Christ is Alive: An Easter Message of Hope
A couple of weeks ago, my daughter was given a small potted mini rose by her boyfriend. She put it up in her room where it didn’t get any light and she didn’t really water it; then one day she brought this super sad-looking rose plant downstairs and, with super-sad eyes, presented it to me while wondering out loud what had happened to her lovely plant.
I told her I’d see what I could do, but upon closer inspection, I was not especially hopeful. As I started pulling off the dried out buds and leaves, which were quite crispy, I realized that virtually ALL of the buds and leaves were completely dried out and everything ended up getting pulled off.
So there I was, putting this poor little rose plant, basically nothing more than a few stems sticking out of some soil that I had watered, on the window sill of our living room, thinking to myself “I don’t think this poor plant has a hope in Hades” - it has no leaves to absorb the sun and do its photosynthesis thing. But I put on the window ledge anyway, mostly as a show of support and hope for my daughter. And then I kind of forgot about it.
About a week later, I was sitting in my living room having my morning coffee and happened to glance over at the window. My eyes fell on the rose plant, and I realized there were some tiny little leaves emerging. I held back telling my daughter right away, but lo and behold, one week later…
Mini rose plant with new leaves
If you are a gardener, especially a rose person, perhaps you’re not that surprised. I’ve been gardening for years now, but still get surprised by nature’s deep capacity for regeneration, and transformation, of life. I offer my rose plant anecdote today, as, obviously, an illustrations of that capacity, perhaps one of God’s ways of showing us how resurrection is a pattern embedded in creation itself. There are so many other examples in nature that we could also talk about - nurse logs, seed germination, and how caterpillars turn into butterflies, just to name a few.
And as our knowledge of the natural world - God’s “original testament” - and its inner workings evolves, we are developing an ever-increasing appreciation for this pattern woven into the very fabric of the universe. Observing these patterns, then, can offer us a profound metaphor to help us understand resurrection in our own lives and in the life of the world as a whole.
However - the resurrection story which the church celebrates today - the story of the resurrection of Jesus - this story is a little harder for us to get our heads around.
Why was Jesus crucified?
Why was Jesus crucified? Why was he executed by the state? Well, we know that’s what happened to political dissidents in the Roman Empire, especially when Rome wanted to make an example of someone - and discourage others from fomenting resistance to the injustices and oppression being imposed on the people.
But Jesus was no ordinary resister or dissident: he was different. He modelled a non-violent way of resistance, one that refused to use might to defeat might. This didn’t make him popular with some, who expected their Messiah (people thought he was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah) - to be a conventional kind of king: to seize power by force and vanquish his enemies.
And even though Jesus’ model of resistance was not conventional, and did not involve coercion or force or violence; even though all he did was teach and eat meals with the outcasts of society, and touch ritually unclean people and feed people and heal them, and, admittedly, criticize the religious and political elites - the authority with which he taught and the power with which he healed and, it was said, even raised people from the dead - and the way he co-opted political terms like “Son of God” and was called “the King of the Jews” - garnered him a mass following, along with the growing fear and anger of the establishment.
So - he was made an example of. He was executed by the state. He was by no means the first, and by no means the last.
Suffering continues in our world…
So we know this story to be, in large part, about the suffering caused by humanity’s inhumanity to our fellow human beings, particularly as that inhumanity - or should we say, the temptation paired with the capacity to dehumanize and demonize our fellow humans - particularly as that (the cancer of) inhumanity embeds itself in social and political systems.
And we are painfully conscious of the many ways that we continue to experience and witness this inhumanity towards each other in our own time. It’s most often directed towards the vulnerable, as expendable, and certainly towards the resisters; the activists, lovers, teachers, artists, poets and preachers - those who speak truth to power, who hold up a mirror, who question accepted norms, who believe things could and should be different; who have the vision for a world where our relations with one another and with creation reflect the reality of our interdependence and each one’s inherent value and worth.
I mentioned Jesus wasn’t the first person to be put to death by the state because he was a threat to the established order and to the power and control of the state. And he wasn’t the last.
Resurrection reconsidered: The Story of Nikolai Vavilov
I want to tell you the story of Nikolai Vavilov - as told by Maria Popover, who is the author of The Marginalian online publication.
Russian Geneticist Nikolai Vavilov
The eminent botanist, geneticist and explorer Nikolai Vavilov (born in Russia in 1887) was a young boy when the early arrival of winter decimated crops all over the country, sending millions into starvation.
Half a million peasants perished that winter as the aristocracy feasted on imported delicacies from Europe — grim structural inequality that became the ignition spark for the long-seething people’s revolution a quarter century later.
Vavilov saw the contours of a different kind of revolution — one no one else could envision, not in Russia and not anywhere in the world. He decided to do nothing less than end the world’s hunger.
