Faith Voices for the Common Good

SAVING PARADISE -- May 21, 2005
By Rita Nakashima Brock

It is a pleasure to be with you and to be able to hear some of the preachers and lecturers you have invited to speak to you this year. I am not a minister or preacher myself, but, a teacher, scholar, and writer. As a church member, however, I have heard my share of sermons, both good and bad, and I know the good preachers are always stretching their skills and searching for new ideas and stories. So, it is good to be with you, though you are probably among those who least need to be here.

In my lecture this morning, I offer you two things:

First, a new theological way to frame the work of ministry and task of preaching, as saving paradise; and
Second, I want to challenge you to understand saving paradise as a commitment to changing the world we live in today.

So, let me begin with a story from my book Proverbs of Ashes.

The first five years of my life were spent on the island of Kyushu in Japan, in a family of Pure Land Buddhists. The Pure Land is, of course, the Buddhist paradise. Recollections of my time in Japan have the quality of something like paradise.

My grandparents’ thatched roof farmhouse sat on the outskirts of the village of Onojo, a twenty minute train ride from Fukuoka. The house faced the mountains across the valley. A gravel path led through the entry gate, which was surrounded in spring by a profusion of pink and magenta azaleas and a lush yellow climbing rose and in fall by stands of rust and gold mums and burgundy maples. The path curved gracefully up to the granite flagstones laid before the weathered wooden sliding door. In this old-fashioned house with tatami floors and without indoor plumbing, my grandparents, Ji-Chan and Ba-chan, cared for me while my mother, a nurse, worked at the U.S. military hospital in Fukuoka.

Ji-Chan kept a store in the village and a garden at home. He wrote poetry and was a quiet, reflective man in a house of garrulous women. He was my bathing partner every evening. After dinner on chilly nights, Ba-Chan warmed the o-furo, filling the large, deep metal tub with water from the backyard pump and lighting a fire under it. The bath sat in a shed just outside the kitchen.

After our long hot soak, Ji-Chan slipped me inside the top of his cotton yukata and murmured to me. Ji-Chan’s low, hoarse voice rumbled above my head as he walked around the garden. The fall evening air was cool and refreshing after the bath. The tops of his beautiful mums were visible from my perch. Their pungent odor wafted upward along with the fragrance of the last of the roses.

Hearing Ji-Chan’s voice lulled me into drowsiness. What Ji-Chan said is lost to me, forgotten along with my fluency in Japanese. What I remember are his deep voice, the solidity of his body against mine, my wet hair, the tops of the flowers, the fragrance of soap and blossoms, and the cool night air.

Later, I was placed beneath layers of a cool cotton futon next to my mother, with Ji-Chan and Ba-Chan in the next room, beyond the paper walls. My mother breathed slowly as she lay beside me, her soft high notes a compliment to my grandparents’ deeper rumblings nearby. The still, silent night was full of presence. The sounds were the leaves rustling on the surface of the ground, and silence was the root network of love -- deep, solid, inexplicable -- a presence both elusive and tangible. Swaddled in that silence, I felt safe, loved.

In some strains of Buddhism, we find a religious practice that emphasizes attunement to the ordinary experiences of life as enlightenment itself, manifested through attentiveness to living every day. The thirteenth-century founder of Soto Zen, Dogen, says of this awareness:

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water.

Enlightenment does not divide you, just as the moon does not break the water. You cannot hinder enlightenment, just as a drop of water does not hinder the moon in the sky. The depth of the drop is the height of the moon. Each reflection, however long or short its duration, manifests the vastness of the dewdrop, and realizes the limitlessness of the moonlight in the sky. . . .

Earthly objects, grass-tree-fence-wall, hold forth on behalf of sages and fools, and in return the sages and fools raise their voices on behalf of the earthly objects. Intrinsic to the world of realization of self and others is that all are fully endowed with an enlightened nature. . . .

For Dogen all existence is already enlightened; enlightenment is the activity of the world itself, in its interdependent arising and passing away. Enlightenment embraces both body and mind, spirit and flesh, self and community. Value is at the core of all life and ultimately unavoidable, whether we realize it or not, whether we see the moonlight in a dewdrop, or not.

