The Good Gardener

John 20:1-18

Easter 2011

How many of us here this morning maintain a garden of one variety or another? I applaud this outdoor activity. I also lament that I don’t have that proverbial green thumb. My thumb is more a blotchy brown mushroom color because it prefers to just sit quietly under the trees!

Yet I do know that experiencing solidarity with soil for any amount of time can cultivate more than just the good organic growth of the seeds. It can cultivate a happier, healthier mind and spirit for the gardener. There is something innately uplifting about getting dirt under your nails and engaging the root essence of earth.

Scientifically speaking, I’ve read how this is caused by endorphins in our bodies getting released while we actively engage nature.

Spiritually speaking, spending time in a garden or any place in the great outdoors is a common way many people feel divinely inspired and faithfully uplifted. Is this true for you?

Perhaps that good feeling folks get when appreciating nature is the result of a spiritual seed buried deep within our souls; a seed planted all the way back to when humankind first came into being, planted by God’s evergreen thumb to remind us of our original part in the ecology of all that was created and called good.

You remember the story of the beginning found in the Book of Genesis, right? And do you specifically recall what sort of location the birth of human beings took place at? It wasn’t under the sea, atop a great mountain, or amidst the scrub brush of a dry desert. It was in a lush garden! We know it as the Garden of Eden. As the Scriptural teaching goes, God breathed us into existence in a natural paradise. When God did this, we were also given the ability to freely choose to appreciate, uphold, and cultivate it. Our emblematic ancestors, Adam and Eve, initially used this freedom to glorify their Creator by being good gardeners.

All was well in this garden paradise until our first parents fell prey to personal pride. This was not a healthy kind of humble before God and others pride, but a polluting pride. This pride told them it was not enough to just be good gardeners under God. This pride sneakily summoned them to become more powerful and important. It tempted them to want to be equal with God. They took the bait and gave priority to this seductive, destructive pride. They chose to disobey their good Creator. This disobedience, this original sin, corrupted everything and humankind ending up being cast out of Eden.

We are their spiritual progeny, and so every human generation has inherited the polluting pride, the rebellious spiritual condition.

All that we read about across the Old Testament is rooted in this epic explanation of good gardener’s gone bad before God. We read how our good and loving Creator attempted again and again, through the chosen nation of Israel, to restore the polluted relationship to its original purity. And we read how human beings again and again disobeyed, choosing to promote their own polluting pride, thoroughly stuck in the quicksand of sin.

Let’s fast forward the epic story on through to the end of the Old Testament teachings. Let’s further fast forward on through the perfectly holy birth of a long awaited baby, a “New Adam,” in a stable in Bethlehem. Now let’s step swiftly step ahead on through all of the radical, itinerant preaching and healing ministry of that child once he’d grown to a young adult. Pause for a moment to remember, as we did last Sunday morning and last Thursday night, how this “New Adam,” Jesus of Nazareth, then rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, dined a final time with his disciples before every one of them denied him, and then was crucified by all the people too polluted by sinful pride to recognize him as the very Son of God.

This morning, we stop at the point in the Greatest Story Ever Told where we find ourselves in … well, interestingly enough, a garden. Not the one in Eden, but one located directly outside the burial cave of Jesus.

In this garden, we stand with a wonderfully faithful woman named Mary Magdalene. Upon first arrival, she hovered there weeping in deep grief over the death of the good and holy man who’d healed her from what everyone understood at the time to be demon possession. This Mary’s sorrow was all the more magnified when she arrived at this garden to find the tomb … empty. Of all the gross injustices in this world, how horribly harsh was her conclusion about what had happened. Thieves. Thieves had boldly removed a boulder and robbed Jesus’ body from a respectful resting place. Standing with her, we can imagine that just had to have felt like the absolute and emotionally excruciating death of any and all hope.

That was what happened at first, there in that grief-covered graveyard garden. We are still standing with her, though, when she received a totally unexpected surprise. She had suddenly noticed a man also hanging about in that garden. She supposed him to be, naturally enough, a gardener. She supposed, logically enough, he might well have had a hand in committing the disgusting crime. After all, if a very close friend of Jesus had been bought out to assist in his downfall, why not a common laborer?

Knowing he’d be pressed for details, the man spoke first, saying, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Then, following her explanation of what she thought was happening, the man did something shocking. He revealed that he knew her name. It wasn’t until this intimate, personal address that all the blanketing blindness of grief lifted from Mary Magdalene. Only then did she see what she had not initially noticed – this man, this supposed gardener, was her Lord Jesus! No Grand Theft Body had taken place! Jesus had instead miraculously come alive again, gracefully up and walked right on out of the tomb, and by doing so conquered all the power of deadly sin in his path!

