Easter makes the future possible. Easter makes the future possible. Let me show you how God does it . . .

Let's begin by rehearsing again the ancient Christian greeting for this day. I say: Christ is Risen! And you say: HE IS RISEN INDEED.

He is risen indeed . . . and there you have it. All you really need to know to know that the future is possible. Your future, the future of the church, the future of the world, the future of the cosmos, the future of life, life eternal, the future of God. Christ is risen indeed.

It is morning, the third day. Mary Magdalene, the faithful one, prepares to go to his tomb. She, who, legend has it, is the one who earlier anointed his feet with the precious oil, now takes oils for embalming the body of the one she served. How brave she was that day! Where are the others, we might ask? According to John's gospel, she went there alone. Were they in bed, afraid, asleep? Paralyzed by grief? In fear for their own lives?

Mary Magdalene boldly goes to his tomb early that morning on the third day, while it was still dark, to continue her discipleship in the only way she could see to do at that point. He was dead. His body was put in that tomb. And she would go and honor him by anointing his crucified body.

Now, WE know what happens, don't we? Things aren't as they are supposed to be when she gets there. She discovers what the whole world, indeed, the whole creation, has been dying to hear. The stone isn't where it was supposed to be! Nor is the body! Imagine the moment . . . the new day is dawning, but it will take a while for the truth to dawn on Mary. In current parlance we might say that she was still thinking "inside the box." She was caught in the "old paradigm." She had assumed that the world would always be as she had known it to be. Dead bodies would be in their tombs. Dead. And so, what would come next, you see, would look just like what had already happened a million times before. The living would mourn their dead and brace them-selves for the next time.

In this way of thinking, we moderns might say, and especially so on this Easter that falls on April 15th, "Nothing is certain in life but death and taxes." It's pretty much how Mary Magdalene was thinking that day. She went to the tomb to finish out the story along the only plot-line in her experience, the one that involved the inevitability of death. The one that precluded hope. The one in which the future would only be more of the same old same old. But, instead, on THAT morning, Mary Magdalene discovered that nothing was where it was supposed to be.

Many of you have referred me to the current little best-selling book entitled, Who Moved My Cheese. Great literature it isn't, to be sure, but its message is one appropriate to this day. It's subtitled: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life. Its main characters, two mice named Sniff and Scurry and two little people named Hem and Haw, spend their days running through a maze to find cheese.

To summarize the plot, which isn't very complex, Sniff and Scurry and Hem and Haw figure out a reliable path to some nice cheese only to discover one day that the cheese is no longer there. As you might expect, the mice recover fairly quickly, following their noses and tiny little mouse brains to some new and even more delicious cheese. But the little people languished in fear and befuddlement. They had felt entitled to their cheese and to the fact that their cheese would always be where it was supposed to be. They hadn't seen that change had been coming. They weren't prepared at all. All they could do was return again and again to the place where the cheese had been and bemoan their loss.

Well, I don't want to give it all away. And I can assure you that the story has a happy ending. For in the end, there is cheese abundant for all. Delicious cheese. All kinds of cheese. But first, they have to learn a few things. Change happens: they keep moving the cheese. Anticipate change: get ready for the cheese to move. Move with the cheese. Adapt to change quickly: the quicker you let go of the old cheese, the sooner you can enjoy the new cheese.

Who Moved My Cheese is not a bad little story for little kids and big kids who can't seem to think outside the box, stuck in the old paradigms of predictability and inevitability. But it's not exactly a Christian story in the end. Because it never makes clear just who moved the cheese or why . . . and that's precisely what makes all the difference in the Easter story.

Mary Magdalene, you see, initially had something of the same experience as Hem and Haw. She went to the tomb that morning, thinking, of course, that she knew what she would find there. The kind of large stone tomb Jesus had been buried in was familiar to her. It was a "box" that she could understand. And covering the opening to that tomb there was to have been a very large limestone wheel stone that would have been rolled into place to seal the entrance. All this she knew and expected. His body would be inside and she would apply the embalming oils, as was the custom.

