Looking Ahead to March 6, 2022 -- 1st Sunday of Lent

 This week is not only the first Sunday of Lent but also the first Sunday of March so we will be celebrating the sacrament of Communion. If you are joining us via YouTube you are invited to have bread and juice available so we can all eat and drink together.

The Scripture Readings this week are:

• Genesis 2:7-9, 15-25
• Colossians 3:1-11

The Sermon title is Regaining Paradise

Early Thoughts: We are created to be in paradise. We are created to live in partnership with God and with the rest of God's creation. 

Let us start by naming the fact that the Genesis account, as wonderful an image as it might be (the omitted verses describe and geographically locate the Garden) also assumes a cis-gendered heterosexual world -- at least after the primordial human is split into two. This does not, to my reading, state that this is what God's intention for the human is. It speaks to the knowledge and understanding of the people who wrote these things down many centuries ago. Given that the first human is both (and neither) male and female (until God decides to split them) a wide range of gender possibilities seems to exist in the beginning of the story. As the centuries have passed God has helped us to broaden our understandings of gender identity and human sexuality.

There is, as Wilda Gafney suggests, a wide gulf between the vision we get in Genesis and the understanding of humanity we find in Paul's letter to the Colossians. Paul lists many ways we humans can fail to live into the new life we find in Christ. AS we look at the world and ourselves I think we could likely add to that list. to paraphrase Dorothy "I don't think we're in the Garden anymore..."

Much has been written, and preached, about how we got out of paradise. Much has been preached, and written, about how we fail to deserve paradise. As Lent continues we will hear the end of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, when (according to what I was taught as a child) paradise was lost. BUt this week I invite us to pause in the Garden.

As we pause in that vision of the Garden, that vision of partnership with God and God's Creation we do consider where we have lost it. We can not, and should not, try to pretend that the messiness and brokenness of the world are not real. But we can dream of the day when reality will be different. We are called not to dwell on the brokenness of the world but to dwell on God's hope for the world. We are people of Good News. The brokenness of the world is not the Good News. The possibility of restoring the vision of Genesis 2 is the Good News.

In the interim we need to hold the two sides in tension. We hold up the vision, and we name the lived reality. Sometimes the reality seems to crush the vision. But the vision always remains. We have a memory deep in our souls of where we came from. May that memory spur us forward as we grapple with the harsh realities of life.
--Gord