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Holy Week
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad you're here and we hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Hit the commons.church for more information. Welcome. Today is resurrection Sunday.
Speaker 1:My name is Jeremy, and I'm so glad that you've chosen to spend at least part of your day with us. This is the second of four celebrations that we'll be having today, and it's been amazing to see people come in and and celebrate with us because this is the moment where we stare directly into the center of the Christian tradition. For believers, today is the hinge point of history. There was a before and an after. There was a time leading up to Jesus, and now we are all part of the long reflection of Christ that has followed ever since.
Speaker 1:Because everything changed on that first Easter morning. And so one of the long and abiding traditions of the church on Easter is that I would say, he is risen and you would say, he is risen indeed. How people know this already? Excellent. That's good.
Speaker 1:It was not as good as the 9AM service. So let's give it one more try here. And I know we are a pretty reserved bunch here at Commons, but let's do this with some gusto here. He is risen. He is risen.
Speaker 1:Oh, was impressive. Alright. Well, with that, whether you knew it or not, you have now joined your voice not only to what is happening here in this room, but also to churches across this city and to communities across this country, to gatherings all across this world, and even to all those who have come before and professed the name of Christ. Now we have created extra space to sing today because this is a day to celebrate. And we will end with the Eucharist at the table of Christ today because this is a day to be joyful.
Speaker 1:But we do, of course, also want to rehearse this Easter story and talk about what it might mean for us before we gather at the table. And so before we pray, would you please stand with me as I read the story of Easter morning. Now, am reading from the Gospel of John chapter 20, and this is verses 11 through 18. Now, Mary stood outside the tomb crying. And as she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus' body had been.
Speaker 1:One at the head and the other at the foot. They asked her, woman, why are you crying? At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize it was Jesus. He asked her, woman, why are you crying? Who is it that you are looking for?
Speaker 1:Thinking he was the gardener, she said, sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him and I will go and get him. But Jesus said to her, Mary. She turned around and cried out in Aramaic, Rabboni, which means teacher. Remain standing. Let's pray.
Speaker 1:Father of all life, son of all grace, spirit of all peace and comfort. Lord of such great supplies as to put a catch in our breath and wings in our heart. We praise you for this joy too great for words. For this new world unleashed in us and now us in it. And in this resurrection wonder which is wiser than we, we see how truly great you are.
Speaker 1:We have journeyed with you toward this day. From Jesus' entry into Jerusalem a week ago where we celebrated your coming. To Friday where we rehearsed your final hours and we grieved your death. And now we have arrived at Easter. At resurrection and life and goodness and truth returned to us.
Speaker 1:Would you remind us this day that resurrection is happening all around us? As life returns with spring, as hope is renewed within as you continue to repair your world piece by piece. And so spirit of God, be present with us in this moment. Breathe new breath into dusty lungs. Pump fresh blood into tired hearts, and bring new vision to eyes that have become too dull to see your beauty that surrounds us.
Speaker 1:May we celebrate resurrection wherever it finds us. In the strong name of the one who died and arose to new life, we pray. Amen. You may be seated. Now, I have a son and truthfully, I've told a lot of stories about him lately and so I apologize for that.
Speaker 1:Not to you because I know that you love hearing stories about Eaton, but I apologize to 14 year old Eaton as he looks back and realizes just how many of his stories are now on the record. Remember, everything that I say up here every week gets recorded and podcast and YouTube. I feel it like it's a lot easier being a pastor when you only had to worry offending the people who were in the room in that moment. But all kidding aside, I'm actually quite conscious of this, especially as our community continues to grow. I want my son to be able to grow up as a normal kid in community.
Speaker 1:And this community in particular has been so amazing about not treating our pastors and staff and their families as anything but real people. So very honestly, thank you for that. But, one of the things that comes with the territory when you have a three year old is seeing the world through a completely new set of eyes. Now, we have lived in our house, just a bike ride here from the church for three years now. That means we have lived on our street for three years.
Speaker 1:We have walked up and down our sidewalks for three years. I have walked the dog twice a day for three years now along the same paths and through the same neighborhood. And we love our neighborhood. But let's be honest, after 1,095 walks with the dog, do the math, things are often a little less than fascinating. Unless, that is, I am with my son.
Speaker 1:Because for Eaton, everything is fascinating. Every crack in the sidewalk has some grass poking up through it. Every stone that we pass is worth stopping to examine. Every stick that he sees has to be picked up and then carefully inspected to see if this is one that needs to go in his collection. You see my son likes to collect things and it started with just his pockets.
