[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation and even the podcast. So we're glad your here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: I want to just turn your attention
[00:00:42] Speaker C: to John, chapter 20, verses 11 through 18.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: This will be our passage for today. We're really continuing with our Snapshots of
[00:00:52] Speaker C: Jesus series that we began before Easter.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: What we're going to be doing for the next six weeks is visiting encounters
[00:01:00] Speaker C: with Christ, encounters with Jesus in the Gospels and in the book of Acts after Jesus's death and resurrection. So these are snapshots of encounters with
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Jesus after the Easter story.
[00:01:14] Speaker C: And John, chapter 20, verses 11 through 18 is our passage for today. If you don't have a Bible, we'll put the words up on the screen. John 20, verse 1.
Excuse me. Verse 11 says this.
But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: And as she wept, she bent over
[00:01:32] Speaker C: to look into the tomb and she
[00:01:34] Speaker A: saw two angels in white sitting where
[00:01:37] Speaker C: the body of Jesus had been lying,
[00:01:39] Speaker A: one at the head and the other at the feet.
[00:01:43] Speaker C: And they said to her, woman, why are you weeping?
[00:01:46] Speaker A: She said to them, they have taken
[00:01:48] Speaker C: away my Lord, and I do not know where they laid him.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: When she had said this, she turned
[00:01:54] Speaker C: around and saw Jesus standing there, but
[00:01:57] Speaker A: she did not know that it was Jesus.
Jesus said to her, woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?
Supposing him to be the gardener. She said, sir, if you have carried
[00:02:10] Speaker C: him away, tell me where you have laid him and I will take him away.
[00:02:16] Speaker A: Jesus said to her, mary.
[00:02:18] Speaker C: And she turned and said to him
[00:02:20] Speaker A: in Hebrew, rabboni, which means teacher.
Jesus said to her, do not hold
[00:02:26] Speaker C: on to me because I've not yet ascended to the Father, but go to
[00:02:30] Speaker A: my brothers and say to them, I
[00:02:32] Speaker C: am ascending to the Father and your Father, to my God and your God.
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the
[00:02:40] Speaker A: disciples, I have seen the Lord.
[00:02:42] Speaker C: And she told them that she had said these, that he had said these things to her.
Would you pray with me, God, we're grateful for today, for this opportunity for us to come to gather in this space where so many others have gathered for so long, to remind ourselves of how we are encountering you, how we are learning to follow you, how we're learning to organize our lives around all the ways that you confront our ultimate concerns.
It's our Prayer today that you would do that work in us, that as we explore how we meet you after the resurrection in the coming weeks, that you would challenge us, that you would confront us with all ordinary ways. We are experiencing you.
We pray all this in Jesus name.
Amen.
Okay, so my mission
[00:03:54] Speaker A: is to take
[00:03:55] Speaker C: these opportunities to convey to you just how hard Janelle has it.
[00:04:01] Speaker A: Last week, I shared a story that
[00:04:03] Speaker C: some of you were a bit appalled by.
It was the story of hosing Janelle
[00:04:10] Speaker A: down with a fire extinguisher when she
[00:04:12] Speaker C: was just a junior in high school and discovering years later that I was the person she'd married.
[00:04:18] Speaker A: That's a true story.
[00:04:20] Speaker C: The horrors don't end there.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: Fast forward a couple of years, and Janelle was giving birth to our first
[00:04:27] Speaker C: child, Savannah, who is 33 years old now.
[00:04:30] Speaker A: When Savannah was being born, we did the usual thing. We packed a bag beforehand, we rushed to the hospital. We got there. Janelle got all, like, know, hooked up to the things. And there was a very helpful nurse who hooked Janelle up to a kind
[00:04:43] Speaker C: of, you know, it looked like a printer, you know, like a small printer
[00:04:47] Speaker A: to me, and it was spitting off paper, you know, with like, a line on it. And the nurse came over and she said, okay, here's what this means. These are her contractions.
[00:04:55] Speaker C: It's measuring her contractions.
[00:04:56] Speaker A: And, you know, see where those contractions are right now? That's low. Once it gets to about this level, it's pretty high.
[00:05:03] Speaker C: Those are pretty strong contractions. And she's getting very close, and you
[00:05:07] Speaker A: guys should be ready. And I was like, this is great information.
So I sat down in a chair, and on the little table next to the chair, there were, like, car magazines, like car and Driver, you know, I
[00:05:18] Speaker C: picked up a magazine and I started flipping through it while Janelle was laboring in the bed next to me.
[00:05:25] Speaker A: And she said, put that magazine down.
And I went over to the printer, and I looked at it, and I said, you got a long ways to go.
She said, I'm having a contraction right now. I said, I know. I can see it. It's not very big.
I don't know why she didn't find that helpful.
I was very chill about the whole birthing thing.
