"In The Garden"

You may “come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses,” and you may hear a “voice falling on your ear.”  But the Jesus, whose voice we hear, and who “walks with me,” and who “talks to me,: never comes to that garden by Himself alone. He can’t.  And He tells us so.  “I have other sheep…”. Jesus always comes to the garden and to us with his extended family.  He does “walk with me,” and He does “talk with me” personally, but he immediately says, “Now, let me introduce you to my family.”  

We aren’t overly interested in His family.  We just want Him.  Why?  Because His family doesn’t count for much with us.  The tax collector, the poor, the prostitute, the outsider, the lame, the feeble, the stranger, the brown, the black, and the foreigners are not our concern.  We are looking only for some relief for ourselves, and for our own family and friends.  We have enough burdens of our own.  We just want a personal Jesus to make everything comfortable for us, to heal our little infirmities and to take away our little trials and tribulations.

Jesus doesn’t come to us that way.  He never has and never will. He brings with Him, and invites us to join, His family (the whole wide world).  It is a “package deal.”  You are not, nor can you ever be, the sole focus of God’s love.  It is a travesty of the gospel to say and sing “and the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.”  Of course, others have shared and known that joy, because Jesus has met them and now carries them with Him wherever He goes.  He always brings His family.

Once we have experienced the garden where He talked with us and walked with us—we can never “come to the garden alone” again.  We now come to the garden carrying His family as our own.  

Cameron Bellm wrote the following “Prayer for a Pandemic.”  The prayer recognizes Jesus’ family:

May we who are merely inconvenienced

Remember those whose lives are at stake.

May we who have no risk factors

Remember those most vulnerable.

May we who have the luxury of working from home

Remember those who must choose between preserving their health or making their rent.

May we who have the flexibility to care for our children when their schools close

Remember those who have no options.

May we who have to cancel our trips

Remember those that have no safe place to go.

May we who are losing our margin money in the tumult of the economic market

Remember those who have no margin at all.

May we who settle in for a quarantine at home

Remember those who have no home.

As fear grips our country,

let us choose love.

During this time when we cannot physically wrap our arms around each other,

Let us yet find ways to be the loving embrace of God to our neighbors.

Amen.

“I sat in my garden but there was no place in the world where I was not.” (Anker Larson)