The Road to the Tomb: The Women Lead

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What is your favorite road trip memory? Our family has taken our share of Clark Griswold trips around the country. One through South Dakota into Montana and Wyoming to see Yellowstone. Another to the national parks out in Utah. One of our favorite trips is the one we took six years ago, on the sabbatical that you all graciously offered to me and my family. We swam in the Atlantic at Virginia Beach, and waded in the Pacific in LA, with stops in between in Palo Duro Canyon in Texas, Sante Fe in New Mexico, and the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. From there we drove the Pacific Coast Highway up to Oregon, where we hiked the Pacific Crest Trail around Mt. Hood, and drove up to Mt. St. Helens. I imagine you have some favorite road trip memories yourselves.

This Eastertide, we are going to take a road trip. One every week, in fact. I don’t know if Luke, the author of both the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, had a thing for road trips, but he used road imagery throughout both books. The road to the tomb, to Emmaus, to Damascus…the wilderness road headed south…the road north to spread the Gospel. Even way back in Luke 9, we read that “Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem,” beginning a journey with his followers all the way to the cross. Of course, the purpose of the series is that as we explore the journeys of others, it invites us to consider our own journeys. This Eastertide season, we will explore together these “roads of the Gospel.”

 

Including the journey today. I would suggest that the road to the tomb is both the shortest and the longest that we will explore. We started to explore that road to the tomb last week, and the journey of the women who travelled it.  Luke describes women who had faced a long road with significant challenges since they had chosen to follow Jesus. Some had followed all the way from Galilee, with others joining along the way. It is likely that many gave most or even all of their life savings to support his ministry and mission. Just like the men who left their nets and their sources of income to follow Jesus, these women might have been ridiculed and even rejected by their families for their choice to follow.

But unlike the men, the women also faced ridicule even among the others who followed Jesus. Luke gives us clues about their relationship. Did you notice that when the women returned from the tomb, the apostles rejected them out of hand? That they thought their story was an “idle tale?” That Greek word leros (lay-ros) translated “idle tale” is used only this one time in the entire Bible. Leros refers to the babbling words of one who is mentally or even demonically unstable. Perhaps this is just a coincidence that Luke uses this word, but earlier in the Gospel, Luke tells us that Mary Magdelene and several of the other women who followed Jesus had been healed by him of demonic possession, Mary herself healed of seven demons. I find it hard to believe that it is a coincidence that they would use this word now, and I would be surprised if it was not the first time that these women had heard this word from these men. These women faced ridicule from their past, and their present.

Now, before we judge the apostles too harshly, can we put the mirror to ourselves? About whom do we mutter leros under our breath? Who do we presume is only capable of “idle tales”? Who are the voices that we have heard, but not really listened to? For example, how many women today would say that they have repeated themselves until they were blue in the face, only to see people sit up and notice when a man said the exact same thing? “That’s an idle tale, but that’s a great idea!” Meanwhile, studies show that professionals such as counselors, teachers, law enforcement, pastors, and even doctors are less likely to believe people of color than whites, even when it is about their own physical symptoms. And members of minority religions regularly have to fight ten times as hard to be able to worship, pray, and practice their faith as those who belong to majority faiths. Those of us who are part of the privileged majority regularly need to ask ourselves what voices are we ignoring? Or silencing? Or ridiculing as “leros”? Are we ignoring Gospel, because we think we know what someone is going to say?

 

That is the road that these women had travelled: ridiculed by those whom they had left…and ridiculed by those whom they had joined. Not an easy road to travel. That’s why I suggest it is the shortest and the longest road. The shortest because it was physically not that far from the homes where they were staying and the tomb where Jesus was buried. But it was also the longest because of the extra burdens they carried along it.

I imagine the experience of a backpacker in the backcountry, carrying the extra burden of their food and tent and sleeping bag and clothes for a week, adding 30, 40, or 50 pounds every time they lift their feet.

Imagine the extra burdens that the women carried on that long road:

• A heavy load of shame and guilt for abandoning their families for a false hope? Were they mentally preparing for a tidal wave of “I told you so”?

• Or the pain of knowing that they were not respected or valued or listened to even among Jesus’ followers?

• The burden of grief after having lost the one they chose to follow.

• The burden of regret, wondering why they chose to sacrifice everything for this one who could not even save himself, let alone all of them.

• Might they have carried anger, at themselves or Jesus or both, for following what seemed a lost cause?

• Every step would have been filled with the weight of all of these emotions.

Who is ready for the long road now?

