Belong here, and you are a member of one of life’s painfilled communities. It’s a select group - with one of the most painful rites of passage imaginable. To enter the gates of this fellowship you need to experience something terribly unnatural. We watched Mary enter those gates as she experienced the death of a child.
        The fellowship of bereaved parents.

How unnatural!
        Those of you who have experienced this know what I mean.
                Children are supposed to bury their parents.
                Not the other way around.

The word comes - "You’re going to have a baby."
And immediately hopes, dreams, expectations begin to grow inside, along with that child.
        What will they look like?
        What will their personality be?
        What will they accomplish?
        What experiences will we share with them?

Generally, over time, parents get answers to those questions.
But not always.
        Sometimes, in miscarriage, the child’s soul is heaven-bound before a day outside of mother.
        Sometimes, only weeks or months.
        Sometimes the answers begin to come and are, because of accident or illness, abruptly cut short.
        Sometimes......
                ......ah, the pain in experiencing it. Years later it hangs with you.

So many of you know that. I was talking with someone from Tubman Funeral Home earlier this week who shared how recently they held a memorial service for a child still-born at 27 weeks gestation – and did the service some 28 years after the fact; a service that the parents didn’t want 28 years ago, but now found very healing.
        - the memories stay.
                What if......
                What could have been.....
                What would have filled those empty album pages.......
 

Oh, Mary - the pain you experienced!
        Not only in the grief of bereavement.
        Also in the horrific nightmare of abuse and torture.

Parents’ greatest instinct is to protect their children.
        How often I have sat with even an aged parent, concerned about an ill or suffering child, and heard the sentiment, "How I wish that I could be ill.... that I could face the operation....... instead of my child."
        Want to endure the rage of a parent? Speak ill of their child within earshot. Treat the child badly. Lay a hand on the youngster.

Oh, Mary - that your first born son not only had to die – but this way?
        The abuse.
        The torture.
        The humiliation.
You experienced it, hour after long dark hour.
Ripped so from your arms.

        When the angel Gabriel came to you, Mary, what did you envision for the future of the favored one of the Lord?
        When told that you will, in miracle ways, conceive a son, a great son, a son destined to sit on a throne, could you have envisioned a throne made of two rough cross members?

Ah, the words of the old man Simeon, spoken 33 years earlier in the temple, before your hair turned gray, before the wrinkles came and your youthful hands became work-worn and calloused, while Joseph still lived:
        "This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel....- and a sword will pierce your own soul too."
How could you have expected it would be this way?

That the good-byes you said would have to be at a distance.
You couldn’t even hold his hand to comfort him.
Your arms are empty.
You are given into the caring, step-son arms of the beloved John.

Whirling memories, no doubt, of wise men and shepherds, living in Egyptian exile, learning experiences in the wood shop, teen age miscommunication in the temple, sermons from this carpenter-turned-preacher, the miracles.

And now......
        now it’s all coming to this black, confusing end. A nightmare.

I can only imagine the haunting hollow look in your eyes as you stood at the cross with empty hands, a broken heart and shattered dreams.

Mary -
        Your pain! Your loss!
        Resonating with the pain and loss that so many of us feel.
 

It’s true, isn’t it?
If your heart is pained this morning, chances are it’s because of the resonance with what Mary experienced.
        Perhaps not on a public garbage heap known as place of the skull, the heap named Golgotha.
        Perhaps not there.
        But your own nightmare.

When the doctor came out of the operating room with that sombre look.
When the phone rang in the middle of the night.......... or never rang.
When the labour started, in spite of the medication and rest.
When the judge’s gavel came down.

The bible details Mary’s loss.
Her scene make others flash before our eyes.
Her note of grief resonates with dark notes deep within our soul.

        The "goodbye" in your life never answered;
        The dream shattered;
        The expectation dashed;
        Wonderful beginnings rudely interrupted.

........ OR........

Maybe it’s not the loss.

