Note:  This sermon is from the second of a two-week instructed Eucharist.

I said last week that we share communion together every Sunday, obeying Jesus’ commandments in the Last Supper:  do this in remembrance of me.  That was the practice of the early church and it is still the practice of most liturgical churches today.  There was a time when in the Episcopal Church it was not the custom to do communion every week, when we were more like our UCC brethren in only having it once a month.  It was seen as too special, too complicated, too time-consuming, etc. – for a wide range of reasons many Episcopal churches did a choral Morning Prayer on Sundays most weeks, and saved the Eucharist for special times.  But the liturgical renewal of the 1960s and 1970s, the era that gave us our current BCP, brought back the Eucharist as the most important thing, the main thing, the main reason we gather.  So I guess we’d better talk about why it’s so important.

It’s important because the early church did it, and it connects us with a long line of tradition.  It’s a powerful experience of taking God into our very beings.  It puts us in mind again and again of Jesus’ love and sacrifice for us.  All of that – and more besides.  What happens in the Eucharist is like what happens in the feeding of the 5000 that we heard about today.  There are four main actions Jesus does in feeding the crowds (after he tells them what posture is appropriate:  in this case, sit):  Jesus takes the bread and the fish, he gives thanks and blesses it, he breaks it, and he shares it.  It’s the same sequence in the Eucharist:  the priest takes the bread and the wine – in some churches these are brought forward from the congregation as an offering, but here we simply set the table with what we have.  Then the priest offers the Eucharistic prayer, which is a prayer of thanksgiving, called the Great Thanksgiving in fact (the word Eucharist simply means thanksgiving).  In the prayer we thank God for all God does for us and we ask God’s blessing on the bread and wine and on us.  Then the priest breaks the bread, remembering Christ’s body broken on the cross.  And then we all share the food.

Here I need to talk a little bit about sacraments.  The official church definition of sacrament is an outward and physical sign of an inward and spiritual grace.  As such, the physical experience is basically a pointer toward the spiritual experience.  And for many reasons, much of what we do physically has been scaled down a lot in church practice:  the most obvious example is that most churches don’t baptize with full immersion into water, but with a little sprinkle of water on the head – even though it began with stepping into the River Jordan, it’s become just a few drops of water.  For logistical and practical reasons, as well as the comfort level of many people, things have changed from the way the early church did them.  But the fact remains that we are incarnate people, here in our physical bodies.  What we do physically does have connection to what we experience spiritually.  And some of the ways church practice has lessened the physical experience have also lessened the spiritual experience.  Eucharist is one of those places where sometimes the ritual part gets in the way.  It’s a ritual meal – but sometimes it can get so ritual that we fail to make any connection between it and an actual meal.  Wafers don’t seem much like bread, and a tiny taste of wine from a dipped wafer isn’t much like enjoying a glass.  We can get a little magical thinking about the whole experience, as if the little wafer has mystical powers beyond its small size and cardboard taste.  And yes, sometimes it does have such power – sometimes despite how small our physical experience is, we can have an overwhelming spiritual experience.  But sometimes it takes extra effort to get there.

In my last congregation we experimented with some services where we actually ate a meal as part of the worship, what some[...]

The following is the first part of a two-week series on worship, part of two instructed Eucharist services at ECA.

Why do we worship?

Sunday:  day of resurrection – 1st day of the week, after the Sabbath (Saturday)

Come together to share the Lord’s Supper – because Jesus told us to

Being Christian is a community thing – you can’t be a Christian all by yourself at home

We show up to nourish ourselves for ministry; we show up for other people

The idea is that we pray all the time; we have prayer practices of our own; this day is for public worship together, which is different than private prayer

(This may or may not be true, but it is the ideal of public worship! The reality is many find little quiet time elsewhere, or take the time to pray, and so depend on the church service to do it all for them.  It can’t.)

Elements of our service:

Gathering

Hearing & reflecting on scripture

Responding with affirming our faith, prayer

Sharing the bread & wine

Sending us out to do our ministry in the world

That’s the basics.  Everything else is frosting and tradition.

