Sunday, April 29, 2012

Saving Paradise

By Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist

Sermon April 29, 2012--Good Shepherd Sunday

Psalm 23
John 10:11-18


About ten years ago, theologians Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker embarked on an artistic quest through the Mediterranean. They were seeking the earliest expressions of Christian art and how those forms of art depicted Jesus. They were imagining what that art might have to say about the liturgical and ethical formation of the early Christians for whom this art was created. And, perhaps most importantly, they were exploring what the liturgical and ethical formation of early Christians might have to say to us, we who are twenty-first century American Christians celebrating “Earth Day Sunday” on this Fourth Sunday in the Season of Easter. A Sunday that has us reading Psalm 23 year after year alongside a lection from John’s Gospel describing Jesus as the Good Shepherd.

The two scholars (whose findings are compiled into a massive tome titled Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire (emphasis added)) embarked on their exploration of early Christian art with the explicit expectation of discovering the manner in which early Christians portrayed the Crucifixion. Meaning that they expected to discover early Christian renderings of a suffering, dying Jesus. On a cross.

Instead, the sanctuaries they explored revealed images of a Jesus who was very much alive. And surrounded by a lavish and vibrant natural world that was also very much alive. And it just so happens that the most popular early church portrayal of Jesus was the image we celebrate on this Good Shepherd Sunday: a glorified Christ surrounded by adoring sheep grazing in green pastures, with lushly painted gardens enveloping the entire community of faith as they gathered for worship. The image reinforced by written quotations from Psalm 23.

Imagine, if you will, how a similar scene would feel in this sanctuary. If the chancel were filled from top to bottom with a vision of Jesus as the Good Shepherd. With our stained glass windows along the sides of the sanctuary saturated in ivy. With four aisles (instead of three) flowing symbolically with living water, as if they were the four rivers flowing in the Garden of Eden described in Genesis 2. How would all this sensory imagery shape our experience of worship?

We would feel as if we were worshiping in Paradise, would we not?

This was, in fact, the conclusion of Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker upon viewing sanctuary after sanctuary of early Christian art. Over and over again they discovered churches drenched in a lush visual garden of grace. As they imagined what it would be like to worship in these churches, they discovered the dominant sensory experience of early Christianity was the recovery of “Paradise.” Not Lost. Not in need of a cross to cover the sin. But Found!

Of course we all, to this day, dream of “Paradise Found” as an archetypal image of the heavenly realm. We might conclude this early Christian art was an escapist attempt to deny the suffering of this world in favor of a future fulfillment. But when Brock and Parker broadened their study to include ancient liturgies and ritual practices and prayers of the early church, they realized the permeation of paradise in the liturgical life of early Christians was meant to reinforce the reality of Paradise here and now. At least as much (if not more than) as an afterlife hope.

Baptismal liturgies used in the fourth century by Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem openly describe this ritual as a “portal to Paradise” through which disciplined, dedicated catechumens renounced their greed. Their fear. Their violence. Their desire for the power to dominate others. Their rage against the powers that have dominated them. After a great season of thorough preparation, they stripped themselves of their burdens and their sins and emerged naked as a “new Adam” from the waters of re-creation, passing through the gate of the garden of the Good Shepherd.

Upon rising from the baptismal waters as a new creation in Christ they were clothed with white robes and escorted to the feast of Paradise—their first Holy Communion—chanting Psalm 23 as they processed to the table: The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. God leads me through the still water. God prepares a table before me . . . God anoints my head with oil.

As they gathered around the table for the Eucharist, they drank milk and honey to break their fast. Then the rest of the community joined them in sharing the bread and wine of paradise. And, get this, the bishop declared these new baptized members of the church to be grafted to the tree of life at the center of the garden! Firmly rooted. Forever in Paradise.

But the portal to Paradise was not just a moment in time. It was certainly a struggle to stay rooted in the Paradise to which they had been grafted. And so the ritualized practices of the community of the church developed, cultivating within the faithful a commitment to the ethical grace of learning once and for all how to live together as one humanity in the generous garden of God. They had to “practice Paradise,” as do we, every time they gathered to worship God. And that is what it meant to be the church.

Now this may sound like a highly idealized view of early Christianity. And indeed it may very well be. They clearly had their problems and conflicts, just like we do. All we have to do is re-read the lesson from the Gospel of John to notice that. Clearly Jesus—or at least the Gospel writer in the name of Jesus—warns against those who might put their own personal needs ahead of the flock. You could assume from the context he means the Pharisees. What’s more, anyone who has actually functioned as a shepherd in the real world would say it’s not exactly a high compliment for us to be compared with sheep, even if it is as Christ’s own “flock.”

But consider, if you will, how our worldview would shift, how our environmental ethics would shift, if we really did worship the God of the garden, rather than the Lord of the laptop. (And I love my laptop!)

The thing is, we really have been created by the God of this good garden we call planet earth to live in perpetual Paradise with God and with one another. We really have. And the thing is, we really do need to fundamentally shift our vision away from the assumption of Paradise Lost to the ethical imperative of Paradise Found. Because we really were created to be stewards of this earth, humans from the humus, Adam from the adamah in Hebrew.
And we really do present the practical gifts of Paradise every Sunday in our Sacramental use of water and bread and wine. I think we do this because deep down in the part of us that is not yet in complete denial that we are fundamentally creatures of the earth we know that we cannot take these things for granted! That water and bread and wine really are “sacred.” A sign and a seal of God’s grace given to us. In abundance. In Paradise.

If Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker are right (and I think they are), then the Sacrament of Baptism we celebrated just two weeks ago (and reaffirmed today with our newest members) really was designed to serve for us as a portal to Paradise. Not just for those individuals involved with the Sacrament, but for all of us. And if they are right, then the Sacrament of Communion we will celebrate next week really is offered to us as the feast of Paradise, training us to know the world through our senses, as a joyous experience of the gift of life.

And if they are right, then the liturgy of the gathered community in worship every Sunday really is intended to cultivate within us the ethics of Paradise. And the minute for mission we received from Mr. Norwood today about faithful stewardship of our electronic waste really is a mandate for us to practice “Saving Paradise,” as if our lives depended on it.

Because they do. Spiritually and socially.

Perhaps I am naïve, but I would like to hope that twenty-first century Christians on the brink of a possible environmental disaster just might start to live differently if we truly believed we had been grafted into the tree of life at the center of Paradise. If we truly trusted the Good Shepherd to supply our need and not just our want. If we truly embraced a disciplined life of ethical grace. I would like to hope that this Earth Sunday could be a taste of Every Sunday, celebrating the abundance of God’s good creation and vowing to practice faithful stewardship of it.

Naïve or not this really is the invitation from our Good Shepherd on this Earth Day Sunday here at Madison Square. That we celebrate the Paradise God has given us in this good creation. That we claim ourselves rooted and grounded at the center of the garden, unable to be who we really are without it. And that we commit ourselves to saving this Paradise one electronic waste donation at a time. May we respond to this invitation with an alleluia for the abundant life God asks us to share.

I pray it may be so.

Amen.

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