The Gardener

Text:  John 20: 1-18

This year Earth Day heralded Easter Day. The conjoined celebrations may help us pay closer attention to the holiness of the earth, the earthiness of Easter. The resurrection story from John’s Gospel announces this very earthy theme—with its setting in a garden and its image of Jesus as the gardener.

You’ll recall that last Sunday’s Gospel story was also set in a garden.  It focused on Jesus’s agonizing prayer in the garden of Gethsemane and his arrest there. Jesus’s body was, a day later, buried in a garden tomb.  So it is to that garden Mary Magdalene returns on the first day of the week.

Because Jesus reappears as a new creation on “the first day,” the story puts us in mind of the first day of creation.  The resurrection garden may remind us of yet another garden--called Eden. Our Hebrew Bible reading today, part of the very first story in the Bible, teaches us that our purpose is to care for the earth’s garden. Genesis 2:15 says, “God put people in the garden of Eden to till it and to keep it.”   

If you think I’m giving you some kind of peculiarly modern, left-wing, hippy-dippy environmentalist take on Easter, then you may not be familiar with early Christian artistic renderings of Jesus.  The book Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire[i] provides overwhelming evidence that the early Christians portrayed Christ in a garden, not on a cross. In fact, depicting Jesus on the cross would have been abhorrent in the first centuries of the church. The most ancient strain of Christianity joyously affirmed the earth and worked for justice and compassion. They would not have recognized a Christianity glorifying the crucifixion or longing for a paradise after death.  In fact, it was not until the 10^th century that churches began to depict Jesus on a cross—a shift connected to an increasingly militant church that launched the Crusades and began to sacralize violence with the Crusader’s cross, that incited soldiers with vengeance for Christ’s suffering, and that promised a post-death paradise to soldiers who died for their religion.

The authors of Saving Paradise, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, at first didn’t believe what art historians had been asserting--that Jesus’s suffering and death were absent from early church art.  Until they made their own 5-year search. Which revealed that in the catacombs and in the oldest art of the oldest churches in Rome and Istanbul, in monasteries in northeast Turkey, and in the Ravenna mosaics and elsewhere—there were no images of Jesus on the cross (xii). But there were depictions of Jesus as a child, Jesus as a youthful shepherd, a healer of the sick, a teacher (xi). Most typical and startling—to the writers of Saving Paradise—were the images of Jesus tending a verdant garden paradise in a world marked by familiar rivers which identified the garden as existing in the here and now.  “Paradise was THE dominant image of early Christian sanctuaries” (XIV).  Church walls were covered with pastoral landscapes, orchards, sparkling rivers filled with fish, lush meadows, sheep, birds, flowers, vines. 

So how did the cross become THE symbol for the Church of Jesus?  Some believe that Christianity abandoned its vocation of loving and caring for the earth and her people when it adjusted its theology to justify war and domination.  Initially Christian converts had to foreswear participation in warfare. But by the time Christianity became the religion of the empire--an empire maintained through violence and which sometimes even forced conversions to Christianity at sword point--the Church had to swap its emphasis on acts of charity, love of neighbor, and spiritual practices for a set of beliefs that needed to be defended and promoted and used to justify oppression and violence. 

If we could recover our love and responsibility for creation, perhaps we could renounce Empire and return to an Eden with a commitment to compassion.  Perhaps we should become gardeners again.

Imagine, if you can, that a great head gardener hired us to care for our little planet. What kind of performance review do you think 21^st Century humanity would receive? What would the head gardener say about the BP oil spill into our Gulf waters, or the tar sands oil chugging alongside our fresh water supply?

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut gives humanity this severe evaluation in Good Friday language: “The crucified Planet Earth, should it find a voice and a sense of irony, might now well say of our abuse of it, ‘Forgive them, Father. They know not what they do.’ The irony would be that we know what we are doing. When the last living thing has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice perhaps floating up from the floor of the Grand Canyon, ‘It is finished.’”

When we harm our planet, we are continuing to crucify the Christ.  When we care for our planet, we are gardening in the God's garden.

An earthy Easter celebration might be a way for us to see the centrality of earth care as a deep and ancient Christian commitment and spiritual practice.  To follow Jesus—to the garden and then to the cross and then to the garden that is Eden—is to help Christ tend the garden.

In John’s resurrection story, Mary mistakes Jesus for a gardener. But maybe she is NOT mistaken.  Resurrection, according to this story about a Gardener in a Garden, is a possibility for all creation. 

