A Sermon for a Service of the Resurrection

In memory of

Judith Chatfield Schwerin

Christ Episcopal Church
Sharon, Connecticut
May 25, 2024

Text: John 20:11-18

Most of you here today, I imagine, think of Judi as a particularly special person. Of course everyone is a particularly special person—I mean that literally, as I hope to show—but she did indeed have a rare combination of artistic refinement, intellectual breadth, and above all a gift for friendship that was uniquely her own and cannot be duplicated. It is no wonder that she was so beloved.

I have here a card from her that she sent me in February…just one of the many messages that she was constantly sending out to her friends. She makes an amusing observation about herself. Her neighbor (Geraldine) had noted that she habitually referred to a favorite television series “All creatures great and small” as though its title was “all things bright and beautiful”—the first line of the hymn we just sang. Isn’t that a remarkable capsule about her unfailing capacity to capture and elevate everything “bright and beautiful” that might otherwise have “blushed unseen.” That capacity made her close-up photographs remarkable. The angel was in the details.

In this same note, Judi writes that she is feeling very optimistic about her recovery. That was written only two months before we lost her. So shocking was the blow that the birds seemed to pause in their mating calls and droop their heads. Morey Road, the library, the town, and perhaps above all the church, have suffered a grievous and, it seems, an irreparable loss.

In the reading from the 20^th chapter of the Gospel of John, the evangelist portrays a community of disciples who are without hope. It is scarcely possible to describe adequately the anguish of the loss of their mysterious friend and Master for whom they had given up everything. The one whom John describes as the Word of God made flesh and dwelling among them had been condemned by both the religious Jewish and Gentile Roman authorities (both!), tortured to death in public, and been entombed. His disciples, both male and female, knew of nothing to do except visit the tomb and weep in despair. That is the setting for the 20^th chapter.

Whoever the fourth evangelist may have been, it is generally agreed by believers and skeptics alike, over two millennia, that the Gospel of John has been shaped by a genius of storytelling. The narratives of the wedding feast at Cana where Jesus spoke water into wine, of the man born blind whom Jesus first healed and then interrogated so memorably, of the death of his beloved friend Lazarus and the raising of Lazarus’ corpse from his tomb—these stories are widely admired for their artistry, but most of all for their impact upon those called to be believers.

The climactic event of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is narrated by the Evangelist with similar narrative impact. We should understand that the previous raising of Lazarus by Jesus’ spoken command, “Lazarus, come forth,” was indeed the revival of a corpse, a sign of the uniquely creative power of the Word of God—just as in the Old Testament story of Elijah raising a poor widow’s dead son. These were restorations to life of persons destined to die later in their lives, in the universal human way.

The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth was not like that. Jesus is raised never to die again, the Victor over the universal power of Death. Henceforth he is understood by his followers as the Giver of the undying life of the eternal realms of God—the same God who is the original Creator. The Christian community is founded on, and sustained by, that faith. Without the Resurrection, there is no Christianity.

I have often stated in public—waiting for someone to correct me—that if Jesus had not in truth been raised victorious over Death, we would never have heard of him. No one so far has contradicted me.

And so we come to the Gospel reading from the 20^th chapter of John, the Evangelist’s narrative of the happenings on Easter Day—the Day of Resurrection. We read that

Mary Magdalene stood weeping outside the tomb…She turned and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? She supposed him to be the gardener.

…She said to him, “Sir, if you have carried off his body, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabboni!”

Jesus said to her, “Go to my [disciples] and say to them that ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!”

Jesus said to her, “Mary,” and instantly she recognized him and knew he was alive.

I have a very particular memory of Judi and I wonder if you have likely had this experience also. In my all too infrequent visits to her on my way north to our house in the Berkshires, I would turn off Route 41 and head to Morey Road. Typically, she would be in the studio as I pulled into the parking area. She would come out—I remember this with unusual emotion—and she would look into my face and say just two syllables, “Fleming.”

What an extraordinary salutation this was. She was saying just the two syllables of my name… “Fleming” (“Mary”)…but in that response to my arrival she was somehow making me feel that she could summon up the depths of everything that I am—for better and worse—while at the same time affirming it and giving it some sort of unique meaning. Put another way, she wasn’t just saying “I am so glad to see you.” She was saying, “I am so glad to see YOU”—the unique person that I am with all the character defects and unnumbered sins that I have committed, but also the person that God created and has redeemed. When I think of that greeting from her, I think of the way our Lord spoke Mary’s name and, in doing so, communicated in those two syllables—“Mary”—his comprehensive knowledge of her, his “inestimable love” of her, and his total embrace of her in the commission that he then gives her. In this same way he speaks the name of all those who turn to him—and sometimes, as for instance in the case of the evangelist Matthew, he identifies and commands one who has not turned to him. I think Judi would want me to call your attention to the great masterpiece by Caravaggio which she probably saw dozens of times in Rome—“The Calling of Matthew.” Jesus enters the room, points to just one man among several, and says, “Follow me.” Matthew gestures, “Who…me?” But Jesus’ feet are already turned toward the door. Those whom he knows, he commands. “Mary…go to my brethren and tell them ‘I have seen the Lord.’”

As I was suggesting earlier, if Jesus had not truly been raised from the dead, we would never have heard of him. One of many factors that make this testimony about Mary Magdalen so convincing is that in the time of the apostles and evangelists, no one hoping to gain an audience for a preposterous piece of news would entrust the message to a woman…yet in the Gospel of John, the first person to carry the apostolic message was not only a woman, but a woman formerly of ill repute. This is a powerful argument for the validity of the story.

To return to the place of John’s narrative in the service here today: Note how many choices the narrator has, how many sayings of Jesus have been recalled and quoted over and over as the gospel spread around the world. The Fourth Evangelist has encapsulated the meaning of the relationship of the Lord to the ones who love him by giving him just one word to say—her name.

The Christian church gathers for the death of one of its members in a particular sense. This is not just a memorial to our beloved friend. It is a service of witness to the Resurrection…not resurrection in general, as if there were such a thing, but the raising of the Son of God who is the firstborn of the dead who trust in him…and, who knows, quite possibly those who do not trust in him, since we are talking here about the God who “calls into being those things which do not exist” (that is the Apostle Paul, writing to the Christians in Rome). So, then, a message for everyone here today.

I imagine I am not the only one here who noticed something special about Judi’s greeting when she saw a friend unexpectedly, or for the first time after an absence. It is as vivid to me as though it was a few minutes ago. I would pull up my car and she would emerge from her studio, her face alight, and she would say, “Fleming.” For me, the memory of that two-syllable greeting encapsulates everything she was to us. With the saying of the name, she invested each of us with our own distinct, unique self…but not our self alone, “self-created” as we seem to imagine today, but the self in relationship to the one speaking. When the risen Lord Jesus said, “Mary,” he restored her whole self from sin and death, from her previously demon-possessed life to the life that only the Creator of life can give. As Paul writes, the life that “We died unto sin once, but we live unto God.”

And so I doubt not that, on that day so dark for those she left behind, she entered the Jordan River, and she came up on the other side, and the Lord himself, whom she served so faithfully in his church for her whole life, the Lord Jesus himself looked deeply into her face and said, “Judi.”

May it be so also for you.