Mary Magdalene had supposed wrong. The man was not a gardener. Were we actually standing with her, though, we would have supposed the same.

And yet, knowing now what we do about the epic narrative of the Greatest Story Ever Told, doesn’t it make sense to identify our Risen Lord as a gardener after all?

He was, He is! When Jesus busted out and planted his fresh feet in graveyard garden soil, He left behind forever the spiritually corrupted legacy of the original Adam. He, the New Adam, arose from the quicksand of sin to replant the good seed of connection with our Creator. He, the Good Shepherd who knows us all by name, who personally forgives us our sin, is also the Good Gardener who leads us to the path of fully restored life with God!

So here we are on Easter Sunday 2011! We are in the sacred garden of God’s redeeming, resurrecting grace in Jesus Christ. What are we to do from here?

We are to follow the example of Mary Magdalene. Jesus told her not to hold onto Him. After all, the Risen Lord had been loosed into the world and was not to be held back. He had to get about the process of re-seeding the great garden of life, a re-seeding that really flourished when the Day of Pentecost and then his Ascension took place. So Mary Magdalene went on to do as she had been directly, divinely instructed. Having done so, she will forever be remembered and celebrated as the world’s first witness to the Risen Lord, the world’s first preacher about this Good News, and as the world’s first disciple in the glorious age of His Resurrected Body.

We stand with her and we too are being sent out. We must actively devote our lives to Jesus, our Risen Lord. Every moment that we do, we reconnect with our good roots. We experience an innate uplift in mind and spirit. We experience healthy spiritual restoration to God’s original intention for us, and thus turn away from the polluting pride within us. And, by God’s grace, we grow. We grow individually as His disciples, and we grow the church in working on behalf of our Good Gardner to restore every garden gone to rack and ruin on the face of this planet.

Jesus is risen! Alleluia! Now let’s get pick up the spiritual spades given to us by our Savior and go out to do His gardening! Amen.

Who Is This?

Matthew 21:1-11

Palm Sunday 2011

Smack in the middle of all the familiar pageantry … yes, right there sailing through the air and the action of a great arrival … is a question … a really big, supremely important, life-centering question. It’s a question that needed to be asked on the first Palm Sunday and it is one that we need to ask today. The question -- Who is this? Who is this thirty-something year old man on approach, aiming to enter the heart of the holy city of Jerusalem? Who is this … this Jesus of Nazareth? Identity is more than what a person looks like and it is more than a name. So who did the people on the first Palm Sunday expect him to be? Who do we, all these many years later, expect Jesus to be?

The question comes only after the Gospel writer Matthew tells us that the holy city was in complete chaos. Have you ever visited the old city part of Jerusalem? Or seen pictures of it? Just imagine those narrow stone streets jammed with about five million people. That’s how many I’ve been told had packed into this Roman province with its Jewish client-king, Herod, in order to celebrate the Passover.[i] The Passover pilgrimage was a most sacred event, for it commemorated the exodus out of slavery in Egypt with mighty Moses in the lead. It marked a new beginning for God’s people, the fulfillment of divine promises. So the city was jammed up with chanting pilgrims, covetous vendors, obedient donkeys, inevitable dust, and tense Roman guards. A new exodus was underway.

How very significant it is that a question about Jesus’ identity is formed at a time with a lot of crazy going on. The chaotic nature of it all complimented how very hungry in heart, mind and spirit the people were – hungry to be reminded of and filled with God’s good promises and power. Our answer to the question of “who is this” must keep this in mind, for our attempts to understand and explain Jesus’ identity must be held in the light of all the crazy going on in the world today as well. How are you and your neighbors in our country and across the world hungry in heart, mind and spirit for God’s reassuring blessings and saving grace?

Back on that ancient day of holy arrival, the Mardi Gras like mob heartily sang “Hosanna!” But not as one, unified chorus. The shouts of Hosanna, a word meaning “help us, save us, we pray,” came from people with different expectations of Jesus’ identity. All of these, however, did flow together by the end of that first holy week. Those divergent views about the man Jesus on approach synched into one dire decree soon after he arrived. They synched to the sinister sound of “crucify him!” More about this shift from high expectations to angry realizations this Thursday night right here at 7 p.m.

Our devotional task this morning is to briefly consider those different streams of thought crying to be saved in the midst of the crazy. We do so because we may find ourselves swimming in any one of them. Or maybe even all of them.

