“ROTTEN TOMATOES”

My next door neighbour has been picking tomatoes of a bush in a pot. This tomato bush emerged from the pot after she put on some of her compost on some other vegetables she had planted. Apparently she threw an over-ripe tomato into the compost and a seed survived to sprout again.

Whoever thought that out of rotten tomatoes would come fresh unexpected fruit. Is God trying to tell us something?

There’s a sense of Easter here. Out of something dead has come something living. Everyone is surprised. That’s the story of Easter.

As Lent moves on with the crepe myrtle flowers of the Indian summer to remind us with their deep purple blooms with variations of red, we join Jesus in his long journey as again he sets his face toward to Jerusalem the place where they stone prophets.

Like Peter and the others, we beg him not to go where nothing good could happen to him but he looks at us sadly and trudges on relentlessly. It all goes horribly, horribly wrong. We feel his humiliation at the hands of the cruel and his abandonment as his disciples turn their backs on him feeling that God has done so as well.

I won’t go down that path to describe what it must feel like to be nailed to a piece of wood which is jolted into the hole dug for it on top of a hill shaped like a skull. We will, like those who still loved him, follow at a safe distance, and yes, too, silently beat our breasts.

He will be taken down, put away in a borrowed tomb and the stone rolled across to keep body snatchers out. His body will be left behind as past history, perhaps remembered, perhaps not. His friends will meet and wring their hands. It is all over.

Stop the presses! It is not all over. He is not dead. He has risen. Disciples are excited with joy and become apostles with tireless feet. The rest is history, our own history, and it still goes on.

So, where is Jesus now?  In my youth we used to sing a chorus with the words, “You ask me how I know he lives. He lives within our hearts.” It’s more than looking at the story this way and that to make sense out of it all. The story becomes an experience for us and still goes on even though we walk through the shadows of death.

We don’t particularly like change, well, not if we have no say in it so often the case. From the time we are born until the time we die, we keep on changing often without even knowing it although there are times when it can be very sudden. Things and people we are used to are replaced by those we are not.

It also happens with churches even if we want to sing “and nothing changes here.” During April, the Easter season, several of us will be attending Synod 2013 at Knox College where we will be obliged to face uncomfortable changes outside of our control. We will have to learn how to work smarter rather than harder, learning good stewardship of shrinking resources just when the need is greater. In so many ways, we are called to walk the dying and rising again experience.

The church is not meant to avoid these experiences of the world into which we are sent. Somewhere deep down in us often where we can’t always find it is that little seed escaped from something that is forever gone.

After Easter will come Pentecost where the church acknowledges that though the body of Jesus has gone his spirit has chosen our flesh to clothe our new life for the sake of the world. Remember, Jesus Christ has breathed on his disciples so that we receive his spirit, so that just as the Father sent him so he sends us.

May the death and life of Jesus grow within you!