Sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Lance Moore on Sunday, March
9, 2008
John 12:23-24: Jesus said, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I tell you the truth, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”
John 15:1: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.”
John 20:10-16: “Then the disciples returned to their homes. But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to him in Aramaic, "Rabboni!" (which means Teacher).”
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Let me tell you what happened as your pastor was putting the finishing touches on this sermon yesterday. I sighed to my family and said, “I’m afraid I’ve not been able to make the sermon, well, my usual masterpiece.”
My wife resisted the urge to chuckle and instead was encouraging. “Well, Lance, you might rescue it if you work extra hard on the delivery... maybe add an upbeat joke or something. What is your topic?”
“Death.”
All three of us erupted in laughter. But of course, they knew I was not kidding. Our topic is a little brighter than it sounds—it is, “From Death to Life”—a sermon about death but also about eternal life, a pre-Easter Easter sermon.
You see, I always tell people that I could not face death, I could not officiate at funerals, if I didn’t first believe in Easter, and this is also true about Lent: the Lenten season has no meaning unless we keep Easter and the Resurrection also in mind. So imagine with me, for a moment, that first Easter. The cool of the morning, just before dawn. It would have been a beautiful Spring morning had it not been for the horrible images of crucifixion still imprinted on Mary’s mind. And actually, it was still too dark to see the beauty of the flowers in the garden, the cemetery garden where Jesus’ body had been placed three days prior. There was just enough light to see shapes, but not faces. Mary was startled to bump into someone, and assumed it must be the gardener. Who else would be up so early among the tombs? But it was Jesus, the risen Lord.
Many of the minute, almost trivial, details of the Bible may have no purpose or meaning other than this: they prove that the Bible is a true account of real people, not some vague fairy tale or imaginary novel. Or there may be deeper meanings in the details: symbolic importance. Allow me to draw on just such a symbol, this curious detail of the mistaken identity of Jesus as a gardener. It presents a powerful paradox: a gardener among tombs.
There, in the place of the dead, is a garden, teeming with life. Perhaps the day before, Mary had seen the real gardener of the graveyard, a man hired by the wealthy owners of these tombs to tend the place, to till and plant, to pull weeds, to water, to bring life and beauty to this dismal spot of death. Isn’t it appropriate that Mary thought Jesus was the gardener?! He is a gardener of sorts. Everything he touched came to life. He brought beauty out of ugliness, fruitfulness out of barrenness, health out of disease, and yes, even life out of death.
As I told you last week, I am not a gardener. Give me something green, and I can make it brown. Once I made a rock garden. Even the rocks died. But many of you are successful gardeners. Gardening is the number one hobby in the U.S., and I suspect it is because of the joy in growing things, of bringing things to life out of the dirt.
God is a joyful gardener, too. God’s act of creating humanity is portrayed in Genesis in terms of gardening. In the garden of Eden account, the word “Adam” is the same as the Hebrew word for human, and the etymology of the word Adam is the same as adhamah, the Hebrew word for ground or dirt. Likewise, In Latin, the word humus means fertilizer. From humus we get the word human. Even Charles Darwin agrees, in a roundabout way, that humans sprouted up from the dirt. The myth of the cabbage patch baby is not too far from the truth.
It’s fitting, then, that Jesus is the gardener who brings life out of the dead soil. He can take the most miserable human and lift them from their humus, their filth, and redeem them, restore them, and make them fruitful again. Mary Magdalene mistook Jesus for a fleshly gardener. But he was truly her spiritual gardener. Legend has it that Mary of Magdala was the same woman who had once been a prostitute, thrown in the dirt about to be stoned. Jesus picked her up from the dust, forgave her, and nurtured her soul until she became one of the saints. Mary knew what it meant to be lifted up from dirt and filth and given new life.
In part one of this sermon, last week, I mentioned that Jesus used agrarian illustrations more than any other. He compared the kingdom of God to a mustard seed. He compared the Christian life to being a branch on a vine, tended by a heavenly gardener. Jesus spoke about trees and vineyards and wheatfields and all kinds of growing things. He used the word “seed” fifty times in the gospels. And Jesus spoke of his own death and resurrection in these same horticultural terms: he said, “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” In the crucifixion and burial of Christ, God planted a powerful seed that sprang to life on Easter morning. That Easter Seed has borne fruit for two millennia. Jesus brings life out of death.
There are four places in Scripture that Jesus comes to either a graveyard or a funeral, and in every case, he brings life out of death. As my old friend Rev. Charles Myhand used to say, “Jesus ruined every funeral he ever attended.”