For Dogen, Buddhahood is not a release from life but the very grounding of all life, revealed in its particularities and contingent conditions. Lake Michigan’s blue color today, our sitting together here this morning breathing together, singing, praying, our churches and schools, the many cultural traditions and institutions we support -- these are not merely artificial, second-rate realities to be left behind in enlightenment but precisely the arena in which we practice enlightenment. These realities are the core of spiritual commitment.

This immanental emphasis of Buddhism has led critics to suggest that it is amoral, that it advocates passive acceptance of problematic social, cultural, and political practices. Dogen was clear, however, that only those who engaged Buddhist ritual and ethical practices in interdependent communities could come to understand the numinosity of life. Dogen forbad any weapons in his monasteries and taught women as well as men spiritual practices, openly criticizing teachers who excluded women. Immorality such as violence, discrimination against women, greed -- these are the ego-driven activities of those who do not know that enlightenment is the enactment of truth, not a passive awareness of it.

You may wonder why, as a feminist Christian theologian, I have wandered off into medieval Buddhist religious ideas. I have done so because, sometimes, we are able to hear and understand our own traditions in fresh ways when they are related to other traditions. This is, I believe, one of the hallmarks and strengths of a Christian incarnational theology. We seek to be attuned to the Spirit of God alive in the world in its diversities. Our faith is not a partisan exercise in ethnocentrism and nationalism. Our faith requires a commitment to the well being of the whole world, a world created and beloved by God and infused with divine spirit. We know from experience that interacting with others from a variety of religious convictions and practices can open us to knowledge, even to fresh ways of seeing and loving more deeply our own traditions.

Dogen’s affirmation of ordinary life can seem at odds with Christianity’s otherworldliness. Christian ideas of salvation often focus on post-mortem existence, on eternal life in heaven, or on a new world created by the destruction of this one. But I ask you to hold the thought that our everyday lives are where spirit dwells because Dogen’s medieval Buddhist sensibility about Enlightenment is very close to early Christian ideas of paradise. Far closer than the other-worldly afterlife Western Christianity began to emphasize in its second millennium.

An earthly sense of paradise is common to many religions, from ancient Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, to Judaism and Islam, and to various indigenous traditions. Paradise captures our love for the beauty of nature and pastoral life, the social harmonies of life abundant, and the value of cultivating wisdom and peace.

For the past two years, I have been working with Rebecca Parker, President of the Starr King School for the Ministry, on a project called, Saving Paradise. The material in this lecture is taken from that project and includes many sources. If you’d like a bibliography, write to me at "rita (at) faithvoices.org" and I will email one to you. Rebecca and I started this project because we noticed that Christian art, until around 965, has no images of Jesus dead. Let me repeat that. For nearly a thousand years in the West there are no images of Jesus dead.

Rebecca and I looked at art in Italy, Turkey, Germany, and France. We spent weeks looking at images and standing in ritual spaces of the first millennium of Christianity. As the art began to capture our imagination, we shifted our attention to what is shown in the art, rather than wondering about what was missing. As we saw more and more images, we came to understand that, in such places, we stood in paradise -- and, after reading early texts and liturgies, we concluded that paradise is this world, not another, not a destination after death, but this life itself in its ordinary tranquility, fecundity, and beauty.

Paradise surprised us. One hears many Christians speak of heaven as the post-mortem gift of faith. We are so accustomed to think of paradise as other-worldly, ideal, or imaginary that a this-worldly paradise seems incredible. Its impossibility is captured in nostalgic descriptions of utopias, "no places," idealized visions of human life and community we cannot live out. But these impossible ideals of utopia first emerged in the sixteenth century, long after paradise had been removed from this world.

Early Christians distinguished between heaven -- the realm of God and the angels -- and paradise on the earth, the human realm. Heaven and paradise were different realms. For them, the earthly paradise had multiple, overlapping meanings. It was this world, restored and sanctified by Christ to be the blessed realm of spirit. The paradise of this life, where Satan always lurked, required the wisdom to resist evil. Christians understood that the daemons of our souls, when not confronted and worked out, force us to act them out. The church sought, with regular exorcisms, to help its people grow in moral virtue and responsibility toward the common good. The early church’s paradise was imperfect, partial, and always-in-process; yet, it was also whole and immediate in the presence of the spirit, especially in the Eucharist celebration of resurrection.

