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Everyone knows that Mary Magdalene is important. She is called “the apostle to the apostles.” In the Good News according to John, as we just heard, she is the trusted source, the eyewitness who announces the Resurrection, the savvy visitor to the garden — the new Eve in the new Garden of Eden — who stays long enough to work out who this wondrous and unsettling stranger truly is. She also stays long enough to weep in the new Eden, carrying into the heart of God our human grief, our human anguish, our human lament at all the death and destruction that haunts us, all the injustice that surrounds us, all the violence that grieves us.
Mary Magdalene is important.
But Mary has not enjoyed an easy path to prominence in our faith tradition. She has not been celebrated as enthusiastically and as often as Peter, who gets his own Resurrection appearance in John, a story appended to the fourth Gospel by a later editor. Now, I happen to love that encounter of Peter with the risen Christ. I love that story so much that it is inked forever onto my right arm. I revere Peter, our first bishop, the keeper of the keys, one of just three apostles we claim to be the strongest voices announcing the Resurrection: Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Saving Peter’s reverence, I simply want to hold up Mary Magdalene as an equal partner with Peter and our patron Paul as a chief apostle. I want to correct the record a little, because scholars have discovered that Mary’s importance has been subtly but purposefully diminished as John’s Gospel has been handed down to us. The biblical scholar Elizabeth Schrader published a study called Women Erased: Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of John. Schrader reveals that later editors of John’s Gospel quietly changed the text so that Mary Magdalene was less prominent in the narrative, less central to the story, less important to what has been revealed to us as the Good News.
As I said, I’d like to correct this record, for the sake of Mary Magdalene herself, but also for our sake. I want us to do a better job of noticing saints in our midst, saints who might be overlooked, obscured, even erased.
For nearly six decades, week in and week out, a gardener took her place in our assembly, and quietly said her prayers. She was not only an avid gardener; she was an artisan: she wove garments and sewed liturgical vestments; she made a cream-colored sweater for the child of a family friend, a child who has long since outgrown it; that same sweater has now been given to the artisan’s great-grandson.
She made me a little stole for pastoral visits, a yoke that I place around my neck, yoking her ministry to mine, and mine to the penitent or the hospital patient in my care.
For many long years, she stayed in this garden, right over there, in the same place, the same pew, the same seat.
When she could no longer stay in this particular part of the garden, she took up a new post nearby, in a care center on Phinney Ridge, where she would look up from her bed to view dozens of photographs: photographs of family, naturally, but also St. Paul’s parishioners. She tended us in prayer in that quiet, sunlit room. She would sip a chocolate shake from Dick’s as she looked upon her community, pictured in Christmas cards and Mother’s Day greetings and snapshots from long-ago celebrations.
This companion of ours, by staying in our corner of God’s garden for more than half a century — this companion of ours proclaims the Good News according to Mary Magdalene. She interprets for us the appearance of the risen Christ to one faithful follower, the one who stayed in the garden long enough to weep, but also long enough to put it all together and carry the Good News back to all the others.
But — as we remember and revere these women, these apostles who all too easily are erased from the tradition, we should be careful not to look at them through a gauzy, glowing lens. They are not merely meek. They are not eternally mild. They are sharp, too. If the wondrous stranger speaks Mary’s name, choosing her above all others to be the first witness of Resurrection, surely he understood that she was no wallflower. And our own Mary Magdalene, our own gardener and Gospeller — she delighted us with her dry wit, her keen vision, her shrewd understanding.
Even her dry humor — even her unintentional humor — revealed a quick intellect, a savvy companion who doesn’t miss a trick. “Father!” she would reliably say, whenever I stopped by for a visit. If you’re not careful, you would mistake her “Father!” as an ordinary, sweet greeting of a faithful parishioner, old school. But she would quickly catch you in your mistake. “Father!” she said to me one day, in her typical way, but then, a moment later, she said, “So. I see you have grown a beard.” Then she paused for one perfect, comic beat. And then the sword plunged: “I don’t really care for beards.”
This, too, is a strand in the tapestry of Mary Magdalene: Mary is not just a sad, weeping figure huddling in the corner of a garden, shaken and haunted by the shadows of early dawn. Mary is clever; she has been around the block. Now, she does teach us not to be cynical: her weeping is heartfelt, and her witness calls us to bear the searing pain of hearts broken open to the suffering around us. But she also teaches us not to be naïve. Our calling as Christians, as people who proclaim the Good News, is a calling that demands an open mind as much as an open heart.
And so, in turn, in the prophetic tradition of Mary Magdalene, our friend’s wicked wit and her ingenious artistry; her ability to weep openly when she feels sorrow and her dry-eyed awareness of all that confronts and confounds us: all of this comes together in one holy apostle.
This whole person appeared to the risen Christ in the new Eden. Awake before dawn, many steps ahead of her sleeping friends, Mary makes her way to the grave, carrying no spices, just bringing her heart, her mind, her whole spirit to this place of deep grief, this place of profound new hope. When the risen Christ speaks her name, she puts it all together, and they very nearly embrace, this savvy saint and her most beloved teacher. But he turns her away, turns her out of the garden, to carry the Good News to all the others. She never keeps it just for herself.
And so today we commend to God our own Mary Magdalene, our own beloved saint, tender and clever, warm and witty, a matriarch of this clutch of saints at 15 Roy Street. We commend her to God, trusting fully that even now, the wondrous stranger in the garden is greeting her as the lifelong friend she has been, to him and to us. He pulls her from the obscurity so many women have suffered in our halting and broken remembrance of the saints. He confronts her in the garden, even now, and his greeting is simple:
“Elaine.”
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Preached at the Requiem Mass for Elaine Coulter Foster, Saturday, August 31, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Lamentations 3:22-26, 31-33
Psalm 139:1-2, 6-11
Romans 8:14-19, 34-35, 37-39
John 20:11-18