This year I’ve focused on the three
trees through the triduum—Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday. I’m
going to go out on a limb and guess not all of you made it to Maundy Thursday
and Good Friday, so for a quick recap there is the Tree of Knowledge, whose
fruit Adam and Eve ate in the Garden of Eden. That tree invited sin into the
world because we began to imagine that we are like God. So, we needed a second
tree, the tree of the cross, which is the tree that stands tall on Good
Friday—the tree on which Jesus died. It is the tree that bridges our pursuit of
sin and death and sends Jesus through death on our behalf. The cross stands
in-between this life and the next.
Then there is today. No tree, you
might think—not in the Easter story—except there is a garden and, in the end,
this is taking us inexorably toward the third tree, which is the tree that has
been there since the beginning. In the book of Revelation, the 22nd
chapter, it says, “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life,
bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the
middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of
life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the
leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”
In the end, we have the tree of life.
You don’t see the cross there because the cross has done its job. You don’t see
the tree of knowledge there because knowledge is no longer necessary. In the
presence of God we will know all we need. The tree of life is the end of the
story because it encompasses all that is leading up to it. The trees are a
progression and they offer a promise of returning to what was once created good
and holy before sin entered this picture.
I love that story of the three trees
that we read today for the Children’s Sermon today; for me it resonates on
several levels. For one, we are like those trees—thinking we are going to be
used in one way when God is going to use us however God pleases and it may have
little or nothing to do with what we expect. On another level, the trees are
themselves transformed through a painful process. None of them remain trees.
All of them are chopped down! They all have to die in order to achieve their
purpose. Finally, the trees find their redemption through work that they could
not achieve on their own. No tree can become a manger without being shaped, nor
a boat, nor a cross. The trees have character all their own—they have wants and
desires—they are more than raw
material, but yet it is only through the hands of another that they are shaped
into what they were destined to be.
Those trees bridge that gap between
death and new life in the same way that the cross leads to the empty tomb and
begins the dominos tumbling toward the tree of life, which was the same tree we
were destined for from the beginning of time in the Garden of Eden. From the
beginning of time until that first Easter morning we-human-beings were walking
eastward through history, further and further from the Garden. Today we
celebrate the moment where Christ broke through death, went to hell and
defeated the power of death even there, and turned us around to walk back in
the right direction. Among many other things, today is about setting us back on
track to the Garden. For too long we have wandered further and further east of
Eden; with the empty tomb Jesus turns us around and starts us marching back.
The tree is waiting; the cross has done its work. We are saved, not by virtue
of what we do, but because of what Christ has done for us, and the empty tomb
is all proof we need.
Today is about resurrection. I saw a
comic last week where a church member greets the pastor after the service and
says, “Pastor, you’ve gotten in a rut lately. All you ever preach on is
resurrection.”
That’s really the goal I aspire to:
Resurrection, resurrection, resurrection. That’s all we’re doing here, every
Sunday. There’s nothing new beside it; there’s no creative new way of
approaching it. If it’s boring, then we’re either failing to convey it, or else
I’m sorry that the most astonishing thing in the history of the world is boring
to you. Everything else that today is about—Easter bunnies and flowers and
trumpets and candy and family and April Fool’s jokes—all of it is so far
secondary from the resurrection as to be like a hangnail after giving birth. Today
is only about resurrection, and if the fact that we celebrate that every single
Sunday is monotonous then I think you don’t get it.
Christ is risen! And that means you
will, too. Everything else is secondary. The three trees are just another cute
way to get you there. The trees are the vehicle; the empty tomb is the
destination. Every Sunday is Easter Sunday. Every Sunday is a resurrection
Sunday. And I’m not going to change. And we’re not going to try to be cute and
say anything special or different. If it’s the same as ever that is strange
because resurrection is the most new, most not-how-the-world-works thing that I
can imagine. And because it is a promise that life is never-ending it is a
promise that things are never the same; it is life in all its varieties—the
tree of life with its many fruits for each season. The greatest work of the
devil is to make resurrection mundane. Today we celebrate the most astonishing
thing above all other things. It is Easter. There is nothing like it and there
never will be and it’s done. It’s over. We just keep walking back to the
garden.
Christ is Risen!
He
is risen, indeed. Alleluia!
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