Easter Sermon, Zion, Torrance 18 April 2022 “Why are you crying?”
Texts: 1 Corinthians 15:3-8; 12-20 / John 20:18

Miracle of miracles, Jesus’ of Nazareth rising from the dead is the event upon which our faith is based. What made Jesus the Messiah for the disciples who went about broadcasting the fact in all directions was that he was not dead but alive. If all they had lived through with Jesus had ended in the death of the man on a public square, all the questions he had raised in their minds would have gone unanswered, left like a big question mark up against the darkening sky, just like his tortured and crucified body on the cross.

But they found the tomb empty. Since the morning of that first day of that week, every Sunday is Easter for all who believe in Him, proclaiming him to be living, risen.
The first person to discover the empty tomb was the woman called Mary Magdalene. She might have been the one whom Jesus had cured of a whole series of psychic problems, exorcising from her 7 demons in the language of that era. Then she could have been the same who one day entered the house of a Pharisee where Jesus was dining. At first she had just stood behind Jesus, with her alabaster container of expensive essential oil; but then she fell down weeping at his feet, and she wiped the tears that fell on them with her hair, kissing them and anointing them with the oil. The host, the Pharisee, was disgusted by this interruption. But Jesus comforted her, even praised her generous act with respect and kind affection.
Now, in the dawning of this first day of the week, for as much as she knows, he is dead. This man, the only one who had loved her for what she was, who had restored her personality, given her back her dignity. Her beloved Master, killed. What immense sorrow! There she is come with her bag of sweet spices to anoint the body in the traditional way and she finds the tomb has been ransacked! One more horror: after the insults at the trial and the unbearable suffering on the cross, now the contemptuous meddling with the grave. Is there no respect at all?
She turns away and runs to find Peter and John. They run back all 3. The 2 men, one after the other, stoop down and enter the tomb. There they find the linen cloths that had been around the body, and bewildered, they leave. But Mary lingers nearby, in the dewy garden, crying.

Normally, early on a lovely spring morning, a person would feel calm, positive, hopeful, galvanized by the fresh air and inspired by the beauty of the garden. Birds would be singing, the dew would be sparkling on the flower petals. But such a promise of a new day has no effect on Mary. Her heart is extremely sore, devastation surrounds her on all sides, grips her and won’t let her go.

A man whom, through her blinding tears she takes for the gardener, approaches and asks her “Why are you crying?” Is it necessary to ask such a question? Isn’t it just a bit impertinent?, if not cruel?
Yet it helps to talk, like catharsis, and sometimes it helps us see that we are making our own suffering through self-pity. Why are you crying? Is it for yourself you are sad, Mary? Or is it the world that makes you so sad? Or are you crying on my behalf?

If Mary is crying out of self-pity, she is also crying, in a sense, for us. Her tears express the sadness of a life without the living Christ. It is said that this world is just a valley of tears. And that was what Mary felt that morning in front of the tomb. She had been a social case, a burden for society, an offence to herself, until the day she had met Jesus. In Jesus she had learned what forgiveness means, the feeling of being liberated from a ton of regrets, of deceptions and of bitterness. Her life had taken a new direction. She realized that it had some value. No wonder then that she had invested her self totally in Jesus.

But now, No matter how wonderful he had been, no matter how magnificent his personality, it was of no account, if now he was dead, a victim of evil and hate. In fact, just a victim like so many other victims of the tragedy of human life. So what did it matter about sins forgiven, hers especially? Saint Paul writes that if Christ is not risen from the dead, then our faith is useless. Just an illusion that we are no longer churned up in the soup of sin.

Many people live their faith in this kind of illusion. On the outside, they appear happy, laughing, full of spirit; but on the inside they are really crying. Under the mask there are tears of hopelessness about the futility of their existence or an empty future. Maybe with time, Mary would come to adopt this sort of stoic mask of courage and resignation. Accept what you can’t change, doesn’t the saying go?

Mary is asked “Why are you crying?” Her answer: “They have taken away my Lord.” Could she be meaning “They have taken away my faith?” Many people today who were brought up in the church are victims of all the criticism made of the church, and even of the Bible. It’s as if some pernicious characters find pleasure in taking away other people’s faith. And with Mary, these people could say “They have taken away my faith”. How many people around the world have had their faith taken away by the churches themselves: Let’s not go into it, the harm done in residential schools or Orthodox church leaders in Russia who openly support the killing of innocent people.

