Exile from Paradise

Expulsion from Paradise. 

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit

CHRIST IS IN OUR MIDST !

   In the past I have given sermons on forgiveness for this Sunday, since this is Forgiveness Sunday. This year I want to focus on the Expulsion from Paradise. Adam and Eve are exiled from Paradise. It’s in the hymns for last night. Let’s look at this story, because, in a very real way, it is OUR story. 

   God has created us in His Image and placed us in a place of brightness, a place of refreshment, a place of repose — where there is no sickness nor sorrow. God loves us — He did not create us as pets. He wants us to respond to Him freely. Thus He gave us the right to disobey Him, to say “NO”. He set up a tree, a tree of experiencing good and evil, and told us not to eat of it. 

   We lived in paradise in communion with God. It was a direct relationship. It was a full relationship. We did not have God, or any of our reality in boxes, in categories, in partialness. It was simple, and yet full. We lived in relationship with God and with all our world. We were present to God and to the world. The scripture says that we were naked and not ashamed. We were OK with that vulnerability to God and to the world. 

   When we disobeyed God, what happened. We hid ourselves from the presence of God. We no longer had that direct relationship. God was walking in the Garden in the early evening, but something was different. “Where are you, Adam?”. . . it was not as if God did not know Adam’s physical location. But something had changed. Adam was not present to the world anymore. 

   “I was afraid, and naked and I hid myself.” He was afraid to show his face to God. The word “shame” carries with it this connotation of being afraid to show one’s face. Shame is something that one is clothed with — something that one wears. 

And then Adam goes from shame to shamelessness — he blames GOD for “the woman THOU gavest me”. 

How different it would have been if we had just said “I disobeyed; I was wrong.”

   And what did we lose?. . . . communion with God. . . . communion with the world. . . . and what replaced that? . . . Noise, Logismoi — we now have this plethora of thoughts that plague us. To give ourselves have an illusion of safety and control, we put things in categories according to superficial criteria. We no longer see each other as persons; we see the blonde, brunette, redhead, gray haired people — white, black, brown, red, yellow people — people of a specific language and culture — specific generations . .  And we do this to God too. . .  God is no longer our intimate companion; He becomes “the Big Guy”, “the Man upstairs”, someone we must either manipulate or be manipulated by — no longer the “One with Whom we have to do”.

   What did we lose?. . . .connection. . . . connection with ourselves, with God, with our fellow humans, with the world.  Instead, we impose our own ideas of order on each other and the world, in ways that are quite foreign to it. We set forth our own understanding of how the world should be. But the world cannot sustain our vision, and so we begin to destroy our world. 

   We embrace this noise because we are unwilling to confront our shame. St. John Chrysostom observes that we have no shame in sinning, but we have shame in repenting. Exactly the opposite of what it should be. We hear the prophets sing how the shame of the nation has come upon them — that they have turned from their relationship with God. We have become exiles from God. 

   When we look at our hymnody for Holy Week, there is not a lot of emphasis placed on Christ’s pain and torture, as often we see in western Christianity. Instead we see emphasis on the Shame of the Cross. Christ bears our shame. We see Christ mocked and spat upon. He gives His back to the smiters. . . and hides not His face from shame and spitting. He lays aside His Glory and empties Himself and becomes a servant and obedient unto death, even death on the Cross. He takes upon Himself our shame. 

   And by taking on our shame in the Cross, Christ makes space for our restoration — He makes a way for us to paradise. 

   In the meantime, we are exiled . . . NOT as a punishment, but because, in our current state, it would be a danger to us to stay in the garden. 

   And so we begin the season of Great Lent . . .  our journey back to paradise. We’ve got to get back to the Garden. Humility restores to us that vulnerability without shame. We journey from exile to the very Kingdom of God. 

   So we are given tools: fasting, alms, and prayer. . . . we are given the great beauty of the hymns and services. . . . their purpose is to let us sing humility, . . to humble our bodies and thus humble our minds and our spirits. . . .  to journey to Jerusalem, to the Passion WITH Christ. . . to be co-crucified with Christ. . . and so let us say with St. Thomas the disciple “Let us also go, that we may die with Him.”