Luke 24:1-12

Lesson for All Ages:

• Show: purple pole bean seeds – invites guesses about what they are and what they’re like
• Notice: they’re hard and small, dry, pretty unremarkable
• Show: sprouted bean seed – invite observations about what has changed
• Notice: sprout, root, tiny new leaves; later in summer – flowers (for the bees), green (or purple) beans, climb poles = shady tent – put nitrogen into the ground, dry beans to eat or to plant again next year
• Plant: each child can push one seed into the soil of their container and mist with water from the sprayer and take the container with them

At Easter we retell the story about Jesus, who was killed and buried by people who were fearful of how he was teaching people to love each other, and showing the ways that the people in power were harmful and unkind and unjust. But, his story wasn’t over. Through God’s power he returned to life to tell his followers to keep telling his story and the story of God’s love and to keep working for love and justice and peace and fairness.

Seeds and plants at Easter remind us of coming to life – so many things come to life around Easter in this part of the world. When this bean plant grows, you can remember this story of Jesus coming to life even though everyone thought he was dead!

Sermon:

I started keeping a garden journal a few years ago. I use it to make little sketches of my garden boxes and plot out where I’ll plant things. Then inevitably scribble out some of the plans to make room for broccoli instead of zucchini or carrots instead of beets. I take note of the dates that I planted things and when they got eaten by slugs or squirrels or dug up by the dog and I needed to replant. I make myself reminders of what needs to be done at what time.

Now that I’m a few years in, I really enjoy looking back to previous years to see what I did last year, when something sprouted, see the record of how the garden took shape. With the beautiful weather this week, my little journal got to see quite a few notes as I planted and transplanted, added fertilizer, pulled weeds, mulched. All the things that you do when you’re preparing a garden.  

I also worried and fretted. A few weeks ago – when I planted those beans that I showed off earlier, I planted a bunch of other seeds too: peas, sunflowers, arugula and cucumbers. But while all the other seeds are not just sprouted but even inches tall – the snap peas are out in the garden and will soon need a trellis – the cucumbers are still hidden under the soil. Dead. 

This time of waiting and wondering and fretting is a part of the experience of nurturing new life. And it’s a part of the Easter story. 

One of the telling things about reading the story of Jesus in – this year in the Gospel of Luke – is that it’s a three-ish year time of ministry but the action slows way down and we get way more detail about these last days of Jesus’ life and ministry and interactions with the disciples and the crowds and the leadership in Jerusalem.

Since we read the story of the entry into Jerusalem, there have been five chapters of action (about a fifth of the gospel) detailing the last days of Jesus’ life, including his last meal with disciples, their prayer in the garden, Jesus’ betrayal and arrest and trial and crucifixion. And at the end of that last day a hurried burial right before the sabbath.

And now it’s early on the first day of the week. And Jesus’ friends and community have spent all the long day of the sabbath sad and fretting and worried. They have not been able to care for Jesus’ body. Their beloved, who has been tortured and brutalized. They would have had nothing to distract them from their grief and pain. 

I wonder what that would have felt like. Lots of us know what it’s like to lose a loved one. And lots of us cope with that depth of feeling by getting busy – we move our bodies and do anything we can to not feel the feeling of loss. Fortunately our culture gives us plenty of jobs to do after death – arrangements and paperwork and cleaning up and planning.

Sarah Kerr, who is the founder of The Center for Sacred Death Care, says about these moments after a death, “When someone dies, the first thing to do is nothing. Don’t run out and call the nurse. Don’t pick up the phone. Take a deep breath and be present to the magnitude of the moment.” 

Jesus’ death was a moment of magnitude for his friends. Not because he was the leader or savior but because he was a son, a brother, a beloved friend. They sat with their grief and now they can’t sit still any longer. The moment the sun peeks above the horizon they go to do the tender and sacred work or anointing Jesus.

But once again they’re forced to wait. The women find not a broken and ravaged body of their loved one but…nothing.

There is a moment before the dazzling and mysterious men appear when they are just at a loss. They thought they knew what they were doing here. Instead: first emptiness and confused fear and then dazzling mystery and more confused fear!

And they receive the instructions: Remember what he told you…The Human One must be handed over to sinners, be crucified, and on the third day rise again.”

Remember!

All the times that they have heard Jesus predict exactly these events and been confused. All the times that Jesus has told them and even demonstrated with the bread and the cup and they have not understood. He has been planting seeds. He has been writing in them like a record that – when they revisit the words and pages they will see all they need to know.

The beans that I planted, that are sprouting and putting down roots – they hold the memory of what they are supposed to become within them – even when they look small and dead, they hold the promise of new life. When you split open a bean seed, you can see the tiny imprint of the sprout that it will grow.

Maybe you have seen the quote – on a sign or in a social media post: “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” I think I first saw this sign in the uprising for Black lives during the BLM protests and marches around 2014. And I’ve seen it again in various places – including in the context of the first Trump administration when families were being separated at the border.

Some places on the internet simply attribute that quote as “Mexican Proverb,” but knowing how the internet can be somewhat reductive I dug a little more. What I found was that while this idea has indeed been used by Mexican activists – particularly  in support of 43 students from a teachers college after they were abducted and disappeared by local police in collusion with both organised crime and the Mexican Army during an organized protest in Iguala in 2014 – it’s actually decades older.

The original writer was Greek. He was a queer, radical poet named Dinos Christianopoulos, who originally wrote this idea into a couplet:

what didn’t you do to bury me

but you forgot that I was a seed

Christianopoulos was apparently addressing these words – written in the 1960s – to the Greek literary community who were critical of his poetry at the time – critical of his provincialism – he rarely left his home-town of Thessaloniki – and of his sometime explicit and radical themes. He went on to prove that through his work he could both put down roots that anchored him in his home and bloom far beyond its borders. (More about these origins).

The idea of a seed, lowly, cast down, and full of the power of life has continued to inspire people marginalized and oppressed. Indeed – that these words have been taken up by the Zapatistas and more recent Mexican activists and Black Lives Matter protestors and immigration advocates here in the US shows the life they continue to have.

Last week I talked about the way that Jesus’ ride into Jerusalem, his action at the temple, were a part of a nonviolent action. A protest movement that led to his torture and arrest. And a death that the powers hoped would crush him and the movement he led. He was buried but when the women arrive, the tomb is empty. His life and death gave way not to the suppression of his message but to its exponential growth. The seeds he planted, scattered far and wide.

But in this story – the one we read this morning – Jesus may be alive but the women don’t see him. He does not appear to them like he does in some other tellings of the Easter story. They have only their memories, the seeds he planted through all their time with him, and the assurance of the mysterious and dazzling strangers. They are assured that he is alive, but they still experience the moment with uncertainty and waiting.

I’ll be honest, this Easter – the weather and bursting spring notwithstanding – does not feel like a time full of life and hope and rebirth. It feels hard and sad and empty. Bereft. I am looking at the lifeless dirt of these recent months and wondering whether there is life in there. Will the seeds bloom.

What I have been given by Jesus is the memory he planted within me – within all of us – that life is possible. We are invited to be ready for it. Tell the story of life and retell it. Till the soil and fertilize. Know that like Jesus, there is no burying the life within. It is meant to spring up and grow. Jesus is risen! He is risen indeed!

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