So I went back on Saturday to pick up the cake. It’s three-thirty, I’m meeting the bishop at four, I have a very short window of time to pick up this cake. So I go to the front and I ask for my cake, and this very excited bakery worker comes out carrying this cake. He’s beaming from ear to ear. I should maybe haven taken this as a sign that something is amiss, but I did not. “Do you want to see it?” he asked. Now, truthfully, I did not care at this point, I had half an hour to get this cake back to Trinity, plus I just asked for four words in Easter colors, how exciting could this cake possibly be, right? But he was so excited that, “Sure,” I told him. “Show me the cake.” He carefully opened up the top of the box, I peered in, and a small army of frosting bunnies and chicks stared back at me. Now, in fairness, the cake did say “this is the night,” in small white letters in the corner, but the entire rest of the cake was covered with bunnies and chicks gleefully hiding jelly bean Easter eggs. It was, and remains to this day, the single most secular Easter cake I have ever seen in my whole life, it was like attack of the cartoon bunny. This is the cake I now have to serve to our bishop, at this our first ever Easter vigil. The bakery kid took my hesitation for amazement. “Do you like it?” he prodded. “Um, yes,” I replied uneasily. After all, it was three-thirty, what was I going to do at that point, I would be taking this cake. But I had enough self-respect to comment softly, “sure are an awful lot of bunnies on that cake…” “There ARE a lot of bunnies on the cake,” the bakery kid agreed delightedly. And then, with great confidence, “people love bunnies!”
And by the time I drove that cake the ten minutes from the bakery to Trinity, I had fallen in love with that cake. I have a picture of it on my phone, I can show it to you after the service, it was really an amazing piece of art. I mean, you couldn’t order a cake like this; it was the sort of thing that could only come from a happy accident. And the cake was so goofy, so joyful, that it filled me with joy. I’d been pretty anxious in the days and weeks leading up to our Easter vigil last year. I knew it was a new thing to our communities, and I was worried that it wouldn’t go over well. I wanted you to love it; I wanted it to be perfect. But as soon as the ridiculous bunny cake was in my car, I knew I had to let the whole thing go. This is going to sound weird, but the cake felt like God whispering in my ear, “this is out of your control. Resurrection is my gig, not yours. Your best efforts are like this cake, trying too hard. So just go with it. It’s going to be ok.” It was like a weight lifted off my shoulders. “I have seen resurrection,” I told the bishop when he arrived, and it looks like an army of bunnies.
And something else you may not know, our bunny cake went viral. The bishop tweeted a picture of our amazing cake, and it got picked up and passed around the ELCA. People from all over were talking about those two Lutheran churches in Battle Creek, this great vigil they’d done together, and their amazing vigil bunny cake. It was strange, it was goofy, and it felt like new life.
Strange, amazing, and just a little bit goofy is how the resurrection story in John’s Gospel always feels to me. It starts out so unassuming, with Mary going to the tomb of Jesus early in the morning, while it was still dark. She went empty-handed and alone. She was not going to anoint his body, Joseph and Nicodemus had already done that, she was not going to witness resurrection, she saw Jesus die, she knew the stone had been placed in front of the tomb, but something, something she could not yet put a finger on, drew her out of bed and to the tomb, in the dark before dawn of that spring Sunday morning. And almost immediately, the story gets weird. See the stone that should have been blocking the entrance to the tomb, was gone. So Mary ran and got Simon Peter and the other disciple to come and see what she had found. And Simon Peter and the other disciple set off in some sort of a strange footrace, which Peter looses, a detail which always seemed kind of unnecessary. One of the early church fathers, Ishodad of Merv, attributed the other disciple’s greater speed to the fact that he was unmarried, do with that fun tidbit of information whatever you wish. So anyway, the other disciple got there first, but then he just hung out outside of the tomb. So Peter arrived, huffing and puffing, and he blundered into the tomb, which blundering, if you think about it, is kind of how poor Peter does everything in the scriptures. Peter is like the over-excited puppy of the Gospels, he’s got the attention span of a four-year-old squirrel. So Peter bumbled into the tomb, saw the linen wrappings and that’s all we get. So then the other disciple went in, and he saw and believed, whatever that meant, because the Bible immediately followed up by saying, “for as yet they did not understand the scripture…” And then they both went home. We all have different ways of responding to shock, and for the disciples it seems this new surprise was too much to process. Believing or not, they were going back home.
So Mary found herself alone again, outside the tomb, weeping. I always wonder what was behind her response. Was it grief over the death of Jesus? Shock at the disciples’ weird behavior? Exhaustion from too many days and nights of struggling to sleep? Anxiety over what would come next? As Mary stood there weeping, the grave clothes were replaced by angels. And you know when you reach that point in grief or exhaustion or pain or whatever, when something else happens, and you don’t even have the emotional energy to get upset anymore? Mary seems to be there. Two angels appeared, and she’s just like, sure, whatever, now this. And proceeded to have a totally normal conversation with the two angelic figures who just popped up in the enclosed space she’s peering into.
So then Jesus appeared, but Mary mistook him for the gardener. Which again I think is an interesting description for John in include. The angels she just rolled with, but the appearance of Jesus himself, he must be the gardener. She begged him, “sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” And then Jesus said a single word to her. Mary. Her name. And all at once, she realized to whom she spoke. “Rabbouni,” she declared, which means teacher. “Do not hold onto me,” Jesus commanded, “but go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Do not hold onto me, I am ascending; there is a lightness, an airiness, in Jesus’ words to Mary. And even in the text you can feel the weight lifting off Mary’s shoulders. You can feel the burden of grief, of pain, of fear, lifted away. And Mary ran. In my mind I imagine her running with reckless abandon down the same worn path that Peter and the other disciples had gone ahead of her, hair flying loose behind her in the first rays of sunlight, feet kicking up dust in the fresh morning breeze, busting in into the house where the disciples sat, neither waiting nor wondering, because there was nothing to wait and wonder for, until Mary declared, “I have seen the Lord!”
Belief of resurrection did not come immediately to them, but it came. In the Sundays following Easter we will hear the other resurrection appearances of Jesus, we will see how the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection dawns on the disciples one at a time. It came to the disciples in the upper room, it came to Thomas in the wounds in Jesus’ hands and side, it came to Peter in questions, and on through the list, until it comes even to us. From Mary’s declaration, news of the resurrection went viral across time and space. We gather this evening because Jesus convinced Mary that he was not, in fact, the gardener, and she went out and told the world.
I don’t know how this resurrection miracle will come to you. If it will come in the waters of baptism, in the wine of communion, in the fellowship of friends, or the words of a song. If you receive it with weeping or running or walking away. For me, oddly, it seems to show up in bunny cakes. What I know about resurrection is it is persistent. In this Gospel, and in all the stories we read leading up to this Gospel, we see a God who continually shows up again and again. Each day declaring creation good, each day leading Noah through the flood, each day calling come to the water, come and buy milk without price, each day delivering us to the places we need to go, each day shutting the mouths of the lions who stand against us, each day standing beside us and calling our names until we know the one who stands beside us. So this evening, I invite you to lean into the glorious absurdity of it all. Christ is risen. Alleluia. Alleluia. Amen.
Vigil Cake 2015
Vigil Cake 2016
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