Passport to Life

When was the last time you looked at your driver's license or your passport? Or if you don't have one of these, ask to look at a friend's or parent's. The last time I got my photo taken, it was taken with strict instructions.  Don't smile. Look up. No glasses. Get your hair off your face. Then the bright flash seems to suck all the color our of your face and the results are ghastly. Pale, dull, emotionless blank look that in all honesty looks way older than you actually are. Boring and lifeless.

I imagine that's how Mary Magdalene and the other women looked when they hurried to the tomb that first Easter Sunday. Shocked and maybe even traumatized by the experiences of Good Friday, they would have been going through the motions, numb and empty. Their faces blank, putting one foot in front of the other, doing the traditional mourning rituals that were a part of their culture and religion. Trying to organize the details of what to do next. The community was in turmoil, and rather than a cohesive group looking to a leader to guide all their decisions, they had no one to fall back on. Did James and John make plans to rejoin their dad's fishing business? Did Matthew think about going back to his job of despised tax collector? Would Mary and Martha have felt trapped back into a life where they would only be allowed to cook and clean and never sit with the men as equals? Would Lazarus have thought about going back into his tomb and never dream of coming out again? Would the Samaritan woman plan to go back to her well and her village, doomed to go from one man to the next as she used to, or the man born blind wish he could close his eyes to the pain he saw in the faces of his new friends?

At times of terrible pain, we can go into such a state of numbness, and many of us can relate. Our days feel meaningless and empty. We slip into states of apathy where even getting out of bed seems too onerous. Now in the days of Jesus, life was far shorter and folks might have been more prosaic than we are with our modern medicine and hygiene, we don't know for sure. But even though Jesus tried to prepare his followers, they hadn't listened, they rejected what they heard as gloom and doom nonsense. So Good Friday would have been a real shock to them all.

It also would have been a time of great guilt and shame for the men who had all either run away or denied their connection to Jesus. The women didn't run, but witnessing the ordeal must have been dreadful.  The United Church’s Song of Faith describes it this way, “Because his witness to love was threatening, those exercising power sought to silence Jesus. He suffered abandonment and betrayal, state-sanctioned torture and execution. He was crucified.” It could have become the stuff of nightmares.

The historian Josephus, writing his book for the Roman Empire of the history of his Jewish country wrote that Jesus was executed. This we know is fact. Jesus was real and he was killed in the most public and shameful way possible, on a hill that could be seen for miles, nearly naked in a culture that treasured modesty, and slowly as a traitor, to remind other potential rebels never to question authority.

That should have been the end of the story. This Roman execution should have snuffed out their small movement before it had a chance. End of story. Except it wasn't. The morning when the women came to the tomb, the one thing they weren't expecting was that it would be empty.

Death was not the last word. Now, there are a lot of theories and explanations trying to debunk the resurrection.  Those theories started from day one, trying to discredit Christianity.  Over and over, the detractors attacked, mocked, belittled and even tortured people believing in a Risen Christ.  The Roman Empire and modern Communists alike made it illegal.  Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan wrote book after book ridiculing the Easter Story, and they expected their scientific debunking to end Christianity and all other faiths.  Their motives were sound, they wanted to end violence and religious wars.  But often religious wars are using people’s faith to manipulate and convince people that war is necessary, it isn’t because religion itself is warlike.  Interestingly enough, even with atheists and countries declaring faith illegal, a research project found that the only faith shrinking in 2026 was Buddhism.  Christianity grew by 5%.  Rather like the Monty Python knight, Christians can claim that “I’m not dead yet!”

The truth is that a stolen body can’t inspire a spiritual revolution, a lie can’t inspire people to come together and risk their lives to talk about teachings of respect, compassion and faith.  A scam doesn’t inspire quiet resistance to tyrants, a plot doesn’t embolden people to protest against discrimination.  The Resurrection story has inspired people for centuries.  Without it, William Wilberforce wouldn’t have worked to end the Slave Trade, Charles Dickons wouldn’t have written about the oppression of impoverished children which inspired the establishment of public schools as a human right, monks and nuns wouldn’t have built hospitals and hospices, and people like Martin Luther King would not have preached equal rights even at the risk of their own lives. 

Easter, like God, is Holy Mystery, beyond complete knowledge, above perfect description.  It inspires us to love our neighbors, love ourselves and love that holy mystery whatever we name it.  Easter helps us work in hope for a better world.  Easter brings people to life, giving them purpose and a vision.  We become more than our passport or driver’s licence photos; we come to life.  Easter inspires us to deeper spirituality, both in our daily lives and in community here.  Easter inspires us to engage in learning more about our faith and our world so that we can practice bold discipleship.  Easter inspires us to also work daringly for justice, whether it’s joining in protest rallies, voting in elections or sending e-mails and phone calls to people who need to hear that we believe in human rights and equality for all.  Easter empowers us to speak against racism, homophobia or discrimination.  Easter is the ultimate “No Tyrants” event, not started by Jesus, or the disciples, but started by Holy Mystery itself. Our Song of Faith says, “in love, the one eternal God raised Jesus from death, turning sorrow into joy, despair into hope.  We sing of Jesus raised from the dead. We sing hallelujah.  