Our worship tradition mirrors what we know of the early church, with customs and practices layered on from the church in Europe and particularly in England.

It looks kind of like the liturgical materials we have from the early church – we have a Eucharistic prayer from the 3rd century, and it’s like ours – and it looks kind of like what other liturgical churches do (Roman Catholics, Lutherans, etc.).

And it has taken on elements and customs of this particular community of ECA and its history as well.

But one good principle of worship is that if we don’t know why we’re doing what we’re doing, then we shouldn’t do it.   So here we go, learning.  And as we learn, we‘ll find that there are a few things we do need to let go of.  As well as things we should embrace!

Worship should energize and inspire us.  To do this, there are a number of things to hold in balance:

It should be familiar enough that we aren’t constantly wondering what’s coming next, and different and fresh enough that we come away with new understandings of God in the world, and so we don’t settle into a meaningless rut.  So we have a set liturgical form, but it changes by season, with different prayers and words, different music, to reflect the theme of the liturgical season:  penitential for Lent, joyful for Eastertide, growing and learning in the season after Pentecost, waiting and preparing in Advent, and joyful again in Christmas.

There should be time for quiet and contemplation balanced with joyful praise and song.  It’s public worship, yes, but that means also being quiet together.  Some of the most astounding worship I’ve experienced happened at Taizé in France:  a church with 5000 people sitting on the floor, sitting in silence for 10 minutes together before breaking into chant and song.  It made me realize how wordy our worship usually is, and how powerful it is with few words.  We need to recapture some of that quiet together in our worship – one way I’d suggest is that we refrain from chatting during the time before the service begins, or during the offertory music. We also might incorporate periods of actual silence from time to time.  And we’re hoping that with our new music director, our music, and particularly our singing as a congregation, can start getting a little more joyful and robust.

Learning should be balanced with worshiping.  We’ve started using the word formation in the church instead of education, realizing that everything we do in church is forming us as Christians.  Not just classes and Bible study, but worship and song and fellowship and service, all form us and shape us, shape our faith and how we show our faith to others.  We all have things to learn – we listen to scriptures we might not be familiar with every week, and the sermon should help us understand them better – as well as how we can live out those ideas in our lives.  But if it’s all teaching, it can get a[...]

So it’s summertime, the gardens are growing, and we’ve got a string of parables in our Sunday gospels that are all about soil and seed and crops.  The metaphor works well for the spiritual life, doesn’t it – things take time to ripen and grow in our lives and in our hearts, seeds sown in what someone once said or some book we read bear fruit later in unexpected ways, things are often happening and shifting in us without our even realizing it, just like seeds grow in the ground without our seeing it.  It was an apt set of symbols for the farming folk Jesus was preaching to, but it suits us pretty well too, even as far away as most of us are from growing our own food.  It helps some that our culture has started shifting back towards knowing where our food comes from – we’re a little more aware of the world of planting and growing than we used to be.

The parable we just heard, the parable of the wheat and the tares, is a little like the one we heard last week, the Parable of the Sower.  It’s intended to answer one nagging question faced by the community of Jesus’ followers then and now:  If Jesus is the Messiah, and his message is good news for all, then why isn’t everyone on board with it?  Why are there some who refuse to join this movement?  Last week’s parable gave the answer that it all depends on our human nature, that just as not all soil is good for growing, not everyone is ready to take in the gospel and let it bear fruit in them.  That we can understand.  But this week’s parable has a slightly different tack:  the implication of the parable of the wheat and the tares is that those who are not part of the Jesus movement are bad seeds, bad from the very beginning.  Bad seeds can’t turn into good ones and weeds can’t turn into wheat.  So there’s nothing we can do about it until God comes and sorts it all out.  You can see where John Calvin got some of his ideas about predestination – the idea that God has chosen only some of humankind for salvation by pure grace.  (It’s not an idea that was only Calvin’s, but he’s the biggest name behind it all.)

