Tag: creation

Garden at the End of the World: A Reflection

I offered this reflection during a parish Lenten retreat at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, which explored the various gardens of Scripture, including Eden, Gethsemane, and, here, the garden of the New Creation in the Book of Revelation.

I want to tell you a story about a garden at the end of the world.

Last summer, I was on a trip to the United Kingdom, and after a very long set of flights from Fort Wayne to London, and a train from London to the northern city of Newcastle, and a car from Newcastle to the Northumbrian coast near the border of England and Scotland, I found myself standing on the seashore, looking out towards my final destination: an island just off the mainland, separated by a tidal causeway that is only passable at certain times of day when the seawater does not inundate it. It was the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, an ancient seat of Christian monasticism and a pilgrimage site for centuries. 

I was still wearing the same clothes I’d put on, many, many hours ago in Indiana, and it was a surreal experience to stand there, bleary eyed, carrying the dust and the baggage of all I’d left behind, and yet to be in the midst of something so luminously, shockingly new. 

We crossed the causeway as the sun sank into the North Sea and the skies were every pastel shade imaginable, like ice cream flavors melting together. Rasberry, peach, grape, blueberry, cream. And once we’d arrive to the other side, my companion and I made our way up a grassy embankment, to the top of a ridge overlooking the sea. We had arrived, and we were bathed in color and salt air, and I confess that it felt like the landscapes of heaven one dreams of as a child, before heaven seems a bit harder to imagine. 

As we stood among the waving grasses of Lindisfarne, we looked out towards the far side of the island, straining our eyes in the falling dusk. Isn’t it interesting how, whenever we get to the edge of something we still want to see what is even further out? Curiousity, or longing, keeps our eyes on the horizon. 

And as we looked, we noticed something that was hard to make out, a low structure of some kind, dark and earthen, out beyond any other buildings or roads. It wasn’t on our map. It was a mystery, and we decided to go out the next day to see what it was, sitting in solitude at the far end of an island at the far end of the earth. 

So we set out the next morning, making our way along a path that followed the sea, curving out around the old castle that sits like a sentinel atop a rocky hill on the otherwise gentle landscape of Lindisfarne. And that low, dark thing, whatever it was, was still hard to make out, until we curved around the eastern edge of the island and followed a narrow road that led us closer. 

It was not a building at all, in fact, but a set of low stone walls, made of rocks piled on top of one another, moss growing in the cracks between them, delicate sea grasses growing out of the top. And in the center of one wall was a gate. And when we opened the gate…we stepped into a garden.

A garden, sitting in silent, abundant repose, at the end of the earth. And in that garden, on this July afternoon, every color flower imaginable was blooming—red poppies and white daisies and flowers I did not recognize—fuschia and pink and gold and amethyst. And there were bees buzzing around, gathering their pollen, and the sea breeze stirred the plants gently and the air smelled like earth and salt and sweetness and greenness. Like viriditas. 

And we just stood there, in awe, marveling that such a beautiful thing could actually exist anywhere, but especially here, out at the end of the world. 

In the Revelation to John, we are given a vision of another garden, in another place and time, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is a vision of a garden that is in every place and beyond time. For it is the garden of the New Creation, the garden that is the fulfillment of God’s promise to redeem creation and to make it whole. To make it holy.

John writes: Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 

This vision, the very last one given in the Book of Revelation, and thus the final one in Holy Scripture, is the consummation of God’s promises: that in the end, beyond death, beyond time itself, there will be a garden, there will be life, there will be food and healing and abundance in every season. There will be a garden at the end of the world, and there will be a place for everyone and everything.

It is worth noting that this new garden, this new and eternal revelation of Divine viriditas, is not just a reentry into Eden. We don’t simply end up where our forebears started, as if nothing had happened, as if the millennia of life and death and growth and decay we’ve survived all just folded back on itself into some sort of primordial, unknowing, unremembering dream. Because God cherishes the beauty of all the seasons we have endured. God knows the seeds we have planted, the dreams and the tears and the blood spilled into the soil. God sees all of it, God sees all of you, all of us, and God does not desire to erase but to redeem it, to heal it, to imbue it with an everlasting radiance. To imbue it with viriditas.