I was like, women do this every day.
What's the big deal?
I actually said that.
See, it's bad, you guys.
But something changed when Savannah was actually born.
[00:06:22] Speaker C: I mean, I know it's a cliche, right?
[00:06:25] Speaker A: But when this human being came out
[00:06:29] Speaker C: of this other human being, I was suddenly confronted by the reality that I was partially responsible for another human being. And I was 20.
And it occurred to me that it
[00:06:48] Speaker A: wasn't that I didn't know how to do it. And I know that that's what usually people say, like, I had a baby. And I realized I didn't know how to do this. I didn't know how to be a dad. I didn't know how to be a mom. There's no, like, parenting manual. And that's all true. But that wasn't my issue.
My issue was I did know how to do it.
I'd seen my mother and father do
[00:07:12] Speaker C: it for 20 years.
[00:07:14] Speaker A: And my concern was that that is
[00:07:18] Speaker C: how I was going to do it.
[00:07:22] Speaker A: My issue was I'm going to be
[00:07:25] Speaker C: exactly the same kind of dad, exactly the same kind of parent that they were.
And for me at the time, at least, that was terrifying.
And I thought, I've got to figure this out.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: I've got to figure out how to
[00:07:44] Speaker C: do it differently, how to be a better parent to my kids than my parents were to me.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: And that is, after many years of
[00:08:00] Speaker C: skepticism and frustration with what was American Christianity.
I thought, well, I'll give this God thing another shot.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: Because I couldn't imagine what it looked
[00:08:19] Speaker C: like on the other side of that crisis.
[00:08:23] Speaker A: I knew what I knew, but I didn't know what I didn't know about being a parent.
And that abyss that, like, unknowing on
[00:08:35] Speaker C: the other side was really concerning to me.
[00:08:42] Speaker A: And, you know, information only gets you so far, right?
[00:08:47] Speaker C: Having facts about parenting isn't quite enough. There is an experience to be had on the other side of birth that
[00:08:57] Speaker A: you can't prepare for by just pouring
[00:09:00] Speaker C: more information into your head.
And I knew that, and I knew that I was in trouble.
[00:09:10] Speaker A: This was in a very real sense, and again, I hate to be so cliche, but this was in a very
[00:09:15] Speaker C: real sense what drove me back to faith.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: I thought, if anybody can fix me,
[00:09:22] Speaker C: then if there is a God, it would be God.
And so I didn't know if that was going to work out. I certainly wasn't certain of it, but I was willing to try.
That wasn't the first existential crisis in my life.
[00:09:41] Speaker A: It definitely triggered a kind of quarter life crisis for me that resulted in
[00:09:45] Speaker C: me becoming a Pentecostal youth pastor in the mountains of Utah. That's another story.
[00:09:55] Speaker A: But it also wasn't the last crisis
[00:09:58] Speaker C: that would drive me deeper into an exploration of reality.
And this is what I want to suggest to you today, that when we talk about Jesus, and the resurrection of Jesus and the Christ who comes in resurrection to us, that we have a tendency to talk about it in an overly simplified and I think, very unhelpful way, as though it is an abstract thing that happens out there and not a real concrete existential crisis that happens here and now and not just once, over and over and over again.
And I think Mary Magdalene is a really wonderful model for us to look at for how that works.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: In verse 11, Mary is experiencing a very real crisis. The person that she has followed as her rabbi, as her teacher for three and a half years has been tried and convicted and crucified by the Roman Empire. Her life has fallen apart, her world has disintegrated. And she is weeping when she encounters a story that seems to be another version of story we visited last week, only this time there are two angels, not just one. And the woman's response is a little bit different. There's a similar thing happening here, but
[00:11:31] Speaker C: it's not quite the same.
[00:11:33] Speaker A: She sees two angels and they say to her, woman, why are you weeping? And she says to them, they've taken away my Lord and I do not
[00:11:41] Speaker C: know where they've laid him.
[00:11:42] Speaker A: Verse 14.
When she said this, she turned around
[00:11:45] Speaker C: and saw Jesus standing there, but she
[00:11:47] Speaker A: did not know that it was was Jesus.
Now, I love this passage for us because I think it speaks to some very real issues that we have when we talk as Christians today about, like, you know, knowing Jesus or meeting Jesus or finding Jesus, or any of the glib phrases that we use when we talk about encountering this person that none of us can see, that none of
[00:12:18] Speaker C: us has ever met in the flesh, that none of us has heard from in a literal audible way.
Mary has a similar experience with Jesus.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: First of all, she can't see him, at least not at first. She encounters him.
She literally sees him with her eyes, but she does not perceive who he is. In fact, she thinks he's the gardener.
And then even after she can see
[00:12:50] Speaker C: him, which we'll get to in just
[00:12:52] Speaker A: a moment, even after she can see him, she can't touch him.