One stream wanted to see more from the miracle man. These are folks who saw Jesus as, to quote how one colleague has cleverly coined it, “The Houdini of the Holy Land.”[ii] By the time of his once and final arrival in Jerusalem, Jesus had this faithfully fervent fan club in tow. Keep in mind that the last thing Jesus did before embarking for the ride into Jerusalem was to raise Lazarus from the dead. Who wouldn’t have wanted to follow and see what was coming next? I know years ago when magicians like Doug Henning, David Copperfield, and David Blane had television specials I could not wait to see how they were going to try and outdo themselves.

More than a show, though, I truly believe these folks fervently followed Jesus because they desperately needed miracles in their own lives and in the lives of their loved ones. Who is this? It’s the only man on the planet who can completely, divinely heal your disease, or that of your mother’s, your father’s, your child’s, your neighbor’s. Who is this? The beautiful balm for all sorrow and suffering. Who is this? This is personified power greater than every valley in the shadow of death. They expected Jesus to makeover the holy city with miracles. Our deepest most desperate needs stand in solidarity with this segment of that first century society.

A second stream of thought was expectant with a much more anxious and angry vibe. They were expecting Jesus to ride into the holy city as a revolutionary warrior come to cut the puppet strings Rome had authoritatively tied above Jerusalem. They swam in the stream of Jewish nationalistic fervor. Who is this? It’s a divine ruler even greater than King David who has finally arrived to overthrow the wretched Romans! Who is this? The one who’ll stop the Roman Empire from “seducing the people out of their Judaism”[iii] and who’ll end the era of enormous tax burden on the Israelites. Who is this? This is holy justice in the flesh.

We can find solidarity in their aggressively marching hope. I trust you’ve noticed and prayerfully companioned the streams of revolutionary thought that have flowed across the Middle East throughout this season of Lent. Day to day we’ve been flooded with sounds and images and written reports of uprisings. Day to day we’ve experienced anxious cries and bold acts on behalf of liberation from oppression. Day to day our country and its allies war against enemy oppressors. And on the home front, people across America daily stand up against social and economic injustices. On several levels, we can well enough identify with those people lined up to welcome the revolutionary King Jesus on his way to reclaim Jerusalem.

One final cluster from within the great crowd crying Hosanna! Matthew’s Gospel directly gives one answer to the question “Who is this?” In verse eleven of the twenty-first chapter, voices in the crowd name Jesus as a prophet. Throughout the Bible, we read of prophets popping up to let people know God’s view and judgment of specific historic circumstances. Most often, they expressed God’s volatile discontent with the ongoing sin of humankind. They also, however, voiced reminders and acted boldly on behalf of God’s good redeeming grace. To this end, the voices in the crowd directly identified by Matthew were correct.

However, recall that Matthew also wrote his Gospel account some thirty years after Jesus completed that first Holy Week. So there’s a good chance Matthew wanted his readers then, and we, the readers now, to understand the problem of having correctly identified Jesus on the first Palm Sunday. I’ve already mentioned it. The voices that could have, should have understood what Jesus did and did not do upon entering Jerusalem, also synched to the sinister cry of “Crucify him!” by week’s end. As one Bible commentary concludes, Matthew wants us to identify with the fact that they got the call correct, but then failed to transform their words into actions.[iv] They could have listened to and obeyed, understood and abided by this prophet. Instead, they too abandoned him.

So there it is -- a swift overview of several streams of thought for responding to the question of Jesus’ identity. Those hungry for more Houdini of the Holy Land; those demanding the new and improved warrior King David; those who thought they knew how to pay attention to a real prophet. All of these people were faithfully, fervently awaiting the true Messiah of Israel, albeit from different angles of expectation.

The day arrived for Jesus’ triumphal entry. They all saw him astride a donkey instead of a great stallion. They all waved their palms, which were like political pennants in their time. And, according to Matthew’s account, they all experienced one particularly potent thing … and quite a curious thing … in their encounter with Jesus. His humble silence. No announcements came from him indicating, “Behold! Last time I made an elephant disappear and reappear, this time the Statue of Liberty!” No decrees of fiercely claiming any worldly throne and power. No words of prophetic judgment from the man on approach, aiming for the heart of the holy city and its children of God in chaos. Just steady, humble, loving silence strolling atop a beast of burden. So they all had to ride on, ride on with Jesus into his first, final trip through Jerusalem.

Even though we know the ultimate glorious outcome of this trip, for today, we too have to just ride on. We have to ride on with Jesus into this week. We do so asking the question, “Who is this?” Holding this question and examining our expectations, we hope for an answer relevant to our personal lives, to the lives of neighbors near and far, and to the great context of a world in constant sinful chaos in need of saving from itself.

