“Saving Paradise”    

Date:  May 24, 2009               Ascension Sunday

Script:  Ephesians 1:15-23 

Source Material:  Saving Paradise; How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire, by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker.

Revd William F. Meier    ~   First United Methodist Church, Saint Cloud, Minnesota

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Yesterday our family celebrated the joy of our daughter, Sarah, graduating from the College of St. Catherine’s.  What a wonderful day it was.  We are so proud of her.   In those long formal solemn graduation ceremonies you look for the key moments…of course the one we always focus upon is the handing of the diploma on stage, but actually the core of the experience is that moment when the president makes a formal announcement, the class moves their tassel from one side of the mortarboard to the other.  It is not much of an action, but at that moment all of them have suddenly been granted the power of a degree—“the rights, duties and privileges appertaining to”— the diploma handing-off on stage is dramatic… but it just saves postage.

At what point did Jesus graduate, (if you will excuse the expression)?  At what point did Jesus become the Savior or accomplish his role in salvation history?  The interesting thing is that Scripture offers a number of tassel-moving moments as possibilities, but doesn’t nail it down.  

For Matthew and Luke it is the moment of birth and that is why we have such wonderful and celebrated birth narratives. 

For Mark (the first Gospel written), it might be his baptism… you know, “You are my beloved…”  

 The apostle Paul delays it past birth, past his baptism, past even his teachings and wondrous miracles all the way to his death; the death of Christ is the important thing for him.  

 In the late-written Gospel of John the answer goes way back in time to the Big Bang when God created the whole show.  “In the beginning was the Word” and the Word there spoken of was Christ.  That narrows the answer down to between 2,013 and 13.7 billion years ago. 

The answer that gets the most air time is that Jesus enacted salvation when he died on the cross.  Ask someone who is outside of the faith and chances are this is the core of the message they have heard: that Jesus died on the cross as a substitute for the sins of the world in a legal system whereby God demands blood satisfaction for sin.  This message bleeds into our culture from Hallmark artwork to Mel Gibson’s violent X-rated cinematography.

Yet, that is not the only answer according to Scripture and not even the primary answer for any part of Christianity for the first thousand years.  I have mentioned the work of Rita Nakashima Brock before.  Now her research has been combined into a book with Rebecca Ann Parker, titled Saving Paradise; How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire. 

They noticed that in the visual representations of Christian life and faith there was no depiction of Jesus dead on the cross for nearly a thousand years.  This common symbol of faith to us was non-existent up until the 900’s just after Charlemagne was baptizing his northern European soldiers at the point of a sword. 

“Jesus’s dead body was just not there.  We could not find it in the catacombs or Rome’s early churches,   in Istanbul’s great sixth-century Cathedral Hagia Sophia, in the monastery churches in northeastern Turkey, or in  Ravenna’s mosaics.”[1]

The oldest crucifix we know of was created in 965 in Cologne, Germany.

Then they began to discover what the subject of Christian art in the first millennia was.  For the first thousand years of Christianity, Jesus was usually posed as a shepherd, a teacher, or most often as the risen Christ, triumphant over death and ruler of the universe (the Pantocrator)  or risen triumphant over the cross. 

“The death of Jesus, it seemed, was not a key to meaning, not an image of devotion, not a ritual symbol of faith for the Christians who worshipped among the churches’ glittering mosaics.  The Christ they saw was the incarnate, risen Christ, the child of baptism, the healer of the sick, the teacher of friends, and the one who defeated death and transfigured the world with the Holy Spirit.”[2]

What Rita and Rebecca discovered on their field tour of all these first millennia churches was that the early church was focused upon paradise.  They stood with stiff necks in awe of these massive mosaics high in the churches that showed depictions of paradise— flowing streams, deer, sheep, trees and verdant landscapes.  At first they were dismayed, thinking that this was escapism, focusing solely on some afterlife reward.  But as they looked deeper, in concert with reading ancient texts and liturgies (worship orders that happened in those places) they discovered another shock.

