Pie

Luke 24:13-35

Yesterday was my Grandmother’s 100^th birthday.

Last month, my father and I talked about how to mark the occasion, because this would be the first time we’d have to do so without her. She died last October, decades after she was ready to be reunited with her husband, but six months short of the milestone we’d all sort of started expecting her to meet. So it was an unexpected challenge, thinking about how to mark this 100^th anniversary of her birth without her, for the first time.

And the first thing that came to my mind was dinner.

A nice substantial dinner in the middle of the day, with ham, and mashed potatoes, and probably collard greens. A few other dishes, and then pie. Very definitely pie.

You see, my childhood memories of my Grandmother are dominated by the dining table. I grew up as a picky eater, not interested in cooking (and to this day, my idea of cooking dinner is taking the Trader Joe’s goodies out of the freezer and putting them on a baking sheet). So my Grandmother’s home-made dinners were a daily wonder to me, when we visited. They were rich in butter and bacon, and unlike my parents, my Grandmother wasn’t worried about my sugar intake. She was a scratch baker – a true miracle in my eyes – and if there was ever a dinner at her house that didn’t end with pie, I have blocked out the memory.

My grandmother showed her love in many ways, but for me, her dinner table is a sign of love that looms large in my memories and heart, and shaped my sense of God’s abundance from a very early age.

Meals mattered with my Grandmother.

And they do with Jesus.

In Luke’s gospel in particular, Jesus is constantly eating a meal, going to one, coming from one, or talking about a meal. And in both of Luke’s stories about the resurrection, it’s a meal that makes Jesus’ risen presence a reality to his disciples.

Imagine this:
You’re headed home after an emotional holiday. The friends and family you’ve been with have suffered political and emotional whiplash as your friend was killed just when he was on the verge of doing great things, fulfilling his destiny.

Now there are rumors that he’s not dead after all. Crazy rumors, but someone you know was there and says that his grave is now empty. It’s crazy, but you can’t stay in the middle of it. There are responsibilities waiting, and you have to go, so you do. We hit the road.

The road is a good place, sometimes, for grief. Or for conversations about crazy things, speculative things, vulnerable things – for saying the kind of things that can be hard to say face to face, but that flow a little easier when you’re side by side, moving along, together.

We try to figure it all out. We get it off our chests, we process our experiences. We do the things you are supposed to do when you’re stunned and sad.

And along the way, someone else chimes in.

“Hey, what’s this you’re talking about?”

Sometimes it’s easier to tell a stranger, to talk about “out there” stuff to people who don’t know you and won’t hold it against you next Monday at the office, or suspect your commitment to them because you’re exploring something new.

And this particular stranger is interested. Passionately interested. Joins in the conversation, working to make sense of the whole thing with us, quoting scripture, citing authoritative sources for the things we’ve only speculated about.

Sometimes telling your troubles – or your wild ideas, your fondest hopes – to someone else creates a bond. You don’t want to lose the moment, and when we get to a stopping place, we don’t want to let go: “Oh, come in and have dinner with us. I insist.”

And at dinner, in the warm, nourishing intimacy of the table, the stranger picks up the bread: breaks it, passes it, shares it,

and everything changes.

Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.

I don’t know why the traveling disciples didn’t recognize Jesus on the road. Preachers and scholars have plenty of explanations – distraction, expectations, the hand of God, – but whatever it was, I think Luke tells the story this way because he wants us to notice that the meal matters. That the dinner table is where the relationship is made real all over again; the meal completes the miracle of resurrection and redemption.

From God’s earliest promises of a homeland flowing with milk and honey, through the prophets’ visions of abundant tables, through the stories and actions of Jesus, throughout scripture, an abundance of good food is a sign of the completion of God’s promises.

So it is at dinner, at the table, in the act of receiving bread from God’s hand, that the disciples on the road recognize the completion of everything that Jesus has taught them; the completion of his promise of resurrection and return and redemption that they had heard, and wondered about, and never quite understood.

You and I, Luke’s readers, Luke’s hearers, are supposed to recognize not only Jesus in this story, but the Eucharist, the meal we still share two thousand years later to remind us that the promises of God are still being fulfilled among and in us.

The words of the story, that Jesus “took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them,” intentionally echo the words that describe Jesus’ actions at the Last Supper when he offered his friends his Body, and at the feeding of five thousand hungry people with an abundance that overflowed even in the leftovers.

