George is away on vacation during August. In his absence, Suzanne Sykes has sent a series of 4 sermons prepared on the theme of Paradise. The first one is below.
July 13, 2008
Kanata United Church
Ninthth Sunday After Pentecost
Genesis 2:4-23
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
Psalm 148
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
Isaiah 11:1-9
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
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The Rev. Suzanne Sykes
When I was growing up I got to spend my summers at the cottage. It was a wonderful spot on a tiny lake outside Waterloo. My brother and sister and assorted cousins and I learned to swim, to sail to canoe. We got to explore the lake and the pond, the woods and the meadows. We fished and camped, read books, hiked, built cities in the sand pile and tried making our own dishes out of clay. We learned the songs and names of birds, the tracks of deer and racoon and skunk, hunted for toads and salamanders, caught caterpillars and watched them spin cocoons then become butterflies, gathered wildflowers and berries, watched the stars and sometimes the Northern lights in the night sky. The cottage was on Paradise Lake. And paradise it truly was.
In our modern world we don’t talk much about paradise anymore. We don’t usually think of work as paradise, we don’t usually think of our cities as paradise. Paradise is where you might go to spend a really good vacation in the middle of winter when the snow is at 200 cm high and still counting. Anywhere but here starts to look like paradise then. And many of us think of our gardens as a little bit of paradise that we create and tend, and so we should. And all of us can name places that we think of as paradise. Memories so vivid of places that took our breath away. But I am willing to bet that we don’t think of our ordinary everyday life as paradise.
Yet, if we listen to Genesis and Isaiah, they claim that our world is a paradise. When God created the heavens and the earth and everything in it, everything, God created paradise. God created paradise for human beings to live in and have as their home. And in Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom, all beings live in harmony and peace together. It is a dramatic vision of beauty and abundance and welcome. And it can become a vision of renewal and purpose for the church in these times, our time, when paradise and beauty justice and peace can seem a long way off for our planet.
So where does this paradise come from? Paradise literally means garden. A walled garden in Persian. The garden of Eden is the original paradise. Watered by four rivers with trees and plants and animals and humans all living together. Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom links the garden of paradise with the kingdom of God’s Shalom - the reign of God’s Justice and Peace.
In the Bible important things happen in gardens - in paradise. The Song of Songs is about gardens, paradise, desire and love. Solomon’s gardens were legendary for their variety, and beauty and fragrance. Jesus prays his last prayer in a garden - the garden of Gethsemane. He promises the thief that he will be in a garden, in paradise that same day. Jesus is buried in a garden, Mary Magdalene looks for his body in a garden and then mistakes him for the gardener. That can’t be accidental. Many of Jesus stories and parables were about gardens and gardening - figs, grape vines, mustard, even weeds.
The theme of gardens, of paradise, of the kingdom of God are woven throughout the scriptures inviting and calling us to bear witness to God’s good creation and to live it out - to live out of paradise in our daily lives.
For Christians of the early church the idea of paradise was central. They took seriously that the kingdom of God, paradise, was here now and available to believers. Baptism was your ticket of admission. Think of that, you entered paradise at your baptism. Baptism changed your nature into one that was paradise compatible.
Churches were built to replicate paradise. When you entered a sanctuary you literally crossed the threshold of ordinary everyday life into paradise. In mosaics and decoration the sanctuary replicated that paradise described in Genesis and Isaiah. On the walls were images telling the life of Jesus and the apostles and saints of the church who had gone before and yet were still present with the faithful worshipping together. Holy Communion was the celebration of the feast of paradise that re¬enacted the abundance and goodness of the garden of paradise. And in this beautiful place a youthful, resurrected Christ reigned as shepherd.
It must have been an extraordinary experience - worship - in the early church. Everything was designed to give the experience in the here and now of paradise, of the original good creation of God, of God’s kingdom, to strengthen the faithful to resist the evil that they found around them in their ordinary lives. Worship was an experience of paradise that was so vivid that no matter what happened during the rest of the week - even the escalating violence and persecution by Rome, the very real fear of economic collapse and foreign invasions - would not cloud your vision or erode your faithful witness to the reality of God’s paradise as our true home.
This is our inheritance as much as theirs. It may have been diminished in the intervening centuries, nevertheless paradise belongs to us still. Baptism is our ticket of admission. And our task is to bear witness to the truth of God’s kingdom of peace and justice and goodness and beauty by the way we live our lives in our world - a world that is just as full of persecution, fear and worry as the world of the early church.
Christ calls us to be witnesses to paradise. We are called by our baptism to care for the world and all its creatures because it is the creation that God loves. It means doing something as everyday as tending our own gardens, our own little patches of paradise and valuing up all the good in we find in them. It means doing everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint and slow down climate change. It means caring for the poor for the poor and disempowered are also part of God’s paradise.
Perhaps the toughest part of our work as Christians, as witnesses to God’s goodness and beauty is simply to say that to a world that is sceptical about the very existence of God that God loves the world and desires its wellbeing.
As Christians we claim that existence has a transcendent reality that we call God. And we insist that we make a difference to God and that God values up the goodness in what we do. And we go further. We claim that we are living in paradise, in the kingdom of God that Christ spoke of, right now. That assurance can free us to live in abundance, generosity, compassion, peace, delight and joy. Our spirits cannot be quenched by the troubles, ills and fears of the present age for we are nourished by water from the rivers of Eden. That is the gift of Christ we claim through our baptism.
So go out and experience God’s paradise, the beauty of God’s creation. Play, celebrate and do what you can to bring more beauty and goodness into your part of our garden home. Amen
c. 2008, Suzanne E. Sykes