“To our surprise and delight, we discovered that early Christian paradise was something other than ‘heaven’ or the afterlife.  Our modern views of heaven and paradise think of them as a world after death.  However, in the early church, paradise— first and foremost— was this world, permeated and blessed by the Spirit of God.”[3]

Paradise was this world, entered into with the mind and spirit given at baptism in the church, and continued to be perceived at the table of communion where God’s good gifts were blessed, shared with the poor, and united the faithful around the table.  Those who died were also in paradise, nearby, but in another realm—in an invisible plain.  The “great cloud of witnesses” gathered with them and around them in their lives and especially in their worship and communion.

Paradise was this world, where the risen Christ helped them overcome evil, sin, oppression, imperial violence and even death.  Christ’s Resurrection and ascension opened the gates to this paradise once again— overcoming sin and death.  They maintained their awareness of the goodness of this world by faithfulness to each other, the spiritual disciplines of prayer, worship, sacraments.  These fortified them for their Christian path serving the orphan and widows, and grounding them in love, justice, non-violence, wisdom and freedom.  Paradise, far from escapism, grounded them and opened their eyes spiritually.

I go down this road today because the writer of Ephesians offers the ascension as a graduation moment for Jesus.  He doesn’t mention the death of Jesus on the cross at all.  Rather, he puts forth the resurrection and ascension as the actuator… the moment which enacts Jesus’ power… the moment that this wonderful paradise is released upon us who believe.  After describing in such wonderful adjectives the riches, power, hope, and inheritance, the writer says: “God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 1:20).  “…put this power to work”, actuating, releasing… graduation.

The Christian sense of ascension is that the power that was located in the person of Jesus of Nazareth is now available to all times and places, even breaking into our experience and enabling it to be a paradise.  A paradise not to escape this dark world, but to redeem it, return it to justice, vibrancy, wholeness, peace.  Christ is reigning above all things… our task is to come to terms with that and align our life and energies with his kingdom.

So how do we tap into this paradise that is present?  How can we know this is true, beyond all the war, terrorism, hatred, abuse, poverty, racism we see when we look at the world?  I think it has something to do with knowing Christ.

Ephesians 1:18:  “I pray that…God…may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know…”

Maybe that is what faith is… this knowing.  Cynthia Bourgeault tells of an experience she had when she was a child.  Her playmates lived next door, Dan and Besty.  In the fall of her sixth grade year Dan fell ill— his kidneys began to fail— gradually at first, then with alarming rapidity.  Dan was taken to the hospital one day by ambulance and immediately moved to the intensive care unit.  Not long after, her parents sat her down and told her that Dan was dying.  This threw her into a spiritual crisis; she’d been praying for his health in her own way and God didn’t seem to be holding God’s part of the deal. 

She slipped outdoors to ponder the situation.  She went to a park nearby to walk.  It was snowy and cold— late November or early December.  Evening.  In the park she raged at God.  “What’s wrong here?  Is there something wrong with me or you?  Why isn’t this working?  How can this happen?” 

“All of a sudden I felt myself suffused in golden light…and I heard a voice distinctly saying, “Shhh.  Dan will die…and all will be well.”  While I certainly couldn’t understand the message itself, I understood that warm, golden light and somehow relaxed and rested.  I discovered in that moment that there was something in me that knew.  It didn’t know what it knew, exactly, but it knew that it knew.  Deeper than all the precepts that had been drilled into me in my childhood religious training, it simply recognized the voice of truth when it heard it and let go into its presence.”[4]

The eyes of her heart were enlightened.  Amid the tragedy of the death of Dan, she could access paradise. 

This passage calls the church to be the body of Christ in the world.  Large shoes to fill to say the least.  Yet I believe we are to be that sign of the kingdom…we are to be a sacrament of the Kingdom of God; a small act and reality that points to and actuates (graduates), releases, God’s fuller reality.  That reality is paradise.   Not a perfect paradise, but an experience of justice and wholeness that God intends for creation.  We get to have glimpses of it, glimpses the world desperately needs to see: glimpses of justice, love, stewardship of this earth; glimpses of non-violence, wisdom, and freedom; glimpses of Christ’s sustaining presence that helps overcome evil, sin, oppression, darkness, imperial violence and even death.