Easter Sermon 2016

This is the sermon I gave at our main Easter service, March 27, 2016.

Just the Gardener

An Easter Meditation

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

March 27, 2016

Scripture: John 20:1-18

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! It the most joyous proclamation of the Christian faith. It is the most joyous proclamation that there ever was or ever could be. It is the foundational proclamation of the Christian faith. Without Christ’s glorious Resurrection there would be no Christian faith. If Jesus had only died as he did, brutally executed by the Romans as a threat to public order, we’d never have heard of him. If he’d only died with nothing more his followers would have disbanded and gone home, disillusioned perhaps or at least gravely disappointed, but certainly not inspired to proclaim the empty tomb and continue his teachings. Jesus’ Resurrection is certainly the most amazing thing that has ever happened to any human being. I mean, dead people don’t just get up and walk out of the grave, only Jesus did. Jesus rose to eternal life, eternal life for him and eternal life for us. Easter is simply amazing. Easter is simply impossible, it just happened, that’s all. Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!

All of which leads me to ask: If Jesus’ Resurrection is so amazing, why do the Gospels make it sound so ordinary? I mean, they really do, or at least most of them do. Take Mark, the oldest Gospel, for example. In that account three women go to Jesus’ tomb and don’t find Jesus’ body there. Instead they find a figure that Mark just calls a young man. That young man tells them quite matter-of-factly that Jesus isn’t there, he has risen. That’s really all there is Mark’s account. No real drama. No fireworks. Just a man stating a fact as though there were nothing to it. Luke makes it a bit more dramatic, and Matthew, in his typical fashion, makes it a bit more dramatic still. He has an earthquake greet the women at the tomb and a man whose appearance was like lightning. Still, all that man does is tell the women quite matter-of-factly that Jesus has risen. Matthew likes his dramatic details, but all they do is dress up a pretty bland story. The tomb is empty and some figure of other tells the women who find the empty tomb that Jesus has risen.

Then there’s John’s version that we just heard. First in that account Mary Magdalene finds the stone rolled away from the front of Jesus’ tomb. She assumes that something quite ordinary has happened. She tells Peter and another disciple that someone has removed Jesus’ body from the tomb and she doesn’t know what whoever that was has done with it. Peter and the other disciple confirm that Jesus’ tomb is empty. Then they just shrug their shoulders and go home. Mary stands outside the tomb crying. Two angels ask her why she’s crying, and she says it’s because someone has taken Jesus’ body but she knows not where.

Then Mary turns around. She sees what she takes to be something perfectly ordinary. There’s a man standing there. He must have looked perfectly ordinary, for Mary just assumes that he’s the gardener and that he must be the one who for some reason has taken Jesus’ body out of its tomb. Now, that person whom Mary takes to be the gardener turns out to be the risen Christ; but apparently there’s nothing about him that tells Mary that he’s anything other than an ordinary man, not at first at least. If there were, how could she think that he was simply the gardener? I mean, of course there’s nothing wrong with being a gardener; but gardeners look pretty much like the rest of us except perhaps for soiled knees and maybe dirt under their fingernails. John doesn’t tell us that the risen Christ had soiled knees and dirt under his fingernails, but maybe he did. In any event there’s nothing extraordinary about the figure Mary sees. To her, at first, he’s just the gardener. He’s just another man. To her, at first, he’s perfectly ordinary.

How can it be that someone who just got up and walked out of his tomb can seem so ordinary? More importantly, why would God choose to have the risen Christ appear so ordinary to the first people who encounter him? I mean, God could have appeared in the risen Christ like Christ appears in so much Christian iconography: cosmic, immense, stern, surrounded by angels, appearing as judge of the world and everyone in it. Maybe with lightning in his hands, or coming out of his head. There could have been choirs of angels proclaiming the Resurrection, like Luke says there were proclaiming Jesus’ birth. The earth could have been trembling under his divine feet. There could have been a solar eclipse or a new star brighter than the sun sitting above his head. I’m sure a good Hollywood director could come up with a lot of other miraculous, awe-inspiring things that could have been going on for his special effects people to put on film. Yet God didn’t do any of that. No, God in the person of the risen Christ appeared as someone Mary Magdalene took to be just a gardener, a perfectly ordinary man.

