Did you know that God Has Always Met Us in Gardens?

God did not place humanity in a temple. He placed us in a garden.

From the very beginning, the sacred has been woven into the sensory — into soil and seed, into morning light through leaves, into what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the dearest freshness deep down things.” The divine has always smelled like earth after rain.

And here is what I want you to hold today: the first time God called someone by name — the very first time — was in a garden. Not from a throne. Not through a prophet at a distance. God walked in the cool of the evening and called: “Where are you?”

That question was not about geography. God knew exactly where Adam was. It was an invitation. A reaching out. The theologian Walter Brueggemann reminds us that this God is not “a static, settled deity,” but one who moves toward us, who enters our hiding places and calls us out of them.

The Bible opens in a garden and the resurrection happens in one. That is not coincidence. That is architecture.

In the first garden, God found a person in hiding — ashamed, afraid, covered in fig leaves and excuses. Adam had broken trust. He flinched at the sight of the One who loved him most. And yet — God came looking. God always comes looking.

In the Easter garden, Mary Magdalene stood weeping among the flowers, so consumed by grief she could not recognize the Lord standing before her. She took him for the gardener. Maybe, she was not entirely wrong. He is, after all, the one who tends us. Who kneels in the soil of our grief. Who coaxes life from what we were certain was dead.

And then, as the novelist Marilynne Robinson writes of grace, it simply “arrives.” Not announced. Not argued. He speaks her name: “Mary.”

That is the whole of Easter, isn’t it? One word. One name. Everything changes.

Notice what both gardens offer us: a choice. In Eden, Adam heard God coming and hid. Fear was his first response to Love. In the Easter garden, Mary heard her name and turned. She ran — not away, but toward.

The poet Wendell Berry says: “It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”

Both Adam and Mary had reached the end of what they knew. One flinched. One turned.

The difference was not their worthiness. The difference was the name they heard.

No matter which garden we find ourselves in today — the garden of our hiding, or the garden of our grief — God meets us there. In our vulnerability, not our performance. In our natural environment, not a cleaned-up version of it.

Easter is not merely a date on the calendar. It is an invitation. Like Lazarus stumbling from the tomb, still wrapped in grave clothes, we are called to let ourselves be unbound. The fears, the old stories, the shame we have carried so long we have forgotten it is not our skin — these are linen wrappings.

The Risen Christ does not ask us to have shed them already. He asks us to come out while still wearing them, and he will take it from there.

Frederick Buechner wrote: “The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.”

You were called by name this morning. That call will tremble outward. It always does.

The stone is already rolled away.

The gardener is standing in the morning light, saying your name.

The only question left is the one that matters most:

Will you come out?

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