This sermon was preached for the Seventh Sunday after Easter, May 29, 2022 at St. Mark's, East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were: Acts 16:16-34, Psalm 97, and John 17:20-26.
Next to the entrance for fourth and fifth graders at my elementary school, there was a small memorial garden filled with pretty flowers and colorful pinwheels, planted by the parents of a young boy who had died. It might seem a little strange to have small children walk past a reminder of the mortality of children at the start of each day. But here I have to remind you that I grew up as an American schoolchild in the 90s and early 2000s. I was in fourth grade when the shooting at Columbine high school happened; the garden sat right outside the doors we were trained to lock and the desks we learned to huddle behind in active shooter lockdown drills. By the time I was 10 years old, I was already being asked to confront the reality that going to school meant I could be in danger of dying by a gun wielded by a fellow child. So in the face of that, the memorial garden was instead a poignant lesson of the endurance and depth of a particular kind of grief, a grief no person should ever know, that of a parent burying a child. The garden stood to say: this love never ends, even when little lives do. Grief, Jamie Anderson once wrote, Grief is love with no place to go. Here, this small, beautiful sanctuary of carefully tended, budding life, was somewhere for a small part of all that love to go.
This weekend is a time we as a nation have agreed to set aside to think about how we memorialize our dead. This Monday is all about remembering lives ended too soon, daughters and sons - so many sons - lost to the cruelty and callousness of war. We have a tendency in this country to set up huge stone markers to immortalize our war dead: plaques and statutes and lists of names made of metal and stone. Their permanence is meant to underscore our vow to always remember their sacrifice. These markers are built to withstand the elements, erected once and for all time. There is something a bit disingenuous about great stone monuments, however, something that memorial gardens capture much better.
Memories are fragile. Memories, like gardens, need to be tended to. Stories need to be retold, seeds replanted. Grief goes through cycles - seasons - of relevance and poignancy. Throughout it all, remembering and honoring loss asks something of us year after year. Memorial gardens make that ongoing commitment tangible.
The choice to plant a garden in response to a tragedy is the defiant choice to create a space of natural beauty in the face of the world’s ugliness, life in the aftermath of death. Confronted by the brokenness of the world as it is, the memorial garden dares to define the world as we know it should be: tender, fruitful, filled with peace. Its seedlings and buds demand our return, season after season. We kneel to spread mulch over its soil, bow to water its roots, lean in to sniff its blossoms, we trim and weed and prune. We pray with our hands and our feet and noses, our spades and shears and hoses. Those rituals change and reorient us. They teach us to see one another as life to be tended to, protected, and appreciated.
Of course, I am preaching to a parish who knows gardens. St. Mark’s beautiful memorial garden was a key part of my first tour here. Many of you have been generous in telling me the stories behind its blossoms and branches that are so beautiful this time of year. And of course, there’s our rainbow garden, which just this week is being resown by our Bhutanese neighbor church once again.
This is a place and a community that understands faith needs to be tended to, year after year, actively reinvested in with time, talent, and treasure, season after season. This church is not a big stone memorial. This church is an Easter garden, bursting with life.
You know, they tried to put Jesus in a great stone tomb. They rolled a huge boulder over the entrance of hewn rock. But that’s not when our story ended; that’s not how our God works. Our God broke open the tomb and transformed the world through human hearts and hands. Resurrection required a response from all who witnessed it. One violent tragedy on the cross rippled out into a powerful movement for love.
The central act of our faith is a memorial feast, a returning to the table to listen again for Jesus’ farewell words to his friends and to take to heart what they ask of us. In today’s Gospel, we overhear Jesus’ final prayer at that table in the Gospel of John, in which he lays out God’s dream: the world brought together as one through the love and witness of Jesus’ followers. Times like this past week remind us of how far we have yet to go and the work before us. Preventing the next school shooting, the next violent war, the next unspeakable tragedy, requires more than standing before a stone in prayer. It demands that we recommit to tending to the most fragile and vulnerable buds in our communities. To remember the dead properly is to remain vigilant to the insidious ideologies and idolatries that threaten our peace; it is to act and vote and march, plant and weed and water.
And so I’ll end with a piece of one of our Eucharistic Prayers, the one where we pray,
“Open our eyes to see your hand at work in the world about us. Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal. Let the grace of this Holy Communion make us one body, one spirit in Christ, that we may worthily serve the world in his name.”
Amen.
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