Mary the Tower (John 11:17-27)2/21/2024
Good evening, Beloved of God, and welcome to Lent, and to this journey into some of our historical church roots through ancestors of the faith you may or may not know. As we’ve mentioned, over the course of the next 6 weeks, we will be introducing you to towering ancestors from each continent whose witness and ministries have shaped the church eternal and guide us even still, whether or not we knew their names before now.
And it’s my honor tonight to peer into the life and ministry of one of our most misunderstood, misidentified, troped, and erased ancestors whose life offers deep roots in the ground and wide-ranging perspective at its spire. Her name is Mary called Magdalene, or -- literally, in the Greek -- Mary, the Tower. Hold on to her name, and let’s begin where we meet her first in the Gospels, which is not John 17 but Luke 8:1-3 where she is named in brief alongside “many women” who became Jesus’s disciples after he healed them of illnesses and demons. These women, according to author Cynthia Bourgeault, form an “opposite and equal female presence” among Jesus’s followers which tells us “participation in Christ’s inner circle was determined not by gender but by their degree of understanding and commitment. And all four gospels infallibly place Mary called Magdalene within that inner circle.” Back to Luke 8: Mary called Magdalene’s particularity here is that she was “liberated from seven demons.” Now, further into Luke 8 we meet the only other possessed person whose demons were also named with particularity -- he’s the man so tormented by the demons named Legion that he’s literally been living in a graveyard. I’m naming him here to underscore that demon possession ravaged a person to such a degree that those who were freed from many at once, be it seven or Legion, would’ve had a uniquely powerful understanding of what it meant to be liberated and transformed. We’ll come back to this. The next time Mary Magdalene is named is when all four gospels, which rarely agree on anything as a quartet, place her as a witness to Jesus’s crucifixion, burial, and as the first person to Jesus’s empty tomb. Already, we can see that her importance within Church history has been diminished; her roots -- our roots -- haven’t been well-tended.
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 This sermon was originally preached on February 11, 2024 at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN. The livestream of our contemporary and traditional services may be viewed here and here. Today's gospel text: Mark 9:2-9 Good morning, Gethsemane. How many of you read The Very Hungry Caterpillar before today? And how many of you have actually seen a caterpillar transform into a beautiful butterfly? I love butterflies and this story so much because they show us in vivid color what a caterpillar must do to Become, with a capital B. They must undergo full metamorphosis.
In nature, this is an extraordinary process of utter, total transformation -- the transfiguring from one kind of being and body to another one entirely. For butterflies, that process happens across four stages -- egg, larva, pupa, and adult. And According to Wonderopolous, an educational hub created designed for kids but also perfect for my own grown-up imagination, it is “During this Pupa stage that the caterpillar's old body dies and a new body forms inside a protective shell known as a chrysalis…. There, the caterpillar's body digests itself from the inside out. The same juices it once used to digest food as a larva it now uses to break down its own body…into cells called imaginal cells. Imaginal -- or, imagined -- cells are undifferentiated, which means they can become any type of cell. Many of these imaginal cells are used to form the new body.” What’s striking to me about that whole process -- aside from the fact that it’s magical and gross -- is that 80% of all animal species do it. Not in the exact same way, but they go through metamorphosis. It also strikes me that biologically, anyway -- and as far as we know so far -- humans don’t. AMY COURTSSermons + Songs + Poems Archives
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