Three events described in today’s readings: 1) how Joseph of Arimathea took Our Lord’s body from the Romans, prepared it for burial, and placed it in the tomb; 2) we learn how the myrrhbearing women watched from afar as Joseph and Nicodemus placed Christ’s body in the tomb, then returned early in the morning to anoint his body further; then 3) we have a description of how the Apostles established the order of deacons to assist them in serving to Christ’s Church.  What must be noted is how each of these, though performed separately by different people, are nonetheless united in one fundamental way: each of these groups is motivated out of selfless love to serve Our Lord Jesus Christ.  It is this selfless dedication to the Body of Christ that we ourselves must emulate.

1)  Joseph of Arimathea took a great risk in petitioning the foreign tyrant Pilate for the body of a criminal.  Not only did this add him to the watchlist of potential troublemakers with the Roman authorities; it damaged his credibility and standing with his own people, of which he was a leader.  He was associating himself with a man whom his fellow Jewish leaders had condemned as a blasphemer; moreover, touching a dead body was seen as defiling and degrading and would place them outside their community until their ritual purity had been reestablished.  Nor should we under-estimate the additional psychological pain of dealing so intimately with the tortured and crucified body of his dearest Lord and Master.  But the pressing weight of these things did not deter Joseph and Nicodemus from doing what needed to be done.  They loved Jesus and their care for his body, no matter how gruesome, was a natural result of this love.

[This service to our Lord is commemorated at every Liturgy after the Great Entrance: see either the new red pew books or one of the commentaries on the Liturgy in the narthex to follow along with this commemoration…]

2) The heartbreak of seeing Christ’s torment and death on the cross must have been unbearable for the women whose witness we celebrate today.  They had seen him tortured, they had seen him die, and they had watched from afar as Joseph and Nicodemus buried him and “observed where [Christ] was laid”.  They were prepared to perform a duty that today is seen as ghastly: to rub the myhrr into the skin of Jesus’s corpse.  We have very little experience with the realities of death today.  Acts that once had been done out of love for family and friends have now been delegated to professionals; so it is hard for us to understand the mix of emotions, the satisfaction, and the closure that might be obtained through this communal service.  For these women, they thought that it would be the last in a long line of selfless and loving acts offered to the service of Christ.  But Christ was not in the tomb: He had risen.  So instead of ministering for the last time to the dead body of Jesus; they were called to begin a new ministry to His living body: the Church.  They became the messengers who shared the Gospel of Christ’s resurrection with the leader’s of the body of Christ (the apostles); and they would continue to minister to this new Body throughout their lives on earth and after their bodily repose.

The last of the events we commemorate today is the establishment of the deaconate – those servants set aside to minister to the daily needs of Christ’s Church.  Today’s reading makes it sound fairly mundane: waiting on tables and taking care of widows.  But as with Joseph, Nicodemus, and the myrrhbearing women; we see that it is precisely in the mundane care for the body of Christ that men are ennobled and sanctified.  We should also remember that Stephen was not just the first deacon/servant, he was also a great preacher and the first martyr.  But what I want you to take away from this lesson is not the martyrdom of Stephen, or the risks taken by all those who cared for Jesus’ body, but rather how their ordinary service; the sacrifice of their time to do the simple things that needed to be done; sanctified them.

This parish is familiar with this kind of effort.  It has always been full of people who are willing to roll up their sleeves in order to serve our Lord.  And while good works themselves are of no account to anything but pride, good works done selflessly in service to the Body of Christ turn us and our parish into instruments of his will.  We become the hands of His Body that He uses to refashion the world in perfection and love, the hands that reach out to those in need of His loving touch, and the hands that offer a world dying of starvation the life giving food of His body and blood.  And so it is that today we commemorate the myrrbearers, and we offer up ourselves in emulation of their service through our Ladies’ Sodality, through our Cemetery Committee, through our festival committee, through our parish board, and through every committee and work that we perform for and through this parish; and we ask the Lord to bless these efforts as he did those of the many who have gone before us.