It was the bottom of the fifth inning at a Blue Jays game this past summer when I was seated with a friend of mine who was visiting Toronto to participate in an Indy race. It was great to share some drinks and food, and I was having a wonderful time – because the tickets were free! I am of Scottish descent, trust me. And, my family is listening. Oh, dear. I enjoyed it, except for the fact that the Blue Jays were awful. It was the bottom of the fifth and it was 7-1 for the opposing team.
Two people who were sitting next to us, through most of the game had been shouting expletives at the Blue Jays players for their inadequacies, decided that they had had enough. So they got up and left. They were large people and they had to pass in front of us. They knocked over our drinks, popcorn, and chips. They were so mad they didn’t even know what they were doing. They went to the steps and stormed out. “It is a disgrace!” the husband said.
The very next moment, Jose Bautista got up to bat. You know what is coming, don’t you? He hit the ball out of the park – and the next inning, and the next inning, and the next inning! The Blue Jays rose, not like a Blue Jay, but like a Phoenix, and won 8-7. I thought, “Those fools who left at halftime. It almost makes the spilling of the drinks worth it knowing that they had missed one of the great come-backs of the summer.” I gloated! Not a Christian thing to do. Nevertheless, it was the lesson: don’t leave at halftime.
Somebody has captured this in a brilliant book that was given to me this past year. It is by Bob Buford. He writes books on management and ways to deal with crises in business and in personal life. He happens to be a Christian, but his books aren’t written with a Christian intention per se. He has written this marvellous book, entitled Stuck in Halftime. Peter Drucker, the great theorists says, “This is one of the best books that anyone can read.”
Stuck in Halftime is about people, who in their careers face a roadblock or a mid-life crisis, and they don’t know what to do next. They are unsure of the future. They are not sure that their past career can continue any longer, and so they get stuck in halftime. He argues they need to move on. It is not just people in work and in business. It is people who have had setbacks or losses in their lives and are unsure what to do. He maintains it is even for students and new graduates, who often become discouraged when they look at the marketplace and wonder whether the highlight of their life was actually their graduation and that there is nothing further for them. They are stuck at halftime!
As a Christian, he gives us some glimpses into deeper things. For example, in the beginning of one of his chapters, he quotes from one of the great T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “What we call the beginning is often the end. And, to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
He argues that there is something greater out there than we can imagine and that it is i that end, that finale, that consummation and completion that should keep us going when we are stuck at halftime.
Now, Christians are not fatalists. We don’t believe that everything is just going to work out okay. We are not just positive thinkers – although there is nothing wrong with being a positive thinker. We believe in something deeper, what T. S. Eliot believed in: that in our end is our beginning, and our end is God and our beginning is God. The Bible puts it this way: Jesus is our “Alpha” and our “Omega” our beginning and our end.
When we get stuck at halftime, it is as if we have forgotten that there is an end, that there is something more, that there is something else. I run into people all the time who are stuck at halftime. There are people who have experienced all manner of things in their lives, but have no great sense of calling, no real purpose that drives them forward, no real spiritual experience on which to draw. They find fleeting joys from little sins once in a while, but they just cover up the malaise and the morass of their lives. They are stuck in halftime. They don’t know what the future is, and they don’t really seem to care. They are just there, living their lives, but with no real power in it.
You might be like them this morning. You might be stuck at halftime. Well, if you are, you are not alone, and there is good news. You are not alone, because clearly one of the people stuck at halftime in her life was Mary Magdalene. Margaret read for us that epic story of the encounter between Mary and a stranger in the garden. But before that, what is really telling is that Mary Magdalene, who had loved Jesus, who had worshipped Jesus, who considered him Lord, anticipated him to be the Messiah, and had seen him crucified goes to the tomb where he is buried.
Tombs were commonplace for families to be buried in. There was a very large stone, and I have seen them in Israel, where you roll the stone along a track in front of the entrance to a tomb, the idea being that you can add family members as time goes along. But to remove one of those stones is an incredible thing. It takes a great deal of strength and planning. Mary goes to the tomb of Jesus simply to pay her respects, and what does she find? She finds that the stone has been moved!
Immediately, she thinks that someone has stolen the body. They had taken the body of the Lord, and she runs back to Peter and to John, and she says, “They have stolen the body of the Lord!” Peter and John then go with her to have a look, and Peter stands back, but John goes inside. We assume it is John, the beloved disciple. He goes in and he believes. What does he believe? He believes everything that Jesus had told him: that on the third day he would rise again, that the grave would not hold him, that they would see each other again. John believed. Peter ran away. He believed, but Mary, Mary was stuck at halftime.
Mary goes back after all this. She is crying. She thinks the game is over: someone has stolen her Lord! That is the only rational explanation she can think of. She weeps. Jesus told her she would weep. He said so earlier in the Gospel: “Mary you will weep over me.” It doesn’t seem to matter. She is overcome by grief. She thinks it is over. She is stuck at halftime. She is inconsolable!
Are there not many people, maybe even we who have come here this morning, for when we look at the reality of the Resurrection of Jesus, we think: “Oh, we can accept that he was crucified. We can accept that he was dead and buried. We can accept that he was a good man. We can believe in his great teachings. We can recite his prayers. We can praise him for being the magnificent, wonderful Jesus of Nazareth, but the Resurrection? We are not sure.” We are stuck at halftime.
Our reason escapes us to think that a dead man would be raised from the dead. Reason escapes us that a tomb which was a burial has become an empty place. We are incredulous! We listen to the themes and the stories of the doubters and the sceptics and we are not sure if they are right. Be honest with me, please! Be honest with yourself! Deep down, you come here on Easter Sunday morning, and you are like Mary, and you are wondering.
