There was a little girl whose name was TANYA. It was a gorgeous autumn day and she was biking in her neighborhood. She loved racing down the sidewalks and watching the leaves fall, sometimes almost in her face. The air was crisp, the kind of chilliness that seems to wake you up and help you feel alive. She biked faster and faster! Faster and faster and faster! She was so fast, so free. It was beautiful. She felt like she was flying.
After awhile, she got tired. Her breath was coming in gasps. She had to slow down. And it was then that she looked around.
It hit her with a cold finality. She was lost.
So the little girl turned her bike around and began to peddle frantically in the direction in which she came, but nothing looked at all familiar. She got a pain in the pit of her stomach. The more she looked around, the more lost she felt. She began to cry. Soon she stopped her bike and just wailed.
A policeman was driving by with his windows down, enjoying the cool crisp air. He stopped his car. “Are you OK?” he asked. When she told him that she was lost, he volunteered to put her bike in the back of his car and drive her around until she found her way. “Well,” she said, looking straight into his eyes, “My mom told me not to talk to strangers but that policemen were OK. So you must be OK, right?” The policeman smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I am OK.”
So they got her bike into the car and she got to ride in the backseat. He told her to look out the window and see if she recognized anything. At first, she couldn’t see anything that looked familiar and that same feeling of panic in her belly came again. But then, she saw it. Her church. She saw the brown stone and the tall bell tower. “You can stop here!” she yelled. “That is my church! I know my way from here…”
“Are you sure that you don’t want me to drive you home?” he asked.
“No.” she said. “I know my way from here.”
When Jesus died, his friends were lost in the worst kind of way. They loved him and looked to him for guidance. They ran away as he was killed and it only got worse when they saw that someone had even stolen his body from the tomb. But there was one person who never left Jesus. She was not the one that you would have thought. She was a crazy woman, a woman who had been possessed by demons that made her act crazy. When Jesus was forced to carry the cross, she followed him. She alone is present at the cross in all four of the gospels. She alone is present at his tomb. Her name was Mary Magdalene.
Mary was totally lost but she did not leave Jesus’ side. Instead she just stayed with him and cried. That is how we see her this morning, she is weeping outside of his burial site. Just crying her eyes out because she feels so lost.
All of you have felt lost at some point in your lives. You wonder why it is that you were born or what it is that you are supposed to be doing with your life. Someone that you love has died or has left you alone. And all of a sudden, you are not sure why you are alive or what any of this is all about. You sit alone in darkness.
Many people try to pretend that they are not lost. They get busy or try to forget their pain. They fill themselves up with food or drinks or stuff to make themselves forget that they are lost. But Jesus does not show his resurrection to people who run away from being lost. Jesus does not show his resurrection to people who pretend that everything is OK. Jesus shows eternal life to Mary, to the one who stays still even when things are really bad, the person who tells the truth and admits that she is lost and alone and afraid. Jesus comes to us when we sit alone in the pit of despair, that is the best place for him to come.
What is eternal life? It is nothing that can be described or understood with our brains. No one has ever described it or evaluated it. It is very simple and yet impossible to understand. Resurrection is your compass. It means that you have been found by God. And you will never be left alone again.
Gil Ott was in Vietnam. He was high on drugs, anything that he could get his hands on, he took. He smoked and he drank. Anything to try to forget the fact that he was in hell. Anything to try and forget the fact that he was killing people that he didn’t even know. He was trying to escape his own mind and he had never been more alone.
It was the middle of the night and the Viet cong had them surrounded. Everyone was shooting madly into the darkness. Gil knew that he might die at any moment. He was firing all around himself, trying to kill them before they killed him. And then, all of a sudden, the firing stopped.
There was this silence. Incredible sllence. Beyond all words. Beyond all meaning. The sun had just begun to rise and it filtered through the leaves on the trees. And Gil was there.
The fighting resumed. It was just as crazy as before. Gil returned to hell, but something inside of him had shifted.
Three years after Vietnam ended, he was lost again. Lost in drugs and alcohol, not knowing who he was or why he was in so much pain, and he wandered into a Quaker meeting. “It was that silence,” he would later tell me. “It called to me. I wanted to experience it again. It found me.”
From the day that Gil wandered into a Quaker meeting, he began his search for that silence, that stillness. He found it in Scripture, in church, in Jesus. What he had found was resurrection.
By the time that I met Gil, he was in Seminary.
How does it go, that part of the great hymn Amazing Grace? I used to sing it in the nursing home and people who seemed almost dead would come alive and sing with me…
I once was lost but now I’m found. I was blind but now I see.
You do not need to be a great theologian to understand what happened when Jesus rose from the dead. All that you need to know is that he found you. He found you in the darkest place, in your death. He found you in your death and your despair. He found you weeping by his tomb and he called your name.
And you will never be alone again.
What is church to me? It is where I find my direction in life. It is my home. When I walk into this place, I can breathe more deeply. I can see more clearly.
Resurrection doesn’t just happen this morning. It happens whenever God finds you and lets you know that he is there. It happens whenever the eternal one touches our mortal lives. It happens in glimpses of beauty. It happens when you look at the person you love and your heart is full.
There is no where that you can go where Jesus has not been. Even in the worst most frightening places of your lives, he is there, waiting for you, saying your name, holding out his hand to you.
You are not lost, he says. You have been found. You have been found.
