The Wounds that Transform Us: April 9, 2023

 

Easter, Year A                                             John 20:1-18                                                                           

           Mary Magdalene wasn’t afraid.  She wasn’t afraid when she walked alone to the tomb in the dark…not when she realized that the stone had been rolled away, not when the two angels appeared out of nowhere…not even when a mysterious man approached her who she thought might just be the person who stole the body of Jesus.  She wasn’t afraid. Now you might be thinking, but how could you possibly know if she was scared since her emotions aren’t detailed in the text? That’s true.  But if you compare the 4 Gospels, you will see an interesting juxtaposition.  Matthew, Mark and Luke all have multiple women going to the tomb. John is unique in that it mentions only Mary Magdalene.  All 4 Gospels describe either angels or someone robed in white appearing to the women.  Matthew, Mark and Luke all say that the women were afraid or record the angels telling them not to be afraid. 

            This phrase (Do not be afraid) might be familiar to you, not just because of the Easter story, but because of the Christmas story.  When the angels appeared to share good news, they were always telling people not to be afraid.  This is a theme throughout the Bible, the appearance of an angel scares people.  Yet in John, it never says that Mary is afraid and the angels never tell her not to be afraid. Then when she sees the man who she doesn’t recognize, she doesn’t cower in fear, she demands an answer from him.  “Tell me where you have laid him.”  A woman alone with a strange man, even in this day would be intimidating.  But in Jesus’ time, it was downright terrifying for any number of reasons.

            There was a fierce courage to Mary of Magdela.  There have been a lot of misconceptions about Mary over the years.  Dan Brown made it significantly worse with the DaVinci Code.  She was not a prostitute nor was she a woman caught in adultery.  At some point, someone just conflated all the unnamed women in the Gospels to one woman and all of their gifts and sins got attributed to Mary of Magdela.  The only thing we know about her was that she was an early follower of Jesus.  She started following him after he cured her.  She was at the crucifixion, at the tomb and she was the first person to see the risen Christ.  So here is what I want to know, what gave her the courage to sit at the foot of cross and watch him die, then visit the tomb alone and then eventually spread the rather unbelievable news that he had risen?  I want to know because I want that courage.

            In order to find the source of that courage, we need to go back to the first time we hear about her, which was a very brief mention. She started travelling with Jesus and the disciples after Jesus cured her of seven demons.  At the time, people assumed someone who was possessed by demons was evil in some way. But more likely, the individual was tormented, not evil.  It could have any emotional illness that we now have terminology for.  It could have been extraordinary grief. It might have been a physical illness. Anyone who lives with that kind of affliction has to have some courage.

            Think about it— think about the time in your life that was the most difficult, the darkest time. I bet it was hard just to get out of bed.  And maybe you didn’t get out of bed that day, but you eventually did.  That required courage and faith.  This woman had that courage in spades, even before she was healed.  Yet once she was healed, she also had what seem like an unshakable faith, the faith that comes from living through hell and coming out the other side, the faith that comes from a personal encounter with Jesus.

            It was that faith and that courage that allowed to her to stay and watch her Lord and Savior die.  It was that faith and courage that propelled her to the tomb on that dark and lonely morning. Now I am not saying that her faith was absolute.  I almost started this sermon saying she was fearless.  I don’t think she was.   I believe she was resilient because she had to fight over the course of her life.  During her times of greatest pain and anguish, she was probably alone quite a bit, which meant going to a tomb alone didn’t scare her.  And once you’ve been the home of 7 demons, a couple of angels aren’t going to scare you either.  Facing those immense challenges in her life and then being healed by Jesus equipped her with the courageous faith that she would need to be a disciple and then an evangelist.

            Episcopalians don’t typically talk about demons, so this might be a leap, but I want you to think about your own demons.   Maybe change the word to affliction or burden.  It could be depression, anxiety, chronic pain, a disease, addiction….anything that inhibits you and keeps you from being the person that God has called you to be.  Some of these afflictions are with us a lifetime and some are temporary, but they all leave their mark in some way.  Usually we assume those marks make us less than, not good enough, not strong enough.  But if someone with 7 demons could become a disciple and an evangelist, why not you? 

            You might think, well yeah, but she was cured by Jesus.  She was free.  That’s true.  No doubt getting cured by Jesus gave her a bit of a head start.  Yet…I bet those demons—even exorcized demons— left their mark.  She never forgot them. She could either let that hold her back, or propel her forward.  Remember, even Jesus’ resurrected body still had scars.  We are all wounded in some way.  We are all tormented by something. What matters is how we let those afflictions and wounds change us.  Do we try to hide them?  Are we ashamed of them? Or do we give them over to God’s power and let them transform us into a more complete and beautiful version of ourselves?  Do we let them transform us into a beloved child of God?

            Someone once said that courage is telling the story of who you are with your whole heart.[1]  Being a disciple of Jesus, watching him die, and going to the tomb….all required courage. But I wonder, if the thing that really required courage was Mary telling the other disciples, “I have seen the Lord.” Because her story used to be that she was the woman possessed, that there was something wrong with her.  That she was broken.  But now…now she was the woman who had seen the Lord. 

Our faith gives us this gift.  It provides each one of us with the ability to change our story, transform our afflictions and wounds into something new and beautiful.   That gift is freely given.  Yet it is on us, to accept that gift and allow it to transform us—to live into the Easter message, that God can make all things new, even you and me.