This last week, I wrote this to some of my friends who are ministers and I said how hard it was to try to capture the wonder and the majesty of the Resurrection: I feel inadequate. One of them wrote back something that was inspirational. In fact, you know him. He has preached here. It is Dr. Paul Wilson of Emmanuel College. Paul wrote these words to me, and they were personal words, but I said, “Paul, they are so magnificent, can I quote them?”
He said, “By all means read them.”
Andrew:
We are like so many others on Easter Sunday: we need the Spirit. In some ways, the Resurrection is no big deal. So many people seem to be okay with the notion of God, who created everything, but they have trouble with organized religion, and the Resurrection is a deal-breaker. That is odd given how vast is the Universe, and current estimates that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies like our own Milky Way. I tend to think that if God created everything out of nothing, then for God to raise Jesus from the dead is no big deal. Still, I realise for us it is everything.
Paul has grasped the reality that the immensity of the encounter with Mary is in fact so incredibly marvellous and spectacular that only God could do it. Only God could meet Mary at the point of her doubts and her needs.
Some of you, however, are still stuck at halftime. Some of you are still dealing with grief and losses in your life and the disappointment of having loved ones taken from you, or having sickness and doubt in your family, or having children who are ill. You are thinking: “I am stuck at halftime because I am still weeping, and I can’t get beyond the reality of the grief and the mourning that I have!” Or, you have reached a point where you are disappointed with God. You have asked God to do something and he hasn’t answered you. You have pleaded with him, and nothing has taken place. You are like Mary at the tomb and you are stuck at halftime, and you think that the game is over.
Wait, there is more. The tension rises. Mary goes back to the tomb. This time she looks in. There, she is confronted with something she can’t describe: almost the appearance of two bodies, one at each end, spiritual bodies – angels. They say, “Why are you looking for him here? Why are you here?”
She wants to know what they have done with Jesus, and says, “What have you done with his body?”
She comes out of the tomb, and she runs into what she thinks is the gardener. The gardener says, “Why are you crying? What are you looking for?”
We know, because we get to read the Bible that the gardener is Jesus, but she doesn’t know. This is the mystery. Mary says, “If you know where He is, if you put Him somewhere (as the gardener), I want to go to Him. I want to find Him.”
Does the gardener give a rational response or an argument? No! He says one word – the word that created Christianity! He said, “Mary” and she knew who He was!
Jesus had predicted earlier, “The sheep will know the voice of the shepherd” and she knew his voice. She says, “Rabboni (teacher)!” – But more than that, “Beloved teacher!” She knew that the victory had been won. She knew that her tears were no longer needed, and her crying was no longer a necessity. She had gone beyond halftime. She had finally gone to full time.
Jesus, whose burial she had come to witness was raised from the dead: victorious! She was the witness to the Resurrection. As Dr. Craig Evans, the great New Testament scholar, says, “It is her witness that is the reason we are here. She is our evidence for the Resurrection.” Her declaration when she goes back to the disciples says, “He is alive! Jesus is risen!”
But wait, there is more, there is overtime! The game might be over, but it isn’t finished! Mary wants to hold on to Jesus in his raised spiritual body, some combination of matter that is hard for us to understand and define. She needed to break beyond that which was holding her. She needed to see other possibilities. It needed her to go and to live in faith.
In 1879, there was a young Jewish boy who was born to parents who were business people. This boy seemed very much an introvert and very ill at ease with himself. He was clever and smart, but really not well adjusted. He suffered because of anti-Semitism. It had made him shy, so-much-so that his parents decided that because he was clever but he wasn’t well adjusted, they should have him examined (very much like Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory!) So they do, and conclude that he is bright but not very outgoing.
In 1895, he writes the exams to the polytechnic in Zurich and he fails them. He is depressed. He is stuck at halftime. He doesn’t know what the future is. So he rewrites the exams, and this time he passes. Finally, a few years later, he goes to the University of Zurich and gets his doctorate, but it is not a particularly good doctorate, not a particularly edifying thesis in many ways and he can’t get a good job. He is stuck at halftime!
He goes and works as a patent examiner for a firm in Berne in Switzerland, and it appeared that he was forever stuck at halftime. But, in his mind, in his brain, was the Theory of Relativity. In this young man who was uncertain and unsure was the brilliance of Albert Einstein! He rose above halftime. He contributed to humanity in a profound way beyond halftime. He would not let the defeats and the bigotry and the problems being with people socially stand in his way: he was going to rise above it and do something greater and do something more powerful.
The problem that so many of us have is that we read the story of the Resurrection and we understand what has happened to Mary, and we glorify in it, but it doesn’t actually come and touch us in our hard time. It doesn’t reach into our souls and change us. That is what Jesus wants to do. It is no good celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus as just an historical artifact or a moment in time if we ourselves are not open to being changed by him now. He says to Mary, “Look, I have got to leave you. I have to go and be with my Father. I am going to send my Spirit, and my Spirit will be poured out on my people.”
In other words, “Mary, it is not just about your crying. It is not just about this moment. It is forever.” It is for you. It is for me. It is for those weeping, for those stuck in halftime, who need the power of God in their lives. The great Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
If you leave this place today with a heart that is open to the presence of the Risen Christ, it is what is within you that will take you into the future. It is He that is within you that is greater than that which is in the world. It is He that is within you that is greater than any sin that you can commit. It is He that is within you that is greater than the power of death. It is He that is within you who is your beginning and you end. So you must never, never get stuck at halftime when Jesus is alive! Amen.