So no, we are never going back to Eden. But neither are we stuck forever in Gethsemane, where life and death struggle in their tortured dance. No, in the Garden of the New Creation, we enter into something far better than a new and improved version of the world we know. We enter into the very life of God. We enter into God’s own heart, God’s own home, God’s own viriditas, a place that is not simply a lost paradise reclaimed, but is the very love and life that underlies every notion of paradise. 

In the new heave and new earth, we enter into God, who is waiting for us at the end of the world. And according to Scripture, it seems that God looks very much like a garden. 

I confess that as we look around the world today, it is hard to hold onto this vision. Our planet is in crisis, and all of us—humanity and plants and animals, rocks, rivers, and seas—all of us are bound together in uncertainty and in pain. So some days it’s hard to imagine a place where there is ever-ripening fruit and balm for every ailment. A place where all creation exists in harmony with itself and its Creator. It is a lovely thought, beyond lovely, but it can feel like a fanciful wish rather than a grounded hope, because we have known so much of hardship for so long.

Loss and death and finitude are so intimately part of our lives; they are big and burdensome yet also familiar, and if I am honest with myself, I can’t imagine life without death, as much as I want to. Sometimes the idea of eternity, even in a beautiful garden, scares me a little. I can’t really understand its unending joy. It’s hard to imagine a world that is not Eden or Gethsemane, a world where the serpent won’t show up again with his temptations, it’s hard to imagine a world where the Cup that we receive will be full of life, with not even a trace of bitterness or loss.

But the Revelation, of course, doesn’t really explain how it all will work. We are given a dream, a promise to trust in. We are given a garden, and the rest is left to our sense of wonder. This vision of the New Creation is not a precise roadmap to eternity, but more of a song, or a poem, or an intuition. A reminder that as we wait, if we seek a foretaste of heaven, we might tend to the earth and help in flourish.

All we can do, here and now, is love the gardens in which we find ourselves, the gardens of the earth as it is: broken yet insistently hopeful; the gardens of our lives as they are: broken yet insistently hopeful. The gardens that remind us of what has been given, what has been lost, what has been promised. All I can do is walk through this earth and notice it, and care for it, and I can walk alongside my neighbor (my human neighbor and all the rest of creation too) and notice them and care for them, and I can trust that my Lord, the unseen gardener and caretaker of us all, is just on the other side of the dense greenery, smiling through the leaves, and that whatever he is planting for that future day, that final harvest, that eternal garden, it will be more beautiful, more whole, more full of connection and love than anything I’ve yet known or imagined. 

More so, even, than the gift I found hidden behind those stone walls on the Holy Island, where for one brief summer afternoon, heaven whispered among the poppies and the seagrass, and God was in the green and in the wind and said,

I want to tell you a story about a garden at the end of the world. 

Emptiness: A Sermon

“In the canyon, we perceive how negative space has its own power; we find that we are just as compelled by what is missing–what has been hollowed out–as we are by what remains.”

I preached this sermon for the 3rd Sunday of Advent, December 13, 2020, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are John 1:6-8, 19-28 and Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11. It is a slightly edited version of the sermon I wrote for The Episcopal Church’s “Sermons that Work” collection for Advent & Christmas 2020.

I spent much of my 20s living in the desert, and whenever I was feeling stressed out or in need of some quiet time, I would drive out past the city limits to an overlook that took in views of Nevada’s Red Rock Canyon and a seemingly endless expanse of earth and sky.

Some people find the desert off-putting: all of that muted, windswept rock and dirt and shrub, where you cannot hide from the sun or from yourself; but others, like John the Baptist, are drawn to such places for precisely this reason—because there is no distraction, because it is a place of unobscured perception, of stark clarity, where one can see farther outward and further inward, if they are willing to brave the emptiness.

Indeed, if you have ever stood at the rim of a desert canyon, you know what it is to comprehend the immense majesty of such emptiness. These clefts in the earth, carved by the incessant flow of water over millenia, are rocky vessels holding a world unto themselves. 

Peer over the edge and look down into the sky held between the canyon walls—a highway for the howling wind and winged creatures of the air. 

Look down upon the stubborn shrubs clinging to the ledges, where tiny crawling things seek precarious shelter at the edge of the abyss. 

