Green Blades Preaching Roundtable

In the beginning, there was a garden. God made the garden and tended it. God moved among the creatures and plants and people. They were at home together.  There was enough for everyone.  There was peace. Until there wasn’t.

You don’t have to take the story literally or factually in order to take it as true – that God moves among us, that God desires wholeness and flourishing life on this planet for all the creatures and forms of life. The ancient people who told this story could feel how true that was, and they could see too the ways things had fallen apart and needed to be set right again. The ways we failed that vision of flourishing life.

We can see around us too the ways things aren’t right.

Injustice and inequity

The exploitation of our environment and a changing climate

War and violence and fear

The things that keep you up at night.

Our privilege may shelter some of us from the reality of those forces of death, but you know what I am speaking about. We are not living in the garden of Eden, anymore. Some of us know deep in our bones that this world we inhabit is not a garden anymore but a graveyard, a land of crypts and dry bones and the ghosts of all that is lost.

In John’s Gospel, as _____ just read, Mary goes to the crypt where Jesus’ body had been laid. His body that had been demolished by the Roman empire and those who collaborated with it. One of the many, many bodies crushed by the domination systems of their time and of ours. She’s not going there for any purpose; there’s nothing to do – the body has already been anointed, the stone has been rolled into place. There’s nothing to do but sit in the presence of the absence of someone you love, whose death was violent and uncalled for. She’s going to grieve.

Ch 19 of John - “there was a garden in the place where Jesus was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid. And so, because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.” – John 19

Your imagination might bring up an image like Lakewood Cemetery, where there are rolling hills covered in manicured grass and gravestones and beautiful buildings for the ashes of the dead. But this would have had to have been a small garden. And the tomb was most likely a natural cave. The practice at that time was to cover the entrance with a stone and wait until the flesh and the stench have both disappeared, and then collect the bones, and then let the crypt be used for the next fresh body. A tomb was not a resting place so much as a place for managing death.

It’ s a little strange, isn’t it. A tomb in the midst of something as beautiful and full of life as a garden.

Mary has gone to this burial ground, this cave tomb to grieve. And as the story goes, when she gets there, the tomb is open and there is no body. Maybe, she thinks, those with power want to rob him of this last shred of dignity, a proper burial.

A man approaches and asks, Woman, why are you weeping?

The text says, Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, Sir if you have carried him away…. And that’s where we need to pause.

Supposing him to be the gardener?

Supposing him to be the gardener? Do you see the parallel that the writer of this Gospel has made? The God who began this world with a garden, and put in our hearts a longing for that abundance and peace – that God shows up here even in the place of Mary’s grief. That God is not defeated by death. That God shows up with dirt on his knees and carrying a spade or a watering can or whatever it was that made Mary think that he was the gardener.

She went to the tomb and she found not death but a place where God was tending new life.

That place was a cemetery, yes, and it was a place where we tend to life in all its forms.  The Gospel of John says that it was both --  a tomb, and a place full of potential for wild, abundant beauty.

My friends, is this a cemetery, or is this a garden?

The Gospel of John said that the place where Jesus was entombed and resurrected was both. Here at Grace Church, it is both, too -- literally. Just outside those windows is our Memorial Garden where we bury the ashes of loved ones in the midst of a garden. That’s where you’ve come this morning.

And more broadly, in all of our lives there is the wild possibility of what God can do with love, and there is the reality of death. The tomb and the garden are together, everywhere we go, every headline, every challenge. Our ultrapolarized politics. Our school funding. Our siblings in Palestine and Israel. Our friends in Haiti.

So we get to choose. You get to choose.

We get to choose. Do you want this to be a cemetery, or a garden?

Gardening is long work, the long work of amending rocky soil, of watching how water pools and flows, of finding the combinations of plants that can withstand this shade and those that thrive in that sunlight. It’s even more work when the climate is changing around us in ways we can’t manage. But we get to choose to throw up our hands and abandon the project and let it be just a cemetery, just a place of death.

Or we can choose to the long work of loving a tangled world with defiance and curiosity.

To proclaim resurrection means practicing the resilient, defiant, embodied, joyful love we see in Jesus and in Mary Magdalene. To see this place, this city, this country, and this planet as a garden we are responsible and privileged to tend. To know our place among our neighbors as partners in God’s work of abundant life, of peace and justice, until every tear is wiped away and death is swallowed up forever. Easter is a day of joy, the day we proclaim that in Christ God has defeated the powers of death. And it’s also a day of defiance. The defiant claim that we will, with God’s help, join in tending this world until it a garden instead of a tomb.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!