Speaker 1:Every day when he would come home, we realized we had to start checking his pockets because they would inevitably be filled with either stones or pine cones or sticks that he had collected through the course of his day. And if you have never thrown uninspected clothes into the washing machine only to hear the terrifying racket of a handful of gravel tumbling against the sides of your new appliance, then be thankful for that. But lately, Eaton has moved on from just his pockets, and we now have a series of plastic bags throughout our home that house his various collections. We have one just for rocks, we have one for sticks, we have one for leaves, there's a bag just for pine cones, And he's very protective about these collections if you move them or heaven prayed, throw them away. Now, he speaks of them often.
Speaker 1:But be forewarned, if you were to come to our house and ask him about them, when he says collections, remember he is three years old, it sounds a lot more like erections. And so if he offers to show you something, please trust it is far more innocent than it sounds. This is just a conversation we're having all the time. But childlike mispronunciations aside, adopting Eaton, becoming a father, dealing with all of these various collections scattered around the house, this has reminded me just how infinitely fascinating our world is. There's always something new to explore with my son.
Speaker 1:There's always something new to discover. Life is just constantly popping up in places that I have walked past a thousand times before. And in its own strange way, this is exactly what Easter is about. That everything deserves a second look. Even the places where you thought there was death.
Speaker 1:And the gospel writers seem to get this in a way that has oddly confounded us for millennia. Over the years, there have been countless attempts to harmonize the different accounts of Jesus' death and resurrection with precise detail and forensic certainty, and yet that seems to just be very far from the intent of these writers. It was rather than provide us with singular clarity. They seem to want to present a story that is infinitely discoverable. A story that you and I could come back to a thousand times and still find something new to add to our collection.
Speaker 1:We started today with Mary, and I wanna stay here because for me this is one of the most tender moments in the resurrection accounts. Now, Mary Magdalene is actually an incredibly important character in the gospels. She is spoken of more than most of the disciples. And yet she has often not received the recognition she deserves. A part of that goes back to the fourteenth century when the Roman Catholic church decided to associate Mary Magdalene with an unnamed woman in the gospel of Luke who has lived a quote sinful life.
Speaker 1:And presumably from the language there, she was a prostitute and she uses her life savings to buy an alabaster jar of perfume and to pour it over Jesus' feet as a sign of her devotion. Now, it is a beautiful story on its own, and it demonstrates the welcome that Jesus extends to each of us. But at the same time, to basically randomly associate that backstory with this woman Mary who was very clearly an important leader in the Jesus community has been historically seen as at best an unintentional way to diminish the significance of women and their leadership in the church. If you ever heard the term the penitent Magdalene, that is quite frankly an outdated reference to the conflation of these two stories. But what's interesting about the legitimate stories of Mary Magdalene is that not only does she seem to be a very trusted ally of Jesus, I think she's got an awesome nickname.
Speaker 1:Now, as a kid, I always wished I was better at basketball because I knew that Slam Duncan would have been an awesome nickname. But as those of us who have watched Seinfeld know, you can't just give yourself a nickname. Remember when George wanted everyone to call him t bone? That was ridiculous. That was me and Slam Duncan.
Speaker 1:Actually, Jesus did love giving out nicknames though. He took a guy named Simon instead of calling him the rock. That's what Peter means. And no, that's not a second Dwayne Johnson reference in two weeks. He took two brothers James and John and started calling them the thunder brothers.
Speaker 1:I mean, if the rock wasn't enough, that definitely sounds like tag team championship material right there. And even after Jesus was gone, he has a mystical encounter with a guy named Saul, and he changes his name to Paul. This is just a thing that Jesus likes to do. If you ever need to be reminded that Jesus sees more in you than you sometimes do, just remember that he probably has a nickname for you as well, and it's probably awesome. I like to think that when I really nail a sermon, Jesus is like, good work, slam Duncan.
Speaker 1:But here's the thing with Mary Magdalene. Traditionally, people have assumed that this meant Miriam from Magdala. That would be the Hebrew or the Aramaic reading of it. Except there's two problems with that. At first, women in that culture were generally not referred to by their place of birth.