And then look down, down, down to the bottom, to the river—the improbable, sinuous source of this vast openness, branching out like a vein, still eroding and shaping the earth in its insistent passage towards a distant sea. 

In the canyon, we perceive how negative space has its own power; we find that we are just as compelled by what is missing–what has been hollowed out–as we are by what remains. There is a potentiality, a spaciousness in the open chasm that, in gazing upon it, we also begin to sense within ourselves, in the caverns of our soul, a certain thick luminousness, a sense of seeing deep into the heart of things that are usually hidden under the surface.

And so perhaps it is in just such a place, deep in a canyon in the Judean wildnerness, that we might imagine John the Baptist, his voice crying out, echoing off of the wizened rockface, mingling with dust and birdsong, proclaiming the Coming of Christ: an approach that will, like a river of Living Water, soon carve its own path through the petrification of the human heart. 

John heralds the advent of God’s own bone and breath and blood; the anointed flesh of the Messiah, which, in its birthing and breaking and Belovedness, will reveal the truth of how our own lives are sustained by the Divine ecology of Love.

But before we get there, we are here, in Advent country, in the desert. And just as emptiness defines the canyon, so it is, in this season, that discovering our identity in God is predicated, first, upon clearing away all that is not for us, in order to discern exactly how God might fill that open space.

“Who are you?” John is asked by those eager to label him and his peculiar mission. But he responds only with negations.

“I am not the Messiah,” he says. 

Are you Elijah? “I am not.” 

The prophet? “No.”

Relinquishment of these identity markers, alluring as they might be, is John’s act of humility, of refusing to be carried away the expectations or agendas of others. He is so grounded in God that he has become an open channel of grace and truth, letting the breath of the Spirit blow through the cracks in his soul, like a reed, like a wind-song. 

And, if we wish to let God shape the melody of our own lives, so must we be.

How often we secretly wish that we were solid rock; the savior of ourselves; the long-expected sovereign of our own small dominions, with the power to do it all, to be it all. How often we take on the titles offered to us, not because they are accurate, but because they’re there, because it sounded good at the time, and because an identity, a name, even one that doesn’t quite fit, makes us feel more real to ourselves, at least for a while. 

But just as the canyon only becomes itself in the void, so, too, with us: so it is ok, it is necessary, even, to not be all things to all people. It is ok to let go of the names and roles that never quite fit. It is ok to let your life take on some empty space, to let the wind rush through you. Because, like John, it is only in each of our own negations that we get closer to the spare, essential truth of our identity—the one that God has prepared particularly for us.

John shows us how brave and beautiful it is to simply be what we are, and to trust that, for God, this is sufficient.

But how difficult this can be. In this anxious time, faced with the multiplying needs of our families, our communities, and our planet, we are frequently tempted to take on far more than what we can actually do or be. Even as many of us attempt to slow down and be more attentive to what matters, the world continues to surround us and shout, “Who are you? Who are you?”

But, if we are ever to cultivate the space in ourselves for God to rush in, then, like John, we must respond with:

I am not the Messiah.

I am not.

No.

We must be willing to disappoint the onlookers. We must be willing to embrace the emptiness of what we were never meant to be.

And then, perhaps, we will find what was ours to claim all along.

“I am,” John admits at last, “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’”

Not a king. Not a savior. A voice. Just a voice–an invisible resonance piercing the air, unbounded, free. Nothing more and nothing less than this. And exactly what God needs from him.

For John, the purpose of his own voice is clear: the announcement of God’s Incarnate Promise. And so he baptizes in the river, that ancient agent of transformative power, inviting others to let themselves be scoured by it—to let their layers of defensiveness and artifice be stripped away, to hollow out a space in their hearts in preparation for “the one who is coming after,” the Christ, the one who makes all things new.

And here, in another time and in another wilderness—the one that we struggle to navigate each day—John’s invitation remains open to us. It is as urgent as ever, because we are still learning who we are and who we are not. Like the canyon, we are still being shaped; still being laid bare to the wind and the light, still becoming as deep and open and vast as God imagines we can become. And, like John, it is only in the cultivation of our own holy emptiness that we will, at last, be the vessels of God’s inbreaking purpose:

to bring good news to the oppressed,

to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives,

and release to the prisoners;

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,

and the day of vengeance of our God; 

to comfort all who mourn. (Isaiah 61)