 

If you have ever taken a backpacking trip, you know what might be the sweetest experience of the whole journey. Not the beautiful vistas that you can enjoy. Not the quiet serenity of a peaceful night around the campfire. No, the sweetest moment of a day of backpacking is the moment that you can take your pack off at the end of the day. That feeling of emptiness on your shoulders and your back is like heaven. You feel like you are weightless. Like you can fly.

That is the feeling I imagined for those women. If the road that those women took to the tomb was slow, and plodding, and overburdened every step of the way…imagine how they flew back over those same rocks and roots on the same road. Would it have felt like their feet even touched the ground? For the first time, perhaps in their lives, they weren’t the left-out, ignored, forgotten voices. Instead, God had seen fit to make these women the very first preachers of the good news of the Resurrection! God picked the most marginalized, most left-out, most ignored voices to be the voices of the very first Resurrection sermon!

In fact, the first eleven Resurrection sermons! Luke implies that the disciples had scattered, and so it wasn’t like they were all in one place for these women to tell the story once. They had to go find each of the apostles and tell each of them. So, when Luke says that they were ridiculed for telling “idle tales,” it didn’t just happen once. They got “lerosed” over and over and over again. And they didn’t care. They went onto the next apostle and tried again. Until one who believed. Or at least one who wanted to believe enough to jump up and head out the door. I am not sure if this is a story about the willingness of Peter to respond, or the willingness of the women to keep preaching, even when their voices were doubted. Or is it about a God who values the voices that we prefer to leave out. A God who, on Easter Sunday morning, literally made them the mouthpieces of heaven!

Dorothy Sayers says that this is what the God found in Jesus was about from the beginning: “Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as ‘The women, God help us!’ or ‘The ladies, God bless them!’; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious.” God chose these women, ignored and voiceless by all but Jesus, to be the first preachers of the Resurrection Gospel!

This is a story that is important to us as Baptists. This is the reason why our congregation makes a point to advocate for women in ministry, in March and around the year. Because God is a God who chooses voices that others reject. This is the reason why organizations like the Baptist Joint Committee work to fight for religious freedom to carve out room for religious minorities. Because God is a God who listens to voices that others fear. This the reason why American Baptists insist on selecting leaders who are not only white males, and why it is the only major denomination that is a plurality: it does not have a single race that makes up more than 50% of the membership. Because God lifts voices from below to speak from above.

And this is a story that is important to all of us this morning. Biblical scholar Holly Hearon says that the women’s Easter story “poses important questions for us: whom do we believe and why? Or why not? Within the community of faith, are we prepared to be perplexed (not angry or vexed) when our expectations are not matched by reality? Are we prepared to have traditional symbols transformed? What memories do we recall so that we learn to seek the living rather than the dead?”

Her questions for me inspire two challenges:

To some of you today, representing those voices often left out, I invite you to keep preaching. Just because you get ten doors slammed in your face, doesn’t mean there isn’t an eleventh out there willing to listen to you. Your voice matters. Your perspective matters. God is the God of “idle tale” preachers, and you might be one of them! Drop the backpack and feel the freedom of a voice given and empowered by God.

Meanwhile, some of us today—maybe most of us—will need to be more like Peter. To believe those voices that others have rejected. To listen beyond the stereotypes, and what we assume someone else will say, or believe, or think. To expect the unexpected from those we meet. Peter did not do this perfectly, and it would take a vision on the roof of Cornelius’ house before he really got it, but he began that journey on Easter morning. He listened to them long enough to let them change his mind.

 

Isn’t that really what makes the best road trip memories? The unexpected? The experiences you have on the way to what you thought you were going to experience. You leave on the trip, assuming you know what you will see, but return awed and amazed by things you never expected. You leave thinking you are heading out to check items off a bucket list, but come home with memories of that ice cream truck at that one park in Los Alamos. Or the quiet morning fog covering the Golden Gate bridge…or that tucked away coffee shop we found by chance in Marin County. Or a spur of the moment trip down to Crater Lake where we swore they dyed the lake to get it that blue. Or the Corn Palace in South Dakota. Or the sanctuary of redwoods by the side of the road in California. Or the prairie chicken that somehow got lodged into the grill of our minivan for about…a hundred miles. Road trips are about the unexpected. The unpredictable. The gifts that we never thought were coming.

Could that perhaps be the point of Easter Sunday morning? That the road that we thought we were going to travel isn’t quite what we expect it to be? Like the women who travelled the road grieving and came back rejoicing. Like Peter, who travelled the road wanting to believe and came back believing. This morning, may we open our ears to the voices we are not expecting. May we open our eyes to the sights that God places along the road. May we keep the door to idle tales open a wee bit longer, in case they might really be true…