The church’s understanding of paradise was not utopian; exorcism of personal demons and the struggle against the principalities and powers of empire dominated the political and spiritual life of early Christianity. In fact the third-century church in Rome personified Satan as the goddess Roma. The conditions of life under empire made human existence short and miserable for most of the lower classes. And yet, with life expectancy at 25, with only 3% of people living beyond the age of 40 and infant mortality rates above 60%, Christians dared to love this life with passion and joy. Always clear that their God was higher than any political power, Christians elevated themselves spiritually in the Eucharist as one with that divine power. The stories of the great witnesses to faith, whom we call martyrs, are filled with visions of paradise. And while Christians often fell into re-inscribing imperial coercions and terrors as sacred power, most obvious in their political visions of apocalyptic endings to empire, they also knew an alternative power, one that could outlast the betrayals, denials, despair, violence, and sorrows inflicted by political might. They called this power love.

Death separated the paradise of the departed from the paradise of this world, but the veil of separation between the living and the dead was a gossamer curtain just thick enough to prevent Satan from passing through. Hence, paradise was where the dead could finally rest -- sort of like retirement in Phoenix or Florida. The veil was sheer enough for prayers to seep across and for the dead to visit in dreams and visions to bless the living. The living and the dead communed with each other through the veil, praying for each other. Where they rested, the dead remained close to the living while they awaited a future resurrection. In this communion of memory and presence, everlasting life flourished.

For Christians, paradise was a realm of blessing that was experienced here and now in the church and in the world -- the work and mission of the church and its ministries reflected paradise. In this paradise, contrasting realities cohered into a sanctified whole: the living and the departed, day and night, past and present, body and soul, heaven and earth – all of these dimensions are present in paradise images sparkling in church mosaics. The images rend the curtain between the invisible and visible worlds, between the resting place of the dead and the world of the living, between the realm of God and earthly life. The church’s liturgies and images reflected these holistic visions.

Christians of the first millennium experienced this world permeated with the joy of paradise, because Christ had re-opened the garden with his resurrection. Even in the midst of struggle and pain, the blessings of paradise flowed to humanity. Ephrem of Syria, (306-373), theologian, biblical commentator , and the most popular hymn writer and poet in all of fourth-century Christendom says:

The breath that wafts
From some blessed corner of Paradise
Gives sweetness
To the bitterness of this region,
It tempers the curse
On this earth of ours.
That Garden is
The life-breath
Of this diseased world . . .
Our inhalation is healed
By this healing breath
From Paradise.
(Ephrem, Hymns on Paradise, XI, 10, 12)

Jesus had said to the thief in Luke 23:43, "today you will be with me in paradise." The church believed that the resurrection confirmed his words; paradise had been reopened and was delivered to them by the healing, life-giving waters of baptism.

Christian theologians were aided in their understandings of paradise by the Septuagint and Vulgate translations of Genesis 2. Both translate the Hebrew gan-Eden into paradeisos truphes and paradisum voluptatis, respectively. These translations suggest a more generic garden, rather than a specific location. Using this sense of generality and an incarnational theology, Christian theologians of Late Antiquity asserted paradise was in this world. They suggested that paradise might be the whole earth filled with the Spirit of God or a particular spot in the east, Iraq for example, or an island off the coast of China.

Whether somewhere or everywhere, the divine Spirit was breathed on all creation in Genesis 1, and the garden of paradise was placed on the earth. The second-century Bishop Irenaeus notes, "The Spirit is sent over all the earth." Through baptism, Christians entered the church, "the paradise in this world," as Irenaeus called it. (Irenaeus book 5.20.2, quoted in McDonnell 1996, 120)

The paradise garden was created on the earth from the materials of creation, or so Augustine asserted in his third commentary on Genesis. Hence, the earth held all the traces of this blessed, original human home. Ephrem of Syria says:

Paradise surrounds the limbs
with its many delights:
The eyes, with its handiwork,
the hearing, with its sounds,
The mouth and the nostrils,
with its tastes and scents...
(Hymn VI, 3)

My hunger takes delight
in the breath of its fragrance,
For its scent gives nourishment to all
at all times,
And whoever inhales it
is overjoyed (Hymn IX, 15)

Ephrem wrote hundreds of poems to paradise. He was born in Nisiblis in 306 during the last and greatest persecution of the church by Diocletian, which affected his family. His hometown was a battle ground between the Constantinian and the Persian empires. After the city finally fell to Persia, Ephrem spent the last ten years of his life in exile in Edessa, where he died ministering to plague victims. In a life lived in the midst of war and loss, Ephrem knew this life as paradise because he knew life in the church.