And when these traveling disciples rush back to Jerusalem, they tell Peter and the others how Jesus was revealed in the breaking of the bread, in the same words the community of apostles will use to describe their first Eucharistic meals, the breaking of bread which makes us one.

When we read and hear this story, Luke wants us to remember that this miraculous meal the disciples shared on the road is the same thing we do every Sunday, every time we meet for Eucharist.

We come from wherever we have been, sometimes puzzling over what has happened in our lives; we bring blessings and griefs and questions, and together, we remember and interpret the stories of scripture.

Then we break bread. And commit ourselves to the truth that the risen Christ is here, that love takes solid form among us at this table, just long enough for us to recognize and respond.

It can be harder to see a real meal in the wafers and wine than it is to see Jesus in them, I know. And sometimes, with all our prayer and faith, the wafers are just…well, a faint facsimile of bread…and the wine or juice is just grapes.

Sometimes dinner with my Grandmother was just dinner. Sometimes I was disappointed to find out the pie was just boring apple.

But even then, the flour and water, wafers or pie, are still love made physical, love made edible, love made – sometimes – boring and bland but still nourishing to the body and soul.

And other times, well…other times the pie was lemon meringue, and I tasted heaven. Other times, Jesus bursts into our sight, our hearts, as we receive a little morsel of bread from God’s hands, and we remember how Jesus has set our hearts on fire.

Sometimes that happens because we come to the table – the altar table, the dinner table – more open than usual, more vulnerable in our grief or wonder or spiritual hunger. Sometimes it happens because God just can’t be kept out of even the most ordinary days and things. Either way, those are the times that make gospel, that set resurrection loose in the world to redeem us all.

So keep eating, my friends. Practice being fed with love at your ordinary dinner table, whether the food is frozen or home-made. Practice being fed by love in the Eucharist, so that we are ready for those unpredictable moments when we recognize God’s promises fulfilled, right here and now, when heaven comes to meet us on earth, and we remember all at once how Jesus has set our hearts on fire, and go forth from the table to light the world anew.

Transformation

John 20:1-18

Somebody took Jesus away from us!

That’s how John’s story starts, today: Jesus is missing. And we don’t know where to find him.

Mary Magdalene’s discovery of the gaping entrance to the tomb triggers a new sense of loss and fear that she runs to share with her fellow disciples, and this contagious anxiety triggers a cascade of searching and misunderstanding that wouldn’t be out of place in a TV comedy: half an hour of rushing around, trying to figure out why one character is missing, only to recognize at the end that he’s been right there, in the middle of their search all along – they just were too caught up in the search to understand.

It’s not funny to Mary and Peter and the other disciple. It’s painfully tragic, this loss of their dearest one, not only to death, but after; a pain many of us have shared in one way or another.

But the vivid, bizzare details John provides – the footrace to the tomb, one entry after another, the puzzle of the abandoned shroud – are all funny in the way that panic is funny when we see it from a place of security, when we laugh at it later after everything is resolved.

Peter searches the tomb; the beloved disciple does one after another, but they don’t find Jesus.

Finally, Mary goes in, weeping (we know he’s not in there; they all keep looking in the one place he’s certainly not) and he’s still missing.

But now there are angels. Ah – perhaps we’re getting somewhere. Angels are God’s messengers, after all. They should surely know what’s happened to Jesus. But they are messengers without a message, a clue that doesn’t lead to the solution. They just ask a question that refocuses Mary on the loss that has seized her heart and mind to the exclusion of all else.

Then, at last, the missing character appears. We know it’s Jesus; but Mary does not.

He too asks her why she is weeping, and she again says what’s at the top of her mind; she asks help in finding Jesus.

And then, finally, the tension breaks:

he calls her by name, and she knows him.

At last!  It’s all been a misunderstanding. He was here all along; we just couldn’t tell,

and we’re finally at the feel good ending.

Except… now there’s a theological addendum that un-resolves the plot and changes the ending.

“Don’t hold on to me,” Jesus says, in one of the most reunion-wrecking lines in all literature.

And in a few sentences jam-packed with layered theological meaning, he turns satisfying comic closure into redemptive mystery.

This part of the story, it turns out, is for the real geeks; the ones who remember the details of all the other stories in this series, and spend hours on the internet debating the hundreds of possible meanings of tiny details. (Talk to me about the plot holes in Star Wars, sometime; you’ll know what I mean.)