The answer is brewing. It will steep in the tastes of the Last Supper. It will steep in the bitter betrayal of friends. It will steep in the metallic tasting droplets streaming from a crown of thorns. It will steep in the stone cold sides of a burial cave. It is coming, it is on approach, and it is aiming to enter the holy city in every heart. Amen.

---

[i] Data from a sermon by Edward F. Markquart, www.sermonsfromseattle.com/palm_passion_heysanna

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] New Interpreters Bible, Gospel of Matthew

Reanimated Hope

Ezekiel 37:1-14

The Fifth Sunday in Lent 2011

This morning, I invite you to find yourself in Tewksbury. Now, before you think you’ve arrived, you should know that I’m talking about Tewksbury, Massachusetts, in the year 1875. It was there, in a state-run “poorhouse” where the mentally ill, prostitutes, and all manner of charity cases resided, a dungeon existed. Not a medieval torture chamber of your wildest imagining, mind you, but it may as well have been. This is somewhat ironic, considering that beyond its despair stained walls the Civil Rights act of 1875 was passed in our country, entitling every American to the same treatment in public accommodations regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude.

In that Tewksbury dungeon, full of very little light and even less hope, there was a cage. Yes, a cage. And In this cage sat a nine-year old girl. They called her “Little Annie.” Her animal-like behavior of violently attacking people who came near her sentenced her to this prison. The good doctors of the day had determined she was beyond repair. They had no hope of her becoming beneficial to herself or to any community. Hopelessly lost, they said, perhaps even totally insane. And the fact that she’d contracted a disease destined to bring about blindness didn’t help her case. So she was exiled to a cage, in a dungeon, in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, one hundred thirty six years ago.

It was her father who put her in this poor-house hole. Not with any evil intent, thank the Lord. It’s just that he was an alcoholic, immigrant farmer who simply could not maintain a family after his wife, Little Annie’s mother, died. Annie did not go to this place for the displaced alone, he also sent her only sibling, a brother named Thomas. But Thomas died of tuberculosis shortly after they arrived. Dark desolation, the kind we reflect on during this season of Lent, had truly descended across every aspect of this little girl’s life.

One of the professors at Princeton Seminary who has had a significant impact on my faith journey, Dr. Donald Capps, has written that “pastors view hope as a critical issue in their ministry and they often judge their ministry to be effective to the degree that it supports, instills, or inspires hope.” He goes on the state the obvious, that we pastors clearly know that “looming against a hopeful attitude is the hard reality of life … against tough and formidable realities, hope is not invincible.”

So I’m compelled to ask, with so much of Annie’s psychological and social safeguards destroyed, had there been any possibility of a brighter day, a brighter life? Could there possibly have been any fuse of hope to ignite within her heart to create a warming, welcoming love, or would any such flicker just touch down and spread further across the gasoline puddle of her life?

It sure seemed like “Little Annie” had been defeated by tough and formidable reality. It sure seemed any hope for a future full of tender loving care had been snuffed out completely, like a cancelled candle flame at midnight in a dank, chilly cell. Can any of us draw out an honest word of Christian hope as we reflect on this sad situation? Are we able to offer hope in any of the devastating circumstances we hear about today?

Once upon a particular time there was a prophet blessed with the bold faithful insight to pronounce hope was alive despite truly tragic, utterly devastating circumstances. He did not come to the circumstances from outside of them, as some kind of missionary of good will. Significantly, he rose up from within the very heart of the desolation with only the faith God was gracious enough to enlighten him with. And his was not a concern for only one young life. His was for an entire, historic community of faith; a community that had been completely decimated by hope trouncing enemy reality. The community was Israel, and the prophets name was Ezekiel.

This son of a priest was a rather bizarre fellow all around -- what with all the eating of scrolls, lying on his left side for three hundred ninety days, and shaving off all his hair and beard then dividing it all into three piles. Despite this bizarre behavior, however, Ezekiel was settled enough to have married, unlike his contemporary, Jeremiah. And his name certainly indicates stability -- translated, it means “God strengthens.”

What primarily made Ezekiel a prophet for his people was his being in the right place at the right time and having faith enough for God to work through him. Like any legitimate prophet, he was at first reluctant to be used as an instrument of God. But this yielded to his eventually taking on the prophet-priest role God needed him to take. Not an easy job. Not one any of us would envy even for a millisecond. His prophetic calling was to interpret the massive self-inflicted wound Israel was suffering. This wound had resulted in the total destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Empire and the subsequent hauling off of the Israelites into enslaved exile.

