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Sermon 03/23/2008
Grace in the Wilderness: Again You Shall Plant ~
by Reverand Thomas Cary Kinder
March 23, 2008 Easter Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 118; Jeremiah 31:2-5; John 20:1-18
“The people who survived the sword
found grace in the wilderness,”
said the Prophet Jeremiah. He said,
“Again you shall plant vineyards
on the mountains of Samaria.”
And when Mary turned from the tomb
in the dewy, cool garden—
that wilderness of grief—
she saw a man who looked to her eyes
like a gardener.
But before resurrection there is crucifixion.
Before grace, there is wilderness.
The Prophet Jeremiah knew wilderness.
He lived in a time when his nation’s rulers
told the people lies to gain power and wealth.
They spoke of victory as the nation
suffered humiliation in endless war.
They spoke of prosperity as war
bled the nation dry and the numbers
of the poor swelled, while the rulers
and their class grew obscenely rich
by violent and dishonest means.
Jeremiah knew the wilderness
of the sword in the service of gold
and he prophesied against it
and against the suffering it caused.
While others sang God Bless
Our Nation, he said, no, God
damns our nation, God damns
our nation for abandoning its sacred morals
and its founding principles and for neglecting
the basic needs and well-being of the people.
Jeremiah spoke God’s truth, as Jesus did, and so,
like Jesus, he knew crucifixion as well as wilderness,
as even his friends denied him or
distanced themselves from him,
and those in power ridiculed or threatened him.
But Jeremiah spoke the truth and the rulers lied.
So in time the nation that lived by the sword
died by the sword, and the wealthy who
neglected the poor became poor themselves,
and those who survived the sword
saw their lives and their nation reduced
to wilderness.
And that is when Jeremiah stood up
with the audacity of hope, talking of
grace in the wilderness
and the everlasting and steadfast
love of God, whose faithfulness
never ends. We can kill this God
and he comes back to life
to love us more.
This God will even descend
into hell, the most firey pit
of our inner or outer wilderness,
and love us even there as our
worst selves do their worst.
Jeremiah was thinking of Moses
who led the people to freedom.
Grace in the wilderness:
where out of the sky falls the bread of life,
where out of the impenetrable rock face
suddenly gushes a spring of living water,
where out of the chaos in which we wander lost
comes the eternal law, the sacred Way
that finds us and binds us together,
that restores us and leads us on
toward the Promised Land.
Grace in the wilderness:
when you are sick,
or when you have been struggling
long with a terrible burden,
or when you have been enslaved
by obsession or compulsion or addiction,
or when you have been oppressed
by others’ abuse or neglect,
when you have been in the wilderness
and you take that first step away—
that is grace,
when you let go all
that you have held onto
and that has held you,
when you flee your Egypt
and leave your life there behind,
when you decide at last to entrust your journey
to the care of a higher power,
be it doctor or 12 Step group,
be it Moses or Jesus or God.
Grace is when you feel
that first wave of relief—you feel free:
that is grace, but
it is still in the wilderness, because
you are not free—not yet.
You are still sick, you are still
addicted, you are still susceptible
to your fear or terrible burden,
your nation is still at war,
the poor are still neglected,
the earth is still crying out,
and you have a long road ahead, perhaps,
to healing and true freedom and the Promised Land.
But imagine Jesus taking that first step
out of the tomb, out of the stench
of his own death and decay,
that first step barefoot onto the grass—
can you remember what that is like,
your first day barefoot outside in spring?
Imagine Jesus smelling the moist predawn world,
so rich, so alive. It is still
the same world that crucified him,
he can foresee at least two thousand years
of struggle ahead, but what
joy in those first wondrous steps.
“Again you shall take your tambourines
and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers!”
Jeremiah said. Imagine living to see
your nation shake off its violence and greed,
recommit itself to the health and well-being
of its children, of its poor,
of its neighbors on earth,
of the earth itself.
Just the vision of that is enough
to make the Prophet Jeremiah giddy
with hope—a hope that is all
in God, in God’s steadfast love.
