Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's April 16, 2006 Easter Sunday Sunrise worship service.

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“That was mean!” our now teen-aged children reminded my wife and me not too long ago. We were having one of those dinner table times of family story-telling and reminiscing, and for some reason, the conversation had turned to Easter customs and rituals when they were children. While I tried to minimize my guilt, blaming it on my wife, which is, as every husband knows, a well-worn strategy that seldom works, I knew they were right, but not for the reasons they thought. It was mean.

We lived in the Valley of Virginia at the time, and on late Saturday afternoon before Easter Sunday, my wife would gather our children up, a six and a five year old, a toddler, and an infant, and plop them all four into the bathtub. “Your job is simple,” she told me ahead of time. “Just take these, stoop down, hold them up, and walk around outside beneath the bathroom window. I’ll do the rest.”

These were, of course, two very large bunny ears suitable for attaching to the head of some erstwhile Daddy who didn’t mind taking the chance that the neighbors would see him making a fool of himself. And so, stooped over, gauging my distance from the window to verify that only ears could be seen from inside the bathroom window, I walked back and forth until I was sure that there had been sufficient giggles and finger-pointing and splashing of water that yes, indeed, the Easter bunny had come! And, as further proof, the Easter bunny even left candy-filled baskets and other treats outside the front door.

Now mostly grown up, from their point of view, it was mean in a fun sort of way because they knew they had been duped and could now give us, the parents, a hard time about it. From my point of view, mean because for all of our parental desire to do the right thing with our children, we constantly end up sending them mixed messages. No harm, we say, to pretend there is an Easter bunny. And I would agree that there is no harm, up to a point . . . .

The candy aisle this April at Rite Aid or Food City is Christmas on a smaller scale. Easter is a cultural commodity that has been put up for sale. Whether it’s Easter’s fashion parade or the 26 lilies lined up across the chancel of my church awaiting me when I step behind the pulpit later this morning, we somehow manage to make it seem as if Easter can be bought and sold.

One Easter about six years ago, when we lived near Boston, my neighbor and good friend, who is Jewish and who lived with her partner basically in the same house that we lived in, said something to me that, at the time, really surprised me. I came out dressed for church that Sunday morning, and she said to me, as we greeted one another there on the front porch, she said, “happy Easter!” Happy Easter, she said. I thought, how strange, strange that someone who takes her Jewishness so seriously, should use those two words to greet me?

It took me a few minutes, but I figured out why. She, like everyone else has seen and heard the endless Easter advertisements and the reduction of Easter to the opportunity for a Monday off of work, but I must wonder if Easter, like Christmas, has been reduced to the lowest common cultural denominator, so that even our Jewish friends now greet us, people of the resurrection, with those two bland, smiley-faced words, “happy Easter.”

I am confident of one thing, and that is that the words, “happy Easter” would not have been adequate for Mary Magdalene in our text from John. A Disney-movie word like “happy” couldn’t hope to contain all that resurrection must have meant to her.

It was, for Mary, to say the least, a confusing morning in that early dawn, made all the more confusing by the empty tomb, by the appearance of angels dressed in white – by the inability of Peter and the others to make any initial sense of what had happened, and, later, by her own confrontation with the one she thought was a gardener. Then, once she discovered his identity, those even stranger words from her Lord that she was not to cling to him but rather to let go and report back to the disciples, no doubt cowering in fear in some hidden place. Thus, her morning climaxes as she goes to them with her breathless affirmation of faith: “I have seen the Lord!”

What John’s gospel makes clear, just like the other three gospel writers, is that it is a woman who is the key witness at the resurrection, this hinge on the door of history. In our rush to gather round the exalted Jesus singing our praises about the “blood that seals our redemption” and the “lamb of God now seated on the throne,” etc. we gloss over the much more revolutionary and often more disturbing and unsettling Easter truth: the first resurrection began with the women, and particularly it began with Mary, the one who tradition said was once a prostitute and a social outcast, one most likely to be the first to say the words, “I have seen the Lord!”

I have studied church history quite extensively, and it seems mean to me that for much of our history in the church, the church has given much more credit than is deserved to the male disciples of Jesus, naming them as apostles and bishops and priests and ministers, deacons and elders with authority over the church, when, in point of fact, it was, in each gospel account, a woman who had the enormous privilege of being the first witness to the resurrection of the Lord.

For a brief time early Easter morning, all of you get to be part of my flock. I speak what I believe, in good evangelical piety, God has put on my heart.

