To the Garden of Victory

[This sermon was shared during the funeral on January 19, of a 94-year-old member of the parish I serve as pastor, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.]

Psalm 104:1, 10-19
John 6:35-40
This week, after Merl’s death, I visited another member of our parish. “I never realized what a knowledgeable man Merl was,” she told me.

He was knowledgeable, as evidenced by his degrees and the esteem in which he was held by fellow teachers at both the high school and collegiate levels.

But Merl didn’t care much about his degrees. On my first visit with him on November 20, he told me about the Ph. D. he never received. While on the faculty at Ohio University’s Lancaster campus, it was decided that Merl would go to Ohio State to receive his doctorate. He did all the necessary prerequisite courses, wrote a dissertation, and went before a faculty committee to defend his work. All went well until the end of the meeting, when the chair informed Merl that he would have to turn his handwritten dissertation into a typed one. Merl felt that he had already done the work and suggested that someone at the university could type it out. The committee told Merl that they couldn’t do that. “Fine,” he told the committee and simply walked out. When he went back to OU, he was told that they didn’t care; he was a full professor anyway.

I suppose most academicians, after having gone through the full doctoral process, would have gotten the dissertation typed. But Merl was, from what I can tell, more than anything a gardener. That's what he cared about. He was fascinated with the functioning of God’s natural order that can be observed in a garden. His nephews, I’m told, always enjoyed seeing the things Merl had grafted together on his farm, resulting in single trees that produced apples and peaches. And the last year he harvested grapes from his arbors, he had a bumper crop. This love of nature also incited Merl and his late wife, Margie, to donate the land for the nature center for Capital University, "in perpetuity," as he would say.

You know, God planted the original garden. Merl, I think, would have enjoyed Eden very much! Maybe only people like farmers and gardeners can fully share the sort of appreciation of nature that Merl had. It almost had to be someone familiar with farming or gardening who composed the words from our first lesson, found in Psalm 104: “You cause the grass to grow for the cattle,
and plants for people to use,
to bring forth food from the earth, and wine to gladden the human heart,
oil to make the face shine,
 and bread to strengthen the human heart. The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly,
 the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.”

But to the discerning, a garden can be a reminder of another garden, one through which we all must go. In the Garden at Gethsemane, In the garden, Jesus wrestled with the reality of His own impending death. He also invited the disciples to pray with Him there, no doubt to remind them that they faced death, too, and that, like Him, they dare not face death without the eternal God of all creation beside them, acting as their Advocate and Friend. At Gethsemane, Jesus offered His prayer, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.”

This is similar to the prayers which the famiy and friends of Merl and I have shared with and for Merl in recent weeks. We prayed with Jesus that God’s will be done.

Merl was entirely sanguine about death, if that was God’s will. I was with him on December 15, when the surgeon explained the dangers associated both with having surgery and with not having surgery. “You could die,” he told Merl. “Well,” Merl said, winking at me as he responded to the doctor, “that’s the way it is for everybody, isn’t it?” The gardener in Merl knew that all living things on Earth, even we human beings, die.

But Merl could enter his own Gethsemane fortified by another certainty, one which his beloved Margie wanted underscored at her own funeral and which we underscore today. It’s summarized in the words of Jesus, from John 6: “This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.”

All who pass through Eden and Gethsemane trusting in Jesus Christ will, in the end and for all eternity, go to what one of our Lutheran bishops once called, “the garden of victory,” heaven itself. Of heaven, the book of Revelation says, “Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates.”

We all must pass through Eden and Gethsemane. But thanks be to God that through Jesus Christ, that needn’t be the end of our journey. As Jesus told Nicodemus, the old teacher of religion, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” That’s as true today as it was on the days that Merl was baptized, taught in a classroom, or harvested his last grapes. The final destination for all who turn from sin and follow Jesus Christ is that garden of victory. May we all follow Jesus so that it will be the final destination of us all! Amen

[The garden themes in this sermon were suggested by a sermon written by my first bishop, Reginald Holle. It's found in Planning a Christian Funeral.]