Searching For Sunday

I was, inexplicably, chosen for Rachel Held Evans's launch team for the release of her new book. I applied online and they sent me a copy of her new book, Searching for Sunday to review. 

I liked this book significantly better than Year of Biblical Womanhood. It is passionately written and honestly told. Evans uses some of the sacraments to discuss the richness of the church experience, the depth behind our traditions, and how they brought her to a deeper understanding of the role the church is meant to play. 

Some may say this book is about Evans leaving the church, leaving evangelical belief, choosing tradition over truth. I would question whether those people had read the same book I did. I found the book to be less about how to find the right church for you, and more about how to find Jesus wherever you are.

Evans looks back on her own experiences, her personality being one wholly devoted to right from a young age, and she sees herself from the perspective of experience, time, and hindsight. She paints a picture of herself, trying hard to do the right thing, looking down just a little on those who were not trying as hard as she was (a picture most of us can easily relate to). She tells of her experiences with learning grace and falling in love with Jesus -- an experience that resounds with most "millennials" who were teens listening to "Shine" and "The Great Adventure." We were young and passionate and had a little bit of a chip on our shoulders.

Evans applies the same lens, the lens of grace and understanding to her church experience. The church was an awkward teenager trying hard to do the right thing, watching the back row boys, extending to them grace it could not extend to itself. As the church grows it learns that the passion of its youth was not as shallow as its parents made it feel and that the legalism it had embraced as a teen was well-intentioned and protective, but ultimately harmful and kind of silly. As the church finds grace, finds Jesus, the table becomes more open and more reflective of the Christ it professes to follow. 

Evans has found her grace glasses, the lenses of which help her to see her church experiences, both positive and negative, through a new perspective -- the perspective of love. She looks beyond a bitter perspective, seeing the evangelical church as loved and loving, if a bit immature in their methods.

Gaining Life

(Final post in a three part series, which begins here.)

She sleeps restlessly, again, anxious for the task, wanting it done. She meets the other women that Sunday morning and they gather the necessary items, setting out before the sun is up. They arrive at the tomb just as the sun is peaking over the horizon and they see that the stone is gone. Mary Magdalene rushes in, suspecting something is wrong, and finds that the body she desperately wanted to be close to, is gone. She stands, panic setting in, darkness closing around her... When suddenly, light -- blinding light fills the cave and the women drop to the ground in fear. The angels say, "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, he has risen, just like he said he would. Go tell everyone!" Then they are gone.

Mary is shocked. Confused. What? Perhaps the angels meant that Jesus had resurrected, his spirit going to heaven. But what had happened to his body. If Jesus was with God, then she would truly never see him again on earth. She would not hear his laugh. She would not touch the hand that healed her. She would not meet the eye of her beloved friend and feel the warmth of God's love in the depth of her soul. 

And as her loss sinks in, the tears fill her eyes. She does not know or care where the other women have gone. She stumbles through the garden, tripping on roots as tears obscure her vision, her mind quickly replaying cherished moments, moments of redemption, understanding, and love -- moments she would never have again. As this realization hits, she sinks to the ground. At this point she is no longer whimpering, or simply tearing up, she is all out bawling -- really ugly crying at this point, tears splashing all around her.

As always, Jesus sees her. 

He sees her sitting there, in her agony, and he cannot bear it. He has to say something. But Jesus is not coming from sadness or loss. Jesus is coming to her freshly victorious. The King of Heaven who had just won the world, made everything right and new and beautiful. He has defeated the last enemy and he is coming to her from a place of exultant joy. So, when he sees her, though she is crying... he is beaming.

It must be somewhat amusing to be the sole possessor of a wonderful secret, a healing secret, that you get to be the first to tell. He walks up to her kneeling figure and in a playful way, as if he were a stranger, he says, "Woman, why are you crying? Who are you looking for?" 

Of course she falls for it. Right in the middle of her sobs she looks up at him, unable to see through her tears. She says, choking on sobs, "Sir, I am looking for my master. He is gone and I don't know where to find him. If you have moved his body, can you take me there?" 

Jesus looks at her. She is collapsed on the ground, head bowed in loss, meanwhile his heart is bursting to share his victory -- and he says simply, "Mary!" 

She is, in a moment, transformed. Hope, though normally difficult to revive when so thoroughly killed, is restored to her in an instant. The darkness that had gathered around her is shattered as the sun itself breaks it forever. She who had been despairing, lost, alone, is restored again to life, life in him, not because he died, but because he is alive! There is a moment where she just stares at him, eyes widening, a new kind of tears filling them. Her brain tries to process the how of the moment, but her heart does not care. She leaps at him, unconcerned with social convention, wrapping her arms as tightly around him as she can. Never ever wanting to let him go again. 

Jesus holds her, feeling the exultation of finally having taken away the awful sting of loss and death. He laughs triumphantly. She catches his contagious laughter and laughs into his shoulder. He takes her hands from around his neck and holds them in front of him. She clings to his healing hands, clinging as if her life depends on them, afraid he will disappear. Maybe she is hallucinating, maybe this is just a dream. If so, she does not wish to wake.

He looks into her eyes, squeezes her hands and says tenderly, eyes sparkling, "Mary. I am here. I'm not going away yet, you do not have to cling to me. I need to see my brothers and tell them that I am going up to my father and your father, my God and your God. Go tell them I'm coming." 

She does not want to leave him, but she cannot disobey. She turns away, grudgingly releasing his hands, walking away slowly, watching over her shoulder to be sure that he is not disappearing. As she walks she thinks about Peter and John, Mary and Martha and Lazarus and Jesus's mother, Mary! She looks back once more at him standing, laughing, urging her to go... and she begins to run. The tears streaming down her face now are happy tears, tears of excitement as she hurries to find Jesus's mother and tell her that her son has returned to them, that he is alive and well in his beautifully whole body. 

