My Name is Mary Magdalene

Luke 24:1-12

 I never had to worry about folks mixing me up with all the other Marys. I was the notorious one. The one with tattered clothes and loose living. The one with dirt under her nails and dirt in her past. You know, the one from Magdala. 

They called them demons. They said I had seven of them. I don’t know about any of that, but I do know that I couldn’t even see straight. Everything felt fuzzy, sort of unreal. All the time. I couldn’t focus my eyes. And listening to what someone else was saying just exhausted me. Every time. Especially when they were trying to tell me that they were praying for me, or loved me or needed me to stay. “Mary! Mary!” They’d say. They’d wave their hands in front of my face. Or so they told me later. I just wanted to sleep, all the time. It’s the only time I could escape the madness. I’d take a pill, cry, and finally, fall asleep. It was a deep, dreamless sleep. Sometimes I saw colors. Or heard voices. But it was better than the relentless pounding of self-loathing that weighed down every thought of my waking hours. 

Some called it “depression,” some said “borderline personality disorder,” some said I just wanted attention. Jesus said, after he’d healed me, he said it’s important for me to remember. To remember my story. To remember where I came from. To kneel and kiss the ground. To keep the dirt. 

I just wanted to forget. Forget all the hospitalizations, forget all the failed relationships and the lost jobs. Maybe if I scrub long enough, they won’t find all that dirt still stuck in my pores. I’m different now. I do mindfulness practices and centering prayer. I pay attention to my breath. But every time one of the disciples looked at me, I knew that they weren’t just looking at me -- they saw seven demons staring back at them. They saw the dust from all that hard ground. I wanted to shout at them, “I’m not like that anymore! I’ve healed. I’ve done the work. I’m in recovery!” But instead, I inhale for seven, hold for three, exhale for eight. 

And they were polite enough, I guess. They held the door open for me when I brought in the supper, said thank you when I poured them more wine. But I knew, deep down, they were remembering for themselves. They were remembering all the hurtful things I said. They were recounting all the painful things I’d done. 

They let all of us women tag along because we were useful. Joanna, Susanna, Mary, mother of James, we bankrolled the whole operation after all; there’d be no “bread, broken for you,” without our trips to the marketplace, no “cup of salvation,” without our bartering with the owners of the vineyard. 

Thank God for Joanna, and Susanna, and even Mary the mother of James. We formed our own little care team. We were a recovery support group. We met in the dank basements and drank bad coffee. We told the truth about our lives. We believed each other. We knew some of the horror of each others’ demons, and when we saw each other’s, we didn’t flinch. We were all smudged with a little dirt. And it was ok. 

And Jesus knew. He saw our demons and then saw past them. He’d been to a few of our meetings. He’d had some of that stale coffee. He’d hold that styrofoam cup in his hands like he was cradling a baby. Like it was sacred stuff. When he looked at us, we knew he wouldn’t stop at that poor choice or that reckless behavior. He didn’t stop at the overdose or the outburst, or the doubt or the fear or the failure. He saw us. The whole thing. When we were with Jesus, we could bow our faces to the ground and be lifted up at the same time. We could stare at our muddy selves in the mirror and find seeds growing there.

Maybe that’s why we weren’t scared. I mean, of course we were scared. Heartbroken. In shock. But we didn’t leave. Not even with all those Roman soldiers all over the place. All of us were there with him to the end. With him as he dragged that cross. With him as he fell to the ground. With him as he called out to his Father, and with him when he cried for his momma. With him when his tears mixed with blood and sweat and mud and fell to the ground. We were with him as he breathed his last breath. Inhale for seven, hold for three, exhale for eight. 

And then it was done. Everyone else was gone, even Peter. Even the sun. Even God. But we stayed. We bowed our heads to the ground and wept. Our fingernails filled with dirt. We lifted our heads to the cross and we cried. We fought back all those demons that threatened to overtake us again and we stayed. 

We stayed all day Saturday. It was a quiet Sabbath. We had a meeting. Told the truth. Said we saw each other. We cried and lit our candles and said our prayers and slept and cried again. Just us women, huddled together in the dark, chairs scraping against the worn basement linoleum, spending all our pain on Jesus, giving no energy or thought to the demons that threatened to creep back into our lives again. Or, at least, trying to.

