Finding God in Interruptions

The following is the Easter sermon preached at St. James Episcopal Church:

The sermon has already been preached.  If you paid close attention to the Gospel reading from John then you’ve already heard the message.  It was short and sweet and all that really needed be said.  It was so short that maybe you missed it.  So I’ll give it to you again, just to be sure you don’t leave the church today without hearing the Easter proclamation.  Here it is: “Mary Magdalene went and announced to his disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord.’”  There is no stronger or more powerful sermon then the one preached by Mary Magdalene some 2000 years ago in a record five simple words: "I have seen the Lord."

It isn’t clear at all that the disciples believe Mary.  Perhaps they thought her hysterical or overly dramatic, or just a bit high strung.  So just to make sure they should believe her, the risen Jesus appeared to the disciples in the upper room while they were hiding from the authorities.  He passed right through the locked door and spoke to them. They were apparently speechless, but John tells us they rejoiced when they saw the Lord. They, in turn, preached to Thomas but he did not believe either them, or Mary, apparently.  So a week later, Jesus came to them again and invited Thomas puts his hand in the wound. Thomas proclaimed: “My Lord and my God!” Which, I’m sure earned him at least one, “Amen, Brother!”  Shortly thereafter, Jesus appeared again to the disciples on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias and there they shared a breakfast of fish and bread. And no one dared to ask, Who are you? because they knew who it was. There they received the Holy Spirit from which hundreds of sermons would be preached. And for thousands upon thousands, then millions upon millions of people through these 2000 years, again and again and again joy would interrupt sorrow and lives would be changes in ways no one could have foreseen. Perhaps even for you?      Who could have imagined it?

For Mary and the other women, and for the disciples, things were turning out quite differently than any of them had imagined. The resurrection had upset all expectations.  Mary Magdalene and the other women expected to continue in their roles, to care for the body, and to mourn and to pick up the pieces of their lives. But joy interrupted sorrow and everything changed.  The disciples had expected to return to the lives they had before they abandoned them to follow Jesus all around the Judean countryside.  It didn’t take long for Peter to say, “I’m going fishing.”  There was nothing left to do.  But even the fishing was off.  Or at least until Jesus showed up on the beach that morning. From the shore he yelled, “…you don’t have any fish do you?” They yelled back, “No.” So he told them to throw the net to the right side of the boat and there they would find some.  Peter recognized who it was and unable to contain himself, and jumped into the water and swam to shore.  Joy interrupted sorrow and now nothing would be the same. 

This isn’t the usual ordering of things. It’s usually the other way around, isn’t it?:  Isn’t is usually that sorrow interrupts joy and everything changes?  But that isn’t God ordering of things. The Easter proclamation is that God delivers unexpected joy that interrupts everything else.  It was this kind of unexpected joy that made it impossible for anyone who saw the risen Jesus to return to the life they had before and the same is true for us. Louis L’Amour captured this paradoxical truth of the gospel when he wrote, “There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.” 

Everybody hopes for a happy ending; that unexpected twist that turns a plot of his head. It’s why we love classic stories that satisfy our longing for things to turn out differently than one expects; stories like Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Eyre, and Mansfield Park. Last week I watched for the second time another favorite, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South.  It’s the story about Margaret Hale, a young women who has moved with her parents to an industrial town in Northern England, far in every way, from the lovely, picturesque southern countryside. From a great house with lovely lawns and rose gardens she must adjust to a modest urban home in the mill district of the dark and dirty little town of Milton.  The family have had to relocate because Margaret’s father, an Anglican priest, has chosen not to sign a declaration of allegiance to the Book of Common Prayer, saying that he could not, because he could not in good conscious swear to a belief in doctrines to which he did subscribe. His wife is inconsolable, believing that he has left the priesthood based on a mere formality.  She simply can’t fathom why he would not just sign the document and go on with his life as it was before. Having left behind everything she holds dear for reasons that are beyond her understanding, she dies brokenhearted.  Though Ms. Margaret longs for the life and friends she knew in the south, she tries to make the best of her new circumstances.  Even so, she rejects much of what she encounters including the gruff, but very handsome mill owner, John Thornton, as she compares her new life with what she knew before.  After losing her father as well, Margaret returns to the South where she finds that it is not quite as she remembered.  Things have changed and there is no longer a role for her to play there.  We, of course, know what she has learned: Try as we might, we can never go home again.  Even with an unexpected windfall following the death of her father, Ms. Margaret finds herself feeling alone and quite displaced.  As the story concludes Mr. Thornton also finds himself feeling alone and displaced, facing financial ruin and the loss his cotton mill.

But this is a period romance after all, so rest assured, things will turn out well for Ms. Margaret and for Mr Thornton.  In the final scene, he is on a train returning to the north, and she is on an opposite train heading south.  The trains have both reached a station somewhere in the middle, and from their coaches they see one another across the platform.  Quite unexpectedly, in a single moment, joy interrupts sorrow, and everything changes.

We love these kinds of stories! even though we tend to dismiss them as fairytales that bear no resemblance to real life. But in truth, these stories would not work if there was not some possibility that life can turn out for the better in ways we could not have planned through our manipulations.  The possibility can only exists if this was not, at least some of the time, the way life really does turn out.   Sometimes people who long for love find it, despite the fact they are convinced they will not.  Sometimes, the events of life, as difficult as they might truly be, present us with opportunities that would not have otherwise been afforded.  Yes, sometimes, sorrow interrupts joy. But many times, in a thousand different ways, joy interrupts sorrow, and our lives are altered.

In either case is the interruption that changes everything.  Sometimes, perhaps even often, we wonder, Where is God in this?  God is in the interruptions. Interruptions make it so we can’t go home again.  They makes us grow beyond our edges, adapt to our ever changing lives, prompt us to change the things we can, and to accept the things we can’t. Interruptions press us to think about how we want to live and the decisions we make. They make it impossible to predict what to expect when even our expectations may be met with unexpected joy. Most importantly, they make us less dependent on our own abilities and far more dependent on God’s mysterious workings.  The stories we tell about our lives are nearly always based on some interruption; some place in time where sorrow interrupted joy or joy interrupted sorrow.  The stories we tell about our God are these kinds of stories too. Mary went to tomb and Jesus was not there. He appeared to her and she proclaimed the impossible: I have seen the Lord.  Joy interrupts sorrow. This is our story, our Easter story. This is the way we see the world, through resurrection eyes.  These are the kinds of stories we tell and this is the truth we preach.