Worth the Wait

Isaiah 25:6-9; John 20:1-18
Isaiah addresses a people who have lost their way and forgotten their God. In the Gospel of John we see Mary and the disciples after the death of Jesus.

LAJ

Wasn’t it just Christmas? And now it’s Easter. Time really does go faster as you get older. I remember how long a school day could be when I was a kid. And the calendar page was stuck on January for months. Now there aren’t enough days in January to get everything done that piles up over the holidays or has to be pulled together for annual reports and taxes. But this year winter has not gone fast – it has been with us forever.

And even though we’ve had glimpses and teasers, spring is taking a very long time to come. We are still waiting for spring on this Easter Sunday. What else are you waiting for today? Maybe the elusiveness of spring this year makes that wait even harder – harder to hold onto the hope that what you are waiting for will come and be worth the wait when it does.

I recently finished a book about Juanita and Ted Morgan, a young married couple who had a year together before he went off to the Pacific during World War II. She became one of those “Rosie riveters” at a plant in Chicago. The book is a collection of their letters put together after their death by their son Bruce, a friend and former colleague of my dad’s at Parkland College. The letters provide a detailed account of their daily lives to each other (and the reader) as they lived apart for three years, tried to maintain a new marriage and keep hope going for their future.

They did a remarkable job. Their story had a happy ending in the life and family they created after the war and the way they lived out the values they had honed through that difficult time of
waiting to be together again.

Waiting is a theme in our scripture readings for today. Mary waits at the tomb in the Gospel of John. In the middle of a prophecy in Isaiah about God’s deliverance, the Hebrew people say, “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited....”

The prophet Isaiah has been waiting for them to say something like that for a long time. They haven’t been thinking about God or looking to God for anything for a very long time. Even now as he gives this prophecy in chapter 25, Isaiah knows that the people aren’t ready for God to deliver them because they don’t even recognize that they need deliverance. And they have no idea how much more they are going to need it in the days to come. Things are going to get much worse for them as they are
invaded, their city destroyed and many people taken into exile.

Aren’t we all like that? We live much of our lives without feeling the need for God’s help – either because things are going well, or because we pretend that they are. We try not to face anything that’s sad or unpleasant until we absolutely have to. Sometimes the noise and busyness of our world helps us escape other, harder realities. At other times, we tune out our immediate circumstances with the help of technology. We have many ways to float through life without really seeing and hearing the people around us or being alone with our own thoughts and feelings.

Having time to look at other folks or what’s going on inside us is one of the reasons we don’t like waiting. We don’t want to examine the hurts and fears and fragile hopes at the heart of our lives. We don’t like to ponder the changes and losses that will come to all of us one day, especially the fact that we and those we love are going to die.

In the days and weeks leading up to Jesus’ death, the disciples never wanted Jesus to talk about it. Maybe it was just too sad to think about, and they didn’t really want to accept what he was saying, even though he was their teacher, the one who always told them the truth. Maybe they thought they could keep putting off his death as long as they didn’t think about it or talk about it. Jesus of course knew otherwise and he kept doing his best to help them face it. Afterward, the disciples had to deal with their regret and guilt about that and all the ways they had abandoned him after they had said they would follow him anywhere.

Mary Magdalene was one of the women who did stay nearby throughout Jesus’ ordeal. She had learned to face her own pain a long time ago with Jesus’ help, and she had been healed. She knew firsthand the power of his love and forgiveness, and there was nowhere else she would be. She was not afraid to wait and watch to the end. Even after his death she saw where his body had been taken and was right back there as soon as the Sabbath was over. It was still dark when she returned early the next morning so she was the first one to discover the empty tomb.

Watching and waiting with someone as they are dying can be very hard, but our focus is on them and we know there will be an end to this suffering. When they’re gone and we’re left to deal with our own sense of loss and emptiness and wondering how we’ll go on, that waiting can feel as if it has no end. This is what Mary is feeling as she goes back to the tomb with the disciples and then stays there after they leave. She is lost in her own despair when the angels speak to her. Even when she turns around and Jesus speaks to her and asks her who she is looking for, she doesn’t recognize him.

But Mary is waiting in the right place, the best place to find Jesus and to be found. I don’t mean just being at the tomb, though that was a good place to start. I mean that Mary was facing the reality of his death and that great loss to the world, and she was feeling her own grief and her own need for healing. She had had some practice with that, as we all do whenever we deal with the little deaths that come to all of us throughout our lives – the disappointments and failures, illnesses, losses and changes that come as we grow up and then get old, as we have to let go of a dream or a relationship, as we move into a different season of life.

If we can resist the temptation to blame someone else, turn up the television volume, check Facebook again, eat or drink too much, take pills we don’t really need, or in some other way escape the grief we feel, and instead be present to the people around us and ourselves, we will be in the best place possible for Jesus to come up next to us and call us by name. Jesus saw Mary so clearly as she waited and wept there at the tomb. When Jesus called her by name, then she also saw him clearly, too. She recognized him. In that moment, the waiting was over and Jesus’ triumph over sin and death, the resurrection, was real for her.

Mary had had no idea of the miracle she would witness that morning. Her world was still dark. Jesus had risen and she didn’t know it yet, but she was in the right place. Sometimes that’s all we can do – show up and be ready and waiting to see what God is up to. That’s what you and I have done today, too.

Scholar Serene Jones says, “We do not go to church simply to remind our conscious minds that God lives and we are called to follow Christ. We need to show up so that our bodies can be reminded of him too, and so the unconscious recesses of our psyches can be moved anew, our dispositions toward grace rejuvenated, our anxieties quelled as the world shifts once again into place and Easter comes, and comes, and comes again.”

So we show up here on Sundays whether we think we need to or not, whether we’re ready or not to witness and experience what God is up to. We don’t come only for ourselves, but to be part of what God is doing in the lives of other people and in our life together. We are more than the sum of our parts because it’s Jesus who meets us here as we wait. And it is definitely worth the wait. Thanks be to God. Amen.