The Garden in the Dark

Easter Sunday

John 20: 1, 11-15

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.

She stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet.

They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”

When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but 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 to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”

Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher).

There is a moment in this story that I keep returning to.

Mary Magdalene has come to the tomb in the dark, and she finds it empty. In a part of the story we didn’t hear, Mary runs to tell the disciples about this empty tomb. Peter and the beloved disciple come, look in, and go back home. They don’t understand what they’re seeing. But Mary stays. She’s standing outside the tomb weeping. She finally looks in — there are angels, and then she turns around, and there is a man she doesn’t recognize. She assumes he is the gardener. He says:

“Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?”

Mary is looking for a dead body. She is doing what grief does — she is trying to locate the loss, to be near it, to care for it. She is not looking for resurrection. She would not know what resurrection looked like even if it were standing right in front of her. She’s so certain that loss and grief and death have the last word that she cannot see new life when she is looking directly at it. 

This isn’t because she is faithless — she is the most faithful disciple. It’s not because she doesn’t care — she is the one who stays when everyone else leaves, whether that’s at the tomb in the garden or at the foot of the cross. It’s because grief and shock and despair have a particular way of narrowing our vision. When we are deep enough in these things, we can only see what has been taken. We cannot yet see what is being given.

I think we are Mary at this present time of ecological, political, social and (soon to be) economic crisis. We are standing in the garden, in the dark, weeping over what has been lost, in shock at the loss, in despair — and we are not yet able to recognize the new life that is also present, right here, right beside us.

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Let me back up a bit and say something about death and resurrection — not as a doctrine to be argued about, but as a pattern so ancient and so persistent that it is woven into the very fabric of existence.

Every spiritual tradition on earth has known this pattern. The seed falls into the ground and dies before it becomes a plant. The caterpillar dissolves — literally dissolves into an undifferentiated biological soup inside the chrysalis — before it becomes a butterfly. The sun disappears into the darkness of winter and is reborn each spring. Indigenous and traditional peoples around the world — including Christians — built their calendars, their entire cosmologies around this cycle, because they recognized it as the deepest truth they knew: that death is not the end of the story. That what looks like dissolution is often the necessary precondition for transformation. That the darkness is a chrysalis, not a coffin.

We know this in our own lives. I’m guessing every one of us has been through at least one death that was not a physical death — the end of a relationship, the loss of a career, the collapse of a belief system we had built our lives around, the death of a version of ourselves we thought we were going to be forever. Many of us, if we look back on those deaths with enough distance, can see that something was being born in them that we could not have imagined at the time. It’s one of the gifts of getting older — I have seen this pattern many times in my own life, and I have witnessed it countless times in yours over these 26 years we have been walking together. But in the moment of the loss, we couldn’t see the possibility of new life, because we were Mary at the tomb — looking for the body, tending to the grief, certain we knew what the garden contained.

And here is something I think is really important to understand right now: This pattern of death and rebirth is not only personal. It is also collective. And I think we are living through one of those collective moments.

Many of you come to this sanctuary today carrying a particular kind of grief.  Like Mary, we are weeping, because we are people who pay attention. We read, we vote, we show up, we care — sometimes almost unbearably — about other people, about this planet. And what we are seeing in the world right now breaks our heart. As Joanna said from this pulpit last Sunday, “The people with the most money and power are exploiting those who are vulnerable and I can’t make them stop.” I heard this week that in order to finance the war in Iran, Republicans in Congress are recommending cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. They want to kill people here so they can kill more people somewhere else. Death-dealing ways seem to have the upper hand right now. 

On Tuesday, those involved in the action on Sansome Street flipped over the tables of greed together — we named those corporations profiting from war, from the killing of children, from genocide and ecocide. These merchants of death seem to be winning. 

Loss is everywhere. I don’t need to enumerate the realities of our present shit show. And I don’t want to minimize any of this. The grief is real. The anger and despair are real. The stakes are real. The harm being done to real people and a real planet is real, and our obligation to resist and repair is real.

But I also want to offer you something this Easter morning. Not a false comfort or a premature hallelujah. But a larger frame. A frame large enough to hold both the grief and the possibility of what might be coming.

Scholars and historians who study the long cycles of human civilization — people who look not at news cycles but at decades and centuries — have noticed something. Periods like this one, periods of high volatility and multiple simultaneous crises, are not anomalies in human history. They are, in fact, fairly regular features of it. The moments of maximum stress and apparent breakdown are often, in retrospect, the hinge points — the moments when the old order is dying and something new is struggling to be born.

