Hearing is Believing

Today I am at St. Stephen's Parish in Westborough, covering for the rector's sabbatical. The joke about the readings for the day is a bit of an inside joke with the rector and our bishop - neither of whom are in the room and intended to get a laugh. The readings for the Feast of Mary Magdalene, and can be found here.

I ask your prayers for all who seek God or a deeper knowledge of God. Pray that they may find and be found by God. 

Father Jesse has invited us all to take a little excursion today from our regularly scheduled program. Today would normally be the Feast of Mary Magdalene, but the normal procedure is that when feast days fall on a Sunday, the Sunday readings win out, and the feast is transferred. In this case, to tomorrow. That’s all insider baseball, but here’s the thing: it was unlikely that anyone was going to come back here tomorrow to remember a Eucharist dedicated to Mary Magdalene, so Jesse suggested that she be remembered today. Which is totally fine with me. (Just don’t tell the bishop!)

As for Mary, she is clearly prominent on Easter morning which is where our gospel reading for today takes us. As for the press she gets about being a former prostitute, you can blame Pope Gregory the Great, who was perhaps a great liturgist and maybe even a great pope, but most definitely not a very great Biblical scholar. He conflated a whole bunch of different stories and started saying that Mary Magdalene was an ex-hooker. But let me repeat: that’s not in the Bible. There is no Biblical evidence for calling Mary Magdalene a prostitute, or even suggesting that she was somehow a worse sinner than any of the other disciples. Some would say, however, that there was a bit of a power struggle between the time of that first Easter morning and when the gospels were written down and some of the male disciples may have wanted to discredit Mary because they were jealous of her. Which is pretty sad, but if you’ve been around the Church a while then you know that we are not immune from petty grievances and sexism and making stuff up about people. For far too long the Church has remained too much of an old boys club. 

All this doesn’t make Dan Brown right; it just means there are some serious gaps in Mary’s story and the fact that she’s so prominent on Easter morning means that she was most likely prominent along the way. She was almost certainly among the closest circle of disciples, even if she doesn't get counted among the twelve. 

I was a parish priest for over two decades and one of my favorite parts of the work when I was doing that was to prepare high school students for Confirmation. I found myself praying some version of the prayer with which I began a moment ago for each and every kid I prepared over those twenty years – a petition that comes from Form II of the Prayers of the People, and can be found on page 386 in the Prayerbook. My hope for them and my commitment as a priest was to help them to find and be found by the living God. At a time in their lives when they were beginning to claim their own identity and independence and ideas, we ask them to say yes to their parents’ faith. Of course I know that it isn’t ultimately their parents’ faith but Baptismal faith, the faith of the saints that has been handed down for two thousand years. But it still takes time to sort all of that out. Faith cannot mature without seeking understanding. Yet if we dare to seek understanding then that process will always begin with questions and even doubt. It’s part of the deal.

In the meantime, I think it is the responsibility of a congregation like this one to “hold” the faith by being a place of wonder and inclusion and love and acceptance, with God’s help, as each person here, young and old alike, finds her path to God. The way forward, in my experience, comes when we discover that it is alright to both affirm faith and to question it. Perhaps the most truthful claim any of us can ever make are the words of that desperate father in Mark 9: “I believe; help my unbelief.”

The Gospel Reading for today is an Easter morning gospel, focused on the witness of Mary Magdalene. Easter faith begins not by offering easy answers to the hard questions of faith, but by loving the questions themselves until we can start to live them. Ultimately I am convinced that, with God’s help, this leads us to a deeper truth. So I ask your prayers for all who seek God or a deeper knowledge of God. Pray that they may find and be found by God.

There is not a cookie-cutter path offered in the Bible to Easter faith; no single formula for embracing this Paschal mystery. For me it is helpful to notice that the gospels give us a variety of narratives and not one narrow creed. In fact, John’s Gospel gives us no less than five different Easter encounters, which is the larger context for the gospel we heard proclaimed today. They are interwoven together which I think is also important. Our stories are part of a larger narrative. I hear something of my story in yours.

And so today’s gospel begins with Mary, even though we didn’t read that part today. She comes to the tomb early in the morning, while it’s still dark, and discovers it to be empty. So she runs to tell the boys – in particular, Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved. They race each other to the empty tomb and then the narrator tells us that “when [the beloved disciple] went in, he saw, and believed.” And then right on the heels of that, this portion of the story we heard today, the story of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with a man she believes at first to be the gardener, until he speaks her name and she knows it is Jesus. In that moment, hearing is believing. 

