On a winter’s day, almost forty years ago, the Rev. Dr. Delmar Chilton was driving back to the church after making hospital visits. It was a particularly bright day and the sun was already starting to sink in the sky. So, when he pulled up to the stop sign at the intersection of two country roads, he had real trouble seeing. Unable to see any oncoming traffic and thinking it was safe, he made a left turn.
It was not safe, however. A delivery truck slammed into Chilton’s little Datsun at sixty miles an hour. It caught his car behind the rear door and spun it completely around, and it kept spinning until a roadside ditch suddenly halted its revolutions. The Datsun was wedged at an angle in the ditch, every window shattered, the steering wheel broken, the driver’s seat broken. Chilton was laying with his head in the rear passenger side seat and his feet still under the driver’s side dashboard. The impact had knocked the breath out of him; he could not catch a breath.
One of his parishioners, Kitty Hightower, saw it all happen. She knew it was Chilton, because she recognized his car. She ran to the car, leaned in the broken window and worriedly called out, “Pastor, Pastor! Are you alright?”
Well, he wasn’t; he couldn’t breathe. But, not being able to breathe, he couldn’t very well tell her about it. In fact all he could do was lay there, not moving, with his mouth wide open, staring in Kitty’s general direction. In her panic, she took this lack of response as a very bad and very definite sign.
She started to cry, but then, spotting some men running over from the country store, she began hollering, “He’s dead! He’s dead! Oh my God, the Pastor’s dead!” That, says Chilton, “is, I assure you, a peculiar thing to have screamed in your ear when you are indeed very much alive.”
Well, while she’s loudly expressing her grief, Chilton was struggling to get some air in his lungs. Finally, his lungs begin to work a bit, and he got just enough breath that he was able to reach out his hand and touch Kitty’s shoulder. No doubt, he meant to comfort her, but he admits, “in retrospect, [it] was not the best thing to do, seeing as how she thought I was dead and all.”
He touched her, she screamed and just about jumped out of her skin, and then turned to look at Chilton with a look of abject terror on her face.
After a moment, which must have seemed like an eternity, Chilton managed to say, “It’s alright Kitty, I’m not dead.” [https://lectionarylab.com/2012/04/09/year-b-the-second-sunday-of-easter/] When those words sunk in, I’m sure Kitty Hightower was relieved, overjoyed and confused, all at once.
I think Mary is in a similar place to Kitty, overcome by shock and grief, not sure what is happening or what she should do now—and, when the dead turns out to be alive, too overcome by confusion to recognize the Good News. To be sure, these two stories are not exact parallels. Chilton was not dead yet. He wasn’t feeling very happy. But he was not dead yet. Jesus, on the other hand, was very much dead—dead as a doornail, or any other lifeless piece of ironmongery you care to mention. Jesus was dead. Mary had seen him die. She had heard him say, “It is finished,” and then watched his head droop lifeless to his chest. She had seen the soldiers pierce his side, seen the water and blood flow from the wound, seen his limp body taken down from the cross. She knew exactly where Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus had placed his body. Yes, Jesus was very much dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of this story.
Now, the Sabbath past, she had come to the tomb on Sunday morning, only to find the stone rolled away and Jesus’ body gone. It must be grave robbers, she thought, so she immediately went and told Peter and the Beloved Disciple. Their investigation confirmed that he was gone, but seemed to rule out grave robbers, who would never take the time to unwind all the linen wrappings and neatly fold the head cloth. Yet, none of them understood what had happened. Where was the body? So, in their confusion, the two men go home and Mary stays at the tomb weeping.
Her grief and confusion are such that the appearance of two angels doesn’t seem to faze her, indeed, it hardly seems to register. She does not fall to her knees, she doesn’t even gasp. She simply tells her grief in response to their questions: “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”
Then, some motion must have caught her attention and she turned to see another man. She doesn’t recognize him, assumes he must be the gardener, and asks if he knows where Jesus’ body has been taken. And he replies with one word: “Mary!” And suddenly she knows who it is. He speaks her name and she knows. Her confusion transforms into its more excited and joyful cousin: wonder.
