Do Not Hold On To Me, by He Qi, used by permission.
You can watch a video of this sermon here, at minute 31:20.
We tend a lovely garden here at St. Paul’s. But it is also terrible. We tend a lovely and terrible garden.
First, the loveliness. Our siblings in the faith – Prue, Daphne, Daryl, Catharine, Houston, and others – cultivate lush greens and bright flowers, taking care of God’s earth in the one square of land in all of Uptown Seattle that is not paved over, or trapped beneath a building. We recently restored the labyrinth, a spiritual path that many of our guests and members follow, some of them literally dancing, as they make their way to the center and back again, drawing ever closer to the Spirit of God.
Our garden is about twenty years old now, and it rises above our more seasoned Bolster Garden, where many of our beloved dead are buried. We created the labyrinth garden after we took down an old house, and briefly debated building a much-needed parking lot on this valuable plot of real estate. But we are garden people at St. Paul’s, not parking-lot people, and our choice in the early aughts to cultivate a garden right here – in the center of the city – is a lot like our choice in the early sixties to stay here, and rebuild here, rather than escape up the hill to a bedroom community, cut off from the thrum of city life.
“Get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do,” we recall the risen Christ saying to St. Paul himself, just after knocking him to the ground, just after rescuing St. Paul from his own folly, his own wrongdoing, his own small, deathward way of life. “Get up!” says the risen Christ, to Paul and now to us. And then we here at St. Paul’s hear the risen Christ say, “Get up and cultivate a garden in the city.”
And so we have.
But as I said, the garden is not just lovely. It is also terrible. Often we find broken glass, and remnants of fires started in the night, needles, and piles of trash. A few years ago it was even worse, and one of our gardeners, Barbara, would, well, muck out the garden, removing human waste. The Seattle housing crisis has devastated our garden in recent years, and even now – even though things have gotten a bit better – even now, we have to work hard to keep up.
But all of this – the loveliness and the terribleness – of our garden is what makes it an Easter garden, God’s garden, the garden tended by the Risen One. Mary Magdalene herself would recognize it as such. She found the resurrection garden far from perfect: it was the place that held her awful grief, and held the broken, deceased body of her dearest friend. It was a complicated, fractured place: it was the perfect place to weep. Mary brings to the garden all of her terrible feelings, all of her agony and aching sense of loss, perhaps even her rage at the forces of evil that had seemingly destroyed her friend.
And the Risen One, in turn, recognizes that a garden encloses not just fragrant flowers and healing oils, not just vining leaves and fruit blossoms and tree syrup and honeybees – no, a garden also is a place where the Risen One encounters human grief, and speaks to our grief. “Woman,” the Risen One says, “Why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” He sees her grief; he sees her. He does not tell her to stop crying: unlike some of his own misguided, compulsively chipper followers who think Christianity is just about happy news and warm feelings, the Risen One knows better. The Good News of Resurrection meets us in the midst of our grief. The Good News of Resurrection reveals to us the wounded Risen One, abundantly alive but not untouched by death.
And so we gather this bright morning just outside an imperfect garden, beautiful but broken — just like us. You are beautiful, but I hope you can forgive me when I go ahead and assume that you are broken too. And now that we beautiful but broken ones find ourselves in God’s garden, I ask you my favorite question: what should we do next? What’s next?
Here is my Easter answer to that question, provided to us by Mary Magdalene. Mary stood weeping beside the tomb, carrying unapologetically into God’s garden all of her wrenching grief, and through her tears she did not recognize the Risen One. She mistook him for the gardener. Her mistake gives me my answer to the question, “what should we do next?”. Here is my answer: we should be mistaken for gardeners. Gardeners work hard; they care for living beings; they fold nutrients and oxygen into the soil; they douse the earth with fresh water; they remove faded blossoms; they mulch flower beds; they cut back rose bushes and train young trees to grow tall; they pick up debris.
We are to go from here and do likewise: we are to work hard caring for living beings; we who are nourished by the Risen One should fill the bellies of all who hunger; we who are baptized should work to literally carry fresh, clean water to those who thirst (our Holy Week offerings went to the Gaza Water Project); we who blossom brightly in the warm light of resurrection should remove all that has faded from the world, packing out the trash of injustice, cleaning up the wreckage of war.
We should be mistaken for gardeners.
For this morning the Risen One rises up not in Jesus of Nazareth, as he did long ago. The Risen One rises up in and among all of us gathered here. When we bow deeply to one another here at St. Paul’s, we do so as a way of reverencing the presence of the risen Christ in each of us, and among all of us gathered as Christ’s Body. And so, when we altar servers — those of us who tend this part of the garden, up here — when we bow to you in a few moments, I hope you can recognize within yourself that you too are one of God’s gardeners. You too are one of the saints in the garden of resurrection.
This means that as one of the saints in the garden, your grief belongs here; it makes sense here; so weep as much as you need to weep. The Risen One sees your tears, and calls you by name. But it also means that your gifts belong here too. You yourself are restoring the face of the earth, lifting all things up in new life, and announcing to a world sick with grief that here, in this beautiful and broken garden, right here — within yourself, and within and among all these gathered friends and strangers — here in this garden, you have seen the risen Lord.
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Preached on Easter Sunday (John’s Easter Gospel), April 9, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Acts 10:34-43
Psalm 118:1-2. 14-24
Colossians 3:1-4
John 20:1-18