Playing in the Graveyard

When I was a child, our favourite playground was the cemetery. It was just a couple of hundred feet from our home. We spent hours playing in the graveyard – hide and seek and tag and climbing trees. And I’m about to tell you a story I’ve never told anyone before. I know, everyone thinks when ministers were kids, they were good kids. I don’t know if that’s true most of the time, but it wasn’t true for me. I got into lots of trouble.

Now, we didn’t intend any disrespect by our noisy antics in the cemetery, and I didn’t intend any disrespect the day I decided to see if I could leapfrog over a tombstone. I always thought a tombstone was somehow attached to the base on which it was sitting. Maybe some are and some aren’t, but when I tried to leapfrog over that tombstone it started to tip over. I was so astonished by this, without thinking, I grabbed it, trying to prevent it from falling over onto the ground. Well, let me tell you, in the contest between a desperate ten year old boy and several hundred pound slabs of granite, the granite is going to win every time! I didn’t slow it down one little bit, but what I did manage to do was to rip my hands open on the edge of that tombstone as it was falling. My astonished friends stood nearby, open mouthed and wide-eyed. The tombstone lay on the grass, unbroken, as I stood there looking down at my bloodied hands. Everyone took off for home, and as I went on my way, I concocted a tale to tell my mother, cause I sure wasn’t going to tell her the truth.

As I sat in the doctor’s office about an hour later with my mother beside me, the doctor looked down at my hands and said, “Well, young man, you really must have been running pretty fast when you fell on that gravel road. You still have some of the bits of stone and gravel under your skin.” You know, I never, ever told my mother what happened that day. She went to her grave still imagining her good, little boy fell while he was running.

That incident makes me think about the nature of graveyards. We children didn’t understand. For us, it was just a big playground with trees and hiding places, made more mysterious and dark by the presence of the scary secret of death. But on that day almost 60 years ago, I was introduced to pain in a graveyard, an experience which has become all too familiar for me.

This is the 31st anniversary of my father’s death. He died on the Saturday of the Easter weekend in 1995. I remember standing in the graveyard and crying as my father was buried. Playing in the graveyard was the last thing on my mind. As children playing in the graveyard, we had not yet learned the hard rules of life and death – of sorrow and tragedy characteristic of that place, but through the years, I’ve learned. Sooner or later, for all of us, it happens. Confronted with the dark reality of death, cemeteries seem more like prisons than like playgrounds. Prisons – holding our hopes captive, locking away our dreams, slamming shut the door on the future. Visits to the graveyard are more often accompanied by tears than by laughter.

In our Gospel reading today, Mary Magdalene goes to the graveyard. We might want to ask her what she was thinking that long ago morning. After surviving the unthinkable horror of Friday and the crucifixion, on the first day of the week in the early morning darkness, she is dealt the crowning blow – one more tragic and mysterious event in the long string of atrocities. The stone is rolled away. The tomb is empty. The body of Jesus is gone.

She runs back with the news, “They’ve taken the Lord out of the tomb. I don’t know where they’ve put his body!”

The helplessness opens the floodgate of tears. There is nothing she can do. They have taken him away to who knows where. It’s more than she can stand. They’ve won. The powers of evil are too great. Mary is helpless and hopeless.

“Why are you weeping?” the angel says to Mary.

Mary might well have asked the angel, “Why not?”

If you’re not weeping, you haven’t been paying attention! Don’t you read the newspapers, listen to the radio, or watch the news? Haven’t you noticed – the world is wracked with war and violence, the Middle East and Ukraine are daily bombarded by missiles and drones from the sky; inflation shrinks our buying power, house prices are out of control, fentanyl and homelessness are rampant in our cities, young people can’t find jobs and everyone is worried about the impact of artificial intelligence. Why shouldn’t we weep? What can we do but weep? There seems to be no choice left, but to play the world’s game of tragedy, heartache and tears.

Only a short time ago, Mary and the other disciples had been playing ‘follow the leader’ with Jesus running through the graveyards, taunting death. Remember Lazarus. He’d been rotting in the tomb for days. Yet he walked right out when Jesus called, “Ollie, ollie out and free!”

Back then, Jesus had dared them to imagine a different world. A world where masters wash the feet of their servants, and the one who comes in last is the winner. A world where the myth of scarcity is proven false by the five thousand plate banquet served from the contents of a little boy’s lunchbox, with more leftovers than all the Tupperware in the world could hold. A world where instead of survival of the fittest, wolves and lambs lie down together, and homelessness is unheard of.

Then, they had been like children playing in the graveyard. But now, it appears the game is over. Their team has lost. The graveyard is a stark reminder of their captivity – bondage to the powers of death, defeat, despair. There is nothing Mary can do, but as she sits weeping in the cemetery, the one she mistakes for the gardener calls her by name.

Peering through her tears, Mary recognizes Jesus. It is one of those eye opening moments. You blink and everything changes! God is still in the game! It’s too good not to be true! The powers of death have not won. All the old rules have changed! Mary realized she is not helpless. There is something she can do. She moves from weeping to witnessing, “I have seen the Lord!”

Mary discovers new purpose, new possibility, new hope. Disciples don’t have to play by old rules. In the resurrection, God breaks the bondage of evil and death. We are set free for life. Set free to imagine the world in a whole new way!

Thirty-one years ago, I stood in a graveyard and cried at my father’s grave. A few days later we returned to the cemetery. This time we took our children. They hadn’t been there earlier. They’d been at the funeral, but we worried about them coming to the cemetery. They were so young, it might be too much for them.

As we drove to the cemetery, I tried to explain why we were going. I said to them, “Grandpa is with Jesus.” I wasn’t sure what they heard or understood.

When we got there, they didn’t linger too long beside the grave. They were soon running around, as children will, playing in the graveyard, astounded by the variety of old tombstones. Suddenly, my son Paul, who was seven at the time, pointed to an especially large and old mausoleum – it was like a little house.

“Look,” he exclaimed, “That must be where Jesus lives!”

The wonderful logic of a child – if this is Grandpa’s grave, and he is with Jesus, well then, why not? We had thought the children were too young to understand, but perhaps they caught the glimpse of a truth we were too old to see.

The hope of the resurrection is this: the world is not just where Jesus died, the world is where Jesus lives! And because Jesus lives, because God has broken the powers of sin and death, we have been set free to live also.

Sometimes that’s hard to believe. The sadness and tragedies of life – the powers of evil – they seem to be in control. Sometimes it’s hard to see with the eyes of faith. But when we look with the eyes of faith, when we listen with the ears of hope, we discover anew the truth of what Mary proclaimed, “I have seen the Lord!”

We dare to imagine a different world – a world not imprisoned by the powers of sin and death, but set free, free for love and justice and peace! This is a day to celebrate! This is a day for playing in the graveyard!

We have been set free! So even though tears may be streaming down our cheeks at the tragedies of the world, we can leap up from our pew and follow our leader – running through the cemeteries and the streets, Pandora Avenue and Parliament Hill, Ukraine and Iran, the board room and the back alleys – challenging the power of death!

For Christ is risen! Hallelujah! We have seen the Lord!