Today, let us choose to have the mystery of Easter, however we understand it, inspire us to continue the work for justice and human dignity that Jesus started so long ago.  Because the empty tomb didn’t stop the followers of Jesus back when they knew what Herod and Pilate did, and they followed Jesus anyway.  Not because he was a passport to power or wealth, but because he was a passport to community, love and abundant life.  Thank God for this passport we have that is the Risen Christ.  Christ has risen, Halleluiah!

Rebel Mary full of?

Louise Penny writes of a portrait that one of her fictional characters paints.  It is of an old woman who looks out, bitterly, cynically and tired.  It is a painting of the foul-mouthed, rude and irrepressible Ruth Zardo, a main character in the Three Pines books, and she is painted to be Mary, mother of Jesus, a more unlikely portrait of Mary to ever be made.

It makes sense to see Mary as a woman who will know the harshness of life.  Anyone who has gone through Good Friday knows how incredibly hard life can be.  It’s one thing to have the hopes and joys that new moms have, it’s quite another thing to sustain that confidence for the long haul.  The flush of innocent hope, the excitement of justice restored and equality being proclaimed to all, would have been heady.  No wonder Luke wrote her singing of the world being turned upside down.  And no wonder this is the only speech Luke reported from Mary.  She doesn’t make a speech at the foot of the cross, she doesn’t make a speech on Easter Sunday or Pentecost Sunday.  No, she kicks off the birth narrative, and we never hear of her again.  

Which is sad, when you think about it, because Mary understood Jesus better than his disciples, from this reading.  Jesus wasn’t meant to be a candy-coated, sugary sweet elf on a shelf kind of figurehead.  He was meant to be a real rebel, someone who would turn the power structures of his day upside down with his calls for justice in the name of a loving God who wants widows and orphans to be taken care of and treated with dignity and respect.  Mary understood that.  She understood God’s plan would mean afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.  She knew that love of those who are weak and powerless is not easy.  It’s more than collecting jellycats to fill an emotional vacuum, it’s more than trying to prove you love your family through expensive presents, it’s more than trying to decorate the house better than Martha Stewart or pack amazing activities into the winter holidays guaranteed to make the kids misty-eyed when they remember it in years to come.  We often get love wrong despite our best efforts.

One United Church person had a habit of writing songs about getting love wrong.  He was an active member of the same United Church all his life.  In fact the first time he ever sang in public was when he was 5, and the Sunday School class performed “I’m a Little Teapot” for the church.  That same church was where his funeral was held, far from the pomp and circumstance of many other famous Canadian musicians.  In fact, if he wasn’t touring or playing in Massey Hall, he was usually found singing in their church choir on a Sunday morning.  His songs of love were memorable, intense, poignant and often full of pain.  He had numerous marriages and relationships, and several children by different womeMan, and sometimes those complex relationships ended up inspiring his music.  Songs of heartbreak, anger, betrayal and also humbleness; one of his most famous songs talked about him being the hero but heroes often fail.  He sings, “I don’t know where we went wrong but the feeling’s gone and I just can’t get it back.”  Love was a complex mystery to him, relationships were hard and family dynamics were not straightforward. He was married three times altogether, but the last time seemed to work out finally.  In fairness, he did a much better job loving Canada.  When other Canadians moved to the United States to become famous, he moved back to Canada after only a few years in California.  That didn’t stop his songwriting, nor his growing fame.  His music was covered by all kinds of people: Neil Young, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Barbra Streisand, and Johnny Cash to name a few.  Even in his 80’s he performed across Canada. People remember him as being kind and humble and compassionate; he was so loved that there is a sculpture of him in his home in Orillia Ontario.  He even was the celebrity captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1991–1992.  He was a member of the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Country Music Hall of fame, and even had a Canadian stamp!  CBC thinks he is the fifth best Canadian Song Writer, better than Bruce Cockburn but not quite as good as Leonard Cohen.  He inspired countless young people to make music and keep loving our country.  Some people said he was the first person that ever got them excited about Canadian history when he wrote songs about trains or shipwrecks.  And when Gordon Lightfoot died, the legacy he left was one of love and respect. 

Interesting that Lightfoot who knew first hand the challenges of love, never gave up on being a caring and kind person despite his personal heartbreak.  Through all the ups and downs of grief and health issues, premature reports of his death, a stroke that had him having to learn to play guitar all over again, Gordon persisted in being humble and compassionate to the end.

