The Sunday of Exile from Paradise

Glory to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Two weeks ago, the Prodigal Son came to his senses in a far country, where he was broke, hungry, and enslaved: “Even the hired help in my father’s house have plenty to eat!”

The Lord woke in him a holy nostalgia – a longing for the time that he remembered when things were right. When he was home, in the place he was made for, in the place that was made for him. This God-given longing for home called him back to the place where his father was already waiting to welcome him.

Today as we enter into the Great Fast, the Church has put before us the Sunday of Exile from Paradise. The remembrance of Adam and Eve being cast out of Eden. This Sunday is here to teach us what we once were. What we hope and struggle to reclaim.

In the beginning, Adam is made in the image and likeness of God. The Lord sets him in a garden of delight — the name Eden means delight. Our word Paradise comes from a Persian word for a king’s royal garden, protected by walls, inaccessible to anyone but the owner who belongs there.

Paradise is our word for the place where man meets God. Where God walks in the cool of the day, and face to face the man and woman walk with him.

But now man is cast out.

One of the verses we sang last night at Vespers:

O precious Paradise, unsurpassed in beauty, tabernacle built by God, unending gladness and delight, glory of the righteous, joy of the prophets, and dwelling of the saints, with the sound of thy leaves pray to the Maker of all: may He open to me the gates which I closed by my transgression, and may He count me worthy to partake of the Tree of Life and of the joy which was mine when I dwelt in thee before.

The Lord has always been with his people – but since Pentecost, since you were anointed with holy oil at your baptism to receive the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit, as the Lord promised, the Holy Spirit of God dwells in you.

Saint Ephraim the Syrian writes,

Insofar as the Son of God dwells in you, the kingdom of heaven lies within you also. Here within are the riches of heaven, if you desire them. O sinner, here is the kingdom of God within you. Enter into yourself, seek more eagerly and you will find it without great travail. Outside you is death, and the door to death is sin. Enter within yourself and remain in your heart, for there is God.” (quoted in The Art of Prayer.)

Paradise, the place where God dwells and waits to meet man, is built within you, in your heart.

If you visit the cathedral in San Francisco, you will see the icons and frescoes, the relics, the services. All the tourists come snap their photographs, say a little prayer, buy something at the book kiosk, and there’s even an Orthodox school. A cathedral is a house of prayer, but it’s also a place of shared culture, a place where we as a people come together, and so much activity happens there.

But many of us have not gone downstairs into the basement of the cathedral. Almost every cathedral has a crypt or an undercroft, a place where tourists don’t go, that’s used for nothing but prayer and the divine liturgy. If our head and our brain is a cathedral and school, dedicated to knowing stuff, then our heart is a place where nothing happens but prayer and thanksgiving and worship, and there the Lord dwells. The Kingdom of God is within you… paradise is down in the lower chapel, away from the traffic.

But man is cast out from paradise. A cherub with a flaming sword guards the gate to Eden.

So most of us live in our heads: we are concerned with our job and our mortgage, with concepts and data and stories, and every kind of thing that exists outside our heart. “The only place where modern man does not like to visit is himself,” says Bishop Panteleimon of Smolensk.  Even in the church, we tend to live in our heads. Some of us can quote Fathers and scriptures, but how many of us have spent the time on our knees to become experts who can speak firsthand about prayer?

This is why the church calls us to descend: To come down from our heads into our hearts. To come down from a religion of concepts and arguments, down to the unseen downstairs chapel where God awaits in quietness. And there we will find that the gates are open.

Christ our God has already become man, has taken our death and sin away and buried it deep in hell. He has broken the gates of bronze, and shattered the iron bars, and led all out of prison into newness of life, and the way to Paradise stands open.

So the Kontakion of the Cross announces:

The fiery sword no longer guards the way to Paradise. It has mysteriously been quenched by the wood of the Cross. The sting of death and the victory of hades have been vanquished; for Thou, my Savior, hast come and cried out to those in hades: “Enter again into paradise.”

We know all this. Yet it seems we need a calendar to call us all together to enter those gates, to remember that we are the people who fast and repent and give alms in order to heal every thing in us that keeps us living outside the Garden, separated from the Lord.

Before Christ was revealed, Saint John the Baptist preached from Isaiah chapter 40:

Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every low place shall be lifted up and every proud mountain brought low; the crooked places shall be made straight and the rough places smooth. The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken (Isaiah 40:3-5).

Preparing the way of the Lord begins today by appointing a day of remembrance for what our life could have been.

We are called to remember the homeland we were made for, even if we have only seen it in glimpses, in recollections of the saints and moments of grace.

These hymns and prayers are given us to keep alive in us the pain of exile.

We moved around a lot when I was young; it’s hard for me to list all the countries I lived in, growing up, all the cultures that formed me. Many of us here have been welcomed in the United States, but we still know what it is to be foreigners.

Christians in this world are like Moses in the desert: “Here we have no city of our own, but we seek one to come” (Hebrews 13:14; Exodus 2:22; Hebrews 11:9.)

We are foreigners, temporary visitors in this life, and our citizenship is in a Kingdom that’s not of this world.

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ… You are no longer strangers and foreigners [to the Kingdom], but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God (Ephesians 2:13,19.)

No longer strangers, but citizens with the saints in the Kingdom of God.

And so this morning we are remembering with grief the kingdom we were made for, the kingdom we lost through our sins and to which we long to return. Together with Adam, we recognize that we are exiles living our lives in alienation from the presence of God. 

We also know that the gates of Paradise are open, and in this season the God who walked with the man and woman in the cool of the day calls us to enter into Paradise.

Saint Ephrem again:

What will you say to the Judge in that day of fear and trembling? Come to your senses, while there is still time. While you are still the master of your thoughts, while your mind is still functioning, while there is yet movement in your body, while it is still possible for grace to touch your heart, and while you can still shed cleansing tears — take a brave stand against the passions and, with God’s help, valiantly smite Goliath.

Do not let a thief outrun you, do not let a harlot reach the entrance before you, do not let one of the violent who take the kingdom of God by force block the door.

Hurry, for when the contest is over it is no longer possible to enter competitions. When the market is closed it is not possible to seek goods; and when a transaction is completed, it is not possible to take part in it. (St Ephraim the Syrian, in A Spiritual Psalter, 48.)

The Lord says in Revelation, “I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture… Behold, I have set before you an open door, and no one can shut it; for you have a little strength, have kept My word, and have not denied My name” (John 10:9; Revelation 3:8)

How do we go through that door? How do we enter into the Paradise that God has already opened and prepared for us? In the age to come you will have no enemies. Forgive them now and enter into Paradise.

To the glory of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.