On the other side of this, on the evening of that same day, begins the story of good old “doubting” Thomas (whom I’d rather call “seeing-is-believing” Thomas or “me-too” Thomas.) He just wants the same chance to see and touch and experience Christ firsthand as alive that the others got. Then there will be the disciples back on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, who experience Christ by a charcoal fire at breakfast, where Peter is asked three times: “Peter, do you love me?” Three times because, well you all remember why it is that Jesus has to ask him three times. And then, I love this, John’s Gospel ends by saying something along these lines:

There are so many other stories I could tell you, the world itself could not contain all the books that would be written if I did: but hopefully these are enough so that you might keep seeking God or a deeper knowledge of God; that you might find and be found by God.

Beyond John, there are additional stories in the synoptic gospels. My personal favorite is found in the Gospel of Luke, on the evening of this very day, on the road to Emmaus. The disciples experience Christ “in the breaking of the bread” which suggests to me that they must have been Episcopalians. My point is simply that each of the disciples had to discover the meaning of Easter in their own time, and the gospels seem to be making the point that there is not one right way to Easter faith. I find that comforting.

So, I know it’s not Easter morning today but in a very real sense every Sunday is Easter morning and Jesse, in his Jesse way, suggested these readings for today over the ones appointed for the ninth Sunday after Pentecost. He wanted us to remember Mary Magdalene and the text we get is an Easter morning gospel.

In that story, to review, we’ve been told that Mary Magdalene came to the tomb while it was still dark, and when she saw that the stone had been removed, she ran to tell Simon Peter and the beloved disciple. This causes the boys to race back to the empty tomb. When the beloved disciple does go in, the text says: he saw and he believed.

Mary Magdalene is the apostle to the apostles. She’s a preacher-woman. You don’t have to be a card-carrying feminist to give credit where credit is due. It’s in the text and all four gospels have her at the empty tomb on Easter morning as an eyewitness, even if some of the men at first think it’s all an “idle tale.” She is the one who discovers the stone has been rolled away. She is the one who sees and goes and tells. That’s important. When Jesse returns from his Renewal Leave and he asks what I preached on today, tell him I said that Mary Magdalene proclaimed the good news of Easter morning to the boys.

But it’s also important what happens in this encounter with the gardener, which is the portion of that day that we have been given to read and mark and learn and inwardly digest for today. The narrator seems to have momentarily forgotten about her during that whole dance between Peter and the beloved disciple. But when he finally turns his attention back to her, she’s crying. That is a pretty normal thing to do when people we love die. She still believes that they’ve taken her Lord away, and the reality of his death is sinking in now. But in the midst of her grief, in this conversation with the gardener (because she doesn’t see through all the tears who he really is) she hears her name. She hears an old friend’s voice, and suddenly, like the beloved disciple, she knows now too. Jesus calls her by name, and her Easter faith begins to grow as well. Hearing is believing. 

When someone we love dies we are in a thin place, a vulnerable place. Freud might call it wishful thinking, but my experience as a parish priest suggests something much deeper and more real is going on. When we confront the death of a loved one, we are open in ways that we are not usually open. At the grave, or in the quiet days that follow the death of a loved one, our faith may deepen and we may experience a sense of peace and hope and even joy, and know from what we see and hear with our own eyes that Christ is alive. Even at the grave we begin to sing: alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

We learn for the first time, or remember again, that when death comes, life really is changed, not ended, when our mortal bodies give out. This means our relationship with the deceased doesn’t end either. Mary’s relationship with Jesus will continue to grow, because Christ is alive. But in smaller ways we experience that too. My father died when I was 19 years old. He never met my wife or my two sons who are now 28 and 24. Yet in some way, in some very real way, I feel he remains a part of my life, and of their lives, too.

Sometimes – maybe not always but sometimes – the death of a loved one opens us up to find and be found by God.

Christ is alive. Death has been vanquished. We don’t have to live in fear. This is truly good news in a world bent toward death and I think it’s what Mary experiences in that conversation with the gardener. I think that we sing these songs of Christ’s victory over sin and death over and over again as a way of proclaiming that we do believe, even as we ask God to help our unbelief. We sing these songs in to nurture a faith that is full of wonder and love and to create space where we can find and be found by the living God.

We should be patient with one another as we find our way. But wherever we are in the journey, we are invited to share in the Feast and to taste and see that the Lord is good. 

May Christ be made known to us on this day in the breaking of the bread. And may each of us find and be found by God, until by God’s grace through faith, we live more fully into our call to become God’s Easter people.