So when the sun came up, we wiped our noses on our sleeves, splashed some water on our faces, and set out to the tomb with the spices. Our eyes still swollen from crying, I thought we were just seeing things. But someone must have gotten there before us because the stone was already rolled away from the tomb. We bent down, we peered in, and there it was, nothing. Just dirt and rock and empty space. Joanna asked Mary to light the candle to get a better look. Sure enough. No body. Some dust. Some linen cloth folded neatly at the end. But nothing else. 

Of course we were scared. We were heartbroken. In shock. But we still didn’t leave. None of it made any sense. We were confused. Lost. Alone. But we stayed. We didn’t leave. And before we could let our demons of self-doubt and failure creep back into our consciousness, before we could throw ash on our faces for another round of mourning, two men just showed up. They sort of…glowed. Susanna dropped the spices. Joanna spilled the water. We all fell to the ground. We burrowed our faces into the dirt. 

They asked us, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” 

And before I could answer, “Well, where else would we look?” 

Before I could say, “Because that’s where Jesus looked.” 

Before we could respond, “Because once we were dead and then Jesus came and gave us life again.” 

Before I could say, “because that’s where life starts, in the dirt, and in the dingy basements where we break ourselves down and we tell the truth," 

they said the strangest thing. They said, “He is not here. But has risen.” 

And somehow they knew the whole story. They knew that he’d told it all before. How he’d be handed over, how he’d be crucified, caked from the mud made of dirt and tears, and then, on the third day, he’d get up again. He’d told us that cradling his bad coffee, down there at our last meeting. It smelled like wet carpet. The faucet was leaking. He’d wanted us to hear it from him.

How’d they know that story? How’d they know our story? 

And so we counted on our fingers. We’d lost so much time. How long does it take to lose your savior? How long does it take to get him back again? Friday. Saturday. Today. The third day. 

Of course the disciples didn’t believe us. They thought we were out of our minds again. That the demons had returned. That the exorcism was undone as soon as Jesus was gone. They’d never believed our resurrection then. And they didn’t believe Jesus’s now. They thought we were delirious. Crazy. The stress of the last two days had taken its toll and now we were regressing to our previous selves. We were ranting, they said. Raving mad. Overcome with grief. We’d lost our minds. We’d left sanity behind. We’d gained our minds when Jesus healed us, but now that he’d gone, we’d lost them again. Go clean yourselves up, they said.

But we stayed. We stayed with the story. We knew what resurrection looks like. We’d felt it before. I knew this earthy lightness. It’s the same feeling as seven demons being removed from your body. It’s the same feeling as being truly and fully seen for the first time. It’s the same experience as when Jesus looks you in the eye and says, “Your sins are forgiven, go in peace.” And it’s the same as looking up to the heavens only to see your beloved murdered on a cross. It’s the same as burying your face in the dirt and somehow still finding life there. It’s the same as when the sun is blotted out and God is silent and your friends are gone, and yet, you stay. It’s the same as when you tell the truth about your life in a dingy basement. You stay. You stay with your face toward the earth until you find something growing there.

Suddenly, Peter got up. Peter just. Left. We tried to follow him, but he’s running too fast. The disciples stayed behind. But Joanna, Susanna, Mary and I, we found him eventually, back at the tomb, back on his knees, looking down, looking low into the tomb. And he saw it, too. We know the look. We’ve seen it in each other. It’s the look of seeing empty grave clothes. It’s the look of being released from your demons. It’s the look of searching for the living among the dead and finding a whole lot of nothing. It’s what happens when you bow low, when you put your face into the dirt, and you wonder if those might be seeds, germinating. 

Peter looked back at us. And he saw. He didn’t see the demons or the trips to the marketplace. He didn’t see us hanging their laundry or bartering our purple cloth. He didn’t see us in our failures or our regrets. He didn’t even see the seven demons. He saw us with the dirt still smudged on our faces. He saw us with the mud still crusted under our nails. And we saw him, his forehead caked with sweat and soil, muddy tears running down his cheeks, Galilean clay on the palms of his hands.

“Let’s go home,” he told us. And we did.

And he stayed. 

He comes to the meetings now. He brings the coffee. We go around the room, introducing ourselves. We get to Peter. “Hi,” he says. “I’m Peter. And I think I’ve seen the resurrection.” “Hi Peter,” we all say together.

Funny, how resurrection can look like you’ve gained and lost your mind at the same time. 

Weird, how, you have to have your face in the dirt to see the new life. 

It’s just like him, you know, to ask us to bend low, to fall to our knees, to stoop down into the tomb, before we can see what isn’t there. Before we can see that the demons are gone. That Jesus has been raised. 