He says, don't touch me.
And then after that, he says, not only can you not touch me now, but pretty soon I'm going to ascend to the Father. And so not only can she not touch him now, not only can she not feel him and confirm that he exists, but she can't keep him. She can't hold on to him, she can't possess him. He says he's going to go away.
So she can't see him, she can't
[00:13:27] Speaker C: touch him, and she can't hold on to him in any tangible sense.
It occurs to me that this is our situation, too.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: We come here because we say that we're followers of Jesus, we believe in Jesus, and that involves believing in the
[00:13:45] Speaker C: resurrection of the Christ.
[00:13:46] Speaker A: But we certainly can't see Jesus. We certainly can't touch Jesus. And no matter how hard we try, it's obvious to me that none of us, no matter our faith or our denomination or our tradition or our politics, none of us can hold on to Jesus.
[00:14:03] Speaker C: None of us can own Him.
Jesus is utterly uncontainable.
And so I resonate with Mary's story.
I know what it's like to not see him and not touch him and
[00:14:24] Speaker A: not to be able to, like, hold
[00:14:26] Speaker C: on to him, to keep him in a very real sense.
What I think this illustrates for us is that faith is not the usual kind of knowing,
[00:14:45] Speaker A: because this is how
[00:14:46] Speaker C: we usually know things.
We usually know things by seeing them. We usually know things by touching them, by feeling them.
We usually know things, especially as modern Americans, by owning them, by holding them, by keeping them.
And so there is another way of knowing at work here
[00:15:13] Speaker A: that's a little
[00:15:13] Speaker C: bit beyond our normal, like, faculties of comprehension.
James Cone, I think, in his book the Cross and the Lynching Tree, describes
[00:15:23] Speaker A: this very effectively when he says, only faith can see that which cannot be derived from the logic of history, reason.
I want you to pause on that for a moment because what cone is claiming is that what we call faith is a way of knowing that exists beyond our usual way of knowing, which is history and reason.
Instead, he says, faith is able to sense and appropriate an ultimate truth too
[00:15:57] Speaker C: deep for human reason.
[00:16:01] Speaker A: And this, I think, is illustrated very powerfully by what causes Mary to see. What finally causes her to apprehend Jesus is not her ability to investigate. It's not her curiosity, it's not her prowess at seeing what actually is there. No, what causes her to see is that Jesus calls her by name.
Her mind can't comprehend who the risen Christ is because it violates all history and all reason. It's only when he says Mary.
[00:16:43] Speaker C: That she is awakened.
[00:16:47] Speaker A: It's only when Christ demonstrates that he
[00:16:50] Speaker C: knows her, that she is shaken from her slumber and recognizes him. John, chapter 10, verse 27.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: Jesus says, My sheep hear my voice. I know them and they follow me.
Our faith is not about information.
[00:17:11] Speaker C: It's not about history.
[00:17:12] Speaker A: It's not about facts. It's not about doctrines or creeds. Or rituals. Our faith ultimately is not about any of those things. It is about a moment in our
[00:17:25] Speaker C: existence when we encounter the invisible, untouchable, unholdable God.
And that encounter only happens when that God speaks our name.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: We are not people who encounter the risen Christ. We are not people who find God. We are not people who discover faith. We are people who are encountered by
[00:17:58] Speaker C: that reality that we cannot apprehend by history or reason alone.
[00:18:05] Speaker A: I especially love the way Paul Tillich, the 20th century liberal theologian, talks about this.
[00:18:11] Speaker C: He says that faith is, he calls it ultimate concern.
[00:18:14] Speaker A: In other words, those things in our lives for which we are passionately captured. The things that frustrate us, the things that disturb us, the things that, that annoy us, that we can't stop thinking about, that we can't stop ruminating over. Tillich says that is what faith is about. It is about the things that are ultimately concerning us. And he says that faith is the act of being grasped by those things.
[00:18:49] Speaker C: It's not that you grasp it, it's not that you understand it, it's not that you are perceiving reality.
[00:18:55] Speaker A: It's that reality perceives you.
[00:19:02] Speaker C: One of the scariest passages in the entire New Testament, I think, is when Jesus talks about those who will come to him on the day of judgment.
And you know, this is a liberal church, we don't talk much about judgment.
In fact, we try to avoid judgment as much as possible. I would rather you all not judge me or each other, although I'm sure I judge you.
But Jesus, in making a point about divine justice from a cosmic perspective, says
[00:19:36] Speaker A: that there will be many of those who come to me on that day, that day of judgment. And they will say, lord, didn't we do many miracles in your name and cast out demons in your name? And he says to them, depart from me. I never knew you. I. I've always found it curious that in popular expressions of Christianity, all we talk about is how important it is for you to know Jesus. And Jesus never said it was important for you to know him. He said it was important that he knows you.