I can imagine that Mary also persisted.  Her vision of what the world needed was so crystal clear and compelling that it must have survived all the challenges of losing her beloved and gifted son.  Maybe when Mary heard Luke ask her about her son, her soul again cried out with joy. The painting Louise Penny imagined of the old, embittered woman?  She wrote that there’s a dot of white in Ruth’s eyes, the moment when her bitterness is transformed into hope. When she is reminded once again of her powerful vision and conviction and how they are turning the world towards justice.  God is still at work, bringing change and love into the world. May we too feel our spirits sing as we remember God’s promise of justice to all!

Searching and knowing

There is a t-shirt that used to be in bible stores with a caption of “Moses was a murderer, Noah was a drunk, Jacob was a con man, Isaiah preached in his birthday suit, Job went bankrupt, Rahab was a prostitute, Martha was bossy, Mary Magdalene was mentally ill and Mary, Jesus’ mom was an unwed pregnant teen who became a refugee.  If God called them, how do we know that God isn’t calling us?

It's a great t-shirt.  We often may struggle with the idea that God is calling us.  How can God call me when I am not whatever I think God really needs?  Surely someone else, anyone else is better than me.  And we put off answering that still small voice, that nagging sense of being lured into a bigger vision, a bolder idea, a stronger stance.  “No, not me! I’m not called to run for town council, join the library board, speak up about racism, knit mitts for homeless people, buy Tylenol for Ukrainians, attend a rally in support of school boards, fill out a survey about pensions, put solar paneling on my roof, drive an alcoholic home, sit next to a hurting person, sign a petition about the environment or get out and vote on a contentious bylaw.  Somebody else is being called to do that.  Not me.  And yet every day people here in this space do exactly this.  They buy that cup of soup on a cold day for some stranger they just met, they buy granola bars for folks who have no homes to go to, they jumpstart stalled cars or push them out of snowbanks.  Ordinary people called to do what seems like something insignificant, yet what may be insignificant to us may be huge to those who see it or experience it.

How do we know we are called?  How do we know what we are called to?  Knowing is complicated, and when we hear the claim that God knows us can be both a gift and a challenge. 

If you have ever tried to study a foreign language, the word “to know” can be tricky. In French, they have two different words for knowing, connais and sais – connais is more about relationships with people and places, and sais is more about facts and skills, knowledge.  Hebrew is the same way, there is “Yada” which is know, and “Bantah” which is understand. So if you hear someone saying "yada, yada, yada", it means, "I know, I know, I know".

It’s one thing to know someone or something, it’s another thing to understand them. When we read Psalm 139, it is both yada and bantah.  God knows of me and God knows me.  In detail.  In depth.  Right down to the dna level and right up to how I will respond to anything that happens.  The thought of God knowing me both Yada and Bantah is, well, quite honestly, more than a little unnerving.  There’s a limit to how much I want anyone to know me.  Even spouses don’t know each other at that level.  Parents find their children to be mysteries, and siblings who have known each other all their lives can be surprised by choices and thoughts.  No one we know are in our lives from sunup to sun down.  No one we know have been in our lives since we were conceived.  It’s an extraordinary claim for an extraordinary faith in an extraordinary God.

That much transparency is uncomfortable.  We humans have been hiding from being known like that as long as we’ve been telling stories.  Some rabbis say that the day God wandered into Eden looking for Adam and Eve and realized that they were hiding from him, trying to cover their nakedness from him and each other, that’s the day God cried.  We even hide from ourselves.  M. Scott Peck wrote a book about people who lied so much they started to believe themselves!  He said that those kinds of people are really hard to help because they are so committed to their own lies.

That’s very different than Nathanael, the one Jesus praised for his honesty and transparency.  Nathanael had no guile in him, which means he was not sneaky or underhanded or manipulative.  He was honest to the point of rudeness when he said, “can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  Nathanael was described by Jesus as a model citizen, the kind of person we would think deserved to be called to some kind of holy ministry.  He’s special, he’s honest, he’s transparent.  And yet, he’s not mentioned again other than that he was in a group that saw the resurrected Jesus.  He didn’t write any books, he didn’t found any churches, he didn’t go on any missions, he didn’t have any hymns written by him or about him.  This perfect paragon of an Israeli disappeared from the bible completely.

Instead, Peter with his wishy washy faith, the big stinky fisherman who denied Jesus before he died, and Paul who hunted Jesus followers down in order to lock them up and torture them, these are the people that were called to turn the world upside down with.  Once again, the perfect people, the beautiful people, the people who had in their yearbook “most likely to succeed” were not the ones God turned to.  God called the ones who didn’t know their own potential, ones with self-doubt and insecurity.

