03/31/2024: Easter Sunrise Service

Love rises. Love persists. Love always will.

Rev. Loren McGrail

Easter Sunrise Service

Holmdel Community United Church of Christ

March 31,2024

 

Kirsten Wheeler, Mary Magdalene: The Woman and the Cave

 

inspired by a prayer in Steven Shakespeare, Prayers for an Inclusive Church

Out of grief, out of faithfulness Mary continues to seek Jesus while it is still dark. She will not give up until she finds him. She is not hopeful; she is looking for a corpse not a risen Savior. She who has followed him from the beginning, who loved and supported him, listened deeply to his words about the soul; she who anointed him for burial with her nard and hair, is now weeping. In her poem the Magdalene’s Blessing for Easter Day, Jan L. Richardson talks about the tears this way:

She let the tears come

as anointing,

as consecration,

and then let them go

I invite you to stay with Mary’s weeping as we too have been waiting between the darkness of death and the bright promise of Easter. I invite those of you who have known grief or are grieving now to appreciate how your tears too are a form of anointing or a kind of consecration. What are you being consecrated for this Easter morning?

Mary misses her teacher, her Rabbi, her beloved, yet when he appears she thinks he is the gardener. What a wonderful detail that Creator God’s son shows up as a gardener and yet she doesn’t recognize him until he calls out her name.  Dear Ones, I invite you to reflect on a time you were in a dark place and heard the voice of the living God call you to assure you that you were not alone. If you have not had this kind of experience, I invite you to imagine what this must have felt like for Mary. Please turn to someone near you and share your stories about being or feeling called. If this is not your story talk about why this is important to our sacred story about Mary, our first witness to the resurrection.

Mary wants to hold onto him, but she must let him go. Jesus has appeared to only her and now commissions her to tell others. This is why she is called the Apostle of the Apostles in the Orthodox church. Without her witness and testimony, we would have no resurrection story to tell, no Easter.

Dear Ones, we too must depart the garden and go where he is calling us into a new creation--- to breathe onto and into our world the fresh air of resurrection. Jesus sends Mary away because resurrection belongs outside the garden in a world where the powers and principalities seek to separate everyone. Resurrection needs legs, hands, hearts, and voices. Ours.

Dear Ones, we are living in challenging times which for some feel like a perpetual feedback loop to the violence of Good Friday or the sadness of Holy Saturday. We know what the wounds of violence feel like on our souls or the way despair can entomb us.

“The Risen Lord is indeed risen. Present, intimate, creative, 'closer than your own heartbeat,' accessed through your vulnerability, your capacity for intimacy,” says Modern Mystic and Episcopal priest, Cynthia Bourgeault. “The imaginal realm is real, and through it you will never be separated from anyone or anything you have ever loved, for love is the ground in which you live and move and have your being.” Dear Ones, this is the message that Mary Magdalene perennially brings each year, and it is the one often lost in the shuffle of easter eggs and chocolate bunnies or even a focus solely on the resurrection as an empty tomb.

Dear Ones, awake and maybe a wee bit chilled, you are invited now to pick up a lantern as we process inside to light the Paschal Candle.

Once it is lit, we will light or turn on our lanterns as a symbol that the spirit and light of Christ has been passed to us. Let us go and celebrate God’s flame of love.

 

As the Risen Christ called out, “Mary” on the other side of death,
may you hear your own name
on the lips of the Beloved

calling you into hope,
even when your heart is shattered.
Evil cannot keep us down.
Love rises. Love persists. Love always will.