Heart of Peace

Here is my sermon frm Sunday, The texts were  Acts 2:14a, 22-32 and John 20:19-31:

Today is a sort of unusual worship service as I said, Easter is a time of celebration, and when at least in my planning of worship, the season of Easter is full of the sense of celebration that Easter brings. What it also normally brings is me being on vacation the week after Easter, but we are not fully to that sense of celebration, and we’re not gathered together, and I am here, and the person who was supposed to be preaching is still in Albuquerque with his daughters and I even changed what I was planning on preaching on after Easter in order to better reflect our time and space. And so we start with a worship series, entitled the heart of the matter, and I’m thankful to Marcia McFee for creating the idea in a fairly short period of time, and it begins with what is the traditional reading for this Sunday, which is the passage from John and the story of doubting Thomas. And although this message is not about Thomas, let me say that Thomas has gotten an extremely bad rap over the millennia with this particular moniker being given to him. I mean we don’t say denying peter or even betraying Judas, but we always talk about doubting Thomas even though the story does not justify that reality.

First, Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb, and she eventually sees Jesus and it is in John’s account that she reaches out to touch him, and Jesus doesn’t allow her to I think in order to keep social distancing. But then she says to the disciples “I have seen the Lord.” But do they believe her, it certainly doesn’t appear to be the case, because we then told that that night, where our scripture started this morning, the disciples are locked up in a house full of fear. If they had believed in Mary’s testimony it doesn’t seem that would have been the case, as we’ll see shortly. And the story says they were fearful of the Jews, and in that we have to hear fearful of some leaders, because what were all the disciples? They were Jews, and so we need to be reminded how quickly these things can lead to anti-Semitism that was not intended by the writer. But back to the story, Jesus then appears to the disciples and gives his greeting, “Peace be with you.” And then I think there should be an ellipsis because it appears as if something is missing, as the passage says “After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side.” But why would Jesus do this, unless the disciples had asked for it in order to prove that he was really Jesus, not just some random guy walking through a locked door. And I think that because it says after Jesus had done this, “Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.” That is they hadn’t believed the testimony of Mary, and they didn’t believe it was the Lord until they had seen the wounds.

Earthquakes and Resurrections

Here is my message for Easter Sunday. The text was Matthew 28:1-10:

Have you ever had a resurrection take place in your life?  Maybe it was that houseplant that you thought you had killed, but somehow it came back stronger and greener, or maybe it was an appliance you thought for sure was a goner, but somehow it was able to be fixed and kept running.  Maybe it was a relationship or a job that you thought were over, but was somehow renewed and given new life and vitality.  Or maybe, like author and commentator David Sedaris, you’ve seen a more dramatic resurrection in your life.  He recounts the time when the family dog Duchess gave birth to a litter of puppies.  After all the puppies were born, one of them appeared to have died but Sedaris’ mother took the puppy arranged it in a casserole dish and popped it into the oven.  When Sedaris and his sisters reacted with horror, their mother responded “Oh, keep your shirts on.  I’m not baking anyone, this is just to keep him warm. The heat revived the sick puppy,” Sedaris said, “and left us believing that our mother was capable of resurrecting the dead.”

What stories of resurrection remind us is that resurrection is only needed; indeed resurrection is only possible when things appear to be at an end.  You cannot resurrect something that is going well. Only relationships on the rocks can be resurrected.  Only careers and jobs that are lapsing can be resurrected.  Only failing health can be resurrected.  Only when the baseball season appears to be over before it has started can it be resurrected.  Only lives that have ended can be resurrected.  I say all this because while it might be obvious that death and resurrection go together, I think that sometimes we forget it, and so especially in this time of quarantines and shelter at home orders we need to remember, in this time in which we so desperately want and hunger for a return to normal, we have to remember that resurrection comes out of the darkness and despair of Good Friday, it only comes from the death and the tomb, and it means so much because of those things. Indeed this Holy Week and this Easter have a different meaning for most people, I think because of what we are experiencing as a town, a state, a nation and a world. And we have much in common in our situation with the women and the disciples this day.

Mary of Magdala

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was John 20:1-18:

As many of you know, it is said that the best-selling book of all time is the Bible.  The 13th best-selling book in any language is the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, which is also the tenth best-selling book in English.  So, it is perhaps not surprising that when I began asking people what women in the Bible I should preach on, nearly without exception, the first name that came up was Mary Magdalene.  Although people have had a fascination with Mary Magdalene for a long time, and within recent memory, she has played a significant role in Jesus Christ Superstar and in the novel and movie The Last Temptation of Christ and Mel Gibson’s The Passion it is The Da Vinci Code which has driven resurgence in interest and thinking about Mary.  But most of this has been more speculation and fiction, than reality.

Now I don’t have a very high opinion of Dan Brown.  I think he is a great suspense writer, and I have, in fact, read most of his books, but the problem is he includes facts that could be disproved with just two minutes on Wikipedia or ten minutes in the library, and then passes those off facts as the absolute truth, and this is especially true in The Da Vinci Code.  So for example, he says that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the 1950s and contained the earliest Christian writings, when in fact they were found in 1947 and do not contain any Christian writings at all.  But the claims he makes about Mary, and what we can claim about her are even worse, and I strongly suspect have influenced what many of you think about Mary Magdalene.  And so to begin we are going to spend some time deconstructing some beliefs of Mary, looking at what we know about her from the Bible, and then because Dan Brown focuses a lot of his material on non-canonical texts, that is books that were not included in the Bible, we will look briefly at those as well, and then we will discuss what she means for us and why she is important.