You know, I don’t think God ever does anything for no reason. I think that if we perceive God doing something in the world there must be a reason for it. And when God does something in the world there must be some lesson in it for us. It must have some significance. It must tell us something about God and about the world. It must tell us something about how God relates to the world. So what message would God be trying to send us by having Godself in the form of the risen Christ appear as someone so ordinary that one of Jesus’ closest followers, Mary Magdalene, just took him to be the gardener? Well, during Jesus’ lifetime on earth he was forever turning the world’s expectations on their heads. Welcome the prodigal home without question. Praise the hated Samaritan and criticize the honored temple authorities. Pay those who worked one hour as much as those who worked twelve. Dine with people the world calls sinners and tells us to shun. Say the poor and the peacemakers are blessed, not the rich and the war makers the world so honors. In almost everything Jesus said and did he turned the world’s expectations upside down and showed us that God’s ways are very, very different from the world’s ways.

So why wouldn’t Jesus continue his revolutionary teaching and living in his new form as the risen Christ? Well, he would; and he did. See, what would the world expect of a man who was also the Son of God who rose from the dead? Those fireworks I said above were mostly missing from the Gospel’s stories of the Resurrection. We’d expect thunder and lightning. We’d expect earthquakes. We’d expect hosts of angels proclaiming God’s triumph over death. We’d expect sky rockets and firecrackers. We’d expect a great big show. We’d expect power and glory. We’d expect a Cecil B. DeMille movie. That’s what the world would expect, wouldn’t it? Sure seems to me like it would.

God and Jesus Christ of course knew that that’s what the world would expect, so they did exactly the opposite. They had the risen Christ appear as someone Mary Magdalene took to be a gardener. He rose with essentially no special effects. He rose with no fanfare, indeed with no human witnesses to the actual event of his rising. He rose looking perfectly ordinary. He rose looking like an ordinary working person, a man of and from the people, a man of no remarkable appearance or affect. He rose as a gardener. Only after Mary had seen him as a gardener did he reveal to her that he was actually the risen Christ.

Folks, there is a great lesson here for us. We so want to look for God in the spectacular. We want Jesus to return with all the power and fireworks that weren’t there when he rose from the grave. We don’t expect Christ to come to us looking like a gardener. Maybe we especially don’t expect that today because so many people in our context who work at gardening are Latinos, people so many Americans look down on and are suspicious of. We don’t expect it. We probably don’t want it. But there it is, right in the Gospel of John. The risen Christ looked like a gardener.

See, God is telling us something really important in that part of the Resurrection story. God calls us to look for God in the ordinary, the mundane, the unimpressive. God calls us to look for God among the poor, the rejected, the outcast. I confess that I haven’t done it myself, but I have colleagues who do a lot of work among the homeless in Seattle. They say that the presence of Christ is very real among those unfortunate souls. That’s where we should look for God among us, among those Christ came specially to save, the poor, the downtrodden, the scorned, the despised, the rejected, the excluded. That’s where we are to look. That’s where we will find God.

Christ rose from the grave. Yes, he did. That we believe. That we know. That we confess. And when he did he looked like a gardener. Not like a prince. Not like a king. Not like an angel. Like a gardener. God is in the midst of us in our ordinary, unexciting, everyday lives. God is present with us in those lives bringing us grace, peace, and salvation. To find God don’t look up as much as you look across and within. Find God where you live. Find God in how you live. Find God in your gardener. That’s what Mary Magdalene did, and it’s what Easter calls us to do too. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Thanks be to God. Amen.