Sometimes, our understanding of the resurrection begins with our faces in the dirt. Sometimes, our understanding of the resurrection begins with remembering all the horror and the hard stuff. 

Sometimes we have to remind ourselves of our demons in order to remember that they’re not there anymore. 

We have to remember that they were in order to remember they’re gone. 

Weird how when we see it in each other, in each meeting of our dirty brokenness, we are resurrected all over again. 

Strange how the resurrection happens when we let the beauty we love be what we do, when we find hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

We still meet together. In basements. In crumbling churches. In living rooms. We greet each other with “Christ is Risen! He has risen indeed!” We set out extra folding chairs. The disciples will join us soon.

“Hi. My name is Mary. My name is Peter. My name is Jenn. My name is Dan and Jonah and Levi, Tim and Debbie and Diane, Judy and George and Reni and Toni and Scott and Sydnie and Emylia, and Ayden, my name is Jim, my name is Rose. I’ve put my face in the dirt. I think I’ve seen the resurrection.”

Thanks be to God. 

Holy Crap.

this one's a doozy: Luke 13:1-9

Stanley Yelnats, (yes, that’s a palindrome) was walking home from school one day when a pair of shoes fell from the sky. They hit him on the head, actually. After his initial shock of encountering shoes falling from the sky, he bent down to inspect them. To his astonishment, these were really nice shoes; a pair of baseball cleats signed by the famous Clyde “Sweetfeet” Livingston. Astonished by his luck, and aware that he has never held anything worth this much money in his life, he picks up the shoes and starts to run. But that is where his luck ends, because, as is the the family lore, all of the Yelnats family has been cursed because of Stanley’s “no good-dirty rotten-pig-stealing-great great grandfather.” See, since the poor decisions of his ancestor, Elya Yelnats, Stanley’s entire family has been cursed with bad luck, all the way down the line, father to son, right down to Stanley himself. So as he is running home, amazed by his incomprehensible luck, he hears police sirens blaring, getting closer, and finally pulling up behind him. He is accused of stealing the shoes from a charity auction to help orphans, is convicted of the crime, and is sent to a juvenile detention “camp” called “Camp Green Lake,” which, it turns out, is not a camp, not green, and not a lake. It is a dry expanse of land in the Texan desert, where he is condemned to dig six foot holes in the ground, one a day, for the purpose of “building his character.” And so begins the 1998 Newbery Medal Award winning book, “Holes” by Louis Sachar. 

Every day, Stanley is forced to dig pointless holes in the desert ground in grueling conditions for a crime that he did not commit, simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although his bad luck has been taken to the extreme now that he is at Camp Green Lake, this has been the way of his whole life, his father’s whole life, his grandfather’s life, and his great grandfather’s life, ever since his great great grandfather made a promise that he didn’t keep. And so the generational curse continues on down the line.

While at camp he meets a kid named Zero. Zero doesn’t say much. He’s small, but feisty, and full of anger. He’s not good at much, he doesn’t have friends, no family to send him letters, and even if he did get them, he couldn’t read them. But he’s really good at digging holes. He’s always the first one done. So Stanley and Zero strike up a deal. Stanley will teach Zero how to read, if Zero helps Stanley dig his hole every day. 

As their unlikely friendship grows, Zero comes to a revelation. It’s his fault that Stanley is at Camp Green Lake in the first place. He was at the orphanage the day of the charity auction, he was the one who tried on Clyde “Sweetfeet” Livingston’s shoes, he was the one who raced out of the building with them still on his feet, and when he discovered that folks were chasing after him and he was going to get caught, he pulled off the shoes and threw them over an overpass, where they hit Stanley in the head, landed on the ground, and the rest is history. Zero feels guilty about this revelation, but he keeps it to himself. 

A whole bunch of stuff happens, and you really should read the book, or at least watch the movie, and Zero and Stanley end up wandering the desert alone, in a futile attempt to escape from Camp Green Lake. Without water, in the blazing heat, they get a bit delusional. And Stanley begins to tell Zero the lore of his “no good dirty rotten pig stealing great great grandfather.” The story goes, his poor great great grandfather had fallen in love with a beautiful girl from his village. But having nothing to offer her father in exchange for his daughter’s hand, the beautiful girl was pledged to marry the pig farmer, in exchange for one of his pigs as dowry. Desperate, Stanley’s great great grandfather goes to the village gypsy, Madame Zeroni, for advice. She offers him a pig in exchange for one thing, that when the time was right, he would carry her up to the top of the mountain. He accepts. But Stanley’s great great grandfather gets his heart broken by the rich man’s daughter and runs off to America, completely forgetting about his promise, and thus, incurring the curse upon his entire family line. And ever since, his family has had nothing but rotten luck, all the way down to Stanley, who is forced to dig holes in the desert for a crime that he didn’t commit.

