“Everybody wants to be free but nobody wants to grieve. In order to encounter the risen Christ Mary Magdalene must move through lament to be liberated by love — and so must we.” — Sermon preached by Lauren Grubaugh at All Saints Church, Pasadena on Sunday, July 22 (Feast of Mary Magdalene)

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In the name of God, who creates, liberates and sustains us and all who dwell in this beautiful and challenging world. Amen.+

Yesterday morning I lay prostrate on the cold stone in front of the altar
preparing my mind and my heart to be ordained as a deacon
as this community invited the Holy Spirit to abide with us.
With the gentle lull of chant moving in waves over me,
I sobbed.

My heart overflowed with gratitude for the ways in which,
over the last five and a half years you prayerfully discerned God’s call with me.
You supported me through the ups and downs of seminary.
You prayed for me as I moved across the country to Virginia for another year of school, and you offered your encouragement and prayers as I began, two months ago, to serve as Curate at Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis.
You have been a community of joy, of challenge, of growth, and of profound love.
Overwhelmed by gratitude, I wept.

I also wept because this moment was bittersweet.

Beloved ones who were steadfast in their support of my journey
were not here to mark this important step.
Among them:
My doting grandfather, who always reminded me that he was proud of me.
The Rev. Zelda Kennedy, whose compassion was larger than life.
And my uncle, who died just last week, a man who embodied resilient and tender love.

I have felt the absence of these beloved ones profoundly during these days;
days which have at once been celebratory and joyous.
Dwelling in this space of grief and gratitude has made writing this sermon very difficult.

Thanks be to God for Mary Magdalene.
This week, she has been, as she has long been for me, a blessed spiritual companion.
In her encounter with the Risen Christ, I am reminded:
in order to be liberated by love,
you must be willing to draw near to pain.

We meet Mary at the tomb, where she is at the end of herself.
She is so traumatized by the public execution of her friend,
that the angels who come to talk with her, don’t scare her!
(angels are terrifying beings — they freak people out throughout scripture — so this is basically without precedent).
She is so exhausted and so blinded by her grief, she can’t recognize her beloved Savior when the Risen Christ is standing before her.

This is a state not unfamiliar to those of us who have lost a beloved.
It is bound to happen in life, to all of us,
that we will be totally and utterly blindsided by grief.
We will find ourselves in that strange and empty, tomblike space
between the frenzied activity that follows loss,
and the agonizing despair of being alone with our grief.

When the body of the beloved has been buried
and the friends have gone home,
and the casseroles sit half-eaten in the fridge,
and the sympathy cards slow to a trickle,
and the boss expects productivity again,
we can find ourselves alone, and frightened, and angry,
walking in a fog as thick as pea soup, with no idea which way is which,
and where is forward, and does it even matter.

It is also a state many of us find ourselves inhabiting now,
in light of our national life.
For some, the society that was familiar
has been replaced by something untrustworthy and cruel and threatening.
Other have long known that this society has always been untrustworthy and cruel and threatening to those who are routinely dehumanized and utilized for the sake of an exploitative, inequitable and unjust system.
The comfort and security of an elite are secured through the exploitation of many.
More and more people are coming to see,
the condition of our nation today is inextricably linked to countless habits and policies and practices which have been formed over generations.
To know the death-dealing effects of one’s own society is to live in a perpetual state of trauma, where grief awaits us around every corner.

Whether the source of our grief be personal or communal,
it is easy to fall into hopelessness and despair.
We wail and we wait for change and we wonder why things are the way they are.
And then we are told to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.
We are expected to move through grief quickly
and to get over it
and to go back to our normal lives.
We are, in effect, asked to leapfrog over grief to get to resurrection.

In Mary’s encounter with the Risen Christ, I realized this week that I have
subconsciously read the question, “Why are you weeping?” as, “Snap out of it.”
I have heard Christ’s compassionate question as a rude accusation.
Of course, this says far more about my own formation
in a culture that doesn’t know how to grieve well,
than it does about the response of the Risen Christ
to his beloved disciple.
It is, after all, Mary, who is ultimately sent to be the apostle to the apostles.
She, maligned and mislabeled throughout history as a woman of ill-repute,
is in fact the first bearer of the good news.

So maybe something else is happening here.

When Jesus comes to Mary in her fear and her loneliness and her anger.
He doesn’t interrogate her pain. He doesn’t tone police her anger.
He doesn’t shock her with the news that he is back — TA-DA! —
and tell her not to worry, everything will be just fine.
He simply asks, “why are you weeping?”

In effect, he compassionately asks her to give her own account of what is happening.
He asks for her version of the story.
“What happened? Whom are you crying for? Where does it hurt?”
And he listens.
He listens.
He listens.

It is as Mary claims her own voice, and tells her own story,
that she begins to process her trauma.
It is when Christ comes to her in compassion, calling her by name,
that she can finally see the Risen Christ, her beloved friend and teacher and Savior,
with the wounds still in his hands and in his side, standing before her:
Ever crucified.
Ever risen.

Liberation is only available to those who would visit the tomb and lament.
Lament gives us the capacity to find ourselves in a story that is complicated and painful
and so vital to tell, because we cannot move toward healing if we do not know our story.
And how are we to tell a new story, if we do not know the one we have been living?

Describing the often trying and painful experiences of women of color in leadership,
Nicaraguan mujerista theologian Inés McBryde wrote on Twitter this week,
“lament leads to liberación.”

Yet, the United States is, as a society, averse to the vulnerability that is required of those who long to be liberated.
So much of the pain we are experiencing as a country
is rooted in the dominant culture’s profound inability to enter into vulnerable spaces
where circumstances are beyond control
As a nation, we have been unwilling to linger outside the tomb,
that place where there are no quick fixes,
only the hard work of coming to the end of ourselves,
where we admit, (as our 12-step friends have taught us to do),
that we are powerless over our addiction
to a system that commoditizes everyone and everything
and that life in this system has become unmanageable.

Mary’s cry invites us to move toward uncomfortable places, where the lament is long, and difficult,
and where we might seek to respond to the question, “Where does it hurt?”
Meanwhile, Christ beckons us to draw near to others in their grief,
asking questions that seek understanding,
compassionately listening,
paying heed to the pain,
and acknowledging those who suffer by name.

Perhaps you have waited and wailed and wondered why.
May your story be heard.
May you be acknowledged by name.
May you be given the gift of proclaiming liberation.

Amen.