History is full of these moments. The Black Death killed a third of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century — a catastrophe so vast it is almost unimaginable. And yet historians mark it as a hinge point, a moment when the feudal order cracked open and the conditions for the Renaissance were born out of the rubble. The Great Depression devastated millions of lives — and out of it came the New Deal, Social Security, labor protections, a new social compact that expanded the circle of human dignity in ways unimaginable before the crisis. The civil rights movement did not emerge during a period of stability and good feeling. It emerged during a period of maximum tension and violence.  Death and resurrection. Again and again and again.

This does not mean the outcome is guaranteed. Resurrection is not automatic. We are not passengers riding some inevitable pattern. We are actors, agents, people with genuine choices to make about what we build in the ruins and what we refuse to let die. Mary had to stay at the tomb. She had to keep showing up in the dark. She had to be present when the moment came. And even then — even then — she almost missed it.

But here is what I want us to also hold this morning: what looks like chaos may be compost. What looks like an ending may be a beginning we simply do not yet have eyes to see. And the reason we cannot see it may not be faithlessness or failure. It may simply be that grief, when it is deep enough, can only look in one direction — toward what has been lost. The invitation of Easter is to slowly let our eyes adjust to the dark, and see what else might be there.

And there is evidence. Real, tangible evidence of new life. Not just hope, but signs.

Look at what has happened in communities across this country in the last several years of crisis. Mutual aid networks — neighbor helping neighbor in ways that bypass broken institutions entirely — have sprung up in city after city. Minneapolis has become an exemplar of this kind of local resistance and repair, showing us what it looks like when a community decides not to wait for permission to take care of and protect each other. Local journalism, once declared dead, is being reinvented by people who refused to let their communities lose their voice. Young people, who were supposed to be apathetic, are organizing, running for office, building new institutions from the ground up, showing up in numbers that are remaking the political landscape from below.

And here, in our own city: Through Faith in Action, which we are deeply involved in, organizers help form civic leaders from among the most vulnerable people in our City — Spanish-speaking immigrants, many of them elders. People who didn’t think they had a voice find one; people who didn’t think they had power have successfully advocated for more money for low-income housing. Now they have set their sights on having a universal basic income in the city of San Francisco! And don’t count them out. 

I could tell a lot of stories like this. In what has become an Easter tradition for us, we’ll have a chance next Sunday to name more of these stories of new life — to bear witness together to the resurrections we have seen. I hope you’ll come with stories ready.

Many of these resurrection stories are not the headlines. The headlines are the breakdown, the loss, the death. But the renewal is also happening, all around us, right beside us — in the very gardens where we are weeping.

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Which brings us back to Mary — weeping, looking for a body, alone, the most faithful of the faithful, the one who would not leave. And the risen Christ does not appear to her in glory. He does not come with light and angels and cosmic vindication like something out of a Marvel Comics movie. He comes as an ordinary person, standing in an ordinary garden, asking an ordinary question: What are you looking for?

That is how resurrection tends to announce itself. Not in the grand gesture. Not in the incontrovertible proof. Not in the moment when everything suddenly makes sense and the grief lifts and the way forward is clear. It announces itself in the ordinary, in the gardens where we are already weeping. It does not ask us to stop grieving before we can receive it. It meets us inside the grief.

The ancient, recurring, never-exhausted invitation of Easter — is simply this: in the midst of everything that is dying, to remain open to the possibility that something is also being born. To let our eyes adjust slowly enough to the darkness that we begin to see what else is here with us. To resist the understandable temptation to look only at the tomb, and to turn — even slightly — toward what is standing right beside us in the garden.

The pattern is ancient. The cycle is real. Descent and return. Death and resurrection. It is written into the DNA of the cosmos, into the turning of the seasons, into the depths of the human psyche, into the long arc of human history.

And on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, a woman came to a garden. And she was weeping. And then she wasn’t.

John 20: 16-18

Jesus said to her, “Don’t hold on to me, for I haven’t yet gone up to my Abba God. Go to my brothers and sisters and tell them, ‘I’m going up to my God and your God.’”

Mary Magdalene left and announced to the disciples, “I’ve seen the Lord.” Then she told them what he said to her.

Alleluia. Amen.

Benediction

Go, as people who weep and also and as people who are witnesses to new life. 

Trust the ancient pattern. Find resurrection in the ordinary. 

Go and tell others what you’ve seen.