The problems with that bit of doctrine, and that interpretation of this parable, are sort of hard to miss.  There are two obvious temptations:  one is to say that well, if evil is simply bad seed sowed by the devil, then there’s not much we can do about it, and we might as well live with it.  No reason to bother making the world a better place or work on making ourselves better people.  That’s all God’s work, not ours, and nothing we do can make anything different.  When this life is all over, I’ll fly away, and then things will be better.

The other temptation is a little nastier.  There are children of the kingdom and there are children of the evil one, and we’re pretty sure we know which is which.  The bad seed people are obvious.  They’re the ones we disagree with, of course.  They’re the ones who cause the problems and commit the crimes.  They’re the ones who don’t pull their weight in society or in our community.  They’re the ones who took my parking place.  Whoever they are, we’re pretty sure we can spot them.  Because of course, we must be the good seeds, not them.  So them, we can go ahead and judge ourselves, because they’re so clearly not us.

Here’s a little explanation of Jesus’ image, things that would have been clear to his listeners but that have gotten lost for us in the translation.  The weeds in the parable are actually a specific plant, what is called darnel, or false wheat.  It’s a plant that looks very much like wheat, and if it were sown among real wheat, the roots underground would be all tangled up together with the wheat.  It would be hard to distinguish it from the wheat, and harder still to pull it up without disturbing the wheat.  At the harvest, however, darnel looks different than real wheat – real wheat’s head grows heavy and droops, while darnel keeps standing upright.  So if you wait till the harvest, it’s more obvious to separate it out, espec[...]

‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.’

Doesn’t some part of you just go ‘ahhhh’ when you hear those words?  I know I do.  I’m always longing for rest, I’m always wishing I could sleep in or take a nap or just lie around.  It’s never possible with small children, of course, something I didn’t fully understand before I became a parent.  There’s lots of ways they trick you into it.  But I suspect it’s not just me that longs for rest of one kind or another, even on this long holiday weekend in summer.   Which one of us couldn’t use more rest, wouldn’t rather lay down some burden or another that we have been carrying?  Burdens of all kinds, in our relationships, in our to-do lists, in our hearts.  Not to mention in our daily schedules.

We all know how it is.  All of the great labor-saving devices of the last century, heralded as the technology that would bring us all leisure time, somehow only made us busier.  The dishwasher was supposed to change our lives – remember the advertisements with the smiling happy housewife? Why do we still fall for this with the latest gadget from Apple?  Instead of ending up with more open time, our life has only gotten more fast-paced – we’ve filled in the gaps.  We may spend less time shuffling paper and writing longhand, but we spend even more time in emails and online.  Even our children have too much scheduling in their lives now, busy going from lessons to practice to lessons again, rarely getting the chance to just play outdoors.  ‘Family time’ or ‘date night’ becomes something we have to schedule on the calendar in advance, or it doesn’t happen at all.  Coming to church on a Sunday becomes one more morning we have to get up early – unless a sports tournament or other commitments call us elsewhere, of course.  Prayer becomes something we mutter quickly on our way out the door, if at all.  We are all overscheduled, overhurried, too busy to get to know our neighbors, just too busy all around.  We need rest.

And yet there are reasons for all of this busyness.  We’re trying to do a good job at the work we do, and so we spend long hours at it.  We’re trying to stay involved in the life of our communities – and church – and that means meetings and volunteer hours on the calendar.  We’re trying to give our kids good educations, forming them as well-rounded people, and that means lots of activities on their calendars as well. Somehow all of these good intentions result in us feeling fatigued and stretched too thin.  What should have been a good idea just is not good for us in the end.