Jesus's life could have communicated God's heart, his death could have saved us through atonement, but only his bodily resurrection could give us hope -- hope that we would see him, hope that we would live, and hope that we would hold those we have lost.

Losing Hope

(This is the second part in an Easter series. Part One, Losing Jesus here.)

That Saturday, for any who slept, was the first time they woke without Jesus. The first day waking without a loved one is terrible for anyone... The first sunrise on a life without them. Waking to a world without Jesus must have been horrifying. Jesus wasn't just a friend, a brother, a son. He was a side of God they had not known, and now could not be sure was real. Losing Jesus was losing grace, losing love, losing hope. 

Mary was lost. It is disconcerting to lose a person so close. I have friends who have lost children and for the first few days (and even now) could barely open their eyes in their house without a wave of loss. An extra seat at the dining table. An empty bed. A pair of rainboots that will never be worn again, but no one wants to move them from their place by the door. A prenatal vitamin, taken before you remember you aren't pregnant anymore.

And when we are lost we sometimes lean on the ordinary, the day to day, the routine.  We look for chores, things to occupy our minds. But for the disciples of Jesus, for his mother, for Mary Magdalene his death was at a terrible time for distraction. The Sabbath was a day devoid of duties. It was a painfully slow day where you could not even distract yourself with chores. So Mary Magdalene and the other women quietly made plans for Sunday, plans to go and honor the broken body. "It's something we can do." They did not know what awaited them, could not have hoped or imagined what they would find. For now, to them, hope was lost. The hope they had found when Jesus was with them, the hope of love, grace, and life -- that hope was killed on that long Sabbath. This Saturday was a day of reality sinking in, of memories hitting them like physical blows. 

This must have been a rough day for all of them, but I imagine Jesus's mother must have felt the blows the worst. She was likely the closest person to him. The love of a parent is immeasurable, she had borne him in her own body. I can't even begin to imagine what she felt at the cross, and facing her first day without him, a day supposed to be devoted to the God that she knew had just poured out punishment on her son.... So much for Passover; this year God demanded her son as the Lamb. This must have been one of the hardest thing she had ever experienced.

Mary Magdalene must have seen Jesus's mother, frozen with grief and anger and loss. And she could offer no words of comfort, she tried to offer action - maybe Mary would come with them to the tomb to anoint the body? But Jesus's mother said no. She could not bear to look on him broken and bruised again, could not bear to seal him away forever, could not bear the finality, nor was she sure she could utter a prayer to God today, or ever again.

Mary Magdalene did not particularly relish the idea of looking on the body, but hoped that touching him would heal this awful ache, get rid of these new demons that threatened to break her if she listened to their voices. Perhaps touching his body would make it real that he was gone. But if nothing else she would be closer to him than she was now.

(Continuing tomorrow.) 

Losing Jesus

Easter is by far my favorite holiday. Christmas makes me fairly sentimental, but I can never get through Easter without getting unbelievably emotional. I can't even think about Mary Magdalene in the garden that morning without tears in my eyes and chills up my spine. My kids keep finding me with tears pooling in my eyes, because I just cannot handle thinking about the Resurrection and its impact on those who loved my Jesus. But before the resurrection is always this terrible day. A day that breaks my heart for those same people, Jesus's friends who in a few days would be joyous, but were now having their hope stripped away from them. 

Poor Mary Magdalene. Poor, faithful Mary. 

I imagine her at the foot of the cross, down in the angry crowd, reaching out, wishing there was something she could do. Watching the man who had seen her, heard her, redeemed her... Watching him die. She stayed as long as she could, watching every painful blow to her friend, getting as close as she could, wanting to reach out and offer a comforting touch, but being kept out of reach. She must have been distraught, sickened by his suffering and yet still hoping for a miracle, waiting for him to take charge, to turn this horror into joy as he had for so many others. 

She continued to hope for such a miracle until darkness fell. The very earth shook and broke at the immense paradox that had just occurred - creation destroying creator. 

And Mary of Magdala quivered. Aghast. Afraid. Alone. 

She heard them say that he was no longer breathing and her hope for a miracle faded.

She watched them remove the badly broken body of her beloved friend. Saw the men carry the body off. Many of the others had gone, but she remained. She followed, stumbling, numb, to the tomb. She watched his body placed on the stone. She focused on it, unblinking as the stone was rolled in front of the grave, hiding his body from her view. But she did not move. She sat and stared as if the stone was not there. The image of his broken body lying on the cold stone was indelibly inked on her mind and she could not move. 

She stayed as others slowly drifted away. She no longer cried. Her sadness was for him and his suffering, now she was simply lost and did not know what to do. So she sat at the tomb, like a dog who could not return home without its owner.

She waited. Waited for some sort of purpose. She had been nothing, rejected by everyone, tortured by demons of all kinds. Then Jesus. He had brought restoration and respect. Respect that, as a woman, she had never been offered, even before the demons. He had made her a new person, given her a life with meaning, and she had leapt into it with such beautiful vigor. She had been the poster child for redemption. But now... Now what was she? With Jesus gone, would the demons return? What would she do? Who would she be? Did she even care to live without him? 

She could not face any of those questions as she stared at the tomb. Eventually soldiers were posted there and she was told she must leave. She should have been home long ago as the Sabbath had started. But she did not want to go. Home was no sanctuary. Once there she felt like she was in a dream, watching herself act out her own life. She simply laid on her bedding, unable to move, unable to sleep, remembering her life before him and not wanting to wake to a world without him. 

(Read Part 2 here)

I asked my five year-old son,
"Are the red spots on the bunny his whiskers?"
"No, they're his tears."