Wild Garden

Propers: Gaudete Sunday, A.D. 2016 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“The desert shall rejoice and bloom.” What an image! What a promise of what God intends for His Creation. Perfect for Gaudete Sunday.

From the beginning of the Bible a symbolic contrast is drawn between the wilderness and cultivated land. Where God rules, where He is loved, where His plans are followed, there the earth puts forth abundant life. Shade and water, fruit and shelter, all abound beneath the benevolence of their Maker and the hands of His faithful stewards.

In Genesis, when God first raises humanity up from the earth and assigns to us a higher calling than that of mere birds or beasts, it is no coincidence that He places us in charge of His garden. The very word “paradise” means “garden”. Yet when we reject God’s plans—when we harvest forbidden fruit and cease to be His stewards—we are cast forth from the garden into the wilderness east of Eden, the land of Nod. Here, life is hard. Here, we must toil to produce adequate food; we must suffer to bear and raise our children. Such is life in the wilderness.

But God does not give up on us. He does not abandon His plans for our abundance and joy. He takes wild shoots—Israel, the children of Abraham—and plants them in a good land, counseling and caring for them, protecting and pruning them, dwelling in the midst of this people as He once dwelt with us all in Eden: growing a new garden that it might grow to be a blessing for the entire world. But still we rebel. Time and again, the prophets speak of Israel as God’s beloved garden, His vineyard, His orchard, yet time and again the garden grows wild, the stewards defy the harmonious plans of the Planter. And so, time and again, Israel is driven into the wilderness, into the wilds.

Yet God does not abandon them. God never abandons His people. He always, always follows them into the wilderness. He gathers them, time and again, replants them, time and again, regrows them, time and again. “Someday,” He tells His prophets, “someday this garden will blossom. Someday this tree will bear good fruit. Someday these vines will grow lush and heavy with wine, for the Messiah, the Christ, to come and harvest. Then, My children, you will see the glories and mercies that I’ve planned for you from the very beginning. Someday soon, you will see the Kingdom of God.”

This is the promise of which Isaiah speaks this morning when he writes, “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing.” When God’s garden, the people of Israel, at last bears fruit (so the prophets proclaim) then there shall be no more wilderness, for the wilderness itself shall bloom! The garden will spill out into the whole world, bringing life to the deserts, abundance to the wastes. The Kingdom of God will overtake the earth, so that all will be paradise again, all will be peace and joy and life again, as it was in the beginning.

“A highway shall be there,” Isaiah continues, “and it shall be called the Holy Way. The unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God’s people.” This, then, is the prophesied Kingdom for which all God’s people eagerly awaited and prepared in the centuries before the birth of Christ. And few awaited more eagerly—or prepared themselves more zealously—than the Essenes.

You may have heard of the Essenes. They’re the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. And though the Bible does not seem to mention them, they had quite a bit in common with the early Christian Church. The Essenes believed that the Kingdom of God was at hand in the time of Jesus. Any day now, they expected the Messiah to arrive and inaugurate the Apocalypse: the end of the old world and the beginning of the new, when God would vanquish His enemies and reward His faithful. The Essenes very much looked forward to this, and did their best to prepare for the imminent arrival of the Kingdom.

Convinced that the Temple in Jerusalem was too corrupted, too worldly, the Essenes began monastic communities in the desert. Every member of their group was expected to live as a priest, even if they were not from priestly families. Their leadership lived as though they were all High Priests officiating in the Temple, a rigorous life of purity that involved celibacy and regular ritual cleansings with holy water. They shared a sacred communal meal, which they believed took the place of animal sacrifices in the Temple. And they were buried, not in family tombs as was common practice at the time, but by individual inhumation in graveyards.

Celibate priests. Monasteries. Sacred scriptoriums. Messianic expectations. Baptism. A communal meal that replaces Temple sacrifices, and a priesthood of all believers. It all sounds rather familiar, doesn’t it? It all sounds rather Christian. They even believed that angels walked amongst them during their liturgy, something Christians too profess when Heaven descends to earth every Sunday in our celebration of the Holy Eucharist.

But here’s the difference. The Essenes knew that no one impure would walk upon the highway that led into the Kingdom of God: no one blind, no one deaf, no one with a skin disease or bodily discharge, no one crippled, no one unclean, no epileptic or schizophrenic, no callow youth or doddering old man. And so the Essenes excluded all such persons from their assembly. There would be no brokenness, no impurities, present amongst them, nothing at all to differentiate them from the angels in their midst. Many maladies, after all, were believed to be caused by demons. And one certainly couldn’t have demons on the landing pad prepared for the coming Kingdom of God!

Jesus too was concerned with the coming of God’s Kingdom. Like the Essenes, He believed that the end of the old world and the beginning of the new had already begun—that He, in fact, was the Messiah, come to do His Father’s work. And like the Essenes, Jesus preached that the Kingdom of God would have no impurities: no blindness, no deafness, no cripples, no fools, no snot-nosed babies or useless old geezers, no lepers, no demoniacs, no imperfections at all. God’s garden must be properly weeded, must be pure, if it’s going to be the seed to save the world.

But unlike the Essenes, Jesus did not seek out purity by rejecting the impure. Rather, He dealt with the broken by healing them. He did not exclude all but the few from His Kingdom; He included everyone, at times quite forcibly. “Go and tell John what you hear and see,” He tells the followers of His cousin, John the Baptist, who have come to Him from the same wilderness as the Essenes: “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at Me.”

Jesus Himself is the Way. And He inaugurates the Kingdom of God not by excluding the broken but by making us whole! The Way is pure not because only the pure may tread it, but because the Way Himself makes pure those who walk in His light. And He calls in the gentiles, and He calls in the children, and He calls in the lepers and lame, the broken and addled, the terrorists and the prostitutes, the thieves and the priests, the rich and the poor. And He gathers us from the wilderness, bringing us back home, bring us back to paradise in Him.

For at long last, in Jesus, God’s garden has borne fruit. In the midst of that garden now stands a single, strange tree bearing a single, strange fruit: Jesus Christ, the life of the world, borne aloft upon the tree of life, the tree of the Cross, pouring out the incarnate life of God for the world. The blood and water from His side bring life to the wilderness, blossoms to the desert. Wherever these holy Sacraments fall—wherever God’s Kingdom is proclaimed in Word and water, Body and Blood—there life explodes in superabundance, and God again dwells in the midst of humankind.

We, gathered here, are the Kingdom of God. We are the Garden of Eden. God walks amongst us in the Spirit and Body of Jesus Christ, healing us, nourishing us, pruning and protecting us, empowering us to bear fruit of everlasting life and leaves for the healing of the nations. And we are called to go: to spread this life to the wilderness, to bring blossoms to the desert, preaching Good News to the poor and proclaiming the forgiveness of sins, so that all the earth may be Eden again.

Go therefore and bear fruit worthy of repentance. Go with joy and spread the life of God to the world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.