This experience of good intentions going awry is one the apostle Paul was familiar with – the reading from Romans today expresses his frustration with himself.  He writes, ‘I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.’  Trying to live a life of devotion to God, following the law as a good Jew, Paul finds nevertheless that his whole effort gets warped.  The authentic relationship he seeks with God gets perverted into something else, and right where he sought to find life and energy, he finds only fatigue and death.  We all know what it’s like to try to do what is right when the temptation to do otherwise is so alluring.  But Paul goes beyond even that, saying that the power of sin is so great that it can take our best intentions, our greatest efforts to find life and truth, and turn them against us.  Sin for Paul is a power unto itself, leading us away from God, and it uses any means possible to do so.  I’m reminded of an image from the Harry Potter books, the moving staircases at Hogwarts School:  even as you climb up them towards one place, they move and redirect you towards another.  And there you suddenly are in the place you didn’t want to get to at all.   Paul is talking about something like that:  You wanted to find rest, and instead you are more exhausted than ever.  You made resolutions to be a better person and wou[...]

With the summer solstice this last week, I think we can officially say that summer has begun. Happy summer!  Among other things, summer is a time of both traveling and welcoming travelers to our homes, time when the guest room gets used more often.  As many of you know, I’ve just been traveling, staying in three different homes (and one tent) over the last two weeks.  There is nothing quite like the gift of arriving late after long travel to a home where you are offered a glass of cool water or a cup of tea, a meal, a comfortable bed, a front door key and the freedom to come and go.  Hospitality done well is good for the body, giving us the rest and the nourishment we need, but it is even more so good for the soul – allaying our anxieties about being in a strange place, about imposing on others, about doing the right thing.  It is a wonderful thing when practiced well.

Genuine hospitality builds relationships and friendships and smoothes social connections.  But it can also be a spiritual discipline.  During Lent I offered a series of adult forums on spiritual disciplines, and we talked about hospitality as one of them.  I asked those in the group to share examples of giving or receiving hospitality.  People had wonderful stories of traveling in foreign countries or cities and being welcomed by strangers, of large Thanksgiving dinners with everyone invited, of visiting churches and being greeted with genuine welcome.  Opening our home or our dinner table to another is a way of allowing others into our lives.  Come in, we say – make yourself at home here.  And the idea of hospitality can extend beyond our homes:  opening our hearts and souls to God is hospitality too, allowing God to come in and make himself at home.   And we can receive that hospitality from God as well, making our home in God, trusting the welcome that is there.  There’s a vulnerability in all of this, a willingness to give and to receive without worrying about the balance sheet.  It’s not a bargaining move – I’ll trade you this for that – but simply a gift.

Which is perhaps why it is so hard to do sometimes. You have to go out of your way to be hospitable.  You have to drop what you’re doing and your plans for things and provide for the other.  And you have to do the same as a guest, allowing the rules of the house you stay in to be the rules you live by.  In order to practice genuine hospitality, you have to let go a little.  And when that hospitality extends to God, you sometimes have to let go a lot.

Jesus talks about hospitality in that bit of the gospel we heard, telling us to welcome others in his name.  His was a culture where hospitality mattered a great deal – social life revolved around giving and receiving hospitality, a remnant from the desert days when hospitality meant survival in a harsh, tribal land.  But hospitality wasn’t simply an exchange between individuals.  When you welcomed someone into your home, you welcomed the group they belonged to as well.  You welcomed them in the name of that larger family or tribe they were a part of, honoring that whole group by honoring the one. And your welcoming symbolized the welcoming given by your whole tribe.  And likewise, the way your guests received your hospitality symbolized their tribe’s graciousness to yours.   So Jesus was saying, whoever welcomes these little ones – his followers and disciples, perhaps especially those new to the faith – in the name of Jesus, were honoring Jesus himself.  And to the little ones – the followers of Jesus, which includes us, those new to the faith and those more seasoned – Jesus is saying, be good guests – receive what you are given.   It is given in my name.

Now hold onto that thought for a moment, because now we have to talk about that Genesis reading.  The story of Abraham and Isaac, the sacrifice of Isaac, isn’t a story we can just let float by.  I always shudder a little inside when someone tells me excitedly that they’ve started reading the Bible, and[...]

