May 12, 2025
• Rev. Mindie Moore
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May 11: A Garden of Eternal Hope
Genesis 2:8-10; Rev 22:1-5
A word about Mother’s Day—I know this can be a really tricky day in the world and in the church for many of us, for all sorts of reasons. For me, as a person whose mom died when I was very young, I have the clearest memories of being the only kid without a mom and of how isolating that felt, especially in my faith community. And so before we even get into our message today, which is about finding and creating hope, I just want to say to those of you who might be in a bit of an anxious or grieving place today that first of all—I see you. I’ve been there and pieces of my heart ARE there.
And I want you to know that this sermon today isn’t going to be especially focused on Mother’s Day but I'll give one short example of my own experience as a mom in the second half of the sermon. If you at any point in the message today just need a break and you need to slip out and slip back in, you are SO welcome to do that. We’ve got coffee and donuts in the lobby, there are some comfy spaces to hang out, but what I want you to know is that taking care of yourself in this space is the most important thing. All of our stories look different and so I want you to know that your story is honored here whatever that might look like for you today—
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it's good. We’ve got space for it all. And we want you to feel the love and welcome that is here for you today.
So with that, let’s have a moment of prayer together as we go into our sermon.
PRAY
(SLIDE) What kind of story are you living?
Ok, I know that is a fairly abstract question and maybe you need a little more coffee before you feel like you can answer that. But I want you to think about it, and maybe even just start with the week you just had.
Think about the last 7 days of your life. What were they like? Who was part of it? Where did you go? What did you do? When did you feel joy? When did you feel despair? At what points did you feel close to God...and when did you feel pretty disconnected?
When you think about the last week of your life...what does it tell you about the story you’re living?
Maybe the story you’re living feels overwhelming. Maybe it’s overscheduled and overstimulated and you need a break. Maybe the story you’re living has some pain and sorrow in it. Maybe the story you’re living feels a little lackluster and you’re wondering if there’s more to it than this. Maybe you’re living a story that feels like a dream and you are so very
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content and grateful and you want to hold on to whatever this slice of life is for as long as you can.
However you would describe your story right now...have you ever thought that at the core, you are living in God’s story?
That’s what we’re looking at this week in our final installment of this “Graves Into Gardens” series. Because this week is all about God’s big story arc. We’re in Genesis and Revelation, and that means that we are holding both the VERY beginning and the VERY end together. We have two images of a garden...and we’ve got a lot of stuff that happens between the two. In a lot of ways today, we’re looking at these images of a garden as sort of a container for the rest of the story that’s being told in the Bible. We’re letting these gardens connect a lot of seemingly disconnected pieces so that we can have a bigger understanding of who God is.
Sometimes I think we can lose the bigger picture of what's going on in the Bible because usually when we study it, it’s in these smaller pieces. A verse here, a devotion there, and that’s all good. But something really powerful happens when we look at these pieces as being part of something bigger. It changes the way we read it. It changes the way we understand what’s happening.
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An example I’ll give you of this comes from Peter Enns, one of my favorite contemporary theologians. I was listening to a podcast where he was talking about the Old Testament and he said that what a lot of us miss as we read the different pieces of it: the writings, histories, origin stories, poetry, prophets, kings, all of it...what we miss is that the bigger container of all of this is that you’ve got a group of people trying to process an incredibly traumatic event. These writers had been through or were closely connected to this thing called the Exile, where they had lost their homes, their identity was at stake, it was just this horrific thing to experience. And so as they tell the stories they tell, there are questions under those stories, like, Why did this happen to us? What does this say about God? What does this say about us? How can we stop this from ever happening again?
I love this example not only because it gives us a bigger picture but because I think we spend a lot of time doing that kind of meaning-making ourselves, whether we realize it or not. Especially when we try and hold our faith up against all of the heartbreak and injustice that exists in our world. I don’t know about you, but I spend an awful lot of mental and spiritual energy trying to figure out what’s going on in our collective story and what God is doing right now.
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And so, as we look at the bigger picture in the Bible, as we think about our faith lives, it’s helpful to remember that, in God’s big story...(SLIDE) we exist somewhere in between this first garden of creation and the final garden of eternal hope.
And that’s what our Scripture lays out for us today. In Genesis, the garden starts out essentially perfect. God has made everything exactly the way God wants it to be and creates people to enjoy it and take care of it. Well, we know that things don’t quite go as planned. Sin, or separation from God, enters the picture and everything gets wrecked. Adam and Eve have to leave this perfect place and while their relationship with God REMAINS...it’s changed. It won’t ever be exactly the same as it was at creation. Sin has changed them and it’s changed the world they inhabit.
Someone once told me that they’ve noticed we don’t talk about sin very often here, and it’s true. Some of us have come from churches where that’s the main topic of conversation every single week. So it might be a little uncomfortable to talk about it today, but here’s why I want us to sit in this uncomfortable space for just a moment...because it IS part of the story. And when we experience the consequences of sin in our world...when we do things individually or collectively that move us away from
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God...we see, in our own way, the same cracks in creation that Adam and Eve saw. We notice that things aren’t the way they could be. We feel the pain of this not perfectly aligned relationship with our Creator. We grieve and we lament and we can’t make it all right, as hard as we might try.
But even in the darkest moments where we feel the furthest away from God...it’s in those moments that the power of God’s love and grace holds so much weight. Because even when the original plan, the original perfect garden went awry, the story that Genesis tells us is of a God who doesn’t quit on God’s creation. God doesn’t quit on people. God’s angry, God’s disappointed...but God also looks at these two who done exactly what they weren’t supposed to do...and puts clothes on them. God tends to them. They can’t stay where they are in the garden but God goes with them to the world beyond. To a place where things are going to get messy. There’s going to be plenty of broken relationships and situations. And God shows them that no matter what this new, painful world might bring...God is going to put Godself right in the middle of and is never going to go away.
