Sermon on April 20, 2025
“Longing and Love”: A Sermon for Easter Day
By: The Very Rev. Pamela Dolan
“While it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed.” While it was still dark—what an evocative, haunting phrase. So many good things start while it is still dark, and yet so often we respond to darkness as if it is all there is, as if it will swallow us up and leave nothing but emptiness and death behind. It takes courage to look at darkness and emptiness and find in it not a place of despair but the locus of hope and possibility.
These last few weeks, some of us have been reading How We Learn to Be Brave by Marianne Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington. She writes a lot about the dark places where people find themselves, places that require courage and that bring out the best in us despite the challenges they pose. One story she tells isn’t really about courage, though, so much as about perseverance.
When the physician Rachel Naomi Remen was a young girl, her grandfather gave her a little paper cup of dirt. She was used to getting nice present from her grandfather, but this one was kind of a dud. A cup of dirt, huh? Okay. But her grandfather placed the cup on a window ledge and told Rachel that if she added just a bit of water to it every day, something wonderful might happen.
Rachel loved her grandfather and did as he asked, but soon trickling water into a cup of dirt became a chore, a boring and frustrating chore. A few times she asked him if she could quit, or give him back the present, but he always urged her to continue—just a few drops of water, every day.
Then, as Budde tells it, “One morning, there were two little green leaves sprouting up from the dirt that had not been there the day before. She was astonished. Day by day, the plants grew a bit bigger. She couldn’t wait to show her grandfather, whom she thought would be as astonished as she was. Instead, he explained to her that life is everywhere, and blessings are everywhere, hidden in the most ordinary and unlikely places. ‘And all it needs is water, Grandpa?’ Rachel asked. ‘No,’ he said. All it needs is your faithfulness.'”
Life is everywhere. Blessings are everywhere, hidden in the most ordinary and unlikely places.
That little paper cup of dirt is a symbol I need in my life right now. As I imagine it there on a windowsill in a kitchen in a small New York City apartment, I see easily it could have been abandoned or discarded, thrown out with the trash. Little Rachel might not have missed it; actually, she probably would have been grateful if someone had made it disappear! The world would have gone on spinning. Even her grandfather might have forgotten about it all after a few days.
In retrospect, though, the loss of that paper cup of dirt would have been tragic. Not because the little plant that grew in it was anything special. It was utterly ordinary. But that little seed, growing in the dark of the soil, brought more into the world than a houseplant. Its appearance brought with it a powerful insight, a revelation, to a child who would need courage, faithfulness, and persistence to make her way through the life that awaited her.
The little girl who was astonished at those green leaves became a great doctor and healer, a woman who overcame tremendous obstacles and crushing physical disabilities to help others. Not only her patients, but the millions of people who have read her books have had better lives, even transformed lives, because of Dr. Remen, and that little cup of dirt with its ordinary, miraculous little green leaves was a pivotal step along the path to all that healing and hope.
Life is everywhere. Blessings are everywhere, hidden in the most ordinary and unlikely places.
Mary Magdalene must have felt crushed when she found the tomb empty. Disappointment, fear, and grief were the darkness covering her in those days, a potent storm of emotions that threatened to drown her. I cannot imagine the courage it took her to go in the dark to that tomb, a tomb that would have been, should have been, guarded by soldiers, agents of a government that saw Jesus and his followers as enemies of the state, and felt no compunction about getting rid of them in whatever way was most expedient.
And yet, the emptiness and darkness of the tomb turned out not to be the end of the story, but the beginning. The emptiness and darkness of the tomb were just the place for new life to begin, the perfect incubator for the miracle of resurrection. The empty tomb, just like that little paper cup, was full of hope and possibility.
The Resurrection of Jesus, the singular and unprecedented event that we celebrate on Easter Sunday, is not just a thing that happened in the past. It is something that changed reality and is changing it still, something that gives meaning and purpose to even the darkest and most frightening of circumstances. The Resurrection of Jesus is what gave courage to so many of our greatest heroes and martyrs and change agents, from St. Francis of Assisi to Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Wangari Maathai, not to mention the countless unnamed others who found to courage to act in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges. And it can do that for us, too.
We are the ordinary, unlikely place where new life can happen, where change can happen, where blessings can happen. We in the church, we in St. Martin’s, we in this community. An email I received this week put it so beautifully,
“We must remember that resurrection is not an event that happens to us, it is a practice we live into in community. Each time we raise our voices in protest, we practice resurrection. Each time we offer kindness and compassion instead of hatred, we practice resurrection. Each time we pledge to hold true to the teachings of Jesus, to seek the common good, to work for love and justice, to shelter the most vulnerable, to care for all creatures of the Earth, whatever the cost, we practice resurrection.”[i]
Amen! We are an Easter people, and even when we find ourselves surrounded by Good Friday darkness, we will practice resurrection. We will not believe the voices that tell us we are too small, too marginal, too ordinary. It is the small and marginal and ordinary who are best able to practice resurrection, because they are the ones the world is always trying to bury. If we align ourselves with the lost, the least, and the vulnerable, we are aligning ourselves with Christ, the firstborn of all Creation, the one who overcame death and the grave, and we will find blessings and goodness everywhere. When Mary left the empty tomb behind her, she went out to tell others that she had witnessed the resurrected Christ. Our lives must bear witness to the resurrection, as well as our words. In a few minutes we will renew our baptismal vows, our pledge to hold true to the teachings of Jesus, to seek the common good, and to respect the dignity of every human being. This is how we practice resurrection—not alone, as individuals, but together, as a community of faith. When we gather at the Baptismal pool, or around the Communion table, we are witnessing to the power of resurrection, and the power of ordinary matter, ordinary places, and ordinary people, when we are set alight with great love. New life is everywhere. Blessings are everywhere. And it all begins while it is still dark. Amen.
[i] From the BTS Center (https://thebtscenter.org)
