April 1, 2018 Easter Sunday John 20:1-18 Ry O. Siggelkow A Love No Tomb Can Contain Immediately after my Good Friday sermon two weeks ago in which I encouraged us to reflect on the meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus in light of the lynching tree in early twentieth-century America, my eight year old daughter came over to me, put her arm around me, and whispered in my ear: Dad, George Washington Carver was the first black student to attend his college. Her words pierced right through me, right through my heart and soul. I pulled her close to me and whispered back, You were listening to my sermon, weren t you, sweetheart? She nodded and I held her close to my chest. I did not want to let her go. As we were singing the next hymn, she whispered again, And, dad, Rosa Parks didn t give up her seat. I pulled her closer and gripped her as tightly as I could. I know, sweetheart. I know. And I love you. I have replayed this moment in my mind and in my heart over and over again the last two weeks. And I have realized that my dear, sweet Aleida, herself a young lover of plants and flowers and herbs just like George Washington Carver, having felt within her something of the pain and sorrow of the crucifixion that I had, with no small amount of fear and trembling, tried to intimate in my sermon that day, had whispered to me the Word of the Gospel in no uncertain terms. I have come to realize that in her whispering words to me, Aleida was bearing witness to the hope of the resurrection: the great Nevertheless! She was bearing witness to the Good News that the God of Jesus Christ not only shares in our experiences of despair and God-abandonment in the crucifixion, but even in the midst of the darkest of nights makes a way out of no way, never ever leaving us alone in our pain and our sorrow. Our text for today from the Gospel of John begins not with daybreak, not with light, but in the dark. The Evangelist focuses our attention on a woman, Mary Magdalene, still mourning the gruesome death of her teacher and the one whom she had come to call Lord. Mary arrives at the tomb on the first day of the week. Consistent with earliest tradition, the tomb is found empty on the third day after Jesus s crucifixion, the day before the Passover, which fell that year on a Sabbath. Upon her discovery that the stone had been removed from the tomb, Mary runs away to notify Simon Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved. Mary is concerned that they -- the ones who killed Jesus -- have taken his corpse from the tomb, and she says, we do not know where they have laid him. In response to this news, Peter and the Beloved Disciple run together toward the tomb. The Beloved Disciple, apparently the faster runner of the two, reaches the tomb first, peers into the tomb and sees the linen wrappings. When Peter arrives he enters the tomb and sees the linen wrappings lything there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus s head, rolled up in a place by itself. The Beloved Disciple follows Peter inside the tomb, and the Evangelist informs
us that he saw and believed, but as yet they did not understand the scripture that he must rise from the dead. The disciples, then, return to their homes. But Mary remains at the tomb, she stands there weeping. And as she wept, she bends over to look into the tomb. The weeping of Mary recalls the earlier weeping of those who accompanied the death of Lazarus. What she witnesses in the tomb are not the linen wrappings but two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and other at the feet. Still weeping, still in the dark, still in sorrow, the two angels ask Mary Woman, why are you weeping? Mary repeats the words that she had spoken to the two disciples: They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him. And as she says this, she turns around to see Jesus standing before her, but she did not recognize him, assuming he is the gardener. Woman, Jesus says, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for? Gardener, sir, if you ve taken his corpse away, please tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away. Then, Jesus, dropping the language of woman, says her name, Mary! At the sound her name being spoken, Mary recognizes that this is Jesus: Rabbouni! Teacher! Jesus does not allow her to hold onto to him, but tells her to go to my brothers and sisters. Mary leaves Jesus and announces what she had seen and heard: I have seen the Lord. It is not insignificant that a weeping woman is the first to discover the empty tomb and the first person to whom the risen Jesus reveals himself. Nor is it insignificant that a weeping woman, whom the risen Jesus calls by name, Mary, becomes the first living witness to the truth of the resurrection: that Jesus Christ, the Lynched One, is living Lord. In her weeping and in her mourning, Mary becomes a living witness to the truth of the resurrection against and in spite of the death-dealing reality of the lynching tree. Two weeks ago, after our daughter Aleida spoke the Word of the gospel to me, our congregation s resident historian, Dr. Shirley Leckie-Reed, briefly shared about another woman, who, like Mary Magdalene, became a living witness to the lynched one. Her name was Ida B. Wells. Born a slave in Mississippi in 1862, Wells became, in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, the pioneer of the anti-lynching crusade, who began the awakening of the conscience of a nation. 1 In 1892, at the age of 30, Wells s close friend Tommie Moss along with two others, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart, were lynched in Memphis, Tennessee. Out of the depths of mourning, Wells, a journalist, responded to the event by writing a series of editorials exposing lynch law in America. Wells spent most of her life documenting and exposing the horrors of lynching -- our country s national crime -- and so became a living witness to the power of the resurrection. Lynching, she insisted, is not the creature of the hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an unwritten law 1 W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett: Postscript, The Crisis (June 1931): 207.