Speaker 1:So yes, you get Jesus of Nazareth. But generally, you would get Miriam daughter of or you would get Miriam wife of blank. Second, Magdala isn't a place that we know of. Now there was a place called Megadan, and some later manuscripts actually substitute that word. And so some scholars think that Magdala was either just a spelling mistake or perhaps a more ancient name for Magadan.
Speaker 1:But all of the earliest manuscripts for all of the gospels say Magdala when they refer to Mary. And Magdala means tower. Now, interestingly enough, there was a Tower Of Mary. Herod the Great built three towers in the century before Jesus. And he had them named after the three people that he loved the most.
Speaker 1:His brother, Phasael, his friend Hippocrus, and his Jewish wife, Miriam. Now Miriam was his second wife and yes he did have her executed later on. He wasn't really all that great. But these towers were so well known and so well constructed that some one hundred years later when Titus destroyed Jerusalem, he actually ordered the towers left standing. And so the words Miriam Magdala would have been well known in the first century.
Speaker 1:Because they stood for strength and security. And now here comes Jesus. Along with his entourage, James and John the thunder brothers, Simon Peter the rock, and Mary Magdala the tower. Given that Mary gets more airtime than most of the disciples, if that's what's going on, that makes the most sense to me. That Jesus sees her.
Speaker 1:Like, I mean, sees her and he recognizes within her a strength and a steadfastness that needs to be named. There are parts of your story that have not been celebrated the way that they should have been. Know that they have not gone unnoticed in Jesus. I promise that God has a nickname for you that reminds him of all the best you bring into his kingdom. But now, take this new, more fleshed out image of Mary Magdalene.
Speaker 1:This strong, committed, unbreakable woman, and return for a moment to the scene in the garden where the writer of John records the very moment of resurrection. It says, Mary the tower stood outside the tomb crying. They have taken my Lord away, she said, and I don't know where they have put him. And see often people will point out how remarkable it was that a woman was the first to see resurrection in the world. And culturally, yes, that was remarkable.
Speaker 1:But I also think the disciples might have said, of course it was Mary. And she was always the strongest among us. But notice here that on the very verge of resurrection, the image John gives us is not one of strength. It's an image of the tower about to crumble. This is the strongest follower and the most faithful servant.
Speaker 1:This is the one that everyone else counted on, and now she's about to fall apart. And you can see incredible confusion here. It says, she turned around and she saw Jesus standing there, but she didn't realize that it was him. People have wondered about this in various different ways with this some type of mystical confusion. Were her eyes too simply filled with tears to see things clearly?
Speaker 1:Did Jesus somehow look different in his resurrected body? And all of that is perhaps possible, but perhaps more simply the writer's point here is that sometimes no matter how strong we are, we just can't see what we don't expect. In other words, our weakness isn't what gets in the way of resurrection. God was ready for that. Our lack of imagination is.
Speaker 1:Because that's how death really defeats us, isn't it? It doesn't just overcome us all at once. I mean, Christ has shown us that the moment your heart stops beating is only the beginning of a new chapter. No. What's really scary is how death can slowly sap away our ability to even recognize life.
Speaker 1:If you become used to violence winning today, or you become accustomed to relationships inevitably falling apart, if you become comfortably numb with offense and injury spiraling out of control, or if you become irrevocably convinced that heat death is the unavoidable end of all things, then forget a man rising from the tomb. You won't even be able to notice life popping up in a thousand different ways all around you right here. As Gerald Manley Hopkins once wrote, Christ plays in 10,000 places. Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his. To the father through the features of humanity's faces.
Speaker 1:You see the resurrection is as much about our imagination as it is about our bodies. Because once you start to notice lives transformed by a kind word, Or marriages renewed through a commitment to grace or relationships reconciled in forgiveness or imaginations reinvented with a glimpse of the kingdom. Once you notice resurrection in the spring returning or ideas being birthed or sun on skin and rain on faces, you realize that what is good doesn't end. It just gets transformed and passed along in new ways. And once you get that, then you look back and you realize, of course.
Speaker 1:Like, of course, God gathered up all that was good and true in his world. And, of course, he embodied that in himself. And, of course, he subjected that to every attempt we could think of to tarnish it because the life and death of Jesus wasn't designed to change God's opinion of us. It was meant to fix our perception of him. Resurrection was never plan b.
Speaker 1:Resurrection was always the natural state of the universe because it is what everything and everyone was always created to discover by God. That's why sometimes in the same way I need my son to remind me just how fascinating our backyard is. What you and I most deeply need is for Jesus to remind us that resurrection is what God is all about. Resurrection for our bodies. Resurrection for our relationships.