And so, under the tambourines and dancing,
there is also the grace of peace,
a peace that passeth understanding,
a confidence that again spring will come
and again you will plant
the seeds of hope in the ground of love.
That peace, that confidence, surpasses understanding
because on the outside the wilderness
is still all around you and ahead of you
as far as the outer eye can see.
And behind you are the swords of your
slave masters and oppressors and
all the powers of death.
Yet you know in your heart, you see
with your inner eye this other truth
that again you will plant, again you will live.
Once I stood at the bedside
of a dying woman. She had suffered
terribly, she had no hope
of recovery, she was still young
and now losing everything,
but in that loss, in that worst
of wildernesses, she received grace,
a vision that helped her let go,
and she told us that she knew
that she was healed,
that now she would live.
We who stood around her were embarrassed,
knowing her to be wrong.
But she knew in her heart this other truth
that surpassed our understanding,
and she never lost sight of it,
never lost the peace and hope and joy of it
even as, days later, she said good by and died.
The power of resurrection comes
with the first steps out of the tomb,
even while the wounds of crucifixion
are still open and the taste of death
is still in our mouth, and once we have it,
the power of resurrection does not stop
even as we watch death draw near.
We can still feel that power in the words
of that modern Jeremiah, that modern
Moses, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
speaking on the eve of his death,
looking out at the poor working people,
saying, “I just want to do God’s will.
And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain.
And I’ve looked over.
And I’ve seen the promised land.
I may not get there with you.
But I want you to know tonight
that we, as a people, will
get to the promised land.
And I’m happy, tonight.
I’m not concerned about anything.
I’m not fearing any man.
Mine eyes have seen the glory
of the coming of the Lord.”
Grace in the wilderness.
Again you will plant justice and mercy
and peace in this ravaged land.
This is the resurrection promise
and the resurrection power.
“Mine eyes have seen the glory
of the coming of the Lord.”
Maybe that is what Mary said to the disciples
when she ran into their hiding place
out of breath and shining the white light
of radiant joy. “I have seen the Lord!
And I thought he was a gardener!”
Imagine how she laughed to say it,
and yet she saw through to a truth,
because he is indeed a gardener.
This is the good news of this Easter
buried in cold and snow.
Jesus lives, and he is a gardener.
He is the gardener who plants
the seed of hope in the ground of love,
he is the hand within the hands of those
who plant the vineyards on the war ravaged
mountains of Samaria, turning them green where
the charred, uprooted skeletons of old vines
lie scattered on the scorched earth
the Babylonians left behind.
He is a gardener who tends even the most
tender and twisted pale shoots. He is the gardener
who touches the dry wilderness within us
and makes water spring from the rock
and makes new life stir and grow
where outer eyes see nothing but death.
He is the one who knows the sacred way
through death and back from death to life,
who knows the way and is the way,
who can heal us by touch,
who can lead us by our deepest intuitions
the way the seed knows which direction
to send the shoot to reach the light.
We all know the swords that threaten us,
we all know intimately the wildernesses of this world
that we wander in day and night,
but do we know the grace in the wilderness?
Do we know, do we feel the prophetic truth
that again we will plant our vineyards
and our gardens, that again we will live,
that again this nation will be a gift
of healing and hope to the poor
and the weak and this endangered earth,
that we will one day get to the Promised Land?
Do we know the truth of resurrection that we need
and that our world needs so desperately now?
If not, all we have to do is
step into the wilderness, or
go to the garden of greatest grief,
go weep at the tomb within us,
go to some hurting part of the world
with Mary in the shadows before dawn,
and stay there until we see
someone who looks like a gardener,
someone who looks like he or she
might know how to make bare soil sprout life,
some agent of resurrection power,
and like Mary we will see the truth,
we will find the grace of knowing
that God’s love yet lives. That God’s love
is risen. It is risen indeed.
And it shall not die and so we shall not die,
but we shall live, and we ourselves
in the wilderness.
Again we shall plant.
Let us pray in silence….
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