Jesus Christ, through his transfiguration, led the way to divinity for those in the church. The transfiguration was the story of the spiritual ascent, not just of Jesus, but of all who had been reborn into his church. The tenth-century mystic Simeon says that the glorified person

Is made worthy to look upon the revelation of great mysteries. . .; I speak of mysteries because, whereas all can see them clearly, they cannot understand. He who is glorified by the newly-creating spirit receives new eyes and new hearing. (quoted in Arseniev 1979, 71)

Transfiguration saved the world. Jesus, as the incarnation of wisdom, was a model or forerunner of transfigured life. His roles as teacher, friend, and healer were the blueprint for the baptized communion of saints. Sanctified souls lived in a transfigured world and found paradise there.

Christians in the church were charged with the transfiguration of each other. They were expected to help each other to conform to the moral virtues, theological knowledge, spiritual insights, ritual practices, and aesthetic sensibilities that reflected their lives in paradise as the community of God. There was no such thing as individual salvation.

In the heady, cross-cultural, inter-religious brew that produced early Christianity, the assurance of paradise in this world was an inebriating grace, a life-giving recipe drawn from

many ancient sources. Christians drank the elixir at the Eucharist, where they communed with the risen Christ. Their sense of assured salvation colored their Christianity with a confidence in human capacities for change and an appreciative sensibility toward the world, despite its many, many difficulties. They believed the spiritual journey was not toward greater innocence and purity, but toward a complex understanding of the forces of life, an understanding they called wisdom, Sophia. Sophia’s fruits were works of love, a passion for justice, care for the sick and the poor, an appreciation of beauty, the discernment of the spirit in the world, the embrace of this world as good, as blessed, and as beloved by God. They did not believe suffering was a good thing; they sought to alleviate it by taking care of each other. They knew that all violence, even shedding pagan blood was a mortal sin and harmed their community. They saw in the courage of those who resisted imperial persecution, models of steadfast faith that benefited them spiritually even from beyond the grave. Joy and wonder seeped into a world afflicted with violence and sorrow. Life, granted through the re-birth of baptism, encompassed death and overcame it.

This life-affirming sensibility began to fade in Europe with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the unpredictable violence that escalated in the seventh and eighth centuries. Church leaders began to try to justify the use of violence in self-defense and defense of the church.

In the ninth century, Charlemagne issued a law enforcing the death penalty against any Saxon who refused to be re-baptized into Charlemagne’s imperial form of Christianity, part of a pacification plan that was never totally successful. During this conflict between the Saxons and Charlemagne’s empire, a debate about the Eucharist erupted between Saxon theologians and Charlemagne’s court theologians. The Saxons held to tradition: the incarnate, resurrected Christ was on the table and the Eucharist was the feast of the resurrection. The Carolingians insisted on an innovation: the crucified Christ lay on the table to judge the Saxons of their sins. After over a century of debate and the Carolingian imposition of this new theology by the point of the sword, the crucified Christ displaced the risen Christ on the Eucharist table. With that displacement, Christ’s death changed ontological status. His death had been traditionally understood as an event that had once happened and could never happen again because Christ had removed the sting of death. As Paul says in Romans 6:9-10

Christ rose from the dead, and he will never die again. Death no longer has any power over him. He died once to defeat sin, and now he lives for the glory of God. So you should consider yourselves dead to sin and able to live for the glory of God through Jesus Christ.

