We are stardust, we are golden—
And we’ve got to get ourselves… back to the garden.
Anybody recognize those words? I was a child—admittedly a pretty small one—when Joni Mitchell penned the lyrics of the Woodstock anthem in 1969. My somewhat-hippie parents weren’t at Woodstock, but they were groovy enough to play this song regularly in my childhood home. Maybe that’s where my intrigue about the Biblical garden comes from. While I wasn’t raised with Bible stories, I assure you that my horticultural interest didn’t come from digging and weeding during the time when my parents dug up the back yard to create an organic garden. It was a good idea, I’m sure. But—like COVID-era sourdough bread-baking—it was a short-lived interest. Perhaps because my sister and I whined so very much about the chores.
Whether we are gardeners or not, we know in our hearts that gardens are foundational to human existence. In Biblical perspective, creation began in a garden. Jesus was betrayed in the garden of Gethsemane, and—based on the account we just heard from the Gospel of John—we might say that the new creation was inaugurated by the resurrection of Jesus Christ in a garden. Perhaps that’s why Mary Magdalene mistook Jesus for the gardener. Uniquely to John’s account, both the burial and resurrection of Jesus were located in a garden. This is typical of John’s storytelling, in which God is revealed in the union of apparent contradictions: water and wine, light and dark, life and death, human and holy. The tomb and death are realities of mortal life, but the garden and resurrection reveal abundant and inextinguishable life. So where else would Jesus be buried? “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit,” Jesus had taught his disciples.
The garden context for Jesus’ tomb is a metaphorical reminder that death coexists with creation and of new life, but it’s even more than that for Mary and the disciples, and for us. You might even say that the garden points us towards our original and our ultimate home. Our story this morning hints at that: home is an ongoing (if somewhat background) theme in this resurrection account. After an utterly chaotic week in Jerusalem, Simon Peter and the other disciple, presumably John, were startled by Mary announcing that the stone had been removed from Jesus’ tomb. You may recall what they did: they ran to the tomb and looked in, kinda jostled each other to see who would go inside first, saw some scattered textiles, and then—anticlimactically—they went home. The most mundane, but perhaps most credible detail in the account. What do we do after both triumph and tragedy? Eventually, we make our way home and try to figure out how to live with what we have experienced.
Unless… unless we are Mary Magdalene. She stood weeping outside the tomb. Perhaps she didn’t have a home to return to. She was from the Galilean village of Magdala—we do know that much—and she was a follower and close confidant of Jesus. She was almost certainly not a prostitute, but she had suffered from a demon—likely a mental illness—that might have left her ostracized by her community. A reminder that those without homes and families to welcome them back are the ones most likely to look for a family with Jesus and a home with God. That’s true of most of the guests who come to Trinity’s front gates for lunch with Front Door Communities, and probably true of a few of us here today. Earthly home isn’t necessarily a safe place for everyone. We know from the stories of this week that it was not safe for Jesus. It is not safe for hundreds and thousands in the holy land right now.
And yet, we go home when we can, and we long for home when we can’t. Jesus’ commission to Mary at the end of John’s Gospel sends her to his brothers and sisters to let them know that he was “ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Here Jesus is summarizing the whole purpose of his ministry. The one he calls, “Father” is not his abba alone. Rather, Jesus is sending Mary to announce that all humanity is welcome to have the same familial relationship with God that he has. That they—and we—are welcome to come home to God.
If this sounds familiar, it might be because we remember Jesus’ farewell discourse to his disciples. “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”
We preach this passage often at funerals, but today is a good time to remember that these words were not written for the dead. They are already home and don’t need any reassurance. But we who are here at church this morning: we actually do need it. We need to be reminded that we have an eternal home, whether or not we have somewhere pleasant to go after church. We need this reminder whether we have kept a holy Lent or not. We need it whether we whether we are young or old or rich or poor, whether we arrived at the garden first or last, whether or not we worked hard all day, whether we are the elder or the younger brother in the story of the prodigal. We need to listen to the two thousand year old voice of a woman telling us “I have seen the Lord, and he assured me that he is ascending to his Father and your Father, to his God and your God.” She knew it was true because she heard it in a garden, the setting where—from the beginning of time and creation—God made a home for humanity.
Gardeners know things. My husband John—who actually is a gardener—reminds me that a lot of gardening is about waiting for conditions to be right, or waiting for things to happen. Waiting for the weather and the water and the unpredictability of seeds. Gardeners can influence the growing conditions, to a degree, but none of us can do what God can, which is to remove the sting of death and restore the garden of Eden. But we can wait and watch and learn from God, in the resurrection moment when cemetery of death becomes the garden of new life. We can learn from the woman who learned from the master, wept for him, and became the teacher and the bearer of Good News.
Back to Joni Mitchell, for a moment. Was she Christian or not? There’s a remarkable amount of debate about that online. I don’t actually think it matters—there are many dwelling places in God’s house and there’s one for her as much as for any of us—but I do believe that she knew something deeply true about the garden that was our original home. We will long for it until we return to it. Listen again to the words of her famous refrain—
We are stardust/Billion year old carbon/We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.
Joni Mitchell knew that our human existence began in the same cosmic crucible as the universe. That we are made to be as golden as the very glory of God. And yet—in some way—sin separates us from this identity. We’re caught in the devil’s bargain. But here’s where I part company with the singer’s theology. We don’t have to get ourselves back to the garden. Because the garden— in which we are all beloved children of God— is actually right here, even with the tomb of our many tears still in the midst of it. Because the Resurrection of Jesus Christ assures us that—in the fullness of time—all tombs will be emptied and every tear shall be wiped away. And we will know for sure—with Mary Magdalene—that our home is with God and our family is with each other. Don’t doubt it for a moment, for the gardener said these things to her.
Christ the Lord is Risen… Indeed!