Consider this: the writer of John’s Gospel COULD have selected a different metaphor for the risen Jesus.  In fact, there are far more obvious images of Jesus if the writer’s intention had been to impress hearers with the magical power of the Christ. Hollywood would have presented the resurrected Jesus exploding out of the tomb—or dashing out in spandex and a cape like the original Superman exiting a phone booth. If I had written the resurrection story to convince people of Jesus’s power in my life, I’d have said that Mary mistook him for . . .  I'm not sure for what but something more dramatic than the humble gardener.  Put yourself in the writer’s position.  You have been transformed by the risen Christ—and you want to impress your readers with the way Jesus is continuing to live on in your life and in your community.  You experience his love as enduring, his lessons continuing, his connection to the Divine still compelling.  Wouldn’t you at least say his countenance was glowing with an unearthly light?  His garments radiant?  His voice thunderous?  I mean, why tell this death-defying story with such an ordinary-looking hero? 

Maybe because the Easter message is not about the creation of a Superhero.  It’s not about the ability of one man to defy death.  It’s a story about humanity's divine capacity to transcend death.  To go beyond what we know for sure.

To admit there is much we don’t know about death, about life, or about God preserves mystery. Easter is deeper than a set of facts and more mysterious than a simplistic metaphor about a butterfly emerging from its cocoon or about the dead seed bringing forth new life.  Those are beautiful metaphors rooted in the natural world.

But resurrection is more than a biological process.

We are yearning for spiritual meaning, purpose, connection.  We are DYING for RESURRECTION in our hearts and spirits.  Yes, even we progressives, we jaded former church folks who have stumbled back into a church setting but this time with our doubts and rationalizations displayed on us like merit badges—we, too, hunger for  transcendence. It’s in the Jesus Story and with the Jesus community that I find ways to experience the spiritual dimensions of life.

After all, even the highly rational ones will miss something that’s potentially life altering if Jesus is simply an archetype and not a flesh-and-blood human being who walked this earth and lived and DIED.  And then . . . and then . . . and then we don’t know for sure.  Resurrection and recognition happened “while it was still dark”—says today’s story. Resurrection happened in the murky pre-dawn of day about which so much is uncertain.  But life-changing, world-altering stories sprang up like wildflowers in spring, and those stories said the one some called Rabbi, or Lord, or Son of Man, or Son of God--this crucified Nazarene--was somehow seen/experienced again by his followers.  This experience was so stunningly inexplicable that a defeated sect, the dispirited disciples, became revitalized because they not only retold these stories but lived into the Resurrection Story. 

And that story acts upon our imaginations to revive us, to recreate us in his image, to resurrect us and all creation together. 

We as a faith community, people who faith into the future, do not have evidence for our hope, nor can we even name exactly what it is for which we hope. We simply try to enter the stories.  And remain humbly uncertain.

Poet Mary Oliver cautions me, even on Easter, with these words:

Let me keep my distance, always,
from those who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

Don’t curb your Easter enthusiasm!  But a good dose of uncertainty might keep us appropriately humble before the biggest mystery of life: death. Here’s the good news: We can belt out an “alleluia” with faith only the size of a mustard seed. We can practice resurrection hope simply by saying “Look!” when we peer into darkness, and laughing in astonishment in the garden, and bowing with humility if we catch a glimpse of the elusive gardener.

PRAYER

God, let us sing alleluia to celebrate any joyful thing. Let us not hold back gladness or gratitude until we figure out the gift.  Let us appreciate the darkness for that which might yet be revealed in it. Easter in us, O God, and in our earth. Amen

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[i] Brock, Rita Nakashima and Rebecca Ann Parker, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008).

When We Are the Women

Text:  Mark 16: 1-8

from “Cancion” by Denise Levertov

. . . When I am a woman—O, when I am a woman,
my wells of salt brim and brim,
poems force the lock of my throat.

When we are the women at Easter’s empty tomb, when we imaginatively enter Mark’s resurrection story as if we were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, we initially approach the day’s traditional rites with dutiful solemnity.  But when we are these women, O when we are the Easter women, old duties suddenly seem pointless, as pointless as anointing a dead body that can no longer be found, as senseless as anointing dead doctrines of Christianity with sweet smelling words.  Suddenly, new possibilities seize us with both “terror and amazement” (Mark 16:8). 

I invite you to enter the Easter story today in the spirit of these three women. I invite you to let resurrection dawn upon you both suddenly and slowly, until the poetry of Easter unlocks your throats. I invite you to consider what the women’s experience of the resurrection can teach us.

You would probably appreciate some background on Mary, Mary, and Salome, our avatars at the tomb, but the Gospels reveal little, tradition is inconsistent, and surely these characters serve a literary not literal function. Indeed, the four Gospels offer four different resurrection stories with four different casts of characters at the empty tomb. They can’t all be factually true. But we can be sure of the radically countercultural way Jesus respected and included women.  And before we make too much of the fact that the women fled at the end of Mark’s Gospel, remember Mark previously told us the male disciples had either betrayed, denied, or deserted Jesus while the women had stayed near the cross and had dared to anoint his body on the third day while the men hid. The women’s flight from the tomb was Mark’s way of signaling, in the final words of his story, that even the women ran away at the very end.

