(13) Getting to Paradise

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Getting to Paradise, originally shared on May 11, 2020. It was the thirteenth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   We’re at a point now in the Coronavirus pandemic where the door to re-openings is being pried open a little or a lot, and when some of the virus escapes, slammed shut again. Masks are being required more and more places. The virus has reached the White House staff and leadership, Disneyland Shanghai reopened with masks and gloves, social distancing, and limited admissions. This even as cases in China, South Korea and Germany seem to be increasing again. Shaquille O’Neal has recommended that the NBA cancel this season. Sporting events with spectators of any numbers may not be back until next year. Hope and frustration at the same time. It’s the human condition.

    Unemployment is approaching 15% and may hit 19%, of those who want to work, this summer. That’s as some guy on TV pointed out yesterday, one finger on one hand.

    Sally and I are still old people doing what we’re supposed to do: staying at home to help flatten the curve of cases and deaths. But even our cat Phoebe is getting tired of it; she’s started giving us looks like, “Don’t you people have some place to go?”

    That has given us a lot of time for special projects. Like this garden.

    We turned about 50 square feet of lawn into a vegetable garden. And, I have to say, it was a beast to dig out and dispose of that much sod, before preparing the soil and planting the plants in back and the seeds in front, nearer the sun.

    It occurred to me this morning that the Bible begins and ends with human beings given their true selves by God and not doing any work. At least, no physical work.

    The Bible begins in a garden and ends in a city. A garden was the perfect place to be for an ancient nomadic people. A paradise. In fact, the word “paradise” means “garden”. A more developed people found the perfect place to be as a perfectly run city. God provides everything in both cases.

    What happens in between is the result of human being’s rejection of God. Sin enters the world in rebellion against God and one of the consequences is, as God says, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust and to dust you shall return.”  Genesis 3:19

    Hence, what it takes to plant a garden.

    So how do we get to the perfect place? How do we get to heaven?

 *Luke 23:39-43

    The traditional name of the repentant thief on the cross is San Dimas, or a variant of it. The promised paradise is not something that is bound to time. It’s neither in the past nor in the present, nor in the future. Paradise is where God is.

    You might have seen a TV program called, “The Good Place”. It ended this past season, and it ended on a strange note. The premise of the show was that some not very good people find themselves in what appears to be heaven, but it’s not. I watched a few early episodes and then lost interest in the fantasy. But after it closed, I was interested in how it ended, and this is what I read: Apparently, in heaven, people get bored after several million years of learning and doing everything there is to do, so they then cease to exist.

    No surprise here, this is not a Biblical view of heaven. Heaven is not finite, and not subject to finite human imagination. Some people think of heaven as boring, like an interminable church service (if they don’t like church services). They hope they won't run into people they don't want to see anymore, who knows what?

    When Steve Jobs spoke at Stanford years ago, I recall him taking a jab saying, “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.”  He drew a cynical laugh, but he was wrong.

 

   We want to live, not because we are afraid to die, that’s already happened anyway in our baptisms, but because the purpose of life is to serve others with what we have been given for as long as we can.

 

   The paradox is that the more we give, the more we have.

 

The apostle Paul writes, referencing Isaiah, “But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
    nor the human heart conceived,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—

1 Corinthians 2:9

   Heaven is not a eternal boring church service; it’s an eternal indescribably joyful worship service in the presence of the living God.

   Our garden is both a reminder of where we are and where we are going. We are going into the presence of God where there is only God’s grace and eternal love.

   Audrey Hepburn once said: “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”

   We are Easter people. We believe in yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

   We are celebrating the season of Easter for the 50 days between Easter and Pentecost Sunday.

   We celebrate the cross and what the death of God accomplished for us.

   We celebrate the resurrection and what was validated by it, the presence and power of the Holy Spirt among us opening us to the reality of the promise of God, and we celebrate the creative power of God the Creator who promised us that where God is, there is Paradise, and that that Paradise that has begun for us imperfectly in this world, will be brought to perfection in the new heaven and the new earth that is to come.

    Meanwhile, we live our purpose by serving one another. And there, we find Paradise. Paradise is where God is.