With the Carolingian innovation, Jesus’ death became an eternal reality. He died at every Eucharist. Paradise was shifted into the afterlife, eventually disappearing into a vague post-apocalyptic hope by the fourteenth century. Western Christianity transferred salvation from incarnation, transfiguration, and resurrection to crucifixion, judgment, and the destruction of this world. In 1098, when Anselm wrote the first atonement theology, three years after his friend Pope Urban II launched the first crusade, Anselm fails even to mention the resurrection. In the crusades, death replaced life and resurrection as salvation. Doctrines of just war were converted into holy war, as Jesus’ saving death as satisfaction for sin became a form of war propaganda. Churches began to fill with gory images of torture and murder. Bloody, gaunt images of the dead Christ replaced paradise in the Christian visual world and imagination. The more Jesus suffered and the more agonizing his death, the more he redeemed sin. Dying over and over came to be his saving power.

By the time Columbus crossed the Atlantic, Western Christianity had replaced paradise with purgatory, not only as a destination of the dead, but also as the world Christians inhabited on earth, where suffering and austerities led to salvation in the afterlife. Purgatorial and purifying penalties after death appeared as a formal doctrine in the Second Council of Lyon in 1274. Masses were said to pray for the deceased and indulgences were sold to free them from the worst punishments. The dead, instead of being a source of spiritual power to the living, became a concern and financial burden. The church heaved humanity into a sodden, joyless pit of failure in this life, where no confessions or penances were adequate to wipe away sin, and in the next, where more punishment awaited sinners. Only the destruction of this world could save it. Today, the experience of paradise Christians once created in their liturgical spaces is more commonly found in Muslim mosques or Eastern Orthodox churches. While Western Christians lost paradise on earth, Islam and Eastern Christianity maintained it.

However, the hunger for paradise still lingered after it was displaced by crucifixion. The pangs were felt in the nostalgia of utopias, in poetic longings like Milton's Paradise Regained, in idealizations of wilderness, in romantic movements, in secular humanism, in some branches of the Radical Reformation, and in the long horizon of hope in a new age to come. Among Protestant acts of iconoclasm in the sixteenth century, reformers destroyed art works in churches, defecated or urinated on crucifixes, built their own sanctuaries in austere, stripped down styles, and denatured worship of its most richly sensual and embodied dimension -- given the gore that filled most churches, it is not hard to see why they rejected visual images and even the primacy of ritual and community. But as a reactionary movement in many ways, Protestantism reduced faith to too little and sometimes perpetuated the worst forms of atonement theology as the core of faith.

Nonetheless, Protestant and Enlightenment-based movements for justice have empowered the condemnation of systems of oppression in American culture and society, and they have contributed to expanding democracy and human rights to wider and wider circles of humanity. Abolition, women’s suffrage movement, the Social Gospel, the Civil Rights movement, anti-war movements, liberation theology, and sanctuary movement of the modern period sought justice and peace in this life, not salvation in the next. In their language of the Kingdom of God, the New Covenant, and the commonwealth of God, they echo a theology of this life as the place where God’s spirit dwells. But they often see the world in polarized, dualistic, either/or terms: male or female, white or black, power or weakness, straight or gay, oppressor or oppressed, perpetrator or victim, insider or outsider.

Liberal thinking and social movements, even in secular form, share in the Protestant tendency to be text-driven, suspicious of pleasure and joy, dualistic, individualistic, reductionistic, prone to splintering into narrow special interest groups, indifferent or hostile to the visual, and driven by the emergency thinking of apocalyptic scenarios. Protestants lack, especially, a spiritual discipline of attentiveness to the world and a core commitment to communal, ritual life.

American movements for justice have largely marginalized or trivialized aesthetics and beauty, an iconoclasm inherited from the Protestants. In addition, the Protestant emphasis on personal faith and individual salvation has attenuated the importance of commitment to community and belied the fundamentally social, interconnected nature of human life.

In speaking of paradise, I do not think we can uncritically reclaim pre-medieval ideas of paradise nor do I think the nineteenth and twentieth century ethical emphases on justice, human rights, and peace are adequate to sustain liberal religion through the next century. The ancient sensibility about paradise does offer us clues to what is missing and what is necessary to the renewal of our faith today. And our faith is sorely needed right now.