Icon of the Martyrs painted by Awer Bul

Today we celebrate the feast of the Martyrs of Sudan whose icon is before us. You are closely connected with these martyrs because most of the children which you sponsor through the Sudanese Youth Opportunity fund are the children and grandchildren of the martyrs. In the first letter of Peter we hear, The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner…once your were not a people, but now you are God’s people; (I Peter 2) In many ways this phrase describes the reality of the Church of Sudan. When European missionaries came to Sudan in the mid-1800s they came as appendages to imperial economic interests, primarily of Italy and England. In 1899 Egypt formed a condominium with Great Brittan in order to jointly rule this vast territory. The Arab-Egyptian interest of course was driven by Muslims imperialism whose mission since the 7th century had been Islamization of all of Africa.

The Kingdom of Nubia, located in what is now Sudan, had become Christian in the 4th century, had eighteen dioceses, and survived waves of attacks by Arab Muslims begun in 642.  Their Christian kingdom finally collapsed in the 15th century.

The Christian missionaries, including our own Anglican missionaries from Scotland, carried all of the European prejudices against people of color.  In their eyes the native population of south Sudan was inferior, culturally, not possessing the intellectual capacity to be educated beyond being servants and field hands.  Certainly they were not capable of self-governance.  The “White man’s burden” was in full play.  These imperial representatives looked to the politically connected Arabs of Northern Sudan as having the intellectual capacity and sophistication to benefit from formal learning and the developmental skills of self- governance.

Consequently, in the nearly sixty years of Anglo-Egyptian rule the North saw the flourishing of schools and universities, of medical institutes and the establishment of western forms of government and commerce.  The South was marked by neglect.  A handful of schools could be found by the 1940s with only one high school for a region larger than Texas…all the schools were for boys.  There were several regional hospitals but virtually no roads – only river travel on the White and Blue Niles and their tributaries.  Hundreds of villages, scattered for hundreds of miles, did not benefit from most of these resources. The inheritors of Anglo-Egyptian rule, the Government of Sudan in Khartoum, continued this prejudice.  Virtually no schools were built in the majority of areas after 1956 when Sudan won its independence.  Where schools did exist only Muslim could attend.

In the context of Sudan, the stone that was rejected were the southern tribes. The rejecters were the Muslim Arab and Christian European.   Remember what I said about the imperial perceptions that these people were not capable of self-governance?  Last February 98.5% of all registered voters in South Sudan and over a half million living in the Diaspora, or in exiled – including in the US – voted in the Referendum with 99% overwhelmingly choosing to create a new nation.  Our own highly “sophisticate” country has never gotten close to that record of turning out to vote.

A rejected people is the context in which the Church of Sudan was born in 1906.  Today, against great odds, it is among the fastest growing parts of the Anglican Communion.  At the heart of their faith is the knowledge that they, the stone which the Arab and European builders rejected, has, in fact become the very head of the cornerstone:  the pivotal element of a new building – a new society and a new Church.

The words of First Letter of Peter resonate within them:  Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people.

In 2006 I was invited by the Church of Sudan to join in the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Episcopal Church among the tribes of the Uppe[...]

[Sermon by Melanie Weiner]

You might have heard of a series of novels called the Left Behind series, dealing with what happens in the world after the rapture takes the few away, leaving the rest behind.  You could say that the Sunday after the Ascension, the day in the church year we’re on now, is the Left Behind Sunday – Jesus has been taken up into heaven, the Holy Spirit won’t be here till Pentecost, and in the meantime, we’re left behind.  No, that’s not really true of where we are – but it seems to play out that way in the story, at least.  So it seems like the logical question in the story is, what now?

There’s this long prayer towards the end of John’s gospel, the last words from Jesus before his arrest and crucifixion.  John means for us to hear in this prayer a kind of summing-up of Jesus, everything he was here to show and say spoken aloud in prayer for his followers.  What we just heard in the gospel reading was part of that, and Jesus prays specifically for his followers – his disciples, and all those who would be his followers in time to come, which includes us – that God might protect them, us, so that we may be one, as God and Jesus are one.  It’s a prayer we still need.

