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This morning, let me be, if not the first, one of the earliest to wish you…Happy April Fools’ Day!
No,wait a minute, I’m the bishop, so I should be wishing you a Happy and Blessed Easter Morning!
So it is, this day on the calendar when the season of Easter begins on the very 1st day of April, April Fools’ Day.
Every year, on the very first day of Easter, the Church proclaims again the good news that Mary Magdalene, the first apostle, the first to see the Risen Lord, did not keep that news to herself but told her friends, told them the very good news that the life and the love of Jesus is greater than the power and the hatred of the Empire. The Empire placed Jesus on a cross and Jesus’ love transformed a symbol of demonic torture into a sign that divine love is perfected in the broken tomb. Easter is a season when the church emphatically proclaims… such foolishness.
St. Paul, in a letter to the church in Corinth, told them “the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” So, from the very beginning, early followers of the Resurrected Jesus knew that others thought them to be foolish to proclaim a belief that a dead man was no longer dead. They knew that their Teacher’s words about God’s love for all being lived out in flesh and blood, in here and now, struck many others as delusional.
Now, as a preacher, I know a lot about Easter. But, I have to admit, I do not know that much about April Fools’ Day. I do recall a few half-hearted attempts at it, but mostly my family ignored it. My mother worked for a Certified Public Accountant, so our big April holiday was always Tax Day and the day after when you could talk to Mom again.
But I do have a friend in North Carolina, named Mallory, who grew up in a family that loved April Fools’ Day. It was a kind of Springtime Christmas day for them. She told me that for her family it was important that April Fools’ Day jokes not be hurtful and that they should only last for a few seconds. You were not to drag out the joke, allowing a loved one to be misled for half a day. For only a few seconds did you leave them in suspense and uncertainty, before shouting, “April Fools!”
She told me about the time her mother, after a 2 mile run in Alabama, came back to the house and told her little brother that she had seen a kangaroo. That same brother, a few years later, somehow got on the intercom at school and told his entire class they were going to Disney World. And years later, her younger sister called her older brother, now living in Birmingham with great news. The younger sister had gotten a new job in Birmingham and was so looking forward to it. The only hitch was she needed to camp in their backyard for the summer.
So, you get the picture. You tell a story, you are all in, with energy and enthusiasm (“I saw a KANGAROO!”), it’s not a hurtful story, but then you quickly admit it is not true. That is how you did April Fools’ Day at my friend’s house.
Some of those rules are helpful for us to consider, not for telling April Fools’ jokes, but for proclaiming the Good News of the Resurrected Jesus. We can consider Mary Magdalene and her telling of her news, her foolish news, to her friends as how you and I might tell others this news about Jesus.
First, Mary Magdalene had a story. She had an encounter with a man in a garden. She thought him to be the gardener.
Now, that makes sense. She is standing in a garden, and there is a man that she does not recognize. Gardener would be a good guess. But when the man calls out her name she knows who it is. It is Jesus.
She knows that Jesus has been crucified, because she was there. And she knows that Jesus died, because she was there. So, she knows it does not make sense for this to be Jesus standing before her. But she also knows her name and the sound of her name when Jesus says her name. So, she believes the foolishness that this is Jesus before her. She has a story to tell.
Along with a story to tell, Mary Magdalene is all in. She does not privatize her faith. She does not keep this news as some kind of interior belief, some kind of personal truth. She wants people to know that she has seen Jesus. She is all in and is telling the news.
The news she is telling is not hurtful. The Good News of Jesus Christ is not hurtful news (say AMEN). If you have ever been in a church and heard hurtful news, well you were not hearing the gospel of saving grace extended to all by the sacrificial love of Jesus. You were hearing some other kind of foolishness. You were hearing someone’s prejudice, someone’s bigotry, someone’s fear about the other, about us and them, about insiders and outsiders.
The Good News of Jesus is not hurtful, it is healing. Now, to be clear, the good news of Jesus places demands upon us and asks us to grow and to change and to be transformed. And that is not always easy, rarely easy. But it is life-giving, it is truth-telling, it is world changing.
Now we get to the place where Easter Sunday and April Fools’ Day part ways. For my friend on April Fools’ Day, it was important quickly to admit that the story is not true. For Mary Magdalene, she believed the story of the Risen Jesus. She believed it was the truest thing she knew.
According to tradition, Mary Magdalene once stood before the Emperor in Rome and confessed her faith in the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. In her confession, she picked up a hen’s egg to illustrate a point about resurrection. The Emperor laughed at her and said there was as much chance of a man returning to life as there was for the egg to turn red. The egg turned red. Mary Magdalene chose to believe in Jesus and not the Empire.
Later this week, we will mark an anniversary. Typically, anniversaries are times when we celebrate, when we give thanks. However, the anniversary we will mark is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
On April 4th, 1968, Dr. King was shot down in Memphis. He was in Memphis because he believed the foolishness that black sanitation workers were men and not merely instruments for cheap labor. But that wasn’t all the foolishness he believed.
He believed that Rosa Parks should sit in the front of the bus, not the back. He believed that schools where blacks and whites studied together made us stronger, not weaker. He believed that segregation was sinful, not simply tradition. He believed that racism, while it inflicted real pain and consequence upon African-Americans, also enslaved and corroded the souls of white Americans. He believed that non-violent protest was a tool for change and that such protest was deeply patriotic. He believed that the gospel of Jesus was not simply about saving your soul but it was about setting in motion a Beloved Community that could practice and live out holy principles of true and abundant life.
Let’s face it. Dr. King was a holy fool.
Like Mary Magdalene, Dr. King stood before the Emperor and told the Emperor, time and time again, that Dr. King believed in the foolishness of the Risen Jesus rather than the hurtful news of the Empire.
We gather this day, not because it is April Fools’ Day. We gather this day because it is Easter and Mary Magdalene never stopped running from that garden.
She ran to her friends and she told them, “I have seen the Lord.” But she kept running. She ran to the Emperor and told the Emperor, “I have seen the Lord.”
But she kept running. She ran to the antebellum South and she told slaves, “I have seen the Lord,” But she kept running. She ran to the segregated South and she told African-American boys and girls, “I have seen the Lord.” But she kept running. And she kept running. And she is running still, even now.
She has news. She has a story. She is all in, with enthusiasm and energy, with a story she believes more than anything she knows. It is not hurtful, it is healing.
It is news, however, that will change us, move us, grow us up into something new, something real, something that looks like the gardener, until you look again, and you hear your name, and you know your name, and you know it is Jesus standing before you.
And then you have a choice. What will you do with such foolish news? Who will you tell? How then, will we live?
Have a blessed and happy and world-changing Easter.
