“The Road to Jerusalem: Security”
Rev. David E. Gray
Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church
Easter Sunday – April 12, 2009
Mark 10: 13-16; John 20: 1-18
Around 8 a.m. on January 12, 2007, Joshua Bell stood at the top of the escalator in the L’Enfant Plaza metro subway station in Washington D.C. and began playing his violin. Bell wore a baseball cap and had his jacket pulled up tight. He acted like many busking musicians playing for tips in train stations across the nation.
But a few things distinguished Bell. For one thing, Bell had recently won a Grammy as one of the nation’s premier violinists. He was playing much more sophisticated music than one would usually hear in the metro. Bell also happened to be playing an million dollar Stradivarius violin that morning.
Bell played in the metro as part of an experiment that Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten initiated to see if people in our area would notice the presence of the beautiful music as they hurried to their daily routines. Bell played at the height of rush hour. A hidden camera showed that of the nearly 1100 people who passed by, only seven stopped to listen to him. To hear Bell in concert would cost a pretty penny. But those rushing by Bell kept missing the free gift right in front of them. On Easter Sunday, we gather to celebrate the gift of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. A gift we dare not miss. Let us hear about how that gift was received on that first Easter morning as recorded in the twentieth chapter of the Gospel of John.
The resurrection story of the first Easter begins with an apparent breach of security. It starts not with triumph, but with theft. As John tells it, the scene of the first Easter morning opens with Mary Magdalene reaching the tomb where the crucified Jesus has been buried only to find that the body of Jesus is gone. The stone security system placed on the tomb has failed.
Mary runs to share the news with two of Jesus’ disciples, Simon Peter, and an unnamed man the Gospels refer to as “the disciple who Jesus loved.” The first words uttered on that Easter morning are not “He is risen.” They are Mary shouting, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid him.” We can almost hear her cry, ”What do I do now?”
Mary has lost something very important to her and feels insecure. More and more these days, I talk to people who, like Mary, have lost something important and are anxious as a result. Some of us here or some of our friends and relatives went to work recently only to find that the company we have worked for for 20 years has cut back our hours or eliminated our job. We ask, “What do I do now?” Or the company is unable to stay in business and we have to start over. Mary cries, “They have taken my Lord,” and we look at our bank statement and scream “they have taken my plans for retirement” or “they have taken the plans I had for my children.” The evening shadows of life lengthen and we wonder where the years have gone and we ask, “They have taken my health. What do I do now?”
Like us, Mary is looking for answers. Her anxious mind immediately locks in on one - that Jesus’ body must have been stolen by grave robbers. Why not? Who else could have moved the stone? In doing so, she misses the signs, the beauty, and the grace around her.
Mary stands weeping outside the tomb. She does not go into it, but John records that Peter and the other disciple do. Actually, the disciple gets to the tomb first and seems afraid to venture in until Peter gets there. When they do go in they see linen wrappings lying there and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head rolled up, carefully in a place by itself. They know that is not the work of grave robbers. Robbers would take the body and run. They would not take the time to unwrap the body, carefully roll up the head covering and then take out a corpse with their bare hands. John suggests that then the disciple became convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead. They go out of the tomb as changed men, pass Mary, yet she is unmoved.
Mary then looks into the tomb and sees two angels sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying. The angels actually talk to her. Having two angels sitting in the tomb might be positive signs that something different was up rather than a common grave robbing experience. In the Bible, angels dressed beautifully in white are usually markers of something special going on. But Mary stays focused on her assumption. She gives the angels the same explanation she gave to Peter and the disciple, “They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him.”
And when Jesus appears, Mary mistakes him for a gardener and thinks perhaps he is the one who has stolen the body.
The tomb is open, Mary only thinks about grave robbing. Peter and the disciple go in and have their opinions changed and pass right by her and Mary is not moved. Angels appear, Mary is still sure the body is stolen. Jesus stands there right in front of her and Mary is totally focused on the routine explanation. Mary wants to find security in finding the body of Jesus so badly that she misses the signs of something new in front of her.
On December 3, 1997, fugitive Vincent McKenzie was being chased by the Connecticut State police through Suffield, Connecticut. He was rushing down the highway, full speed in his car. In an attempt to out maneuver the police, McKenzie pulled quickly into the parking lot of what he thought was a shopping center. He pulled to the front entrance, jumped out of the car, and ran into the front lobby. However, in his rushing, McKenzie missed the sign out front of the building that read, “MacDougall Correctional Institution,” a high security state prison in Suffield. McKenzie said he began to feel something might not be right when the automatic doors of the building closed and locked behind him.
There are important signs in life for us. Warning signs for our health and well being. Signals for us to act, and the signposts that tell us that things are not what we assume. Above all, the simple signs of God’s grace make life worth living. That is what Easter is all about.
As we rush through the metros, highways and footpaths of life searching for what assume are the most important values in life, we do well to remember the wisdom of the ages - that life’s meaning comes more from the grace we receive than from the goals we reach.