But the geeks have good news for all of us, here.

When Jesus tells Mary, “Don’t hold on to me, but go to my siblings, tell them I am on the way to be one with my Father, who is their Father.” He is telling her that a promise is fulfilled – one the disciples didn’t understand, that probably we didn’t understand, at the time since, let’s be honest, Jesus doesn’t always make sense.

But in their meal together only days ago, in their last conversation, Jesus told them that when he is gone and glorified; when he has returned to and is one with the Father, his disciples will be transformed: we will have Jesus’ intimate relationship with the Father; we will become children of God.

Don’t hold on to me, he tells Mary, because I am still in the middle of this; it must be completed.

The “glorification” that Jesus has been talking about – his great work of redeeming and transforming the world, that begins with the lifting up of Jesus on the cross, and moves in a single arc through the ascension to Jesus reunited with the Creator – is still in process.

This moment of resurrection – the defeat of death itself, the healing of loss, the overwhelming joy of being face to face with living Love, any of which would be enough cause for joy

is just a quantum moment of the whole, a tiny concrete slice of a process that can’t be measured and seen and known except by its results: that you and I are transformed in our relationship with God.

And Mary somehow understands this deep but confusing truth. She lets him go. And she knows her own transformation.

She is transformed in this story from the anxious lead in a comedy of misunderstanding to an angel herself, a messenger of God. Transformed from an insignificant bystander into the first apostle, child of God, sibling of Jesus, bearing in herself, like Jesus, the words of God to be shared and made known.

The words with which she brings the news to the other disciples are radiant:
“I have seen the Lord,” she proclaims, and tells them what she has heard from him.

It’s the absolute reverse of the anxious tidings she brought to them in the dark of morning.

He is not missing. Instead he is exactly where he is supposed to be; in the midst of salvation, going to God and transforming us all.

You and I come to the Easter tomb in an entirely different way than Mary, or Peter, or the disciple whom Jesus loved. We come with flowers and fanfare, candy and eggs – not the anxious fear of discovering that we have been robbed of our greatest treasure. We can watch the comedy of the empty tomb unfold because we know the ending will be happy.

But many of us come to today’s fanfare full of loss and grief. Others of us come full of busyness, with other things on our minds because we’ve heard this story so often before, or numb in parts of our hearts and spirits that have been worked too hard or hurt too often. Others still come drawn by the brightness and eager for good news.

Any of this – like Mary’s panic over the opened tomb – can both trigger our search for Jesus, and keep us from seeing that he is right here, all along, fully immersed in the whole complicated work of our salvation.

But Jesus is there, no matter what has seized our attention, no matter what we are seeking. He has been there all along, and meets us, like Mary, with a gentle prodding to name the cause of our weeping – or our indifference – or our hope – to name what you are missing, or seeking, or even bored with, whatever has taken hold of you above all else, so that when we lay that noise within us bare, we can hear him call us by name, and invite us into that sudden solid moment of resurrection, from which we can know ourselves loved and see God’s promises being made true, for you and for the world.

Sometimes our road to this moment is tragic. Sometimes it’s comic, accidental. Often it is both at once. But we each get here today because we all need to hear, to recognize and believe, the news of God’s mysterious promises actively being fulfilled. We all need to receive the truth of our own transformation.

Mary came to the gaping tomb that dark morning in grieving panic, in pain and loss, and returned to her fellow disciples radiant with the revelation of Jesus’ presence and the news of God’s work being completed right now.

We come this morning to brightness and celebration, in all the different shades of hope and indifference, pain and happiness, that both draw us to God, and make it hard to recognize Jesus when he meets us.

And Jesus has the same news for us all: that this morning’s glimpse of resurrection means that the mission of God is actively being completed, right this moment, and that our relationship with God has already been transformed into the intimacy of a family bond that nothing can break.

So, here this morning at the empty tomb, will you, like Mary, name for Jesus the root of your weeping – or your hope, or your numbness, indifference – whatever is occupying your mind while you seek God?

Can you hear Jesus call you by name, and know yourself loved?

And will you go home today, like Mary, fully aware of your own transformation,

radiant to share the news that you have seen the Lord?

If Only...

John 11:1-45

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

If only you were here, it would have all been different.
Wouldn’t it?

That’s the question that plagues this story:

Lazarus is ill – very ill. His sisters send a message to Jesus, saying “Your dear friend is dying.” When Jesus hears this, he says, “This is all for the glory of God,” and waits two days – two days! – before starting a journey to Bethany, to his friends who have called out to him in crisis.