They continue to wander the desert as Stanley tells the tale, and they become delirious with dehydration. With the situation becoming more desperate with each step, they come upon the mountain shaped like “God’s Thumb,” which is rumored to have the only source of water for miles around. They begin to climb. But Zero is in worse shape than Stanley, and can’t make it up the steep mountain. So Stanley begins to carry him. To keep him conscious, Stanley talks to him, and at one point they rest, and he says, “Hey Zero, what’s your real name?” Zero chuckles to himself, and blurts out, “my real name is Hector Zeroni. And I was the one who took the shoes. You’re here because of me.” But suddenly Stanley realizes that it’s quite the other way around. Zero is the great great great grandson of that gypsy who cursed his great great grandfather. Zero is here because of him. Stanley sees his family story in a new way, and in the act of carrying his friend, the great great great grandson of Madame Zeroni, up the mountain, the curse is removed, and they are both unbound by their recent and distant pasts. They confront, honor, accept, and embrace the messy manure of their histories, and they use it to grow.

The book is better.

But it’s this story of generational trauma, passed down from one generation to the next, through Elya Yelnats all the way to Stanley, through Madame Zeroni all the way down to Zero. This story is a great, and often humorous, allegory of what we often do as humans -- what we do to ourselves, and what we do to each other. We think, surely there is a reason for this hurt we are suffering. Surely there is a cause for this pain we are enduring. Someone, somewhere along the line screwed up, and now, here we are, paying for it years and generations later. And this helps us pretend that we are safe from future hardships because if we follow the rules and don’t do anything wrong, we’ll be safe from the tragedies of life. Bad things happen because someone, somewhere along the line, did something wrong, and they’re getting what they deserve. So we, too, can keep bad things from happening to us by always doing it the right way at the right time for the right reasons. Pain can’t be random after all, and that’s way too scary, there has to be a reason. Right? Right?

That was certainly the Jewish-Galilean approach to understanding life. Someone must have sinned, either in a past life, or right here and now, since that man was born blind, or since that woman is barren, or that wife has been widowed so many times. Someone must have done something wrong to deserve their affliction, or their poverty, or their round of “bad luck.” Because if it’s not this way, if there isn’t a reason, then we could be next. And we all just can’t handle living in that kind of fear every day. So we create stories, we place blame, we find reasons for why terrible things happen, and then we live by them, creating a cycle of self-fulfilling prophesy that seems to prove the stories true. Some folks from the crowd ask Jesus, “Haven’t you heard about these atrocities? Haven’t you heard about what Pilate did to them, killing them, and then mixing their blood with the sacrifices at the altar? Terrible, just terrible.” But Jesus reads beyond the words into what’s going on inside of them. He asks them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way that they did anything worse than any of you? Or what about that horrible tragedy with the falling of the tower of Siloam, where eighteen people died, do you think somehow you’re exempt from such a horror? Nope. You’re no better than they.” 

They suffered. Suffering happens. Tragedy happens. Sometimes, there’s an explanation, and sometimes there’s not. But if you keep looking at the world in this way, in the way that makes the so called good kids the winners and the supposed bad kids the losers, if you keep thinking that everybody always gets exactly what they deserve, then you’re going to suffer just as they have. You need to repent. You need to change your minds. You need to see the world in a different way. We’ve got to let go of this idea that we get what we deserve or that there’s some reason why we’re suffering. We’ve all got no good dirty rotten pig stealing great great grandfathers. We’ve all stolen a pair of shoes and let someone else take the blame.

Those folks who were murdered by Pilate were a mixture of sinner and saint, just like we all are. They didn’t deserve what happened to them any more than we would. We have to repent - metanoiete - literally, to change our minds - about this idea that if we are suffering it must be because we, or our ancestors, have done something wrong. It’s not so black and white. It’s not so either/or. I suffer the sins of my fathers. And I commit some sins of my own.

