Sermon at All Saints Lutheran Church, Aurora, Colorado, for July 22, the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene:
Indulge me a bit today as I relate to you my Friday morning. It started with my cat acting strangely at about 4:00 in the morning. Maybe it’s my years of growing up on the farm, but when animals start acting strangely, you know something has happened, you just don’t know what.
Then, the next thing is that I see a text message from Charlie that says that the young people from Sky Ranch who were here this past week were pretty shook up because they were going to go to the movies, but they decided not to. And I thought, “There has to be something more to this story.”
When I got to church, I, of course, heard the news right away. I don’t know if my jaw dropped, but my heart sure did. As I posted that night on Facebook, “You know it's not going to be just another day when the first thing you do in the morning is check in with the youth group to make sure none of them got shot overnight.”
That was the first thing. Then, I must admit that it suddenly occurred to me: What am I going to say about this on Sunday morning? I’m thinking, “We were planning for Mary Magdalene Sunday. How does this horrible shooting have anything to do with Mary Magdalene?”
But you know what? When we get right down to the heart of it, it has everything to do with Mary Magdalene. It was Mary Magdalene who changed the world, and changed our lives, when she said, “I have seen the Lord!”
That’s why we’re here today. It’s why we’re Christians. It’s why we trust in Jesus. It’s why we believe in God. It’s how we understand our world--all because Mary Magdalene said, “I have seen the Lord!”
So today it is important for us to think about, reflect upon, and find comfort in, the resurrection of Jesus. When tragedy strikes, Christians go to God, to church, to the Bible, to the Risen Lord Jesus, as they look for hope and comfort.
Today is the feast day for St. Mary Magdalene, the person whose words so changed our lives. Strange to say, we don’t know very much about Mary Magdalene at all. She doesn’t figure very much in the four gospels until you get to the death and resurrection of Jesus.
There, however, she looms very large indeed. Of the 13 times she’s mentioned in the four gospels, 12 of them are at the death and resurrection of Jesus.
The one other reference is also interesting. It’s in Luke, chapter 8: “The twelve were with him and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases including Mary Magdalene, from whom seven demons had come out.”
There are several theories about the meaning of those seven demons. I take it to mean that she was, at one time, a very lost soul. When the Bible says seven of something, it usually means completely or totally--seven demons is total alienation, total lostness, total hopelessness.
Nobody was ever worse off than worse-off than Mary Magdalene, not even James Holmes. Nobody was ever farther away from God. And yet, Mary Magdalene was healed, restored, reclaimed, and renewed.
As far as we know, she is the only one of Jesus’ followers who was healed personally. As far as we know, she is the only one of Jesus’ followers who, personally, experienced a miracle.
We also know this: All four gospels say that Mary Magdalene was present at the cross of Jesus, and all four gospels say that she was present at the empty tomb on Easter morning.
In both cases, she is the only person who was. When the going got tough, she was there. She was there when they nailed him up, and there when they took him down. She was there when he was put in the tomb. She was there when they rolled the stone in front. Matthew writes that “Mary Magdalene…was sitting there, facing the tomb.” She was there to the bitter end.
All the others, you’ll remember, had left the city. All the big name, famous disciples had run away—high-tailing it out of town as fast as they could.
It was still dark when Mary came back to the tomb on the following Sunday. When she saw the stone rolled away, her natural assumption was that someone had broken into the tomb.
Someone asked her why was she crying? She thought it was the gardener, but then, that gardener spoke her name—Mary—and that’s when she knew. “Mary” That moment changed the world. Then, “Mary Magdalene went and said to the disciples", in those great words, "‘I have seen the Lord.’”
“I have seen the Lord.” All our faith is in that, and all our hope is in that. What we Christians do, how we think, how we live our lives, how we understand our world--everything is in those five words.
When tragedy strikes, especially, we hang onto those five words with all the strength we can muster. When a truck hits a car and kills three members of our church, we remember those words. When another traffic accident claims a life again, a year later on the same day, we remember, again, that Christ’s resurrection is our only hope.
When a shooter scars our city, and kills our people, with no regard for common decency and human life, who spreads terror and fear through the community, we remember the one thing that trumps it: the words of Mary Magdalene, “I have seen the Lord.”
It means that Christ the Lord has power over every demon that afflicts our world and our lives. It means that tears and sorrow will not afflict us forever. It means that death does not have the last word, but God does, and that word is always life, always love, always hope.
Lots of us, maybe all of us, keep asking "why?" At the same time we ask it, we also know that we’re really not looking for an explanation because no explanation could possibly make sense out of something so senseless.
When we say “why?”, though, it’s not really because we expect an answer. As Pastor Alebouni in Fort Collins puts it, “It is a cry of the heart, an expression of grief.” It means: “We feel it too.” Grief is painful, but it’s also holy. Sorrow hurts, but God is closer to us in sorrow than at any other time.
I believe the Lord Jesus is present with us this morning as he is every Sunday. Today, he’s also roaming the halls and the patient rooms at University Hospital, and Childrens’ Hospital, and Swedish, and Porter.
As Pastor Alebouni also said, grief and sorrow are as new as Friday’s headlines, and as old as the Bible where the great prophet Jeremiah says, "Rachel is weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because her children are no more" (Jeremiah 31:15).
That is why the plaque outside the front door of our church reads “In Christ there is Hope.” Yes, life can be brutal. Terrible things happen, and brace yourselves, people, because this is only the beginning.
Before, when people would run down the list of terrorist acts, they would say “Oklahoma City, Columbine, 9/11.” Now they’ll say “Oklahoma City, Columbine, 9/11, Aurora.” It’s a scar that will run deep, and take a long time to heal, if it ever does.
Without Christ, we’d all be left right there, lost in grief, lost in sorrow, lost in hopelessness. This is a brutal world, and nobody gets out of it alive, and that’s just the way it is.
Ah, my Christian friends, but we beg to differ. There is hope, and its name is Christ the Lord, risen from the grave, appearing to his close friend, who told her friends, who told their friends, who told us, “I have seen the Lord!”
The apostle Paul said that faith hope and love were the only things that last, and the greatest of these is love, which I agree with on one level--it’s pretty miserable to live without any love in your life. But on another level, hope is even more important because you can’t live at all without hope.
That is what we have in the resurrection of Jesus the Lord. That’s why Paul could also say, “We grieve, but not as those who have no hope.” We suffer in our sorrows, but we also trust in God’s victory.
I don’t know what happened to Mary Magdalene after this. Nobody does. It’s possible she went to Egypt, as some have said, or to France, as others have said.
My own opinion is that she stayed in Israel, and was a beloved figure in the early church. Whatever the case, she will always be known in this very special way. The Lord Jesus appeared to her first, and she is the first one to say, “I have seen the Lord.”
It’s only five words—in Greek, only three. But those words are the hope of the world, and, for each one of us, they are the rock and the foundation of our lives, even and especially in the darkest times.
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