Because I believe what this big biblical story wants us to know is that (SLIDE) God is always working to get us back to the place where we are fully connected to our Creator. Where we know that we are fully loved, where we fully love
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each other. Where there is no pain or suffering or longing or fear. That’s the end goal.
But right now, we’re making our way there. We’re in the middle. And there’s a lot of complex stuff that has happened and is happening and WILL happen before we reach the next iteration of the perfect garden that John talks about in Revelation.
Even as John is writing Revelation, and he shares this almost mirror image of what was created in Genesis and that THIS is what it will look like once God has restored everything to how it’s meant to be...he’s writing that from an incredibly challenging place. A place of great despair. When he’s writing this, the world is in turmoil, there’s a leader who is doing terrible things, those who follow Jesus are in danger because of their faith and their practices, and there are a lot of people wondering how in the world they are going to get through it all.
John knows that he and the people in his community have every reason to only see what’s broken. They have every reason to only see the very real danger around them. Hope feels like a ridiculous concept. And this is for people who lived so closely to Jesus. Some of them KNEW him. So they had experienced all the things we talk about in past tense, they had lived it in real time. And even for THEM hope kept
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getting dwarfed by all of the terrible things that were happening in their world.
They couldn’t see what God was doing for themselves, and so John uses this WILD book of Revelation to do just that. With all the talk of beasts and angels and apocalypse...John leads us back to the garden. Back to where it all began but a garden that has been restored. A garden that has SEEN some things. A garden that God has been tending and growing and fixing for generations...because even when bad things happen, even when evil gets loud, even when evil does damage...evil doesn’t win. Revelation reminds us, the image of the garden is SO important because it reminds us, that (SLIDE) hope has the first and final word in God’s big story.
I think it is the most human thing to need a reminder to see what’s good and hopeful and right around us. I know one of the places I’ve needed this the most has been as parent. Especially when my kids were babies, and one of them, who I shall not name, but she knows who she is, would not sleep through the night for an entire year...I needed hope! I needed to be reminded that good things were happening and that I was doing a better job than I thought I was doing.
And one of the greatest gifts of my life has come through this church and the women who have come alongside me as I’ve
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mothered. Especially not having a living mom, one of my biggest fears was that becoming a mom would be a really lonely, solo pursuit. But the ability to have women in my corner who I can ask questions to, who I can reach out to when times have been hard, who would hold my babies so I could get a break, who tell me stories of their adult children and for some of them, their grandkids...because of the way they’ve shown up in my life, they’ve kept revealing hope to me.
We need those people and we need those revelations of hope. We need to remember that we have a future hope that is so BIG, that is so beautiful beyond what we’ve ever experienced. AND it’s that future hope that drives us to CREATE hope right here and right now.
What I always think is fascinating about this image that John shares in Revelation is that this new garden isn’t happening in some kind of abstract, faraway place...it’s earth, restored. It’s familiar but different and it’s unlike anything we’ve experienced. It reminds us that hope is coming AND that hope can be created right here and right now and that this hope...can be created by US as God’s people.
Because it’s true that there are some things we WON’T see fully resolved until we reach that next garden. But it’s also true that we don’t have to wait until that future garden to
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tend the ones we are in right now. We don’t have to wait for FOREVER hope to be about creating hope here.
And not to be the most churchy person EVER...but Jesus is the best illustration of this that I can think of. I know, the Sunday school is always “Jesus!” BUT! Through Jesus, you have this person who understands this eternal hope more than anyone. He can see the big picture, he knows and is aligned with what God wants to do. AND, even with that knowledge and understanding, you have a person who is all about creating hope in the world right then and there.
I mean, can you imagine if Jesus encountered a sick person who needed healed and he looked and them and said, “well, we’ve got a future hope and it will be better when God restores all this.” No! He HAS the future hope AND he cares about both. The two work together. And he acts with purpose and urgency to bring healing and God’s love to the people who are right in front of him.
I feel that urgency for us to do that same thing. To create those gardens of hope ourselves. Not a perfect garden, but a faithful one. That responds to the environment that we’re in and that is committed to growing something beautiful and good.
And we're probably all going to have the ability to do different things with this. It isn’t a one size fits all sort of call
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that God gives us. When I lived in Pasadena, my favorite things to see in people’s yards were succulents and rosemary and these birds of paradise flowers. And then we moved back to Indiana, and those things really don’t work here. But here, I’ve got my peonies and hydrangeas and hostas and it’s beautiful in its own way.
The thing you are called to garden and tend to in your season of life and in the place you are uniquely located in may look different from the person a few seats over. And every single bit of it matters. You might be called to stand up in front of a room and preach. You might be called to bring snacks to a teachers’ lounge. You might be called to show up to the statehouse and protest. You might be called to answer the phone for a friend who really needs you. You might be called to pick up trash or mow a neighbor’s lawn. You might be called to make a baby blanket or hold someone’s hand in the hospital.
You might be called to do so many things. Here’s what I know—whatever it looks like, each and every one of us...we are called to do something. We are called to create our own gardens of hope.
And so, as you think about the story you’re living...as you think about the hope and the healing that we live in-between, I wonder:
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(SLIDE) What kind of garden will you create?
We’re part of a bigger story. A story that begins and ends in a garden. A story that’s shaped by God’s goodness and love. Because of that goodness and love, let’s do our own work to shape the part of the story we’re in right now.
Let’s pray.