             

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[1] Brene Brown

Possessed: January 28, 2018

Year B, Epiphany 4                                                     
Mark 1:21-29                                                 

 

            Recently my husband and I were talking about a yearly event that we attend.  It’s not my favorite event in the world, but it’s also not completely horrible, nor is it particularly memorable.  This year my husband reminded me of one almost 10 years ago.  “Do you remember how mad you were?  I had to take away your car keys.”  I looked at him like he was stark raving mad, because I had no memory of the incident he was referring to. He reminded me of what happened that made me so mad and it started coming back to me.  I remember being very annoyed, but I don’t remember being enraged.  I thought, “Why would that have made me so mad?  How stupid to be mad about something so trivial.”  In my defense, someone did something pretty rude and embarrassed me in a public setting and made me feel small and foolish.  I confess, the more I thought about the incident, the more I remembered the anger.  I could feel it 10 years later.  But to be so enraged my husband did not trust me to drive? That seems excessive.

            Anger is not necessarily a bad thing.  There are times when it is appropriate to be angry.  Jesus got angry, especially in the face on injustice and hypocrisy.  Anger becomes dangerous when it envelops you and clouds your very being…when it almost becomes part of who you are, your very essence.  We can say that about a lot of things. Fear, competition, confidence, success, desire… None of these things are bad…but they can take us over at times. They can possess us and change how we think and act.

            The Gospel of Mark does not start the same way that the other gospels do.  There is no dramatic story of Jesus’ birth like there is in Matthew and Luke.   There is no poetic prologue like there is in the Gospel of John.  The Gospel of Mark begins with John the Baptist and moves quickly to Jesus baptism, the temptation in the desert and the calling of his first disciples.  This is all in the first 20 verses of the first chapter.  Those first 20 verses are full of important events, events and people critical to the life of Jesus and to the Christian faith.  After reading those 20 verses, we would expect that the next event would be equally important.

            That brings us to today’s reading. Our story for today starts in a fairly typical fashion.  Jesus went to the synagogue and began to teach.  Everyone was impressed with his teaching.  Then the unexpected.  A man possessed by demons approached Jesus…no it’s more like he confronted Jesus.  The demon recognized Jesus immediately.  Everyone else saw Jesus as a teacher, perhaps even a prophet.  But the demon identified Jesus as the Holy One of God. 

            Of course Jesus did what we would expect him to do.  He freed the man from the demon. He exorcised him.  This was Jesus’s first miracle in the Gospel of Mark.  Exorcism.  In the Gospel of John, Jesus turned water into wine as his first miracle.  In Matthew,  he cured lots of people who were sick.  In Mark, one of the first things he does in his public ministry is exorcise a demon.  Surely Jesus could have picked something different.  He could have healed a small child or a wounded animal…but why get involved with a demon?

            The Gospel writer must have thought this was important if he put it in the very first chapter.  Now I know we all get a little antsy when we start talking about demons and evil spirits.  I don’t know what to tell you about the existence of demons, but I do believe that there is very real evil in the world.  Mark knew this.  Jesus knew this.  Thus one of his fist acts was to confront that evil and free a person of that evil. It wasn’t some abstract thing…it was there right in front of him, possessing a human, a child of God. 

We don’t hear much about the man who was possessed.  We know he was a man possessed.  That is it.  Part of me wants to know more about this man, how it happened, how he made it into the synagogue, what happened next? But the other part of me knows that none of that really matters. What matters is that this man was a child of God, a child of God who was being suffocated by something evil, something that controlled him.  Thus Jesus’ first act was not merely exorcising a demon. He was giving someone their freedom back.  He was giving this person back his identity as a beloved child of God.  If we look at it that way, then it makes sense that this would be one of his first acts.

            In the Episcopal Church, we don’t talk about demons much, or being possessed.  Yet I believe that most of us know what it is to be shackled by something.  It might bad relationship or job. It might be an addiction or an emotion that has taken over.  It might be guilt or something from the past that continues to plague us.  It might be an illness or a pain that has made us feel less than whole.

It doesn’t have to be something that is bad in and of itself. It could be money and belongings.  They can possess us. We can be possessed by knowledge that makes us arrogant and closed minded.  We can be possessed by fears, fears that keep us from seeing others as beloved children of God. We can be possessed by anger, some of it righteous anger, some of it just plain foolish. 

            Jesus seeks to free us from those things.  Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t like being controlled by something like anger or jealousy. I don’t like it when fear keeps me from doing good things for other people.  Sometimes I wish that we could just stick with the demon language.  When my husband told me about that time I was enraged over something foolish, I could have said, well that was a demon. That would be so much easier. We know demons are bad.  In stories like today, they seem to be eliminated with expediency. It is not the same with these amorphous things and feelings that possess us. They are much harder to get rid of. Sometimes we do not even realize we are possessed. 

            One of the interesting things about the story of the exorcism is that we don’t know what happened to the demon.  What we know is that Jesus continued to exorcise people. It seemed that he never quite conquered evil; he freed people from whatever possessed them.  He healed one person at a time. But he never rid the world of all evil. He was only able to heal the people who came to him, who knew that they needed his saving grace. That is what Jesus continues to ask of all of us….that we come to him, that we admit that we need him.  We might have to keep coming back.  I am fairly certain we will.  Thankfully, Jesus doesn’t keep count—he’s just happy to see us.