Easter Day: Seedlings All Around

Very truly, I tell you, 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.  John 12:24

Today’s version of the Easter story from Mark is one we rarely hear.  The earliest of the Gospels, it tells a story that unsettles and disturbs us, one we look to the other Gospels to finish for us more happily.  And yet, there is something about this Gospel that feels real. When the women come to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus in Mary and find that he is gone–with a strange man in white telling them he was “raised”–they have no way to understand that.  For them, as for us, death is simply the absence of life, a time of mourning and loss.  Lightning had struck the great oak tree they had come to depend on for shelter and strength; their teacher, their friend, had died on a cross. So when the strange man in the tomb gives the women a message for the disciples and Peter, they run from the tomb in amazement and terror, and, according to this Gospel, they say nothing to anyone. And who could blame them, really?  There is no life in death. None of this makes sense. 

Except…everything in the natural world and everything that Jesus taught them says otherwise.

In the forest, the dead tree in A Log’s Life gives life to many, from lichens to fungi, from gorgeous woodpeckers to prickly porcupines and even to slimy slugs.  When I was in college, I was great at the Atari arcade game Centipede; I could play for over an hour on one quarter, and my initials stayed on the high scorers’ list on my favorite machine. Mostly I loved the game because centipedes, with their creepy legs and armored, snaky bodies, seemed so worthy of extermination. When the game Millipede came along, it was too much ick even to play.  And yet the log gives even millipedes food to live.  

And so it was for Jesus.  In his life, he welcomes everyone–the lepers, the slimy tax collectors, the rich, the poor.  And when he dies, that welcome just gets bigger. He summons the disciples and Peter–Peter, the loyal friend who swore he’d stand by his side and then in fear for his own life, denied he knew him.  Yet Jesus summons  Peter by name to Galilee, where  Peter tells us in Acts,  Jesus–the one who was killed, hanging from a tree–gives them food.

And then Jesus leaves again.  But again, not really.  In that rich soil of his example, his rising, his love, his followers are, like the acorn, given life.  Their terror leaves them, and as Peter tells us,  they spread the good news as a young oak tree spreads its leafy branches. And, again, from death comes life.

Living through this past year has, in many ways, felt a lot like being struck by lightning.  As we gathered a year ago, we were afraid.  An unstoppable virus was spreading sickness and death.  The familiar, everyday places where we worked and ate and played and learned and worshipped shut down as we sheltered in place, unsure how to stay safe.   And then another man died a confusing, violent, and senseless death, and protests erupted in our state and then around the country.  We were cracked open, broken, and bruised. So many structures we thought of as sturdy and immovable shelter were broken, our assumptions of how things should be scattered like the limbs of the oak tree.  

And then, as time passed, we realized that toppled and split, the tree was still there. Messier than before, with lots of parts missing, there still lay the trunk and the roots.  Our families, our faith community, our closest friends, still feeding and sheltering us.  We learned new ways to live our daily lives, to learn, to work, to connect.  

And over time, some of the stuff that we thought was so essential began to break down, transforming into something new. We discovered new ways to see and care for one another–from wearing a mask to recognizing the biases we never knew we had.  Like the women at the tomb, we started to see that death is loss and death is frightening and death is hard–but the death of what was sometimes also creates space for new life. 

And so, here we are, another Easter on Zoom not spent getting doused in water by people half our size, not hunting for Easter eggs, not sharing a feast of ham and braided bread and fruit salad and way more jelly beans and chocolate eggs than are good for us.  Sometimes it seems like that stuff will take as long as it takes an oak seedling to grow into a tree to happen again.  And yet, everywhere, within us and around us, so many new seedlings–new ways of understanding and seeing and caring, new ways of being God’s loving presence in the world–are rising out of the soil of our lives.  What does that new life look like in and around you?