Thus I say to you, its mean, at least it seems mean to me, that the church too often denies the full privileges of membership and ministry to women in favor of cultural customs that restrict church leadership to men. Like the Easter bunny and its cultural equivalents, we sometimes bow down to what the culture says we should believe and do instead of embracing the true meaning of Easter. The true meaning is the radical declaration of equality in the church, the truth which is that God can call whoever God chooses to call, just as God deemed that the very first witness to the resurrection would be a woman with a past named Mary.

Remember, according to scripture, it was a Mary in Bethany who anointed the body of Jesus for burial, and it was said of her that “wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her” (Mt 26:13); it was Mary the mother of Jesus who remained by his side by the cross; it was that band of women who had accompanied Jesus throughout his days of ministry who, later, with the 12 disciples, gathered in the upper room in Jerusalem and awaited the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 1:14).

If anything, Easter is the day of all our days that should challenge our comfort zone and our tendency to deify the status quo, and in particular, the “sacred cow” of our business as usual in the church. When I read the stories of Jesus, I read of his practices of open table fellowship, of welcoming all people into his presence, of healing men and women and children, of showing God’s love for Jews and Samaritans and Gentiles; I read about his fearless, what was to many frightening, rejection of cultural taboos. Jesus, I believe, never played favorites, least of all, in denying the inclusion of women into the new spiritual movement he had begun. The early church knew it, and that’s why Easter begins with the witness to the resurrection by women at the empty tomb.

This text from John’s Gospel is about many things. Among them, it is about grief, the kind of grief Mary felt as she struggled to mourn the loss of her friend and master. But more than that, it is a story about a grieving church that has failed to model the kind of inclusive, life-giving community intended by the one whose death and new life we gather to commemorate today.

Even before the recent sensation occasioned by the announcement of the release of the Judas text, there was another apocryphal text purportedly written by Mary Magdalene called the Gospel of Mary. There are, in fact, some 50 of these ancient texts, like the Gospel of Mary or like the Judas text, which were written not long after the gospels in the Bible were written, that talk about Jesus and his life and ministry.

These other texts, however, for various reasons, did not get included in the ancient canon of scripture that we now know as the New Testament.

The Gospel of Mary was written in the early 2^nd century, perhaps only a decade or so after John’s Gospel was written. In it Mary Magdalene has a revelation from the risen Jesus that she is to assume a role of leadership in the church. That a woman, even someone as close to Jesus as was Mary, could receive such a direct revelation from God, was something unprecedented. When she reports this vision to the apostles, Peter and Andrew tell her that her vision is false and the teachings she has received from Jesus cannot be true. The very idea that a woman could be the recipient of such revelations was too much for the third and fourth generation of believers in the early church to stomach, and so the Gospel of Mary has been relegated to the margins of influence and importance. Instead of seeing the Gospel of Mary as an orthodox witness to the truth of Jesus, the early church labeled it heretical and, thus, outside the bounds of acceptable teaching.

But one wonders, how might the history of the church have been different if those who decided what gospels and letters and other texts to include in the New Testament had decided to include a text like the Gospel of Mary or some of the other 50 texts which weren’t included?

I, for one, believe there would be a greater willingness to accept a wider range of Christian belief and practice, and to be less cocky that we know exactly what God intended about the organization and leadership of the church. And I, for one, believe that would be a good thing.

And maybe we would find that even parents with our misbegotten efforts to teach children the meaning of Easter, or maybe others who feel judged and rejected by the church, or maybe women who deep down long for the freedom the gospel promises to all, and maybe, then, even the rest of us, we all would be able to hear the Gospel in a new language, and to be people of faith in old, yet in ever new and in ever renewing, ways.

This morning, please don’t wish me a “happy Easter.” Those words are just too mild, too bland, much too easy to say. But if you believe, as I do, that Easter is truly about resurrection, about the new life each one can have in the present moment, if Easter is all about being raised into a new life with Christ and if it is about turning the world – and the church -- upside down, then we had better be willing to not just say it but more critically, to practice resurrection by practicing being open and loving and caring and inclusive to all we meet along the way.

The earliest creed of the church is found in I Cor 15 and it goes like this. I close with these words because I really believe this is what, for all of our differences, holds us together in the church:

This is the good news which we have received,

In which we stand

And by which we are saved,

If we hold it fast:

That Christ died for our sins

According to the scriptures,

That he was buried,

That he was raised on the third day,

And that he appeared

First to the women,

Then to Peter, and to the twelve,

And then to many faithful witnesses.

We believe that Jesus is the Christ,

The son of the living God.

Jesus Christ is the first and the last,

The beginning and the end;

He is our Lord and our God. Amen.