Out of the Darkness, Life!

Easter Vigil
St John’s Lutheran Church, Sacramento, CA
April 23, 201
John 20:1-18

Mary Magdalene comes to us tonight after some “20 centuries of conscious and unconscious composition," writes James Baker, "she is Bible story, saint, medieval myth, Renaissance legend and [finally] modern pop heroine”--and shady lady, ala Kazantzakis’ novel and later the movie, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Jesus Christ Superstar, and Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code.

In the biblical accounts she is one of several women who followed Jesus from Galilee to his appointment with fate in Jerusalem. She is the one out of whom Jesus cast seven devils. She sees Jesus crucified, follows his body to the tomb, returns with the first group on Easter morning, and later in the day is the first to speak with the Risen Christ. The Gospels say no more. By Easter Monday she has disappeared from the record. But she’s never been forgotten.

Mary’s story is a story about any of us people of faith. Easter always begins in darkness. I speak to both you new ones in the faith and you older ones in the faith. I speak to you who have affirmed your faith and you who have accompanied these seekers on their journey into the life of Christ as lived in and through St John’s Lutheran Church. I speak to us all:

Easter always begins in the darkness. For Mary, her darkness began with the mental illness that once oppressed her. Now we have gathered here tonight in the growing darkness that symbolizes the shadows of our lives. We are haunted by our shadows; there is the darkening desolation of our losses, and the agonizing midnight wilderness of our humiliations, shame, and the looming wee hours of anxiety and hopelessness. All the spoken and unspoken truth we bring here tonight. Here, where our very souls cry out for light and life and hope.

And therefore every one of us here tonight, no matter the gender, is Mary Magdalene.

And, like Mary Magdalene drawn to the garden tomb, hoping against hope, here we have been drawn, or in the dark depths of some bottom we’ve hit, been nudged by the Spirit, toward faith and to this gathering. And we hope and pray that in this time and place, especially in the blessed sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion, we will again, or maybe for the first time, recognize in our own deaths and resurrections the compassionate presence of the One who loves us and with such tenderness speaks our names even in the shadows of our lives.

For this is the night. This is the beginning. This is the dawning of the eternal light for every Mary Magdalene. “Mary”, he says. “Mary”. And she calls him her old familiar name, “Rabbouni”. And he says, “Do not hold onto me.” He means, let go of what you think you must still have from the past. Let go of even your old ideas of me.

“Mary”, he said. In overwhelmed love and gratitude, she lets go of her Jesus, leaves her shadowed old life behind, and in the dawn of the new age goes straight to her friends and proclaims, “I have seen the Lord.”

The One who once was dead is now more alive than any other human being she, or any one of us, has ever known.

Thus, writes Presbyterian Pastor and scholar Craig Barnes,
After the resurrection, things do not return to normal. That’s the good news. It is basic to everything else the New Testament proclaims. After seeing a risen Jesus, we see that there is no normal. Now we can’t even count on the darkness. All we know for sure is that a risen Savior is on the loose. And he knows our names.

Let us be apostles of such an Easter. Amen.