We live in a society in which religion and the word “Christian” have become associated with extreme right wing politics, with support for war and torture, with moralism and bigotry, with indifference to the poor and our social obligation to each other, and with the destruction of this world by an angry God. Since the Reagan years, extreme right-wing secular foundations, such as Coors, Olin, Bradley, and Scaife, have sought to disempower mainline churches and move them rightward. According to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, these and other foundations have funded right-wing think-tanks such as the Institute on Religion and Democracy, the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, and the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Grants totaled $7,620,000 in 2003 alone. These think-tanks seek to spread the impression of a nationwide moral decay based on a narrow definition of morality as confined to sex and family, to instruct citizens in the ethical basis of capitalism and the privatization of public services, to affect public policy against commitments to the common good, to make mainline churches conform to conservative politics, to evangelize for conservative Christianity, and to use churches to distribute government assistance. In addition, the Family Research Council, founded by James Dobson, puts its efforts into "pro-Family" legislation, such as bans on gay marriage and abortion. The mission of the Institute for Religion and Democracy or IRD has been to destroy mainline Protestantism.

In 1994, I became the target of an IRD smear campaign, which prompted me to trace its formation under the Reagan administration, which was furious with mainline churches for interfering with their Central American policies, esp the Contra War in Nicaragua. After the end of the Cold War, the IRD turned its crosshairs on feminists, people of color, and gays and lesbians.

One of the major recipients of funding to move the country religiously to the right is Campus Crusade for Christ. This organization is the 21st largest of all nonprofits, receiving $347 million in donations in 2003 alone. Other campus organizations, such as Intervarsity and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, bring the total invested in evangelizing students for conservative Christianity to about $700 million annually.

The New York Times this past week reported that a chaplain at the Air Force Academy, Capt. MeLinda Morton, described a "systemic and pervasive" problem of religious proselytizing at the military academy. She reported that a religious tolerance program she helped create was watered down after it was shown to officers, including the major general who is the Air Force's chief chaplain. The academy began developing the tolerance program, called Respecting the Spiritual Values of all People, or R.S.V.P., in response to a survey it took last year, which found that more than half of the cadets said they had heard derogatory religious comments or jokes at the academy. Critics of this religious bigotry attribute the problem in part to the academy's location in Colorado Springs, headquarters to dozens of the largest evangelical ministries and churches in the US. Many leaders of the academy are active in those organizations and churches, including Focus on the Family and the Officers' Christian Fellowship.

Based on interviews with current and former Air Force academy staff and faculty members and cadets, a report was sent to the Air Force in late April by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It said that academy officers and staff opened mandatory events at the academy with prayer, sent e-mail academy-wide with religious taglines, and published advertisements in the academy newspaper asking cadets to contact them to "discuss Jesus." Fliers advertising a showing of "The Passion of the Christ" were placed at every seat in the dining hall, with the tagline, "This is an officially sponsored USAFA event."

Captain Morton said she had decided to step forward without authorization because: "It's the Constitution, not just a nice rule we can follow or not follow. We all raised our hands and said we'd follow it, and that includes the First Amendment, that includes not using your power to advance your religious agenda." She added, "I realize this is the end of my Air Force career."

Until recently, mainstream religious leaders have been slow to respond to the religious right, partly for reasons grounded in liberal values. Stressing tolerance and believing that truth speaks for itself, many have sought to engage right wing Christians in dialogue. As a sign of respect for education and scholarship and a commitment to separation of church and state, progressive leaders tend to use secular language and meaning systems borrowed from law, public policy, and the social sciences when speaking about social and political issues. We find distasteful the heat and controversy ignited by the right for media attention, pyrotechnics to which the increasingly corporate-owned media has been happy to respond. Reinhold Niebuhr noted after World War II that liberals lack an adequate understanding of evil and are slow both to recognize it or address it. The left has also failed to invest in major media technologies. Progressive foundations prefer to fund direct services or innovative new programs, rather than provide long-term operating costs for think tanks free to pursue their own programming or television networks. The secular left and its funders, unlike the secular right, openly distains religion and sees the separation of church and state as the elimination of religion from politics. Finally, getting progressives to cooperate is difficult, since free thinking and independence from coercion are progressive values. I think organizing religious leaders is harder than herding cats -- it is more like herding border collies. For these and other reasons, progressive religion has been largely invisible in recent years, belying its public involvement in politics throughout American history. The secular left and secular society are weak alternatives to a religious right, as we now see.