Paul Rock points out that for a long time we’ve followed a certain pattern in the church, a pattern for becoming part of the congregation that’s been around since the 1950s or longer. Call it the three B’s: Believe, Behave, Belong. First, you learned what the particular church believed. You would go to a new members class and learn the specific doctrines of the Catholic Church, or the Presbyterian church, or the Serbian Orthodox church. As you were learning this, you also learned how to behave. I don’t only mean ethics, how to live as a Christian. I also mean what to wear to service on Sunday, when to stand, sit or kneel, how to take Communion, how to fit into the congregational culture. And then, when you had all of that down, when you knew and affirmed the beliefs, when you mastered the behaviors, you would officially join, you would finally belong. [Paul Rock, “Easter Sunday: Insider Knowledge, John 20.1-18,” in A Preacher’s Guide to Lectionary Sermon Series, p. 113-114; my ensuing comments are inspired by Rock’s commentary]
But that’s not how Jesus handles things. Jesus inverts the order: Belonging comes first and is followed by behaving and then believing. Just look at the experience of Mary and the disciples in our scripture. They’ve known Jesus for a long time, they’ve heard him predict his death and even allude to his resurrection. If anyone should believe, it’s them. And yet there they are, standing by the empty tomb, befuddled.
And yet Jesus comes to them, where they are, weeping in a garden, hiding out behind locked doors, back at the lake, plying their old fishing trade. Jesus comes to them, comes to Mary in the Garden and later to the whole confused lot of them, and calls them: calls them by name; claims them as his own. He tells them they belong, even though they are confused and don’t know what’s going on or what to do. They belong, because he loves them. It’s an act of sheer grace. Believing and behaving will come later, but they already belong.
Notice that Jesus acknowledges that Mary belongs before he instructs her on how to behave. He first calls her by name. Then he gives her a task. After declaring that he knows and loves her, Jesus tells Mary to go and tell the other disciples and tell them he is alive and will soon ascend into the immediate presence of God, who he calls “my Father and your Father.” Jesus is commissioning her to share the Good News, sending her to be the first evangelist, really, the first Apostle in the Gospels. And she goes and tells. She behaves, but only after it has been made clear that she belongs. As for believing, well, while I don’t doubt that she believed he was alive, I’m quite sure she still didn’t understand. If you’re having trouble wrapping your head around the resurrection, don’t worry, you’re in good company. Faith seeks understanding, but that’s an ongoing, life-long process. Love seeks to be obedient, to behave—Jesus said earlier in John, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” But that too is an on-going, life-long process. Belonging comes first. As First John declares, “We love, because God first loved us.” Then, because we belong, we seek to believe, to understand more fully. “Faith seeks understanding.” [Anselm, Proslogion] Because we belong, we also seek to behave, to learn how to act like disciples of Jesus and lovers of God and God’s creatures.
It all starts with God coming to us in Christ and calling us, welcoming us, claiming us as God’s own. Dennis Covington’s book, “Salvation on Sand Mountain,” is a story of snake-handing churches and more importantly, a memoir of growing up in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1950s. The book concludes with these words: “Most of the children in my neighborhood are called home for suppers by their mothers. They open the backdoors; wipe their hands on their aprons and yell, “Willie!” or “Joe!” or “Ray!” Either that or they use a bell, bolted to the doorframe and loud enough to start the dogs barking in backyards all along the street. But I was always called home by my father, and he didn’t do it in the customary way. He walked down the alley all the way to the lake. If I was close, I could hear his shoes on the gravel before he came into sight. If I was far, I would see him across the surface of the water, emerging out of shadows and into the gray light. He would stand with his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker while he looked for me. This is how he got me to come home. He always came to the place where I was before he called my name.”
“He always came to the place where I was before he called my name.” [Dennis Covington, SALVATION ON SAND MOUNTAIN, 1995; quoted by Delmar Chilton, https://lectionarylab.com/2014/05/27/year-a-the-seventh-sunday-of-easter-june-1-2014/]
In Christ, God comes to the place where we are and calls our name. Christ comes to us wherever we are on life’s journey—weeping in a garden, grieving by a tomb, hiding in our room, wandering about in confusion, not knowing what to do or believe—and he calls our names. Christ knows you and welcomes you as you are—with all your doubt and confusions, with your quirks, shortcomings and sins. Love and Life come to us and we are adopted into God’s family, welcomed into God’s people. On this Easter Sunday, know that, even if we are not sure what we believe and haven’t quite figured out how to behave, Jesus, the resurrected one, is calling each of your names. He has come to the place where we are and calls our names. On this Easter Sunday, let us rejoice with Mary, for in Christ, we belong. Let us rejoice, for the Good News of Easter is that “in life, in death, and in life beyond death, we belong to God!” Hallelujah and Amen!