The first thing to say makes sense of the others. The first thing to say is that Lane loved her family. And sought above all to provide for her family. With her family, in her work, at this church, with her friends, she expressed what Matt calls a kindness different from niceness. Does that make sense? he asked me. A kindness different from niceness. It absolutely makes sense. A kindness different from niceness, lived out in ordinary moments. Small moments. Real moments of a life. With others. For others. In ways that made them visible. In ways they’d later call something like an encounter with sweetness.
Matt’s observation about Lane made me think of the early 20th century American singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie. Guthrie one time wrote: Love makes the big world little and the little world big. Lane shared a kindness different from niceness into the small corners of life, and maybe that’s because it’s only the small, ordinary corners of life that can carry love that big. Love that is authentic and real.
Attention to the small and ordinary does not come naturally to most of us, but then I learned Lane was a gardener. This helped me understand. Because gardeners inhabit the world of the ordinary. They’re the original down to earth people. Gardeners trade in the soil from which we literally get words like humility. Depending on things like weather and rain will do that to you.
Lane loved to plant literal seeds but at some point, I suspect, seed planting became a way of life for her. The way she saw the world. The way she loved her friends, her family and grand-babies. She served over twenty years with the Mortar Board, investing in the flourishing of student leaders. Planting seeds. Those who worked with her at UNT remember both her kindness and that they learned from her. Her seed sowing was as generous as it was gentle.
I don’t know if she was mindful of it, but Lane’s love for the planting of possibilities toward the good and the beautiful, not least for her family, gave her a special kinship with the Lord that she loved. After all, on the first Easter Day, when Mary Magdalene was lost in grief at the tomb, maybe like some of us today, when Jesus met her and she didn’t know it was him, who else did she mistake him for, but the gardener? On the one hand, it was a real mistake. Grief can sometimes make it hard to see. On the other hand, it was the truest truth. Standing with her was the one who had brought God’s children back to Eden. Who broken death open. Who had brought new life to fullest flower. “Unless a grain of wheat fall into the soil and dies,” Jesus said, it remains just a grain. But he became the seed who laid down his life, and the seed became life, became a great tree, with branches reaching wide with the possibilities of God, so that, Jesus said, every bird might find a home there, in the branches of that tree. And I want you to hear the echo of that mustard seed promise in John’s gospel this morning: In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.
And in that home, every grief Lane knew in this life is known. Her last years with dementia, every wound those years contained, along with every tear. All of them, tended, like a tender plant, by the Gardener whose love is life for all people. In the reading we hear today from Revelation, the saints from every corner gathered ‘round the throne, we’re given the promise that God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. The promise is not like the old shampoo tagline - no more tears - it’s not that life’s difficult parts are erased, lest some love or rose among the thorns be harmed in the process, but that love’s every grief is seen and touched and healed. Every tear tended. With the compassion of the True Gardner. Church, do you here this? The saints who are gathered are allowed to have tears. Because their tears have become seeds of love.
It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. In quiet kindness, which is different from niceness, with the patience of a gardener, and not without some stubbornness, Lane has waited for the salvation of the her Lord, whose steadfast love never ceases, whose mercies never come in and end. Not in life, not in death. So we sing the love of God today by which Lane has been brought, through Christ Jesus our Lord, from bud to glorious flower.
Amen.
