
It is no secret that, in the region east of Monadnock, the Evangelical churches are full to the brim every Sunday.
Neither is it a secret that churches like the United Church of Jaffrey, earnest and loving as we are, are struggling to survive.
Now I have never actually been to one of those churches, perhaps I should… but in my defense, I am busy on Sunday mornings at that time.
I have read about the services that they hold, I have seen some videos, and I have heard people describe them to me.
The music is supposed to be great.
The visuals too are supposed to be spectacular.
It all sounds very entertaining.
I’ve heard that they have amazing programs for children too, and that their Sunday schools are overflowing.
I will not put them down.
These churches are doing something important that I am having trouble doing…
They are creating community – and for that I am grateful to them and to God.
One of the big reasons I got into the ministry was because I wanted to create community.
You might think, then, that our church would consider reshaping our services. Maybe pull in a drum kit and install a fog machine.
If it works for them, it could work for us!
But we will not do that.
Let me hasten to say that we are not one of those sects of Christianity that frowns upon fun and entertainment as the work of the devil. We have fun here. We have not banned entertainment from these hallowed halls.
But fun and entertainment are not the goal.
If it were the goal, we would come to expect church be just like everything else in America – an institution dedicated to the whims of our pleasure.
There is something about God – something about the presence of the sacred, that demands something more than an institution dedicated to the whims of our pleasure. To honor God our worship requires a certain space – a certain separateness from the rest of our lives. When worship becomes about entertainment – about flawless music production and spectacular visuals effects, it is not different, in any way, from everything else we experience in American culture. When worship becomes the act of exciting our senses, it does little more than reflect our whimsies and desires back at ourselves.
I don’t want to spend Sunday morning looking in the mirror, feeling content with what I see.
Is that what I should expect from Sunday morning?
If so, Sunday morning would be about pleasing myself.
I don’t think Sunday morning is about me! Surely it is about God.
And to be about God, it has to be separate in some way.
Unexpected.
Easter morning is separate, isn’t it?
It is unexpected!
On Easter morning, the most basic and universal thing that we know – that dead people stay dead – is turned upside down by God.
Mary – the woman who went to the tomb – somehow knew that dead people remain dead and also knew that her Rabbouni – her teacher – was different… that he just might be alive.
She knew what was expected, and she also had a kind of awareness – a glimpse of faith, perhaps, that Jesus might be risen.
And when she arrived at the tomb on Easter morning, she found that the stone was rolled away!
Jesus wasn’t dead.
He was alive!
Jesus was not just human. If he was just human, he would have stayed dead like everyone else.
Jesus was divine, so he became alive.
God, was the unexpected within the expected.
On Easter morning, God – the Divine in Jesus – was the new thing – the part story that refused to surrender to hatred, suffering, and pain.
God, the unexpected, made Easter separate from any other day. God made the moment sacred by defying the expected.
Humans – in all their ugly thirst for power – killed God.
But God would not be killed.
Instead God did the unexpected. God turned the terrible pain of the cross into the promise of life.
WIth his resurrection, the Divine in Jesus transformed a torturous death into an expression of the power and the reality of love.
On this Easter Sunday, in this place, we carve an hour out of our expected American life, to worship and honor this unexpected, grace filled truth.
Amen.