I will never forget my crazy friend in High School, Roger the grease-monkey. Roger would buy old broken-down cars, fix them up and sell them for a profit. He traded cars three or four times a month, always trying to find the strangest vehicle he could. He probably had bought and sold 50 different cars, all before he was 18 years old. Roger finally found the ultimate attention-getter: a 1957 Chevrolet Hearse. Roger thought it was funny to dress up in a black suit and drive the hearse around town, trying to impress girls. One day I was riding with him and the brakes failed. I mean, they completely went out, and Roger and I almost became the first people to be killed in a hearse! After much coasting, we managed to roll to a safe stop and then had a good laugh.
You see, it was easy for us to laugh at death then; we were young and healthy and death seemed distant. But during Roger’s senior year, one of his classmates was killed in a car wreck on the way to the Prom. When Roger heard the news, that big, tough grease monkey broke and cried like a baby.
As we grow up, we find it harder to laugh at death because it comes closer to us. Now we tend to avoid the subject of death altogether. Society hides the dying away in sterile hospitals where we don't have to see them; health foods, exercise fads, wrinkle removers and longevity vitamins are part of our denial mechanism about aging and death. And we try to shield our young ones from the pain and reality of Death, capital “D”. A good thing to try, perhaps, but an exercise in futility. I’ll share a touching illustration of this. A woman became ill, and was on her death bed. As the doctor left the room, he consulted with the husband. “I’ll be honest with you, sir. I’ve done all I can. Your wife will not live much longer. By the time the last leaves of autumn have fallen from the trees, she will be gone, too.” The doctor didn’t know that the couple’s 7-year-old daughter was listening behind a door. And so, a few months later, as the autumn came and the leaves began to turn bronze and fell from the trees, the father left the bedside of his dying wife for a moment to check on his daughter. She could not be found in the house, so he stepped into the yard to look for her. And there was the little girl, underneath a small tree with a spool of thread, desperately trying to tie the leaves back onto the branches.
I can hardly bear to tell that story. It exposes not only our futility in trying to hide the knowledge of death from our little ones, but also exposes our own equally-silly notions that we can stop the Grim Reaper with a bit of surgical twine. No, the mother did not miraculously recover. She died, as we all will. We can no more stop death than the little girl could hold back Autumn, with her leaves and thread.
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Now, if this was a Unitarian Church or the Church of Scientology, we would end the sermon there, sing a song and adjourn for punch and cookies. Not very satisfying punch and cookies. But no, we are Methodists, we believe in something greater than death, we believe in a resurrected Jesus Christ!
And just as surely as winter turns to Spring, and just as surely as the somber Lenten season leads us to Easter, so also are all tragedies ultimately resolved in the miraculous event of Resurrection. One of the early church fathers, Origen, suggested that the Garden of Eden will be literally restored at the end of human history, that Paradise would be re-made, with Christ as chief gardener. The Book of Revelation presents just such a literal restoration of Heaven on Earth, and in Revelation 7:9, the resurrected saints greet the Conquering Christ with palm branches. According to legend, those palm leaves were taken from the original palm trees of Paradise. The Garden of Eden, the Tree of Life, they are all put back together for the New Heaven and the New Jerusalem, which St. John envisioned in his book of Revelation. Maybe the little girl with her leaves and thread was right!
I’ll finish this sermon not reading Revelation, but with excerpts from the 1st Epistle to the Corinth, Chapter 15. The Apostle Paul was pretty sure that he would not live much longer... he had seen many Christians put to death at the hands of Jews and Romans, and he had narrowly escaped death himself on several occasions. He was a wanted fugitive, and on top of that, we believe he had some kind of physical ailment. So when he wrote to his friends these impassioned words about death and life, we should open our ears to hear what the wise old man is saying to us. He wrote:
“But someone may ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?" How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow [a garden], you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.… So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.… The first man [Adam] was of the dust of the earth, the second man [Christ] from heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth [now]; and as is the one from heaven, so also are those who [will be] of heaven. And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly human, so shall we bear the likeness of the one from heaven.…”
Now there were some of the people at Corinth that believed in a thing called “soul sleep.“ That is, some feared that when this body dies, the soul just falls into a great sleep and there was debate about whether anyone ever wakes from that soul sleep. So at this point in the letter, Paul wrote something which to me feels like he was not writing the words at all, but speaking them, as if he were right here, bent over, and whispering this great and valuable secret in my ear:
“Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable.... For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with IMMORTALITY.…”
And then Paul changes his mind. This not a mystery any longer, not a secret to be whispered. It is to be announced joyously, it is to be heralded, shouted out with the volume of trumpets:
“Then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory!! Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" ...Thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!”
Christ has done more than sew the leaves back on the tree. Christ has conquered Death entirely, he has brought the tree out of winter, into eternal Spring,
evergreen, evergrowing, everlasting.
Christ has risen, and with him all humanity can be reborn and resurrected. He has faced the worst thing, and from it the best thing has come. He is risen, and for me there is no other event in history, no other phrase, no other reality any more important than this: Christ has risen.
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(He has risen indeed!)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Foley, Alabama