So you see, when she arrived before dawn, while it was still dark, and discovered that, in fact, that huge, heavy stone had been rolled away, all she could think to assume was that "they" had taken her Lord. That the same cruel soldiers who had crucified Jesus had furthered their scornful cruelty by coming in the night and stealing the body away so that his disciples could not even properly grieve. Mary Magdalene was in the dark here, in more ways than one. The light had not yet shined, nor could she grasp what was happening.

Then Peter and another disciple arrive at the tomb and have the same experience and return to their homes because, as John tells us, they do not yet understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Their only response is panic and fear, and they run away to the safety of their homes.

I suppose that should not surprise us, we who are more like Hem and Haw than we would like to admit, that it took awhile for the truth of this change to sink in.

To her credit, Mary Magdalene stays at the tomb, weeping. Perhaps something that Jesus had said to her is beginning to make sense. Perhaps the dawn is beginning to break in her soul and she is starting to see. For she looks into the tomb now and sees not nothing, not gaping emptiness or dark despair, but, instead, she sees two angels where the body had been. She turns, and sees a man standing there, and when he calls her name, when she recognizes the voice of her shepherd, she gets it. It is as he has promised and she proclaims: "I have seen the Lord!"

The Christ will forever after be found not among the dead but among the living. The new future has begun. Mary Magdalene sought to be faithful to the end. But the new reality of that Easter morning would now propel her into faithfulness unto a new beginning.

We are way outside the box here, folks. The power of God moved the body. The power of God rolled away the stone. The power of God emptied the tomb. The power of God raised Christ Jesus from the dead. The power of God makes the future possible. The power of God in Easter makes the future possible. For Mary Magdalene, the first apostle, and for all of us.

In the 4th century, long ago, when baptisms were performed only on Easter in recognition of the new life in this holy day, Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem used to preach to the newly baptized who were seated in front of the Lord's tomb in the rotunda of the Holy Sepulcher. He would invite the brand-new Christians to look into the open door of the tomb. "Do you see this tomb?" the bishop would ask. "It was you who came forth from the tomb when you were baptized and came to life."

Dear sisters and brothers, it is YOU who have come forth from the tomb into new life. It is you and I. God is making all things new. God's reign has begun. We have only to ask for the courage and the maturity and the wisdom to live outside the box, outside the tomb, where what IS certain in this world is love and hope and a future for every broken heart and fragile dream.

For us, now, every door is open. We do not have to let the past dictate the future. Where we have failed and fallen short, we are given a new chance. Where we have longed to reach out and grow, we are given encouragement and incentive. Where we have wondered "what if" or "if only" when it comes to this world of ours, God has answered with a resounding "May it be so."

But we must first let go of our need to keep everything the way it's always been. And when we find ourselves standing and weeping in frustration and despair, we must pause and listen. And tune our ears to hear the Risen Christ calling our name, offering us hope, leading us into a future that need not, that will not, be a repeat of the past.

The things about our lives that we want to change, we can change. The things about our relationships, our work, our priorities that we want to change, we can change. The things about this world that we want to change, we can change.

Mary Magdalene got up that first Easter morning bereft of hope. And before it was even noon, God had revealed to her a whole new reality. God is eager to do the same for us, ever at work to change this world from a place of death into a place of life. From a place of grief into a place of joy. From a place of fear into a place of courage. From a place of inevitability into a place of faithful initiative and transformation.

You see, dear friends, there IS something more certain in this life than death and taxes. And that something is our Risen Savior. God raises Christ Jesus from the dead to make the future possible, for you, for me, for the church, for this whole world. Easter makes the future possible. Alleluia.

Christ is Risen. HE IS RISEN INDEED! Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

NOTES

Johnson, Spencer. Who Moved My Cheese. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. 1998. Bishop Cyril, quote from Homily Service. The Liturgical Conference. April 2001. p.46.

(c) Patricia E. Farris, 2001. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution. All other rights reserved.