This line from scripture has spawned all kinds of activity in the church throughout the ages.  Elizabeth I brought an end to the bloody fighting between Catholics and Protestants in England by insisting on unity in worship and tolerance in other areas – people can believe what they like, she said, that is none of my business – I do not wish to have a window onto their souls – but we will worship according to one rite, and so be in unity.  Richard Hooker, a theologian of the early English church, continued the theme by arguing that there were things essential and things inessential to the faith, and that tolerance of differences in things inessential – like church structure and minor doctrinal matters – would preserve unity in the important things.  The ecumenical movement in modern times, especially the last half-century or so, sought to find the ways that different Christian denominations could agree and unite, setting aside historical arguments over differences.  And the plea for unity has been a lively part of the debate in the Anglican Communion over the last decade, as those worried over the increasing conflicts of culture have begged that no churches make any moves that will compromise our unity.

Of course, what all this activity is really about is the fact that despite Jesus’ fervent prayer for us, Christians have not done a terrifically good job of being one as God and Jesus are one.  Before the canonical scriptures were even finished, while John’s gospel itself was being written, Christians were already arguing with one another in councils and letters about who was a real follower of Jesus and what Jesus really meant.  And so it has gone, through the centuries.  I rather wonder that Jesus hasn’t given up on us yet.

When I was preparing for our conflict and reconciliation gathering this last week, I was looking at liturgies and rituals for forgiveness.  I came across a blog that described the Russian Orthodox practice that begins their season of Lent.  At the end of a penitential vespers service, with many prayers and scriptures stressing our own sinfulness and need for God’s forgiveness, the Orthodox do this amazing thing.  Everyone stands in a circle, and beginning with the priest, each person turns to another person there individually, and asks their forgiveness.  Each person in turn offers forgiveness to the other, and then the two embrace.  Each then turns to another person and repeats the process.  With a good-sized congregation, this can take an hour or more to do.  At the end of it, every person has both asked for and received forgiveness from every other person present, and every person has embraced every other person present.  (I thought of doing this on Wednesday night, but we all seemed a little tired and ready to go by the end of things, so I hel[...]

One of the first churches I worked in after I was ordained was a church in Berkeley, St Clement’s.  While I was in seminary in Berkeley, we had known of it as ‘that weird church that only uses the 1928 prayer book and doesn’t like women clergy.’  But we hadn’t quite had the full picture, and besides, things had shifted – so the rector hired me as the first woman priest for that congregation.  I was amazed that I had the chance to be ‘the first’ so long after women’s ordination became the norm.  And mostly the novelty went over with little comment from the congregation, which showed that they had been pretty ready for this change.  There were a few, however, who were still opposed to women’s ordination, and who let it be known that my coming did not change that.  If I presided at the Eucharist, they would not come up for communion; if my male rector presided, they would.  But I tried to consider them my parishioners like all the others, chatting with them at coffee hour and the like.  After I’d been there a few years, one day when I had celebrated the Eucharist, one of the men quietly slipped up to the communion rail and stretched out his hands.  I gave him the bread and moved on down the rail.  I didn’t mention it and neither did he, but from then on, he took communion from me.

It does seem to be that when someone gets to know another person, they’re less inclined to exclude them – that is, when people are against a category of people, like women priests or gays, and then they get to know a person in that category, they tend to change their mind.  Not always, but usually.  Because it’s different when you know somebody.  It’s harder to keep your prejudices.

Jesus told his friends, I will send you another Advocate, the Spirit of truth.  The world can’t receive the Spirit of truth, because it doesn’t see or know this Spirit.  But you, my friends, can, because you know me, and the Spirit of truth is already in you.  In other words, Jesus’ disciples had spent time with him.  They knew him.  They didn’t always understand him and what he was about, but they were in relationship with him.  And in that relationship, they could receive the truth of him – they could begin to hear what he was there to say, and know God in him, hearing God’s voice through him.  But without that kind of relationship, hearing is hard to do; it’s hard to trust what a stranger is up to.

