SERMON FOR TRINITY 1 | 07.06.2015
As party of our renewed commitment to basic religious education I am going to try, over the summer, to use the sermon slot to ask some basic ‘Why do we?’ questions. They will be guided by the Sunday readings of course but I hope they will begin to help us build up a bank of information that might otherwise get overlooked. So, on the week-end when so many gardens are being opened up to the public around the country this question: why do we have flowers in church?
As I write this, I can see Maria up a ladder in the Vicarage garden. She has already been there for four hours and is doing her best to train the vine over the mesh that separates our garden from our neighbours, cajoling the wisteria and the yellow roses to fill more of the gaps; taking secateurs the obdurate bits that won’t go where they are told, spraying for black spot and watering the rest of the flowers with Miracle Grow so that the place looks its best for the visitors that will be coming in the large numbers this afternoon.
My mother was a great gardener and for million of people it is one of the most therapeutic of places: everything that otherwise dominates our lives can be left to sort itself out while we wrestle with the extraordinary fact that, given just an ounce of encouragement, stuff will grow; we just need to make sure it is the right things and that they flourish!
In my last parish, one of the older members had a large stone by her front door. And as I finally reached it via a huge flight of stairs from Haworth Road to take her Holy Communion, I would often read it as I waited for her to answer the door:
The kiss of the sun for pardon,
the song of the birds for mirth,
one is nearer God's heart in a garden
than anywhere else on earth.
Now we know that this sometimes was used as an excuse for people not to go to Church: I’m too busy potting up my geraniums! But a quick glance at the Bible will see that there are at least three different stories of encounters in gardens that tell us a good deal about our faith. Take for example our first reading.
The familiar story of Adam and Eve is, as we all know, set in the Garden of Eden. Little by little the theologically orientated story of creation unfolds: first nothing; then sea and earth, then plants and food and animals – all carefully named; then Adam before Eve, settled in what is described as Paradise. Day in and day out they enjoy all that the world has to offer – and then in the evening God comes and the three of them enjoy a long conversation in the cool of the evening. Everything seems idyllic and there is a closeness, a n openness, between each of them which each clearly values – God included. No secrets, no subterfuge or misunderstanding – all symbolised by their nakedness.
Of course there is a small price to pay for this idyll: neither Adam not Eve are to eat the apple that will enable them to know right from wrong; so you might say Eden was a bit of a kindergarten, an unreal state of infantile dependence – and certainly when the apple is eaten and they are thrown out of Eden they face all the hardships all that we know life contains, symbolised by toil for Adam and child birth for Eve.
So the first Garden contains a mixed series of metaphors. In one sense it describes the perfect life, and in particular a closeness to God that we have been struggling to return to ever since. It represents a time when Creation was perfect in balance and, to use the biblical phrase, everything was good. But it wasn’t life as we know it and we might ask whether we would want to return to a time when half our faculties were suspended and we didn’t know the difference between right and wrong. The flowers in Church might remind us of how fantastic creation is; but they might also remind us of the eco-challenges that demand we take global warming, the use of fossil fuels and the destruction irreplaceable rain forests, much more seriously.
Gardens number 2 and 3 come at the end of Jesus’ life and are therefore in the New Testament. His public ministry over, Jesus has celebrated his Last Supper with the disciples and, singing hymns, they make their way out in the darkness to the Garden of Gethsemane, Garden no 2. This isn’t the fertile, lush environment of Eden but a large compound, full of olive trees (Gethsamane literally means, oil press), across the KidronValley from Jerusalem itself. It is sparse, brittle; the old, dry leaves crackle underfoot as you walk. And here Jesus separates his closest friends, Peter, James and John, from the other nine and takes them to a remote spot where he tells them to watch out for him while he prays. Stay awake, he tells them. Something significant is going to happen. He leaves them for a yet more remote spot – and they promptly fall asleep.
The symbolic nature of this garden is obvious enough. It is the garden of desolation, the garden of decision and challenge, the place where the characters have to face up the possibility of an uncertain if not frightening reality. And we know from this story, in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, just how quickly the outwardly strong relationships within the band of the disciples, just falls apart at the seams. Peter James and John fall asleep – three times: Judas sneaks up to Jesus – and kisses him – as a sign to the arrest squad that this was their man; Peter lashes out and cuts off the ear of the High Priest’s servant, and Mark so fears being arrested that he leaves his tunic behind when someone grabs him. And Jesus finds himself in thsGarden, utterly deserted and alone. What have these three years amounted to? Apparently nothing.
You’ve enjoyed someone’s garden and you have known the glorious feeling of being in something akin to Eden. And you have been to Gethsamane too: a time and a place where you felt utterly alone and at a loss: when your known world seemed (and perhaps was) crumbling all around you. And I suspect, like me, you have wondered where God was in the middle of all this? When we are almost at the My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? stage. Our second Garden is not very pretty and it hurts to even recall our visits there.
And yet that dependence theme keeps coming back to mind. Because, to be honest Eden was too small for real living: too confined, too child-like. We had to break out, painful though it was – and Gethsamane is one of the destinations that process almost inevitably leads to. And whereas in Eden there was a wonderful closeness to God, it wasn’t a freely chosen one. What marks out Gethsamane is that we have a new release of energy: God is real alright – but where is he when we need him most?
In Garden no3. Here, one Sunday morning, the crucifixion is over: the broken body of Jesus has been laid to rest; the disciples are nothing more than a group of broken men and women cowering behind locked doors, scared to death that their arrest will follow.
It is just a handful who leave the security of the house that Easter morning and it is Mary Magdalene who goes first - to the cemetery garden. Why her? Why on her own? We don’t know. But because we read the Bible looking for symbolic clues that will help us to understand the story at more depth, we take at face value the detail that she was alone in the Garden, was first to see the stone rolled away, the one who was too distraught to tell the difference between the local park keeper and Jesus…
Gardens at their best are places where we can allow our minds to wander, and where – as a result – things happen to us and things seem to change.
But I want to suggest to you that these three gardens – the place of growing up, the place of pain and defeat and finally the place where the penny drops and we understand what God has in mind for us, are useful symbols in our lives. symbols. The flowers in Church at their best, symbolize the glory of creation. But we don’t have flowers in Advent and Lent because (we remind ourselves) there are days when that glory seems a very long way off and we need to feel the sparcity and the lack of such colour. And then we have an Easter Garden right at the heart of the Church to remind us that God is never absent for long and he has, and always will, come to meet us in our loneliness.
The whole poem of Dorothy Frances Gurney is a bit longer than the one verse I quoted earlier. It goes like this:
God's Garden
THE Lord God planted a garden
in the first white days of the world,
and He set there an angel warden
in a garment of light enfurled.
So near to the peace of Heaven,
that the hawk might nest with the wren,
for there in the cool of the even
God walked with the first of men.
And I dream that these garden-closes
with their shade and their sun-flecked sod
and their lilies and bowers of roses,
were laid by the hand of God.
The kiss of the sun for pardon,
the song of the birds for mirth;
one is nearer God's heart in a garden
than anywhere else on earth.
For He was broken for us in a garden
under the olive-trees,
and the angel of strength was the warden
that the soul of the world He might ease.
Wherever our particular gardens are, whatever shape or form they take, may they continue to remind us that there isn’t any place on earth where God is not at work, walking alongside us in times of delight, times of pain - and at those magical times when we feel him close by.
Flowers: sign of God’s never failing presence.