Speaker 1:Resurrection for our imaginations. Resurrection for our world. Resurrection is not the exception. It is the rule in the kingdom of God. And what I love about this story with Mary Magdalene, this tower of strength is the fact that all of this resurrection can be gathered up and the cosmic story of life can be collected in time and space in a particular moment of history.
Speaker 1:Jesus can come back from the dead and stand in front of her. And yet, that life can still somehow elude her. Until that is, Jesus says, Mary. Because here at the tomb, there are no more nicknames. There's no illusions about what she can offer God.
Speaker 1:There is no pretense about what she can do for others, how she can be strong for them. There is simply a woman and the resurrected Lord. And in this moment, the universe stands before her and speaks her name. Having just spent lent in the words of Jesus, Studying his parables and fascinated by his insights, there is nothing that matches this moment for me. The moment where the resurrected Christ says nothing but my name.
Speaker 1:You see, to reduce resurrection to a fact of history that happened two thousand years ago is to miss the point. Now it is that. Christianity is a waste of my time, but it better be more than that as well. Lazarus came back from the dead, but that doesn't change anything for me. No.
Speaker 1:It is the risen Christ who comes to meet me and who says my name and who forces me to see through my tears in order to recognize life even in the places I thought there was death. That's what resurrection is. And this is what's so beautiful about sharing at the table of Christ especially on resurrection Sunday. Because this is not simply the memory of something that happened long ago and far away. This is a present participation in the ongoing resurrection of the world until Christ return.
Speaker 1:Because this day and this meal, this is the promise that God is at work in and through Christ that he has already begun the renewal of all things. Even when we struggle to notice it. And so perhaps today, that you will come to the table because you need to know that God has a nickname for you. And you need to trust that God sees goodness and grace and value where you sometimes struggle to see it. And today, you need resurrection to help you see yourself with new eyes.
Speaker 1:And perhaps today, you will come to the table because you need to know that you are surrounded by resurrection all the time. And that sometimes making sense of the most important moment in history starts with noticing what is happening in your own backyard. And so you will come and you will share this meal because you need to know that resurrection can start very small. With a piece of bread and a small grape, but it can grow into something absolutely remarkable. Maybe you'll come because you have been strong for a very, very long time now.
Speaker 1:And there are a lot of people who have come to look to you, but to be honest you're not sure if they should anymore. And you'll come because you need to know that even this can be a form resurrection. That Christ can meet you even when you are about to crumble. Maybe finally you come because life is beautiful. And it's Easter.
Speaker 1:And you wanna celebrate. And this is a joyful moment to come and enter into the resurrection of Christ. But for whatever reason you come to the table today, know that the resurrected Christ is here to meet you. With nothing on his lips, but your name. And so I invite you to come.
Speaker 1:Not because you are strong, but because you are weak. Not because you are the tower but because sometimes you feel like crumbling. Not to testify that you are worthy of resurrection but simply to trust in the resurrected one. Not because you have any claim on the grace of God, but simply because in your frailty, you stand in constant need of new eyes to see and new ears to hear the resurrection that surrounds you every single day. So as you come and you eat, even if you can't see him right now, would you listen for the voice of God, trusting that he will say your name?
Speaker 1:I invite you to come up the center aisle if you're seated in the sanctuary, to come up along the curtain if you're seated in the overflow. If you need someone to bring the elements to you, simply raise your hand. We have service at the back who will come and meet you. But take the grape that is Jesus blood and the bread that is his body and then eat in celebration of all that God intends. All things renewed through his resurrection.
Speaker 1:To God be the glory forever and ever. Amen. Come and eat at the table of resurrection. Let's pray one final time. Lord of resurrection, as you bring new life back into our world, as we see it emerge with spring, as we notice it in our relationships, in our imagination of a world being renewed.
Speaker 1:Would all of that be gathered up and drawn back to the moment of the first Easter when you stepped out of the tomb and you began the process that would renew all things. God, by your spirit, would you be present to each of us, helping us to notice resurrection around us so that we can become more and more convinced that this is the end you have in mind for all things. All things renewed, all things drawn back to you and made beautiful. In the strong name of the one who has risen, we pray. Amen.
Speaker 1:Amen. Now let's try this one more time for Easter. He is risen. He is risen indeed. Amen.