Sometimes we forget that.  Our cultural climate now is pretty loaded against getting to know and listening to people we don’t agree with.  There was a time when people tended to live more or less where they were brought up, so that the kids you disliked in school were still around as adults that you had to interact with.  If you went to church, you just went to your neighborhood church, and consorted with whoever came.  You sent your kids to the neighborhood school, where they learned to be with different kinds of people that they would have to know all their lives.  You read the town’s newspaper, with articles and opinions on a range of topics, and so you heard about different things.  Of course, unless you lived in the urban centers, you usually lived in places surrounded by people of the same color and class, people who were likeminded in some way, and you didn’t let your Protestant daughter date a Catholic.  But there were ways built into society that you had to come up against people and ideas that were different than you, and you had to think about them and relate to them, like it or not.

We have the luxury of avoiding that more now.  We don’t have to get the newspaper for our news – we can go online and look at particular websites, or listen to particular radio stations, that accord with our political views.  We can go church-shopping for the place that suits us just right, and put our kids in exactly the right school with the right kind of people.   We can move around to different cities and suburbs in search of the perfect location for our lifestyles, [...]

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

All around the world people are greeting each other with these words – particularly our Orthodox brothers and sisters, who this year are celebrating Easter on the same day as we are. Khristos anesti! Alithos anesti! It replaces Hello, how are you? for a few days in some countries. A great way to remind ourselves in everyday ordinary moments that things have changed – that something has happened. Because we need reminding.

We just heard the story of two women, Mary Magdalene and ‘the other Mary.’ They were the some of the same women who stayed at the cross when Jesus was crucified. And now they’ve come to the tomb. They were at the cross; the disciples, you remember, weren’t there at the cross – they had fled in fear. And now the disciples aren’t there at the tomb. They’re somewhere else, disillusioned and afraid. But here come the women, at dawn.

And there’s an earthquake and the stone rolls away and an angel appears, and the guards at the tomb faint. But not the women. They listen to the angel, who says to them, Don’t be afraid! Jesus is risen. Come and see the tomb. And then go and tell his disciples to get to Galilee, where he’s meeting them. The guards are still lying there unconscious and comatose, but the women run to do as the angel tells them. And on their way, they meet Jesus, risen just like the angel said. And he tells them the same thing, Don’t be afraid – go tell my brothers to meet me in Galilee. And off they go.

Here’s one thing that’s amazing about Easter in church. Even though most of the year when we read stories from the gospels we hear about a lot of guys – Jesus and his disciples, Pharisees and scribes, tax collectors and paralytics, nearly every character is male – on Easter morning, the focus suddenly swings over to the women. In every story of the empty tomb in the four gospels, women take center stage – even when, like in Matthew’s gospel, we’ve only heard these women mentioned as a kind of afterthought: in his story of the crucifixion, Matthew says, ‘Many women were also there…they had followed Jesus from Galilee and had provided for him.’ No mention of why we hadn’t we heard about them in the preceding 26 chapters. At any rate, even though the stories about what happens at the tomb differ in each of the four gospels, all four accounts agree that women were the first ones there, and the first ones to see that it is empty. But women weren’t legally able to be witnesses – they wouldn’t be believed. They weren’t fully their own people. Any status they had came from the men they were attached to – the wife of so-and-so, the daughter of so-and-so. But these two women in our story today are just named Mary, one of them from Magdala, and the other one from somewhere else – not apparently attached to any man at all. Interesting.

The women come to the tomb for reasons that aren’t entirely clear – to grieve, to see if something will happen like Jesus said it would, who knows. Since we haven’t heard of them through the rest of the gospel, we don’t know why they followed Jesus in the first place, or why they provided for him. Something compelled them, it seems. So they show up. And they are told three things:

Don’t be afraid. There is nothing to fear – God has won.

Come and see. See the empty tomb – he is risen just like he said.

So go and tell, tell the disciples that Jesus is risen.

Don’t be afraid – Come and see – Go and tell.

And they do. They have the same experience as the guards at the tomb, you’ll notice – the guards felt the earthquake, saw the stone rolled away, saw the angel – but instead of fainting, the women act. They believe from these signs that Jesus really is risen – or at least, they know something really amazing has happened – and they start acting accordingl[...]