Up to that turning point in their historic identity, the Israelites figured God had their backs one hundred and one percent of the time. After all, God had made a covenant promise to protect and love them at all times and in all circumstances, never again to destroy his children. But they were in denial about their collective wound. They had abused God’s graciousness, taken advantage of it by assuming they could live morally corrupt lives and get away with it. They figured God was a nice doormat with the words “welcome” always at full bristle.

What Ezekiel came to know, however, was that some kind of breaking point in divine patience had been reached, and it was Ezekiel’s task to explain that it was the contemptible persistence of the Israelite’s sin that compelled God to allow the leveling of Jerusalem.

There, in Babylonia, the remnant that had survived the enemy siege felt that hope had been crushed, smothered by their own inability to love God rightly by following divine law. They saw no way out of the dungeon of despair, no return back to being God’s chosen people, a mighty nation. So stripped of this identity, they considered themselves, in effect, dead.

But also there in Babylonia, Ezekiel of their exile was privileged to receive an amazing glimpse of hope from God. Despite the seemingly permanent self-inflicted wound of sinful life, despite the deadly destruction, despite the forced relocation, despite the dissolution of all previously held belief about living under divine privilege … all was not dead. Ezekiel had it on supremely good authority that these children of God were going to be fully restored to life. Their battered bones and their broken hope were going to be reanimated. God was going to put all the members of the household of faith back together again. They were going to rise up out of the desolating darkness and be a mighty people under God once again.

The gift of Ezekiel’s glimpse was read to us today from the 37th chapter -- The Valley of Dry Bones. For most of us, this apocalyptic vision may seem spooky and strange. It most certainly may seem hard to figure out -- hence our needing to place it in its historical context. Symbolically, then, a quick review --

The dried up bones represent the dried up, inanimate faith of the Israelites.

The mysterious, foreign valley they lay in represents Jerusalem’s fall and their exile in Babylonia.

Ezekiel, the prophet-priest God raised up from deadly destruction with an amazing, undeserved word of hope, is the one who brought the Good News of salvation.

This prophetic word about complete restoration came most fully true many years later. Can you venture a guess as to when? In the hallowed time of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This is one reason Ezekiel’s well-known vision is commonly preached on this, the Sunday before Palm Sunday. If we have been diligent in prayerfully walking with Jesus toward Jerusalem through these past five weeks of Lent, we should be feeling the desolating wound of our sin against God. We should be ever more aware of the hopeless dungeons sin tries to keep us in. We should be looking about our lives and realizing we are in the valley of the shadow of death. This shadow will lengthen once we hit the gates of Jerusalem next week and we join all the other people fanatical about welcoming home the Davidic king of our dreams. Once that fanfare ends, however, and Jesus starts doing all we think him a fool with a death wish for doing, we just may find ourselves questioning whether or not our faith in the power of God has dried up and flaked off a façade of what we profess to believe and live by. And come the sorrowful uncertainty of Good Friday, we’ll need some kind of powerful sign from God to reanimate our hope.

I pray you have or have had an Ezekiel in your life. Someone whose radical vision and reanimated hope is a rejuvenating reminder that God’s love is greater than self-inflicted sinful wounds and that there is life beyond any and all dungeons of despair this world presents.

You may be wondering about Little Annie. About the answer to the questions concerning hope I asked a few minutes ago. Glory be to God, I have an answer. There had been a nurse nearing retirement who lived with an incredibly animated belief – she believed there is always hope for all God’s children. So strong was this faithful conviction that she began taking her lunches down to the dungeon and sitting alongside Little Annie. When she was finished eating, she’d leave a brownie in the cage. For her part, Annie showed no signs of acknowledging the presence of the compassionate (dare I say, prophetic?) nurse, save for the fact that the brownie would always be gone the next day.

Yet God had clearly called this Ezekiel to Annie’s life. One day after who knows how many lunches, the Massachusetts state board of charities chairman, Frank Sanborn, visited the Tewksbury poor-house. To everyone’s amazement, the former animal-child with the tragic life destined for complete insanity, threw herself at the administrator’s mercy, saying, “Mr. Sanborn, I want to go to school.”

While enduring many surgeries to slow the blindness causing disease she was afflicted with, Little Annie eventually attended Perkins Institute for the Blind. In 1886, she graduated as valedictorian. That’s when she God called her to be an Ezekiel for a seven year old, highly undisciplined blind girl enduring her own desolating realities. Yes, glory be to God, that’s when Anne “Little Annie” Sullivan became Helen Keller’s teacher. Amen.