Mar 27 | “A woman in a garden,” (Easter Vigil Sermon, March 26th 2016)

Note: The community in which I serve uses a much abbreviated version of the Easter Vigil which leans more heavily on the vigil/Holy Saturday tone than the full-on Easter celebration, which it reserves until the morning. The Gospel reading for this evening service as the current rector has chosen it is the following incredibly truncated passage:

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb[.]

John 20: 1a

It all comes back to this: a woman in a garden. The cool of twilight. The in-between time, the balance between light and dark.

Beneath the story of salvation that we just heard runs a shadowy thread: the thread of our Fall in that lost garden of Eden. Beneath the image of Jesus’ beloved lost sheep, weeping outside his tomb, another image lies in secret: innocently naked Eve, reaching out to a forbidden tree.

It all comes back to this: a woman in a garden, standing on the precipice of something inescapable and irrevocable. Things are about to change.

Two women, leaning toward a promised wisdom, walking a shared path into history, and the path suddenly splitting in two. One walks into a thick tangle of angry thorns, blamed and shamed and painted forever as the millstone weighing down the human family. One walks into an earth made completely new, an earth still humming with the echo of shattered manacles, Love’s great exodus from the world beneath our feet.

Two women sharing twin experiences. A brand new heart, learning a new existence – outside of him, without him. An invisible thread, pulling each one in to remind her of the new limits she faces. A lack of knowledge. A turning around. New eyes, new focus, new vision, fresh tears.

A woman in a garden. The cool of twilight. The in-between time.

The cool of twilight; fragrant grass bending under holy feet that somehow walk on the earth, pressing impossible footprints into soft soil – once, the soil of Eden; now, the soil of this latter garden, and indeed the soil of humankind’s grieving flesh. A veil of mist parts along a brow that has no business being there. Silent stones share secret surprise, sputtering stars go out, one by one, mute to us, but singing beyond the expanse of space and time, underneath the range of the ear, hovering in the range of the heart. Written into our cells, our bones, our sinews, held hidden, waiting for the inevitable turning of the earth into dawn.

A woman in a garden. The cool of twilight. The in-between time.

A liminal time, held in tension, the eternal space between the hand and the object of desire, the sacred dance between seeker and wisdom, the thin surface of energy blanketing each living thing blending, seeping in, becoming one…but never further, always in process.

This is the truth of our kingdom, our new reign of love. The already and the not yet. The joy of the unfulfilled lover, dreaming of the beloved. The yearning of the heart that yet sings shy on the threshold. The searing bliss of peering through the lattice and leaning into the voice, “Rise up. Rise up and come away – the winter is past.”

A woman in a garden. The cool of twilight. The in-between time.

The slow pulse of a bleeding heart, raw with the ecstasy of grief, leaving the breast warm and crimson with spent ardor, kept there as memorial to what once was and can never be again, and yet destined to be burned away in the tender new sunshine of once-familiar nut brown eyes that should not be open, should not be, because how could God have eyes like a man’s eyes, how could God have feet to walk in the cool of the evening, how could the one who swooned with love onto the hard, splintered wood of the Tree and died there be the one who now waits for the moment when his lost sheep is ready to hear his voice speak her name into the fading dark?

How could this be?

It cannot.

And yet.

A woman in a garden. The cool of twilight. The in-between time.

A woman in a garden, Church Triumphant, a bride waiting under a veil of early morning shadow, bedecked with the glory of spring and carefully silenced bells, holding her breath.

A woman in a garden, holding out her hand.