Perhaps what makes you tremble is the pain and abuse that Mary witnessed.
For you’ve seen it in your family, in you.
Felt it.
        The indignity.
        Helpless.
        Horribly naked - maybe figuratively, maybe not.
        The pain.
        Blood, maybe.
        Innocense lost.
        Violation.
        People walking by, minding their own business as if nothing has happened.
        And a burning sword jabbed right into through your heart.

Like Mary you wonder, "why?"
Like Mary it makes no sense.
Like Mary there seem to be no answers.

Where there should be joy....
Where there should be hopes for the future....
Where there should be peaceful sleep....
        ....oh, the grey, the fear, the storms, the anger, the tears,
        the helplessness.

With Mary we weep – for ourselves and our children.
With Mary we gather before the cross.

Only - something is different now.
        Something is very different between our suffering and her’s.

What a difference 3 days can make!
Mary couldn’t see it then, just like so often we can’t see it when we’re in the middle of the storm.
But what a difference 3 days can make!

        For in three days Mary came to understand that the brutal, shocking, devastating and deadly powers — which ripped life right out of her hands and left her feeling so incredibly vulnerable --
        -- these powers do not have the last word.
                Theirs is not the final deed.

"Weeping may last for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning" said David in the ancient hymn we know as Psalm 30.
        How little could he have known about how true that is!!
        The joy that came on Easter morning when the power of death was shattered and Mary could begin to see the power of the throne that her son ascended -
        the cross won victorious over the grave
                life over death
                re-creation over devastation.

Jesus took absolutely the worst that sin, evil and death could throw at him and withstood it to the end - a stronger, deeper power that stretched further back in Cosmic and Heavenly history than the Prince of Darkness could ever imagine.
Which meant, for Mary, that where her heart and dreams lay shattered on the ground that awful Friday afternoon, Easter Sunday brought a resurrection of hopes and new beginnings bigger and better than she ever imagined possible.
        Different than things were before.
                Oh, how so different!
                But a good different.

An empty cross.
A vacant tomb.

Which led someone who carried his own load of grief, Paul of Tarsus,
        - a man rejected by his family, left for dead after a mob beating, scars on his back from abusive beatings in prison while illegally held, struggling with a disability of some sort, and always living somewhere below the poverty line -
Paul of Tarsus looked at the empty cross, looked at the vacant tomb, looked at the scars on his body and wrote:

"If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all – how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?...
...Christ Jesus, who died - more than that, who was raised to life - is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?.... No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." [Romans 8]

Traumatic though his beatings were, nightmarish as the mob terror was, dark though the prison cells were, painful as the empty stomach sometimes felt - Paul keep his eyes on the cross.
        Maybe not today, but someday,
                the cross power would have the final say in his life, too.
                As it did in Mary’s.

The shape of that answer may be different than what we expect.
And the timing....... well, who can set the clock, anyway?
But new life is coming.

Abuse, tragedy, conflict, illness, death – none of these have the last word.
Jesus does.

Which is why parents can leave a memorial service 28 years after leaving an infant they never held, and somehow find hope. For that child rests safe in the arms of the Victor at Calvary.

And that’s why survivors of trauma and abuse can dare to face a life without relying on cover ups and facades and buried feelings. They can dare to explore recovery, Christian therapy, new patterns of behaviour and in time begin to see the first shoots of hope out of what was a dead stump of an existence.

Mary doesn’t see that.
Not yet, anyway.
She’s still on the far side of Easter.

Perhaps sometimes we don’t see it, either.
The pain is too fresh. Perhaps still happening.
Or we’re just sunk in too deep.

I want to invite you to take the next few moments to imagine a hand reaching out to you; one that bears nail scars; that hand which on Friday could not hold Mary and comfort her; the hand that is alive now.
        It reaches to you - whatever the heartache you’re carrying.

Lent is a season to acknowledge sin.
It’s also a season where we can be very honest about those deep aches we experience.
        And we bring them to that strange but very real place where healing can begin - a place where those without faith would see only death, but we see life.
       To the cross, for:
                Renewed life.
                Eternal life.
 
 

Trusting that, in very real ways and days of God’s healing, planning, choosing
        the cross’ power will have the final say in our lives, too.
                As it did in Mary’s.
                And in Paul’s.