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Grace, mercy, and peace be unto you from God, our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, the text for this morning comes from the Gospel reading.

This is a special lady, Mary Magdalene, because of what God chose her to proclaim to His blessed apostles in that locked room who were gathered there because of their own fears. God took this woman out of whom he had driven seven demons and placed in her lips the very words to speak to His apostles. Words that she did not have to make up in her own head. Words that she did not have to figure out and find the right construction. Words given to her from the lips of her Lord. No different than you or me. We don’t have to come up with new jingles to speak to someone about our faith, but merely the words that God has already given us, things that He has accomplished in us and through us and to us by these proclamations. These are the things that continue to extend the kingdom in this world.

Now, our doors are not locked as they were nearly two thousand years ago, but the doors of the church were locked for nearly three hundred years after Christ had ascended into Heaven. For the church was a persecuted lot, accused and ridiculed and mocked, crucified and burned at the stake and thrown to lions and wild animals in the great arenas of Rome. All in fun and jest. But we are gathered here because we’re different and set apart from the world, just as the church has always been. And though we live in a day where we can still remember the grand days of old when the church was the favored child of our nation, it is no longer so, and it is becoming more and more apparent that what we are gathered around here to confess and believe is markedly at odds with the rest of the world. Markedly at odds with the rest of the world as it was in the first few centuries and as the church has always been. And that’s not a difficult burden but a very difficult burden to bear because we are set apart. But the same thing that empowered these apostles to go forth from that closed room with fears in their hearts was God’s Word delivered to them by Mary, and it is the same thing that God uses for you and me gathered here in a nation and in a world that totally disagrees with what we are proclaiming and preaching, believing and confessing to be true. It is what empowers and emboldens us to leave here.

But notice how God does these things. That is very important indeed, for we all wish to have that emboldened courage. We all wish to have the ability to speak loving and kindly, but to speak clearly and succinctly of truth that there may be confidence brought about and wrought by such truth. The kind of stuff that is substantive, not a spiritualizing philosophy, but flesh and blood substance like the resurrected Lord revealed Himself to Mary and to these blessed apostles. Flesh and blood. Not spiritualizing. Not philosophizing. Not memory making, but real concrete flesh and blood. The same kind about which Job wrote and confessed. “Yet in my flesh I shall see God. Yea, with my own eyes I shall see Him. How my heart yearns within me.”

So when she sees the Lord, she does not recognize Him because she’s so overwhelmed with grief and sorrow. Many of us have been blinded by such grief and sorrow over many things. I had a phone call that kind of shook up my house about a good friend of my beloved bride, a high school and even church friend with whom she grew up, whose son who was the same age as our son took his own life because of the many demons that he struggled with inside of his very mind and heart. That does cause one to stop and ponder. It causes one to look at and shake your head and….Why? That’s the kind of world we live in, but it’s nothing new, is it? The church has always existed in such a world with tragedy and grief that overwhelms us, crushes us seemingly, and leaves us not recognizing God’s great grace and gifts. And instead of coming with pomp and circumstance and a trumpet’s horn does Jesus quietly reveal Himself and gently to Mary by merely speaking her name,“Mary.” She grabs hold of Him because she does not want to lose what finally her physical eyes have seen, but having touched and embraced flesh and blood, mind you, resurrected flesh and blood, does Jesus point her to something that’s the same but different. Different in that He will not reign in the world and in the church in the same way that He reigned for those thirty-three years in a physical form to be seen, touched, and handled and tasted. Same in that He has and will continue to rule the world, but especially manifest in the church, in the room where the church gathers with resurrected body and blood. Something you can taste, touch, see, and hear just as Mary and the apostles did.

That’s the kind of comfort that God wishes to proclaim to you in the midst of grief and things that do not make sense and overwhelm us. It is not mythological. It is not a fairy tale or merely something to remember. It is real. As real as the person whom you have an arm around or sit next to and feel warmth from the flesh. It is as real as the sound of their voice in your ears, as the shape of their body before your eyes, and the smell of their own perfume or cologne or just the smell of them like a little boy or little girl that we love to put our noses to their heads and smell that soft baby smell. That is Heaven, brothers and sisters. That is how Jesus revealed Himself to His holy apostles through Mary’s proclamation, first and foremost.

And the message He told her to proclaim, “Go tell my brothers,” it’s the first time and only time that God in the flesh refers to His believers as brothers and not friends as He spoke earlier. If he refers to you and to me as brothers, we are then sharing a common Father. Common in the fact of our faith. By nature for Him, it is His Father. By faith and grace, we call Him our Father. Same thing. He is my God and your God. By nature, He is His God. By faith and grace, we call Him our God. And if we are brothers, then we will inherit what our Brother Christ Jesus showed Himself to be to Mary, a flesh and blood resurrected person, God in the flesh. Not a specter or a ghost, but a real live person, and in the same way that He revealed Himself to Mary, so He revealed Himself to the disciples when He appeared to them in the locked room for fear and spoke words of peace to them that they would be comforted by not only the words of proclamation but by flesh and blood that they would touch and see and hear, just as we gather here to hear those same words preached to us, to touch Christ our Lord and to taste and hear Him who comes to us in flesh and blood and not in abstraction but an incarnation that brings comfort to His people, the church, and sustains us, the bread from Heaven during our pilgrimage in this God-forsaken world.

This is your and my hope that we leave here with and are comforted by. And as Mary left the Lord’s presence with confidence and trust, though she had physically let go of Him, so we, though we leave this place, are still comforted because here is where we have heard our Lord speak our names and speak words of peace to us, where our Lord lays upon our lips and our mouths His very self to bring us that which alone brings peace, which is forgiveness. And where there is forgiveness, there is Christ, and where there is Christ, there is life. And where there is life, there is always great joy and peace.

John’s Gospel is the only Gospel that contains this great proclamation of Mary to His blessed apostles. Later on in that same chapter is read that which we sing before we have the Gospel reading read to us. “These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” Amen.

The peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds on Christ Jesus to life everlasting.

Amen.