Christianity has been hijacked for the ambitions of a military empire. What we currently have is corporate corruption and greed, the military, and the state colluding to maintain sovereignty, supported by the ideological propaganda machine of hard-right Christianity. We are, as a nation, now ruled by a government determined to dismantle an independent judiciary and the Constitutional balance of powers, using the absurd accusation of religious persecution of Christians as an excuse to do so. We live with growing economic inequality, sharp declines in social health, the increasing privatization of public services and goods, a growing percentage of GDP for military uses, the dismantling of environmental protections, the erosion of human rights and civil freedoms, and strategic wars of American corporate profiteering and hegemony. All this, despite polls indicating the uneasiness of the American public with our current state of affairs and the lowest poll ratings of a second term president in history.

A new documentary film, called "Theologians Under Hitler" makes clear how religion can be used to support fascism. It also shows how the German churches were involved. Send me an email, and I will tell you how to get a copy. Show it to your churches. I hope we are all doing what we can to turn the tide and restore the basis of our great democratic experiment and its institutions. They may be the right wing, but we are the rest of the bird.

You may have noticed that there is currently a major resurgence of mainstream, liberal, and progressive religion welling up across the country. On Sept. 11, over 1000 Christians from across the country logged onto a new collaborative writing technology called Synanim to write a consensus document called Lift Every Voice! a Declaration on Christianity and the Future of America, a Write-in sponsored by Faith Voices.

On March 30, over 13,287 Americans had signed up for a Faith Voices Write-In against the Iraq War, which was read to the over 1000 people who attended an interfaith service in Riverside Church on April 4, commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech against Vietnam. The writers were from many faith traditions, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Unitarians, Zoroastrians, and Bahai and included nonreligious people who wanted to partner with people of faith. In mid-June, the second leg of an interfaith Bus Tour to Build the Beloved Community will begin in Chicago and travel to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Missouri. To stay on top of such breaking events for the faith community, visit www.buildingbeloved.org.

Like the early church, we must understand that to affirm this life and to have confidence that God intends the whole world be saved by the love of Christ, requires us to be wise about the world around us, to resist violence, to do all we can to save life, and to stand against the principalities and powers of this world.

Our religious convictions and values motivate us to want to change the power structures of the world we live in, to create greater justice and human thriving. We seek to understand, to bless, and to embrace life and to change the world for the better. We live in a delicate, constantly-shifting balance, as it were, of beholding the moon in a pool of water at the same time we ask if that water is acid rain. Remembrances of love, of beauty, of moments when we opened ourselves to the world’s pleasures and gifts enable us to love and receive the life-giving powers that surround us and do all in our power to make such life flourish. At the same time, we must engage the world with an astute, critical consciousness attuned to both our internal demons and the oppressive and destructive powers of human greed, fear, and cynicism.

I suggest that saving paradise is the work of church in its many dimensions: appreciation for the beautiful and the power of aesthetic forms, care for the material life that sustains us, respect for the numinous world that surrounds us, reverence for our common life and its rituals, and an unwavering commitment to creating just communities and societies. These commitments ground the struggle for justice in a response to the gift of life in this world. They encourage a responsibility for the common good as a life-sustaining call from God.

We must honor the fullness of life and seek to affirm the whole world as blessed. While we often fall short of this call, we must constantly renew our spirit, enliven our passions, and engage with issues that matter for religious life and for the common good that sustains us all.

Lake Michigan’s blue color today, the sun and breeze on our faces as we walked here this morning, the friends sitting beside us, the ideas spinning in our minds, the lunch we will eat soon, the people who love us and await our return home, the many life-giving, ordinary things that make our lives worth living, these are how the spirit of God touches us in the ordinary course of living in paradise. The many cultural traditions and institutions we support, especially the church -- these are not merely artificial, second-rate realities but precisely the arena in which we know the spirit and grow in wisdom and truth. They are the leaves rustling on the ground of our lives, a ground which holds a root network of love, deep, solid, inexplicable, the ground whose waters reflect the limitlessness numinosity of the moonlit sky and the dark depths of oceans of mercy that we hold together in our consciousness of this precious life, this paradise. Let us save it together.