Let’s also bear in mind what these women witnessed earlier: the torture and death of the prophet, teacher, and beloved friend who’d brought them healing and hope.  In an atmosphere of betrayal and conspiracy, how could they trust or even make sense of the stranger’s message that the crucified Jesus would meet them later in Galilee? So they ran away. And they told no one.

Mark ends not with a triumphant proclamation that “He is risen!” but with fear and silence.

I emphasize that unsettling point because it is not how you THINK the story ends. Each Gospel presents a very different account of Jesus’s resurrection, and you might have subconsciously added some details to today’s reading that are not there.  Look back at the Gospel reading to see if your eyes and ears deceived you.  Did you notice that in the resurrection story which concludes the Gospel of Mark, the resurrected Jesus never appears? Mark’s readers glimpse an empty tomb and a man (not an angel, by the way) telling the women that Jesus is risen. But a post-resurrection Jesus does not appear to the women, does not allow the doubting Thomas to see the nail prints in his hands, does not ascend into heaven.  Look back at the final verses and keep in mind these are the final verses of Mark’s entire biography of Jesus, our oldest Gospel and the one Matthew and Luke took as their main source. Mark ends abruptly with the statement that the women fearfully keep the story to themselves, contrary to the messenger’s command. Mark ends with terror and silence. If Mark had been the only Gospel to survive, we would have only the secondhand testimony of an anonymous man who told the women Jesus had risen.  We would not know if the women believed this stranger. We would only know they had run away, and though the man in white told them to tell the others Jesus was alive, the book ends with the narrator’s statement that they did not. 

Well, Happy Easter.

Of course, if we had only Mark’s Gospel, we’d still recognize that someone at some point told something of this experience, else the Marcan community would not have passed along the story to us! But Mark’s version of the resurrection does not attest to any original disciple knowing and sharing the news that Jesus had been raised to new life. 

Yes, some versions of Mark do add another twelve verses to tidy things up a bit with appearances of Jesus to various people mentioned in Matthew, Luke, and John and well as his ascension to heaven.  But almost all scholars agree those twelve verses were added to Mark many years later in at least two stages, and the best translations omit them.  The oldest manuscripts do not contain verses 9-20.  Perhaps a conscientious scribe wanted to improve upon the story’s ending.  After all, maybe the final page was lost or maybe the writer dropped dead before writing the most important words of the Jesus story. We can forgive an overly zealous monk for wanting to correct an ending that hardly seemed to ring with Easter enthusiasm.

But in this case one or more copyists, eager to affirm the eternal Christ, likely added verses that, in effect, hindered future readers from recognizing Mark’s rhetorical methods. You see, some biblical scholars think the original ending is the culmination of a brilliant strategy Mark has been building up to all along. Over and over Mark shows us that the disciples do not understand Jesus’s mission.  Repeatedly, Jesus tells them NOT to tell anyone what they have seen and heard--though some tell anyway--because they still do not comprehend the meaning and methods of God’s reign.  They are not capable of transmitting the Good News yet.  However, after the crucifixion, the followers of Jesus can no longer insist that he will rule with power and might.  After the cruel cross, after the empty tomb, Jesus’s way of radical love is unmistakable. At last his followers can understand.  At last they are commissioned to tell the Good News.

And that is when, ironically, the most perceptive, even the women, flee in fear and confusion.  And there the story ends.

But we as the readers understand. Mark plays to the reader’s understanding in contrast with the original disciples’ lack of understanding.  Mark’s first readers already affirmed that Jesus was resurrected in the lives of their faith community.  Mark’s first readers were living through persecution and peril and were themselves beset by fear.  The rhetorical move that Mark makes is to invest them with the responsibility of carrying on the work of Jesus, to be the faithful ones in contrast with the first disciples. And 2000 years later, you and I also read of the women’s silence and resolve that we will carry forward the Good News.  We feel the responsibility for continuing the Way of Resurrection. We know that it’s now up to us.   

The young man inside the empty tomb says that Jesus the crucified has gone ahead of them to Galilee, that backwater district where he’d started his ministry.  “There you will see him, just as he told you,” says the stranger in white.

And there, in the continued work of healing and feeding and freeing folks caught in the domination system of the Empire, Jesus’s gradually comprehending followers did reunite with Jesus again.  The writer doesn’t have to fill in the blanks for us.  From this final chapter of Mark that instructs the disciples to meet up again with Jesus in Galilee, we readers circle back to Mark’s first chapter and recall where Mark’s story began, with Jesus calling the first disciples from their fishing nets along the Galilean shoreline.  You’ll see him there again, the strange messenger in white says, as you fish for people and rescue them from the waters of Empire.

