Looking Ahead to September 29, 2024 --Creation 4

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The Scripture Readings this week are:

• Genesis 8:1-22
• Revelation 22:1-5

The Sermon title is Paradise is a Garden?

Early Thoughts: Our story begins and ends in a garden. I read the Genesis passage this week and I find it suggestive of Noah returning to a garden. Certainly there are echos of the instructions to Adam in the instructions to Noah.

Maybe paradise (where our story starts and stops) is in fact a garden. [The hours of weeding over the years make me doubt that a bit] But then I remember something I learned a few years ago. Something etymological.

Picture on the cover of Saving Paradise

 9 years ago I read a book called Saving Paradise. Early in that book it talked about how the earliest church focused not on the crucifixion but on paradise. I remember wondering what it might mean if we chose to focus our attention in the same way. That might be another sermon, maybe for Reign of Christ Sunday some year....

Anyway, in the first part of that book I was introduced to the idea that the word 'paradise' has its roots in words relating to a walled enclosure or garden. Add that to our Genesis and Revelation accounts of Eden and the New Jerusalem and yes maybe paradise really is a garden.

What might that mean for how we live in the world?

Now I am remembering a more recently read book. This was a book on Celtic Christianity and spirituality called Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul. In this book it is suggested that one of the reasons Celtic thought was incompatible with "orthodox" Roman Imperial Christianity was because it raises up the sacredness of creation. Empire (Roman, British, American to name a few) is built and maintained largely by seeing the creation as a tool and/or raw materials to use as the structures of empire are built and maintained. To name Creation as sacred and something to be honoured and treasured for what it is rather than what we can do with it gets in the way. How do we see the world around us now? Is it gift to be celebrated or tool/raw materials to be utilized effectively? Do we sometimes like to claim one answer while our actions reveal something different?

We are invited to see the world as a garden. Or maybe we are invited to pine for the time we will return to the garden. I am now pondering what it might mean to see the world as a garden (though maybe without the wall implied by the etymology of the word paradise).
--Gord