Of course many others could weep not because their Lord has been taken away, but because they have never had a Lord, never been introduced to faith. Apparently in the United States numbers are increasing incrementally of teenagers who say they suffer from constant sadness and hopelessness. Analysts blame the dangers of social media, the decrease in social activities, the stress of being constantly exposed to the possibility of violence, to the drama of climate change, and the mess of politics, as well as over or under-caring parents. However, recently I read a survey that claimed that teenagers who have a link to a religious organization are much less likely to suffer from sadness and hopelessness. On Friday I stopped to chat with a cousin of mine who told that a friend of his had asked him what the celebration this weekend is all about. Just a normal Muskokan Canadian from generations back. He thought it maybe had something to do with the queen. Our society is suffering from an incredible lack of teaching of the Christian faith. For many such people, living is just working and playing, working and playing constantly in order to avoid any deep questions about the meaning of it all. But sooner or later, these questions arise on their own, when physical strength diminishes or an accident or a personal tragedy takes them by surprise, then these people know the valley of tears. And either they become cynical or withdrawn, consumed by sadness and hopelessness.

So there are many reasons to weep. Sometimes it’s just caused by uncertainty, to the fact that we don’t know why or where, or that we can’t understand so many tragedies. Zelensky says of the Ukrainians that even should Ukraine manage to maintain its independence as a country, “There will be no complete victory for people who lost their children, relatives, husbands, wives, parents. That’s what I mean, They will not feel the victory, even when our territories are liberated.” the tragedy goes beyond understanding.

Here’s another man, a North American Christian who writes after his son died in a mountaineering accident. “I do not know why God would watch him fall. I do not know why God would watch me wounded. I cannot even guess … My wound is an unanswered question. The wounds of all humanity are an unanswered question.”
“Sorrow is no longer the islands but the sea,” is how Wolterstorff described his feelings at the time.

So there are many reasons to cry.

“Sir, if it’s you who have removed the body, just please say where you have laid him.”
‘MARY!’ HE SAID MY NAME! Or did he say “Jane” or Michael or Scott?
The call from Jesus is personal and intimate. Because he is there, in person, alive. In the Bible God calls people by name. Moses was herding the sheep of his father-in-law when he heard out of a burning bush, “Moses, Moses, take off your sandals for you are standing on holy ground”. The little boy Samuel was asleep when he heard his name called, several times before the priest tells him No, my son, it’s not me calling you, it must be the Lord”. So only then, the next time he heard it, he answered, Lord, your servant is listening.” And Saul - Paul before his conversion, heard that voice while he was riding on horseback, asking “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”

Well, of course even if God calls us by our name, many of us never hear his voice. Even if we believe in Him, we think he is too far away to be interested in our little affairs. Not so the little girl who came home from Sunday School announcing proudly that she had memorized the Lord’s prayer. She just made a few mistakes in the words: Instead of Hallowed be thy name, she recited “Hello! you know my name!” That’s how, inadvertently, she expressed the great mystery that God knows us by name and expects us to answer personally and individually.
Paul writes to the Corinthians that what he preaches, he did get it from others: “Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures. He was buried and he rose again the third day.” When Paul is writing, 2 or 3 decades after the fact, it was already necessary to have these established formulas of confessions of faith. And when we say them, as we will today, this formula links us jointly to all the Christian generations before us. But there’s more: Paul continues, Christ appeared to Peter and then to the 12. After that, he was seen by about 500 persons, and then by James, and then also by ME. (Well, he forgot Mary, the first one to see the risen Christ. Oh well, let’s not hold that against him!) Anyway what exactly happened when he called Mary by name? She recognized him! She responded with one word: Rabboni. רבבוני my Lord. My living Lord. My hope. the meaning of my life. But what is that meaning now for her? Not to posses him or hold him back, for he says “do not touch me, but go to tell those I love”. Which she does, hastening to tell them “I have seen the Lord!”
Everybody who saw the risen Christ transposed that revelation into a testimony. We must bear witness, because we have something universally important to say, an urgent reason to serve, to share, to be compassionate, to say YES to life. Without that, all is a No, or a question mark, like the body on the cross. The death of Jesus was a No to justice, a No to love, a No to honesty, a No to openness. They have taken away my Lord. But as soon as Mary heard him call her name, her whole life became a YES. and a straight exclamation mark. Forgiveness became a reality and God’s love offered adventure.

Are there reasons to look up and stop crying? a meaning to life? life after death? YES. For Christians, the agony of the cross gives way to the glory of resurrection—and with the resurrection comes redemption, shattered lives that are made whole, and the promise that all things are made new, which does not mean that loss and hurt disappear but that they are incorporated into a richer faith and carried with renewed strength and given deeper meaning.
“My faith endured, writes the man who lost his son mountaineering. But it became a different kind of faith, a faith that incorporated my son’s death and my grief. And that would reveal to me a different kind of God. My relationship with my fellow human beings also changed: I felt an emotional affinity with those whom I knew were also in grief.”