God called, in other words, people like you and me.  Flawed, imperfect, impatient humans.  God still calls us because God knows us and wants to be in relation with us just as God once had a relationship with Adam and Eve.  God sees us just as we are, as beautiful creatures that can share love and hope and joy to everyone we meet.  God calls us to share our light of hope in daily acts of random kindness, to stranger and family alike.  God calls us to tiny acts and large acts alike.  May we have the courage and the faith to trust that God calls us because God sees us as we really are!

Hero Worship!

Who’s your favorite hero?  When I was six, I was fascinated with a hero that was about social justice, surprisingly enough.  I didn’t learn about him in Sunday School or in the bible picture books that were in every waiting room and hospital in town.  No, I learned about him at my grandma’s house.  I would climb up the stairs to a dusty old bedroom, and pull down a book, probably as old as the ones here in the front of the church.  At first, I looked at the pictures, then when somehow the magic of reading became possible, I read the stories over and over again.  They were all about Robin Hood.  Some of you might not know who he was, because it’s been a long time since Disney turned him into a fox, or since Kevin Costner or Errol Flynn tried to make him seem more than a legend.  But the idea of a man wandering around in the bush, practising his aim and his political understanding of the world he lived in, and the compassion he had for people living in poverty, and how he tried to make a difference, well, all you can say to that is oh da lolly!  And in my grandmother’s old book, there was no doubt that he was a real man who pressured King John to sign the Magna Carta, a document enshrining the idea that everyone would have equal access to justice and a fair hearing.

I suppose there could be worse heroes to believe in, after all, he was robbing the rich to give to the poor.  And compared to some of the anti heroes we have now, like Deadpool, who seems more sarcastic than anything else, Robin Hood was an interesting study in morals, reminding me not to judge people by how big they were, like Little John, or what they wore to work, like Friar Tuck.  It was about how they cared for each other and their oppressed friends and neighbors.

That’s very different from our Easter story.  Jesus is no hero in many ways, he doesn’t wear a cape, he doesn’t have the strength to hold up huge buildings, he doesn’t have a little sister who manufactures amazing armor or weapons out of vibranium,

he doesn’t come from a hidden kingdom of amazon warrior women, and he can’t sling a web and catch thieves like flies.

He certainly doesn’t use weapons or get into fist fights or win a beautiful princess and live in a castle happily ever after.  And if we stay in Mark’s Gospel, the oldest gospel to try to put into words what happened that first Easter, well, it’s more than a little eerie, creepy, weird.  Dare I say it? Rather like an ugly April Fools day joke gone wrong.

The followers of Jesus are not expecting anything more than another dead body to take care of, to prepare for entombment in the rituals of the day.  The men are conspicuously absent.  It is the women, coming at dawn to work with the messy business of death.  The women, ready to confront the cause of their grief and pain and bathe the body with their tears of grief.

The plot twists unexpectedly.  That which they had planned for was not what they found.  Their morning of sadness was shattered by the unexpected, an unnamed stranger telling them something so impossible that all they could do was run away in fear.  Even the last command they were given, ‘go and tell the disciples of Good News’ they could not do.  They ran in terror.  How many times do we flee that which we cannot understand, and run from that which we have no words?

The story ends there and yet it doesn’t.  The ending isn’t really Easter Sunday morning.  It’s more than just a dead end of a would-be hero, conquered by politics and government.

It’s more because Something happened afterward and kept happening.  People kept experiencing the story in ways that felt more real than the dangers and fears they had come to accept as normal. 

People kept being surprised by this story’s power to touch them personally, and they handed down that story, just as the women had been commanded to do at the tomb.  Go back to where the story begins, remember it all, not just the Good Friday and Easter, but the new life and hope for a better way not just for the Marys and Salome, but for everyone.  A story that has been handed down for generations until now it is your turn to hear it.

This is not a story about which hero you like best, or even whether Jesus is better than Black Panther, Thor, Robin Hood or Wonder Woman, nor is it about being tough, or having super powers or beating up everyone that gets in your way of what you think you want. 

This is a story of how even when we are broken down, or maybe especially when we are broken down, when our world feels upside down and out of control, when we have no hope left in anything we can do, when we are too tired to keep on fighting, when we have given up, when we feel fooled by hope, that’s when God’s upside down call to us to hear good news can sink in.  That’s when hallelujahs can make a real, authentic difference in the world;

The story of Easter is about ordinary human beings like you and me empowered by something mysterious and unexplainable. The story of Easter calls us to make love the cornerstone of the next chapter in our own Easter story. Hear these words not as some ancient April Fools trick, but a promise of good news for all who continue to add to the story of Easter. Christ is Risen, he is Risen indeed, halleluiah!