After graduating as a botanist, Vavilov founded an institute focused on using the new science of genetics to cultivate plant species that would thrive in conditions none had survived before - and which would feed humanity even through droughts and freezes. He spent the 1920s roaming the world to collect wild varieties of staple foods.He traveled to places frequented by droughts and food shortages, from Africa to the Middle East, taking care to learn the language and talk to locals about their lore of growing food in inhospitable conditions. He traveled to the birthplaces of the most nutritious plants.
By the end of the decade, Vavilov had completed numerous ethnobotanical expeditions to collect hundreds of thousands of seeds from five continents, including many places where no scientist had set foot before. He was quietly building something unexampled: the world’s first seed bank — a living library of biodiversity that would come to the rescue of the people of any land whose crops were decimated by a drought or a blight.
Vavilov continued his work, but when Stalin came to power, he fell under the spell of a pseudoscientist who convinced him genetics was a sham and launched an assault on Valvilov’s work, and banned him from attending international conferences. Vavilov devoted all of his energies to his institute and the seed bank, vowing:
“We shall go into the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not retreat from our convictions.” - Nikolai Vavilov
Vavilov was eventually accused of treason and sabotage. In the middle of a field expedition in the Ukraine, he was arrested as “an active participant of an anti-Soviet wreckage organization and a spy for foreign intelligence services.” His home was raided and all of his field notes destroyed, but his colleagues managed to save his voluminous correspondence with other scientists and his manuscripts, tucking them away in the basement of the institute, beneath the seed bank.
Vavilov was imprisoned, and eventually was put to death. During WWII, Germany attacked Leningrad, specifically to try to destroy the seed bank. With the city under siege. At Vavilov’s institute, scientists barricaded themselves to protect the seed bank from the rats and the Nazis. Famished themselves, they took turns staying up all night, warding off the rodents with metal rods. In what may be the most moving sacrifice in the history of science, nine scientists died of starvation, guarding a cornucopia of nuts, beans, rice, and grains. The curator of legumes was found at his desk, an envelope of peas by his side.
The seed vault survived unharmed, holding the seeds of life.
The Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry in St. Petersburg is still home to one of the world’s largest seed banks and was the inspiration for the creation of the a new (Svalbard) Global Seed Bank near the North Pole in 2008.
In this story, I find a beautiful illustration of the vision and faith of martyred Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero (archbishop of San Salvador and outspoken advocate for social justice in his country) who once said, “I will be resurrected in the hearts of the people.”
“I will be resurrected in the hearts of the people.”
- Archbishop Oscar Romer
At this point, maybe you find yourself:
Thinking about the enduring, life-generating power of love and loving resistance to the ways of empire - and the many examples of people, including Jesus, who have modelled that;
Or maybe you’re pondering the life-generating ways of plants and seeds and nurse logs;
Or perhaps you’re thinking of caterpillars and butterflies and the need to let go of the things that entomb us and prevent us from experiencing the freedom and fullness of our life in God.
There are so many ways we can experience the possibilities and pattern of resurrection that are embedded in the world, and within us. The key is to know and trust it as a pattern, God’s powerful pattern.
Which means that resurrection isn’t “one and done” - or, as a member of the Progressive Faith group put it this week, “It isn’t “done and dusted’.
The resurrection we celebrate today isn’t about one person - or that person’s body. It’s not about believing something specific about that person and what happened to them in order to be “right with God” at some end time. Resurrection is about a love at the heart of the universe, seeking always to renew and reconcile. And, in a world where we aren’t as separate as we often think we are (at least in the western world), where all life is intricately related, resurrection through God’s love is communal.
And the more we can align our lives with that love, and practice the ways of that love, the way of Jesus, the more we can experience and become conduits ourselves for God’s resurrecting, renewing, life generating and life affirming activity.
Sometimes we’ll get to see that activity for ourselves, and sometimes, we won’t. That’s where the faith comes in, as we plant the seeds, speak our truth, wave our signs, and choose love over fear.
“Sometimes we’ll get to see that activity for ourselves, and sometimes we won’t. That’s where the faith comes in, as we plant the seeds, speak our truth, wave our signs, and choose love over fear.”
You are being called
In the gospel story today, Mary Magdalene is the first to encounter the risen Christ.
At first she thinks he must be the gardener, until he speaks her name, “Mary”, he says. She then recognizes him, but as she goes to put her arms around him, he tells her not to touch him.
Theologian Frederick Büechner offers a commentary on this scene, writing: “(Mary) was the first person… to have her heart break a little to realize that (Jesus) couldn't be touched anymore… because the life in him was no longer a life she could know by touching it, with her here and him there, but a life she could know only by living it: with her old broken-heart and with him here too, alive inside her life. In the meanwhile, he had much to do and far to go, he said, and so did she…”
Friends - Christ is loose in the world; in us and among us; going before us; taking new forms; beckoning us, like Mary, to hear our name being called, to see with new eyes, and to witness.
May it be so. Amen.
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Note: The story of Nikolai Vavilov is an edited version of that published by Maria Popva in The Marginalian.