Tending Resurrection
Table Talk
Setting the Table
You are welcome here. Come just as you are, bringing whatever is on your heart today. Take a few moments and allow yourself to just be. Take a couple deep breaths, grab yourself a cup of coffee, light a candle, do something that brings you comfort. Allow yourself to be present in this moment.
Take a moment to be quiet. Consider the places in your life or in the world where life is quietly pushing through the soil—places you thought could no longer bring forth life.
What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that eve was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.
— Frederick Buechner
John 20.15-16
He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).
Food For Thought
I have learned in my life that gardeners know a little something about resurrection.
My grandparents were farmers, running a produce farm through my dad’s early childhood. By the time the grandchildren came along, they had retired from farming — but they still kept what they called a “small” one-acre garden in their backyard. And we grandchildren? We were the eager (and sometimes reluctant) harvesters.
Farming and gardening were great teachers in my granddaddy’s life, and he shared those lessons with us often. He spoke of the cyclical gift of gardening — the way a single plant produces seeds that multiply the harvest, and how a gardener’s life moves in rhythm with the earth: rising with the morning, tending through seasons of sowing, harvesting, and rest. It is a life shaped by quiet optimism, where cultivating the soil becomes an act of hope, a practice of trusting again and again in renewal, in restoration, and in the promise of life.
I think that is why, when my grandmother had her stroke, my granddaddy gave each of us a small silver acorn — to remind us what God can do with just a seed of possibility, how God can work even in the most difficult moments of our lives to bring life. That acorn remained a symbol of hope, even in her death.
Gardeners often have the work cultivating the hardened soil, tending what seems dead or dormant, and bringing forth new life in ways that might seem near impossible.
This is what I think of when, on Easter morning, Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener. Is this a simple act of confusion? Or is it yet another display of her faithfulness? Mary who, just before this calls him Lord, and just moments after this calls him teacher – here in this moment, calls him Gardener.
There is something holy in that title. There is something tender, even reverent, in seeing Jesus as the one who tends life. Mary names him gardener, and we can't help but remember that this is who Jesus has been all along. Jesus, who spoke often about growing things — who taught that God’s dream for the world is like a farmer scattering seeds with abandon, not in neat rows, but freely, generously, without regard for where they might land.
Jesus, who said that 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, who said that we are like branches on a vine — connected, nourished, sustained.
Jesus, who took bread and cup and showed his friends that even ordinary things — broken and poured out — can become a feast.
Jesus, who now in his own resurrection shows us that in God, death does not have the final word. In the hands of the divine gardener, what has been buried can become the very place where new life begins. That the holy creator is always at work making beautiful things from the dust of our lives, from the mud of the garden.
The resurrected Jesus, standing in that garden, invites us to look again at the places in our own lives that feel wasted. The relationships that did not last. The years poured into something that never came to be. The work that didn’t bear fruit. The grief that lingers long after others have moved on. The parts of our story we quietly name as failures… or losses… or endings.
But what if those places are not as finished as they seem? What if the soil is not dead — just waiting? What if, even now, God is at work beneath the surface – in the dark, in the quiet, in the places we have long since given up?
Because this is what gardeners know:
what looks like an ending may, in fact, be the beginning of something we cannot yet see.
God, the Good Gardener, does not waste anything –
Not our love.
Not our grief.
Not our longing.
Not even the parts of our lives we would rather forget.
There in the garden, Mary learns and we learn what all gardeners seem to know: that new life often sprouts where we expect only death.
This story of resurrection cannot, must not be kept for Easter Sunday alone. This is the gospel — the good news of every day, meant to be sown into the very soil of our faith and our lives. Nothing in God’s love is ever wasted. All things are being made new.
Resurrection is upon us this day and every day.
New life is springing forth.
Hope is alive.
Christ is risen.
Hold a seed in your hand — or simply imagine one. As you feel its weight, ask yourself: What in my life feels small, fragile, or hidden, but full of possibility? Sit with that question for a few moments, noticing any hope, longing, or curiosity that arises. If you like, you could plant a seed as a visual reminder of that possibility and watch it grow over time.
Take a moment to be still.
As you breathe in, pray: God of life…
As you breathe out, pray: …grow something new.
Let this prayer rest on whatever feels unfinished or heavy.
For a printable version of today's reflection Click Here!
Blessing
God, help us to be Easter people:
with hope that is not sealed in a tomb,
with alleluias that cannot be silenced,
with the courage to peer into the depth of our lives and our world,
with an Easter imagination—
to see joy where once was sorrow,
dancing where once was mourning,
singing where once was silence,
healing where once was brokenness,
hope where once was despair,
rising where once was defeat,
life where once was death.
Amen.
A little Table Talk for your table...
Name a place in your life that feels fallow or unfinished. What might it mean to trust that it is not yet done?
Where have you seen unexpected life emerge before? What does that memory teach you now?
What would an "Easter imagination" look like in your life this week?
Try taking it to the Kids Table...
Go stand outside together and take a moment to look around. Where do you see life around you? What is something God made that is alive?
What do you need to grow? What do you think the world needs to grow?
If God were a gardener, what would God be growing in the world?
Meet This WEek’s Writer...
Lin Story-Bunce is a North Carolina native and lovingly calls Greensboro, NC home. She earned a Masters of Divinity from Wake Forest University and has served a wonderful and thoughtful congregation at College Park Baptist Church since 2009, pastoring to families and their faith development. Most of all, Lin loves the moments she gets to connect with her family, snowboarding with her wife, and keeping up with their four kiddos and two energetic pups. Lin is a teacher, preacher, dreamer, and procrastinator who has a knack for trying to do way too many things in far too little time.
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