Blessing of Giving Garden/Memorial Day Weekend
Acts 17: 22-31 Psalm 66: 8-20
1 Peter 3: 13-22 John 14: 15-21
Grace and peace to you from God our Creator and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ. Amen.
On Thursday, I was returning to the church from a synod committee meeting. It was a meeting of a committee that I serve on as chair, so I’m a bit reluctant to paint a negative picture of this meeting. In fact, it was, as meetings go…productive! And we met at Luther’s Table, the new mission church/restaurant/bar on the site of the old First Lutheran Church in Renton. We were group of pastors and associates in ministry who got along well and enjoyed the company of our bishop AND it was a beautiful day. So, maybe my spirit had just grown a bit weary of meetings. For we talked about the usual things one discusses in meetings: budgets and timelines and when we would have the next meeting. And I returned to the church from that meeting with a longer to do list than I had when I’d left.
And that’s when I saw them. Well, first I heard them. I heard the high pitched energetic squeal of young voices. Where was that coming from, I wondered? There was still a good thirty minutes before Broadview-Thomsen school would dismiss.
There! I heard it again! Peals of laughter! Voices ringing out together. Away to my window I flew like a flash…..(now I know what that line from that poem means!). And there they were… the sweetest little children….all in a line….standing in our Giving Garden. They were each carrying a clip board. None could have been older than three or four years old. Their teachers were with them. Everyone was wearing a bright yellow day glo vest for safety, which made them look rather like flowers that belonged in the garden.
At first I wanted to dash out and join them! I needed to laugh like they were laughing! I longed to delight in simple beauty of the day. I’ll have whatever they’ve having, I prayed to God, much like one would speak to a waiter. But I did not want to intrude on the lesson the teacher was teaching and on the moment that were enjoying together. It was one of those moments of pure and untainted bliss. Those children, led by their very wise teachers, were one with Creation and the Creator there in that garden.
Their clipboards must have had pictures of plants, because they were scarcely old enough to read. The teacher would point to a plant and shout out “Garlic!” and the children would reply “Yaaaay! Garlic!” and then they would look at it on their picture boards. And on they went…”Yaay tomatoes! Yaaay zucchini! Yay onions!” And I thought to myself then that although we will bless the Garden today, it was most surely blessed by those children long before we will ever arrive there this morning.
In our first reading this morning Paul said: The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made my human hands…
George Bernard Shaw wrote that “The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there”. ( The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, 1932)
A well known but unknown person wrote that one is closer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth.
And on Thursday you would have had no trouble convincing me of that. God was present in our garden that day in ways that you didn’t have to look hard to see. You did not have to dig for God….God was present in those children, in their teachers, and in the vast array of plants growing there in that space.
I thought about that experience for the rest of the week. In fact, it re-shaped where this sermon was heading. But only a little bit. The sermon was originally about the ways we search for God, just as the Athenians Paul was addressing also searched for God. It is one of most profound passages from the book of Acts, this one from Chapter 17 today. Paul is speaking to the people in Athens, with whom he did not have a close relationship. He is not happy to find such a vast array of idols; gods with a small G, whom the Athenians are worshipping. They were covering all of their bases, even going so far as to erect an idol to an unknown god. And Paul reminds them that the God who made the world and all that is in it cannot be held within such an idol. That the Creator God is not found in shrines made by human hands. That God…our God…is too big for that. Paul goes on to say in verse 29 that “we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.” God is too big for us to even comprehend. God is too amazing for us to even imagine. God is too wonderful for us to even conceive. And yet, at the same time, God is everywhere….all around us….and that is both the gift of each new day and the challenge of each new day. Can we see God? Can we?
Some days it’s a struggle. Paul said that all nations of the earth…every single one of us…would search for God and perhaps grope for God and perhaps find God, although indeed God is not far from each one of us.
Some days it feels that God is far from us. Very far. It can be a challenge to find God in budgets and business meetings. It can be a challenge to find God in homework and after school activities. It can be a challenge to find God in the unemployment office or at yet another interview. It can be a challenge to find God in the addiction or illness of a family member. It can be a challenge to find God in the doctor’s diagnosis or the challenging prognosis. But indeed, God is not far from each one of us. Indeed, although, God may not show up in ways as profoundly unspoiled as those children in the garden each and every day, God does show up. Every time. Every single time. In the midst of our sorrows, our struggles, our disappointment…when we are about to give up…when we are in fact, groping for God….God is there. And in our joys and our surprises, our pleasures and our passions…when perhaps we forget to stop and search for God….God is there.
Jesus promises us that God is there. “I will not leave you orphaned” Jesus said to his disciples, “In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.” (John 14: 18-19).
Beloved community, we live in a world that does not see Christ. It does not see him, because it does not look for him and it does not look for him because it does not know him. We live in a world that builds idols to every possible god…to the gods of money, power, sex, technology, politics, fame, war, injustice and even to unknown gods. But we are people of the promise, remember? The promise that we have not been left alone. The promise that because Christ lives we also will live. And not that we will live in some far off place with Christ when we finally pass from this life of struggle. That’s only a part of the promise. The promise is that we will live now. Here, in this day, ripe with the potential for finding Christ, ripe with the potential for seeing God. This is where we will live. And this is where we will see God, where we will find Christ. In water and word. In bread and wine. In the song and sound of children. In laughter and love. In pain and pleasure. In promise and possibility. And in a garden, where miracles happen every day and where God is closer to us than we might have dared to imagine.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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