What Christianity has to offer in response to shattering events is not a philosophical or formulaic answer. It offers a cross, a wounded saviour, a “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief,” The God of the Christian faith is not just sympathetic; he is empathetic, which is something deeper. Jesus was a protagonist in the human drama, hardly immune to anguish. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus said, “My soul is very sorrowful even to death.” Eli Eli lama sabachthani?—“My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—is a cry of agonized uncertainty. (The Atlantic, 17 April 2022)

In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who never knew any pain?”
But the resurrection signified that the pain, the qn mark of the cross was only the beginning of the story. The rest will follow. And it will be glorious.

There is an apocryphal story told of a speech given in 1930 in Kyiv, Ukraine, by a famous Russian communist leader, Nicolai Ivanovich Bukharin. He was a very powerful man, editor of the Soviet journal Pravda and author of numerous works on political science and economics that are still read today. The topic of his speech was atheism, which is of course a tenet of Marxism. For more than an hour before the huge assembly, he addressed his hardest hitting arguments against Christianity. Rational proofs and insults put down the historic faith of the Ukrainian people. When he finished, he looked out over what he assumed to be the smoldering ash heap of the crowd's faith and asked if there were any questions.
Silence.
Then one man came down to the front, and stood next to the famous speaker. He looked over the audience, left and right, and then shouted the Easter greeting of the Orthodox Church. "Khrystos voskres!" (Christ is risen!) And the people in their thousands stood on their feet and shouted back, "Voistynu voskres!" (He is risen indeed!)

A young Ukrainian couple taught me a common greeting in Ukrainian: "Slava Isusu Khrystu" (Glory to Jesus Christ!) to which we were to respond with "Slava naviky" (Glory forever!) (Kenn Stright, PresbyCan Daily Devotional, 18 April 2022)

Easter is God’s definitive YES. This can be your Easter day. The risen Jesus Christ calls you by your name. Your life has an on-going storyline, a story to tell. Amen.

Haapiseva Jane

Prayer (adapted) Robin Keelor

Heavenly Father,
Thank you for your love: On this Resurrection Day, thank you for what you did on the cross on our behalf and thank you for what you do in our hearts every day.

Thank you for our church family - dear ones that we love. We lift the congregations of Zion and Knox and pray a hedge of protection around every one of them, that you set YOUR angels around them, protect them and keep them safe and strong. We are not delicate snowflakes…. we have lived lives; we have resilience. But the last 2 years have worn some of us down. May we all remember to whom we belong, who is in control and who is by our side……always.
Jesus you are the Christ and the Son of God. The Resurrection proves this. Everything you did and said was true. You were with us then and you are with us now - guiding us every day. With immeasurable gratitude, our hearts are truly full.

Yet we find ourselves in troubling times. The scale and scope of the pandemic is still unsettling and some days it’s just difficult to make sense of things. We keep hearing that we have to learn to live with it.

With the state of the world (wars and rumours of wars) at times it is hard not to get caught up in the hysteria, the fear and the bad news of the day about what may or may not lie ahead. If we as Christians can feel so vulnerable and discouraged at times, then how much more challenging must it be for those without any God-dimension in their lives at all??
And we hear the words of President Zelensky of Ukraine, who asks if it is still possible to associate religion with morality, how Russian Orthodox leaders can say they are faithfully empowering soldiers to kill Ukrainians, how the largest Christian Orthodox community in the world on Easter will kill and be killed.

If we as experienced adults feel vulnerable and discouraged, how much more challenging must it be for so many young people who have never been taught anything about you.

And so we pray for all people whose faith has been taken away or who have never known you. May you reveal Yourself to them and change their lives forever.

Our little churches have struggled in the last several months…. But right now, is an opportunity for your people and your church. We are being watched, even scrutinized……and now is the time to step up and step out in faith to show what it is we truly believe. Our actions are most important now.
You have said that YOU are before all things and that IN YOU all things are held together. Thank you, Lord, for holding all things together. Thank you for holding us together. Teach us and remind us that we can trust YOU even when things seem to fall apart.

Lord God, we ask you to equip us: let us be examples of your kindness and compassion. Let us think of others before we think of ourselves. We have been the recipients of your abundant blessings and endless grace - let us be a representation of your generosity and encouragement now.

In the strong name of Jesus, and with Him, we pray Our Father.