Over the past seven weeks, we have been joining in a sermon series here at Bradley Hills called The Road to Jerusalem. It has been about our spiritual journey and every week we’ve mentioned the road to Jerusalem.
Why Jerusalem? Why are we going to Jerusalem spiritually? Does it matter where we are going in life? Do we only walk the spiritual road to Jerusalem because Jesus went there to be crucified and so we go there to honor the past on Easter morning?
Jerusalem is a city, but also a Biblical metaphor for the restoration of our relationship with God. We walk to Jerusalem to honor the prophetic faith of an exiled Hebrew people who believed that a place and an idea called Jerusalem would restored. We walk to Jerusalem because a New Testament author named John reveals that our eternal home is with God in a New Jerusalem. We walk the road to Jerusalem because there on Easter morning Jesus demonstrates and proclaims that our relationship with God is made new. When Mary was in her most desperate hour, pleading with the gardener to return the body, Jesus called to her by name. When Jesus reached out in sympathy, then Mary finally realized that Christ was alive. Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go tell my brothers, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your father, to my God and your God.’”
Because of Easter, God is no longer a distant or foreign object. The breach between God and humanity has been repaired through the saving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. God has come to us and that is why Jesus expresses that there is a new relationship, “he is going to my Father and your father, my God and your God.” God is now our Father again too.
Last Tuesday evening, my wife, Bridget, went out for dinner with some friends and I was at home alone to put our two young boys to bed. This is often a recipe for drama at the Gray household. I was giving our two year old, Andrew, a bath and he slipped and hit is chin on the side of the tub.
He immediately looked up at me. I expected him to burst into tears. I know I was about to. And I think Andrew sensed that. I think he sensed my deep concern and so instead of crying, he began laughing.
The sympathy of a father can make us see things in life a little bit differently.
We can be a bit more secure and can laugh at the music of life – regardless of whether the music is happy or sad – when we let go and open ourselves to receiving the grace of our heavenly Father, our heavenly God.
Like Mary, we are searching for security. We ask, where have they taken my security? Tell me where the job is, where that relationship went, where the memory is stored, and I will go and get it back. We seek security in what we know. In what we have seen before. In our routines. In what we can hold onto. But Jesus said to Mary, “Do not hold on,” even to me.
Throughout most of that first Easter morning, Mary has been running around trying to find Jesus. Maybe some of you were running around this Easter morning getting dressed, getting your family ready and your brunch plans set, before coming to seek Jesus in worship today. But you know, Mary finds what she is looking for, she finally gets to the place where she can say, “I have seen the Lord,” when she is willing to let go.
I hope that you will find this church, this sanctuary, a safe place for you to let go and be in the presence of the spirit of God.
When Joshua Bell played the violin in Washington, DC, 1100 people of every demographic passed by. People of different races, genders, and classes, passed by and missed the presence of something and someone very special in their midst. But the behavior of one other demographic remained consistent. According to the Washington Post, nearly every time a child walked past, the child tried to stop and watch and listen to Bell. And every time they did, a parent scooted the child away. Scooted them on their way to an appointment or activity. The children were open to hearing the music in a way the parents were not.
Weingarten reminds us that poet Billy Collins once observed that babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, “life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us,” and maybe the music, too. Our God has a father’s sympathy and a mother’s heart. We who receive God’s kingdom as God’s children do not have to let life choke out the poetry and music of our souls.
Jesus cautions that unless we “receive the kingdom of God like a little child,” we will not enter it.
Despite all our efforts, we do not create, run down or find the kingdom of God on our own. We receive it.
If Easter teaches us anything, it is that God appears to us when we least expect it. In the form of a gardener who comforts an anxious woman at Easter with a single word. In the generosity of a neighbor or stranger who appears to us at just the right time. In the beauty of a moment when we realize our child has the gifts we never had, but always wish we did. In the opportunities God gives us to stretch ourselves by helping someone else see the way out of a tomb they had made for themselves. In the opportunity to become like a child once again.
The disciple whom Jesus loved only found God when, like a frightened boy, he trusted his friend Peter enough to enter into one of the dark places of life to receive evidence of Jesus. Mary Magdalene only found Jesus at Easter when she looked up at a man she had thought was a gardener and, like a child in a classroom, called him, “Teacher.”
Our security in this world and the next comes from a God who reaches out to us, calls us by name and experiences the pain of a world where things we care about can get taken away from us, so that someday we can be free of that pain.
We come to church on Easter to get a glimpse of the savior through whom childlike wonder and laughter can still be found in this world, because God has not given up on this world.
God’s grace comes to us in Jesus Christ at Easter to do what we can never do on our own no matter how much we run or search or toil– and that is to restore our relationship with our creator. And then, because of that grace, we, like Mary, can slow down and say with conviction, “I have seen the Lord.”
Receiving such grace might make you venture into a deeper relationship with God if only to see what life in the spirit is all about. But then, that’s when you really start to hear the music of life. Thanks be to God. Amen.