[00:20:11] Speaker C: This is what it means to be known by Christ.
That in our moment of existential despair
[00:20:20] Speaker A: and our moment of crisis in our mom, when our ultimate concern erupts and threatens to disintegrate our sense of being in the world.
The voice of God calls Jason.
[00:20:37] Speaker C: And I'm shaken awake.
The 20th century psychologist Abraham Maslow talked about this as an experience that he called peak experience. And he wasn't speaking religiously or theologically.
[00:20:57] Speaker A: He was just observing that in normal human experience, in everyday, ordinary experience, that as humans, we often have these moments in our lives where suddenly, usually because of some crisis or some difficulty, we are broken into by reality.
We suddenly perceive reality and experience. Clarity of mind and clarity of thought.
[00:21:28] Speaker C: And as a consequence, clarity of purpose
[00:21:31] Speaker A: in a way that makes us. Maslow says it this way.
[00:21:34] Speaker C: This is not a direct quote, because this is not on my notes.
[00:21:37] Speaker A: Maslow says that it's when we truly become our.
[00:21:45] Speaker C: I think he's describing the same thing
[00:21:50] Speaker A: in this way. This is the reason I love this story. In this way, Jesus really is the gardener. In this story, Mary mistakes him for a gardener.
[00:22:04] Speaker C: She doesn't perceive that it's Jesus standing before her.
[00:22:08] Speaker A: But the beautiful twist of this story is that Jesus really is a gardener.
[00:22:12] Speaker C: He's the gardener that waters the seed of Mary's faith.
It's planted in the soil of divine goodness.
The love and the grace of Christ shine on it in a way that causes it to break open and germinate.
So I think the question for me that I ask myself when I read this passage is when have I heard Christ call my name?
And I told you one story, one story of how I realized in a moment that I couldn't know what needed to happen on the other side of my oldest child's birth. That I stood on the edge of an abyss, and not only did I
[00:23:16] Speaker A: not know what needed to happen on
[00:23:18] Speaker C: the other side of it, but I didn't know what I didn't know.
And in that moment Christ called my name. I was confronted by a reality to which, prior to that moment, I'd been totally blind, completely unable to see.
Hopefully I'm making it clear to you
[00:23:49] Speaker A: that this may or may not be
[00:23:51] Speaker C: a strictly religious experience.
[00:23:56] Speaker A: These kinds of experiences, these kinds of
[00:23:59] Speaker C: moments, these
[00:24:02] Speaker A: existential crises, that birth in us a new kind of clarity. The ability to see what is real may not for you feel like religion, but it is what religion at its best is all about.
Bringing us to these moments where we are suddenly very clear about the need
[00:24:30] Speaker C: for resurrection might be a personal reality that you suddenly become aware of, like I did when Savannah was born.
[00:24:41] Speaker A: Or it may be, for you, a social reality. Like the day that I realized that
[00:24:47] Speaker C: it was absolutely bonkers that a good
[00:24:54] Speaker A: God would carry or would care whether
[00:24:56] Speaker C: you loved a man or a woman, regardless of your gender.
[00:25:00] Speaker A: Or the day that it occurred to
[00:25:02] Speaker C: me that there was no rational, reasonable explanation for the existence of poverty in a nation that is wealthier than any nation that has ever existed.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: Or the day that I awoke to the reality that we are still struggling
[00:25:19] Speaker C: with, with systems of injustice and oppression and racism that are invisible because they have been intentionally hidden from us.
Or maybe it was the day that I realized that no Republican or Democrat was going to save us, that politics as we know it are a game and a trap that forever perpetuates the same injustices over and over again.
That's just me.
But all of these moments, these moments of clarity are moments of resurrection.
They're moments of salvation.
And anytime you experience them, whether you're
[00:26:15] Speaker A: in church or out of church or think about God or Jesus or religion or Christianity or faith at all, they
[00:26:22] Speaker C: are moments of revelation in which you experience the living Christ.
I love what Serene Jones says about this passage. Specifically, she writes, as he did with Mary, Jesus comes to us not as
[00:26:39] Speaker A: a general idea or an imagined ghostly figure, but as a presence that reaches
[00:26:45] Speaker C: beyond our mind's overt powers of knowing and touches our lives in ways we cannot see.
It's my prayer today that we would become more aware of the way that the resurrected Christ is touching our lives in ways that we cannot see.
Amen.
Would you pray with me?
God, we thank you again for today. We thank you for this passage and the way it proves to stretch and challenge us, the way that these ancient words can still provoke and inspire and frustrate and annoy us in ways that are helpful.
It's my prayer today, God, that as we sing this last song together, that we would open our hearts and our minds to all the ways that you are meeting us, apprehending us, capturing us with your imagination, producing in us new expressions of life and resurrection.
We pray all this in Jesus name.
Amen.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
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