that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without the right of appeal. 2 Wells put her life on the line to expose the crime of lynching, but she like Mary Magdalene could do nothing else. She was empowered by the love of God, a love that did not leave her passive and silent in the face of injustice, but brought her out of the depths of mourning and into the life of the resurrection. No other save Divine Strength, she wrote to Frederick Douglass, could have helped me so wonderfully, and to God I give all the praise and glory. Even when the black church did not support her work, Wells still witnessed to the truth: Under God I have done work without any assistance from my people. She refused to remain moderate when men, women, and children were scourged, hanged, shot, and burned. Writing in her diary after the lynching of Eliza Woods of Jackson, Tennessee, she wrote: It may be unwise to express myself so strongly, but I cannot help it and I know not if capital may not be made of it against me but I trust God. 3 Wells trusted in the God of the resurrection, in the irrepressible power of a love that no tomb can contain. Her words to twelve African American men unjustly jailed in Elaine, Arkansas, represent, in the words of Emilie Townes, the zenith of womanist spirituality 4 : I have been listening to you for nearly two hours. You have talked and sang and prayed about dying, and forgiving your enemies, and of feeling sure you are going to be received in the New Jerusalem.... But why don t you pray to live and ask to be freed?... Let all of your songs and prayers hereafter be songs of faith and hope that God will set you free.... Quit talking about dying; if you believe your God is all powerful, believe he is powerful enough to open these prison doors, and say so.... Pray to live and believe you are going to get out. 5 The resurrection is the ground of hope in times of despair. The resurrection of Jesus marks the promise of dreams of a better day when desires are out of joint. The resurrection is the power that allows people to cry out, Hallelujah! to life when worlds crash and dreams whiten into ash. 6 Because Christ is risen, there is always a growing edge of hope in the midst of the most barren and tragic circumstances. 2 Ida B. Wells, Lynch Law in America, in Mildred I. Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893-1930 (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1990) 235. 3 Wells, Southern Horrors, 143, 144. 4 Emilie M. Townes, In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995) 121. 5 Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice, ed. Alfreda Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979) 403. 6 Howard Thurman, Deep River: The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1975) 83.
Over the past week, we have witnessed the rise of young people all across this land embodying the hope and the power of the resurrection. At the March for Our Lives event last week, seventeen year old, Emma Gonzalez stood in silence before thousands of people offering a silent prayer -- 6 minutes and 20 second -- through a veil of tears. Alongside Emma stood Mary Magdalene and Ida B. Wells weeping and crying out for a new world, bearing witness to the truth that because Christ is risen We are God s children now as the author of 1 John once put it (3:2). While the sins of the past powerfully possess us in the present, so too and all the more, the future reign of God, the reign of love and justice and peace, is present to us and with us. For Emma and Mary and Ida, the truth of the resurrection means that we need not and cannot be content with the present political and social order of death. We need not and can no longer make deals with the devil. We need not and can no longer make deals with the powers of this world, because we have had an encounter with the living truth of the resurrection, a truth that no lynching tree, no cross, no prison, no gun, no police officer, no military, no banker, no nation, and no weapon of death can contain. The truth of the resurrection opens the way toward a collective future, a collective future that does not begin with what is presently possible, but that hopes against the hopes of this world, against all the self-made gods that we have erected in the place of the God of the cross and the resurrection, the God of the new creation. Ernst Käsemann once said that Faith must be lived today.... The dead bones of the past remain ghosts if there are no living witnesses oriented to the present to take up their message. Those of us in this room gather here this morning because we have been called out by the risen Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit to live as witnesses to the light that breaks through the darkness of the world. To live as witnesses to the resurrected one means to be torn from the possessive grip of neutrality in the face of injustice. As Mennonites we have too often lived as if peace is merely the absence of conflict. But the gospel, because it is about life conquering death, brings us into direct conflict with the violence of the world. To live as witnesses to the resurrection is not to avoid conflict in the name of peace. The church is not a place to bury one s head in the sand or remove oneself from the troubles of the world. No, the church exists *only* for the sake of this world's liberation from grip of the powers of death, for only in this way does the church conform to Christ. The resurrection is the Good News that there is a light and a life that breaks into the darkness of the world that is so full of *love* for each and every person, each and everyone of you in this room, so full of *grace* and *truth* that nothing can mitigate against its bursting open every closed grave, every tomb, bringing forth new life out of the silence and weeping of the darkest night. And it is this love, the love of the resurrection that sustains us at the core of our very being; it is the love that moves the sun and the stars; the love that formed you in your mother s womb; it is the love of a child who whispers to her despairing father: Dad, George Washington Carver was the first black student at his college. To become a living witness to the event of the resurrection is to bear witness to the truth alongside Mary Magdalene, Ida B. Wells, and Emma Gonzalez, that there is a love that is so profound and so deep that it cannot be contained by the
powers of Death and Destruction. This is our hope and this is our prayer: that the power of the resurrection take root in the deep soil of love that stretches across our broken earth; may the God of life nourish our resistance for the sake of a world that cries out for freedom. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. Thanks be to God!