Christ on the Loose

A Sermon Preached by the Rev’d Peter De Franco
at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church on Easter, 2007

If you ever take a close look a really close look at the bible, you must come away with the impression that God must be a gardener. If you remember back to the first book of the Bible, you will remember that when God make Adam and Eve, he placed them in a garden. The garden of God was planted as a place of ultimate harmony, of a peaceful co-existence between creatures, of delightful contemplation of the beauty of landscapes, of pleasurable participation in the waters of streams and rivers, of that soul satisfying delight of walking with God in the cool of the evening.
Even though they were expelled from that garden, I imagine Adam and Eve always felt a deep longing in to return to that garden, to the perfect harmony of the place, the scents of the flowers and the plants and vegetables God prepared for them. A longing for the beautiful rivers in the garden in which they would bath and drink and behold water in its beauty.
I sometimes think that we all inherited from Adam and Eve that deep longing to return to the garden. Those of us who are gardeners know that pleasure of digging the spring earth, cleaning away the debris of the winter, tilling the soil, preparing it for the new plants. Those of us with less than green thumbs know the pleasure of beholding the beauty of a garden, be it our neighbor’s garden or the vast expanse of a manicured garden estate. Little wonder then that God started it all over again in a garden.
When the body of Jesus was taken down from the cross, his friends completed a hasty burial in a tomb, a cave in which a tomb was newly carved. But let’s not forget that they found that cave in a garden. To that garden Mary hastened on Easter morning to go as mourners go to the place where the body of the beloved lies buried. Perhaps many of us know that feeling, of going back to the place where we buried our loved ones, finding there some comfort as we weep and mourn their passing from us. Perhaps that is why so many cemeteries are festooned with flowers and plants. My own nieces and nephews called my fathers’ grave Grandpa’s garden since we always decorated his grave with flowers.
Yes, God drew on that deep instinct to return to the garden to start the world over again when God raised Jesus from the dead. God drew on that deep desire for us to return to a place of harmony and beauty, of delight and comfort, of joy and abiding peace. God drew on that deep desire in God’s own heart to replant the garden of paradise and the first seed God planted in that garden was the body of his own son. For in God’s garden of the resurrection, God plants all the worse that humanity could devise against Jesus and transforms it as gardeners do.
As gardeners take old leaves and transform them into mulch, God took what the world considered so useless in the life of Jesus that the world crucified Jesus on a tree and transformed Jesus into the beginning of a new humanity. As gardeners take cast off bricks and transform them into garden paths, so Jesus took the disciples starting with Mary Magdalene, and transformed them into paths on which we could walk to God. As gardeners takes a bulb from here and a plant from there and arranges them in a new design of beauty so Christ has taken us the mismatched of the world and changes us into the new pattern of beauty in this church, Christ’s new creation in Clifton.
God has set Christ loose in the world through the power of the resurrection. God has set Christ loose in the world to transform the world beginning with you and with me.
God is working in the world to change the world, one heart at a time. This work of transformation begins for each of us with our baptism, the moment when God grafts us onto the vine who is Christ, the moment when God washes us in Baptism’s waters, the moment when Christ gives us new birth from the opening in his heart’s flow of water and blood, even as our mothers give us birth in water and blood. God transforms us in our baptism not only that we can profess our faith in this hidden gardener who is creating the world anew. God transforms us that we might be the faithful people who acknowledge God’s presence by our prayer and our faithfulness to this Christian fellowship. God transforms us that we might be the people who with God resist evil in the world even when those around us conspire against the forces of life and liberty. God transforms us that we might be a people whose lives and words proclaim with God the reality of the resurrection. God transfigures our eyes that we might see Christ in the countless forms and faces of people and not only see Christ but serve Christ. God transfigures each of us that we might struggle with God in the world to be instruments of justice where the world deprives people of their fair share, to be soldiers of peace in a world torn by strife and war, to be envoys of respect helping one another discover anew the dignity that God bestows on each of us.
Look out and beware. For Christ is on the loose in the power of the resurrection.
You can be sure of one thing. Christ will not leave you unchanged.