This is generational trauma. This is trauma that has happened to our ancestors, to our people, to our culture, that can literally switch certain genes on or off, and this suffering can get passed down from one generation to the next. The children of Holocaust survivors carry their parents’ trauma inside of them, in their very genes, and they pass that trauma on to their children, even as they tuck them in safe in their beds thirty, forty, seventy years later. The decedents of slaves still carry inside of them the trauma of over two hundred years of brutality and oppression, and they pass that trauma on to their children and their children’s children. What trauma will the children of those people who were murdered by Pilate in the Temple and whose blood was mixed with their sacrifices carry? And what will they pass on to their children and their children’s children? Will they blame the victims, believing, like most of us do, that they must have done something to deserve it? Or will they lash out at the oppressors, binding themselves to a life of hatred for what has been done to them by their perpetrators? And what about Pilate and the trauma he's placed upon himself? Upon his children? 

How can we be healed of all the pain of those who have come before us?

Repent. 

Repent, Jesus says. 

And I know that we think that we need to wear hair shirts and kneel on a bed of nails and think about how awful we are and that’s what it means to repent. But I don’t think that’s what Jesus means. We are called to change our minds. To see the world in a new way. That’s metanoia. And I think a clue to the truth of this is found in Jesus’s perplexing parable of the fig tree. 

A landowner gets frustrated with this fig tree that was planted three years ago. It’s not bearing fruit. “Cut it down,” he tells the gardener. “It’s a waste of resources, it’s not doing what it was made to do, so get rid of it.” But the gardener sees a potential in this tree that the landowner does not. “Give me one more year,” he says. “Let me aerate the soil around it, let me scatter some manure on it, and then let’s see what happens.” 

We never know if the landowner agrees to the gardener’s request. Jesus doesn’t really finish the story. But I think that’s not the point. Jesus doesn’t want us to focus on the broken fig tree, or the impatient landowner. Rather, he wants us to see the world through the eyes of the gardener. The gardener sees, not how this tree is failing, but rather what it needs. The gardener sees that instead of treating this broken, ailing thing as a lost cause, it needs time, and tender care, and some manure spread around it. This gardener sees this suffering tree, and instead of blaming it for its suffering, or blaming its past, it listens to it, it gives it what it needs. 

To repent means to see at the gardener sees.

The manure here, I think, is the key. Because what is manure other than piles of stinky, rejected, discarded waste? Old stuff that has been used up, passed on, and left to rot. It’s all those things in our histories and in our lives that we are ashamed of, it’s our past, it’s our interpretations of the past that so and so got what was coming to him, that somehow we deserved the sufferings that we’ve experienced, it’s all the old stuff that we have rejected that will come back to this tree and nourish and revive it. It’s crap. It’s what we reject. It’s what we think we don’t need that will feed us. It’s all those broken stories of alcoholic fathers and depressed mothers and unmentioned war wounds and the slave owner’s whip that can be turned around and seen in a new way. Not in a rose-colored glasses, God fixes everything sort of way, but in a way that lets the crap of our life feed us, rather than bleed and starve us.  

Stanley takes the mistakes of the past - his and his ancestors' - and uses them to rewrite his future. He carries Zero up the mountain, and instead of blaming his great great grandfather for the predicament he’s in, Stanley fulfills his great great grandfather’s vow, breaks the curse, and his whole family starts anew. But it isn’t until Stanley sees his story in a new way that he’s freed from it. Once he can see it in a new way, suddenly there are possibilities for some fruit. 

Repent, Jesus says. Change your minds. Go back to the manure, the things in your past, the things in your families, the things that have hurt and torn you apart and all the blame that you’ve place on yourself and others in order to somehow makes sense of the suffering, and see it in a new way. See how all this crap can nourish you. How it can bring you back to life. How it can help you bear fruit. Don’t reject your story, or throw blame on something else just so that you can feel safe from the suffering. Don’t ignore the pain of it. Don’t try to wash out its stink. In God’s hands, the hard stuff and the brokenness and the poor choices and the oppression and the pain that has come before you and still hurts you now can be fertilizer to a hungry soul. God takes crap and turns it into fruit. We can’t undo what’s been done. The pain is still there. The brokenness abounds. But God can make crap sacred, and healing, and even nourishing for new fruit.

Embrace the crap. It’s holy. That’s what it means to repent. How can you take the curse of your no good dirty rotten pig stealing great great grandfather and let it feed you and make you in to something new? You never know, if we repent, if we see our stories in a new way, maybe we’ll have the strength to carry a friend up the mountain and break the curse after all.

Maybe with time.

Maybe with room.

Maybe with a little bit of holy crap, spread around our roots.

Thanks be to God.