A Tale of Two Gardens - And a Third by The Rev. Donald L. Hamer
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Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford
Easter Sunday, Year A
April 20, 2014
As many of you know, I am a big fan of several sports and, while I have never been a particularly gifted athlete, I happen to believe that there are a lot of life lessons to be learned from sports and the people who play them. And so it will come as no surprise that I have been particularly inspired by our two University of Connecticut championship basketball teams, but most particularly by the story of the UConn Men’s team.
It was September 2012 in Storrs, Connecticut. Legendary Head Basketball Coach Jim Calhoun had just announced his retirement after leading the team for 26 seasons, including three national NCAA Men’s titles. The future looked bleak. The team was already banned from any tournaments for the coming 2012-2013 season due to poor academic performance of some players. That ban came on the heels of a personal suspension for Calhoun due to a recruiting scandal. Only five players who had seen significant playing time in the previous season were returning. Five of their top players from the previous season had fled – two for the professional NBA and three transferring to other colleges. To make matters worse, realignment of several top collegiate leagues seemed to be leaving UConn in the middle of nowhere.
Given all of the bad news, amidst so much ambiguity, sports commentators everywhere were forecasting doom and gloom for the team’s future. How would it ever return to dreams of glory after falling so far?
I suspect that’s about how Team Jesus must have been feeling on that first Easter morning. The one who had first called them together, the man who had held them together for these several years was gone. Not just gone – he was publicly humiliated, rejected by his own people, and hung to die upon a cross as a common criminal, next to common criminals. Afraid for their own lives and having no idea where to turn, they went into hiding – all but one abandoning him even while he was still alive on the cross. For the past couple of years they had travelled throughout the region, attracting other followers who were also drawn to this man whom they did not quite understand but whose message and life drew them in to want to know more. And now he was dead. And their lives were thrown into utter turmoil – the previous three years with all of its hope and promise seemingly pointless.
That is how that first Easter began. Because, unlike us, they thought that was the end of the story. The Gospels were still to be written, Paul was still Saul and was yet to be smitten, and Jesus’ disciples didn’t have a clue what was going to come next. There was no road map to show them the way, no directions they could follow. No one had ever been there before. So how does the gloom and uncertainty at the beginning of that first Easter day turn into the joy of celebrating Jesus resurrection?
The UConn men’s basketball team overcame the adversity of uncertainty two years ago and in only the second year under the leadership of head coach Kevin Ollie, claimed the NCAA Men’s Basketball national championship alongside their female colleagues. And while I would never be so foolish or misguided as to compare Kevin Ollie or Shabazz Napier to Jesus, I do think there are some lessons we can learn, and some inspiration to be drawn from this team in terms of turning adversity into success, confusion into a sense of purpose, and yes, even death into resurrection.
First of all, BELIEVE. Kevin Ollie calls it “believing in the dark.” Even in the darkest times, he says, even when you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, you have faith in the basic value of what you are doing and you stick to what you believe to be right. Know what you are looking for and stay with it until you find it.
Second, Don’t give up. When the core of the UConn team was abandoning ship for greener pastures in 2012, there were a few – like the leaders of this year’s team – who believed, who kept the faith and who stayed around. And indeed, they reaped the rewards of new life as this team turned things around. When we look at Team Jesus, recall that on that first Good Friday almost all of the disciples had fled for safety. Only the beloved disciple had the faith and the tenacity to stand by Jesus, along with his mother and a few of the women, to the end. And before his death, one of the last things Jesus did was tell them to care for each other. That’s something that both of our UConn teams are known for.
Third. SOW SEEDS FOR THE FUTURE. Of Kevin Ollie, Senior Tyler Olander said, “He took a job with a team that had nothing to play for last year, but he didn’t look at it that way. He would tell us to plant seeds for the future.” And indeed, that was a metaphor that the UConn coach employed for much of the season, and especially during the tournament: “You don’t give up in the hard times; you sow seeds for the future. . . We’re going back to the Garden, and there’s no better place to sow seeds than in the Garden . . .”
The seeds of our Christian journey were sown at our baptism. We should ask ourselves, “Have we been nurturing them into mature growth?”
Fourth. When you believe, and don’t give up, and you sow seeds for the future, you do not fear the unknown and you can face an uncertain future with confidence. For the Huskies, they found themselves with all of the old securities gone, and they were under a new and untested leader. And yet, they approached the unknown without fear. Coach Ollie spoke of the dark times of uncertainty: “You don’t linger in the dark times or it will destroy you . . . You can settle in the dark times, but you can also stretch in the dark times.” Coach Ollie said of Shabazz Napier, “He has something deep inside of him that he is not afraid to fail.”
In this morning’s Gospel account, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to the tomb on that first Easter and saw that things were not as expected. Indeed, upon their arrival, they experienced an earthquake; next they saw an Angel descending from Heaven who looked like lightning. Then the angel removed the stone from the tomb and sat on top of it as the angel announced that Jesus was no longer there. The angel gave them a message for the disciples. As if that were not enough, on their way they had their own encounter with the risen Jesus, who also told them that he wanted to meet the disciples in Galilee. Mary will then go on to become the first one to preach the Good News as they return to tell the disciples what they have just experienced. They too faced uncertainty with confidence.
To their many fans in Connecticut and around the country, the 2014 UConn Huskies experienced nothing short of a type of symbolic death and unexpected resurrection. Last Sunday, more than 200,000 of those fans came out to a parade here in Hartford to thank them and their female counterparts for their hard work and to see them in person. They captured the hearts and the hopes and the imaginations of so many, establishing in the process a firmer foundation for a more promising future.
If this kind of reaction is possible for the unexpected resurrection of a college basketball program, we can’t even begin to imagine what possibilities lay ahead for Jesus’ followers as they contemplate and wrestle with his own resurrection. The Resurrection upsets all expectations, and the only way to apprehend it is to come and see that things are different. But then again, things are always different than expected with Jesus. For those early followers of Jesus, the resurrection meant, first of all, causing them to experience the loss of the only leader they had known and, secondly, forcing them to continue their journey into an uncertain and changing landscape. They came to the Garden searching for Jesus; but that’s not where they found him.
We have been talking about two gardens – Madison Square Garden and that Garden in which Mary encountered the Angel on that first Easter morning. But there is a third garden – the garden into which we walk on this Easter Sunday 2014. And a question comes to you and me as individual Christians, and it comes to us collectively as the church – as an institution facing uncertain times, seeking to become a community of faithful seekers: “Where are you searching for Jesus?” Perhaps more fundamentally is the question, “What will Jesus look like when we find him in his risen state?” When the women came to find Jesus in the garden, the Angel told them, “He is not here for he has been raised. . . he is going ahead of you to Galilee.” Jesus is still going ahead of us today, inviting us to find him in places we do not expect. As it was for his very first disciples, our challenge today is to always and everywhere be on the lookout for the risen Jesus, to expect the unexpected, and to follow where he leads without fear. AMEN.