Two days. While his good friend is dying.

And when he finally gets there – before he even enters the village, his friend Martha comes out to meet him, saying, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Those are the first words out of her mouth, and out of her sister’s mouth, minutes later.

If you had been here…

You, the Messiah, God’s Anointed, you could have saved him.

If you’d been here.

And you weren’t.

How could God let this happen?

It’s the question that plagues all of us from time to time, in the midst of grief and loss: in the violence that bleeds on every evening’s news; when one unnecessary trauma piles on top of another in our family’s life, our own; when a long-held promise or dream is denied:

Why does God let this happen?

Why did Jesus wait two days, instead of coming to save his friend?

That’s the question I hear in my head every time I read this story, every time Martha says, and Mary, “Lord, if you had been here, he would not have died.”

But this week, for the very first time in about 20 years of reading this story with careful attention, I noticed that when Jesus got to Bethany, to the home of Martha, and Mary, Lazarus had been dead for four days.

Jesus delayed for two.

He never could have gotten there in time. Not if he had started out the moment he heard the message that Lazarus was ill.

And I’m not sure what to make of that.

Because like Martha, like Mary, like the neighbors and mourners who speculate audibly to one another that the rabbi who opened the eyes of a man born blind should have been able to keep his friend from dying, in the wake of tragedy, I speculate about what might have been.

If I had only called last week… If only he hadn’t gone so far…

A friend was wrestling with this the other day: “I keep thinking that if I had been there, if I had been in Florida, in my father’s crisis, it could have been so much better.”

I believe her. It could have been better.

And I believe that if Jesus had been there, Lazarus would not have died.

But Jesus was too late.

It was too late already by the time he got the message.

My friend could not have been there, for her father, even if hindsight looks different.

I can’t change now what I did last week.  I might not have been able to change it then.

And the tragedy, or the mess, or the stupid error, happened the way it did, and I can’t let go of “if only…”

So Lazarus dies.

And Jesus – who could not have been there to prevent his death – goes to the tomb.

He weeps.

He announces again that this is all for the glory of God, and calls Lazarus forth from the tomb, still wrapped in the shroud of death, but alive, and we are amazed.

It’s a miracle beyond the healing we would have prayed for, an answer more dramatic and profound than the one Martha and Mary hoped for when they called out to Jesus.

But it’s not the one we asked for, not what we’d have chosen if we’d been there; not the one that would allow life to go on, and to get better.

Instead, it’s a real tragedy, followed by a real miracle, that add up to a dislocating change we can never forget, a permanent mark on our being.

And it leads directly to the cross.

“Many of those who had come with Mary and seen what Jesus did believed in him,” John tells us. But some of them went to the Pharisees, for whom this raising of the dead was the final straw, the greatest threat to their power and their true faith, and from that moment on they plan to kill him.

This powerful miracle at Lazarus’ tomb leads directly to Jesus’ cross: to his death, his burial, his empty tomb and ascension and the salvation of all the world.

That’s what Jesus meant when he said – at the beginning, and again at the tomb – that this was all for the glory of God.

That Lazarus’ illness, the message that came to Jesus too late, the four day certainty of death, and the miracle more powerful and less comforting than any we could have prayed for, are directly linked to the salvation of the world.

What if our most profound regrets, yours and mine – our grief, our fear, our pain, our if only – are also linked to the salvation of the world?

To be honest, I don’t like the idea of God manipulating us into the right place for salvation any better than I like wondering how God could let my tragedies happen.

But it does help to remember that there is life at the end of this story of death.

That Jesus could not have been there any more than I myself could have kept a friend from being hurt, an illness from progressing, kept Lazarus from dying. And even so – and maybe because of that – after the tragedy something new and unexpectable happens.

God acts as only God can act, and launches the salvation of the world out of the grief of what might have been.

It may not cure me of the “if only”s. But it might help me – or you – live with that pain, to know that God will act after tragedy, or even after our common, miserable mistakes, in ways that link our errors as much as our best efforts directly to the salvation of the world.

In this season of Lent, we spend time with our regret. We confess, we reflect, we repent.

But Lent looks forward as well as backward:

forward to the empty tomb,

forward to what never would have happened if we’d been there to prevent it,

forward – as we must look, in the midst of our regrets and if onlys – to the salvation of the world.

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