Here are two things I understand about resurrection: it happens gradually and it happens in community.

It is no wonder that the resurrection took a symbolic three days. Realizations dawn slowly. Mary, Mary, and Salome could not perceive the resurrection of Jesus immediately.  But in the forty years between Jesus’s state execution and the writing of the Gospel of Mark, the Marcan community had time to make meaning together out of the beauty of Jesus’ life and the horror of his death and the continued real and transforming presence of his Spirit among them. Gradually and communally they created this story of what the vital, healing, transforming way of Jesus meant to them.

And this is why I suggested we become the women.  So that we realize the point of Mark’s seemingly unacceptable ending is that we not allow the story to end there.  We take up the women's role from there.     

Mark’s clever rhetorical choices make the readers into the sole possessors of the Gospel. Like the people who first read Mark’s Gospel, we should come away feeling that it’s up to us to carry on the mission of Jesus. We have heard the story.  The original actors in the story failed to some extent perhaps, but the story lives on as long as we tell it with our lives.

              

Sure, the story continues to get extended and reinterpreted and sometimes manipulated and mangled.  The beautiful story of Easter gets co-opted by Hallmark and Cadbury and politicians and preachers.  But even you and I get to “contribute a verse,” to borrow a phrase from Dead Poets Society.

However, if you are like the women, you need some time before the poetry unlocks your throat.  You need time, I need time, for the story to unfold in our hearts and lives. 

Like Mary and Mary and Salome, we react first with fear when we face something totally unexpected.  Even good news may sound threatening.  And we may flee. But when we DO go to Galilee and begin that healing work in the world, we see where Christ remains, Christ who is the heart and mind of God.  And we find resurrection—slow and communal resurrection—happening in and through us.

We at Open table have witnessed recently the beginnings of resurrection as Rosemarie has come back from the brink of the grave.  But resurrection is NOT instantaneous—as those know who watch Rosemarie make slow, hard progress to think and speak and move.  Likewise, it took many days or perhaps years for the followers of the Way to frame their story into meaningfulness for their lives. 

Even when we’re in the process of resurrection, it doesn’t always feel wonderful.  Just ask Rosemarie.  

Occasionally one of you will say something like this to me: “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t returned to church after all these years.  It was easier not to think about Jesus and church.  It’s hard now to rethink Christianity and try to live in ways that are consistent with Jesus’s life.  This is all harder than I thought.”

Resurrection happens slowly and communally.  Sometimes our first impulse is to run from a bracing or unexpected word.  That’s okay.  Because after awhile, the Spirit of truth and love lures us back. 

Joan Chittister says that “until we find ourselves with new hearts, more penetrating insights, less need for the transient, greater awareness of the spiritual pulse of life, resurrection has not really happened for us.”

Mark’s resurrection story is about what is happening in us and through us. Mark’s resurrection story happens to people in community.   

There will be folks who participate in Open Table for awhile and then leave.  Even the good news of Progressive Christianity that is reviving a moribund church will frighten away some. 

But our mission at Open Table is not to put Christianity on life support.  Some things must die so that others can be reborn.  It’s scary when religious assumptions are questioned, when the parts of Christianity we once held as essential are stripped off like binding grave clothes so we are free to walk out of religion’s tomb. A new self, a renewed church comes out of that darkness.  

 

But be assured, friends, that our small congregation is not alone in recognizing that American Christianity “is flailing and failing.”  A “spiritually renewed and intellectually credible Christianity” has been undergoing resurrection for the last two decades. An article this week titled “A Resurrected Christianity?” by Diana Butler Bass is one of many suggesting that what we at Open Table are doing is in line with a growing movement of liberal mainline Protestant churches, “Emerging" churches, and progressive Catholics from “around the edges of organized religion” asking new questions and trying to “reform, reimagine, and reformulate” church to resurrect “a heart-centered Christianity.”[ii] 

My friends, this is extraordinary.  Once again, the body of Christ, which is the Church, is being resurrected.

Clarence Jordan said, “The proof that God raised Jesus from the dead is not the empty tomb, but the full hearts of his transformed disciples."

Like the women in the story, we are both amazed and terrified.  In fact, we don’t quite have the poetic vocabulary for this resurrection of our individual and congregational lives. But when we are the women of the story just beginning the resurrection process, wells of salt brim and brim, until finally Gospel poems force the lock of our throats. 

Christ is risen! Alleluia! 

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[ii] Bass, Diana Butler.  “A Resurrected Christianity?" Huff Post Religion (8 April 2012)          .  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diana-butler-bass/a-resurrected-christianit_b_1410143.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false#sb=1329620,b=facebook