Like the women at the tomb, we all need to be reminded so that, once reminded, we can remember. And, then having remembered, we can, once again, believe. Jesus is not in the tomb. He has risen! Life is trustworthy and love is strength and truth is freedom and forgiveness is wisdom and hope is alive!
For this is not a story simply for telling – it is a story for living – and not only in the rituals of this week but – and more importantly – with every breath and every thought and every action of every day, life without end. Amen.
So repent – which is to say, turn again and again to God, who is our patient and attentive gardener. Offer yourself up to be pruned and fed and watered. Reach your roots deep into the fertile soil and your branches high towards the sunlight so that you might bear all the fruit you possibly can for however long your fragile, beautiful life turns out to be.
If we are willing – if we accept the invitation to be sheltered, safe under the open wings of our mother Jesus, something remarkable happens. Our hearts are broken – and we discover that it is in the breaking open that they are healed.
Like the disciples present at the Transfiguration, like Peter who wants to built a monument to the event, we are actually intended to return to the challenges of our regular lives and to look for God in the ordinary and the mundane. God is not only on the mountain; God is not only doing miracles with “dazzling” light shows. God is ready to transform our ordinary lives, if we are ready to listen.
Love does not allow injustice and abuse. The call to turn the other cheek is not a call to suffer for suffering’s sake or to deny one’s own belovedness in light of another’s. It is not a call to endure violence – it is a call to reject violence and the tit-for-tat, us versus them, me-first script this false world would have us live by. Love is active, not passive. Love is, perhaps, the only form of resistance that does not become that which it resists.