Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity

admin | 15 July 2018

How can any one satisfy these men with bread here in the wilderness?

We are in the wilderness, an empty and solitary place, a desert, to be exact, and yet the desert becomes a paradise where we are fed with more than what we need. Wilderness and paradise are powerful and important scriptural images in the Christian pilgrimage of faith. What do we mean by wilderness? What do we mean by paradise?

The latter is a Persian word used in Genesis about creation as a garden, the proverbial garden of Eden “in the east,” as Genesis 2 explains, in which God plants our humanity. That connection between Paradise and a garden which, as Dante envisions, is “full of every seed,” includes as well the idea of trees and a forest such that Paradise is not only imaged as a garden but as la divina foresta, a divine forest in contrast to the dark and savage wood that is wilderness, too; a particularly apt image for Canada. The image of trees recalls us to “the tree of life in the midst of the garden” and “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” in the Genesis account of the paradisal garden of Eden.

The contrast is between an original harmony of man with the natural world, a harmony with God and with one another, a place of innocence, and the loss of that harmony and innocence; thus paradise becomes the wilderness of our exile. Is our pilgrimage, then, about reclaiming paradise?

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

The refrain of Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock” seems to make this claim. And in the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rendition of her lyrical ballad, it has become, quite “uncritically,” as Camille Paglia notes, “a rousing anthem for the hippie counterculture” in the forging together of the “Romantic ideals of reverence for nature and the brotherhood of man.” Joni Mitchell’s own rendition, Paglia suggests, offers an altogether different interpretation. “With its slow, jazz-inflected pacing,” she writes, it becomes “a moody and at times heartbreakingly melancholy art song,” indeed a critique of the unbearable shallowness of the sixties’ dreams and aspirations; in short, “an elegy for an entire generation, flamingly altruistic yet hedonistic and self-absorbed, bold yet naive, abundantly gifted yet plagued by self-destruction.” Such things haunt our own culture and disordered world.

The ballad is full of biblical and poetic references many of which which Paglia unpacks. “Going on down to Yasgar’s farm” is the “hippie reworking of Yahweh’s garden,” for instance, a yearning for a sacred nature, for the earth as paradise now. Such yearnings continue to inhabit aspects of our environmental concerns. Yet the twice repeated refrain about being stardust, being golden, and about getting ourselves back to the garden undergoes an important change in its third expression with the insertion of two off-rhymed lines.

We are stardust
million-year-old carbon
We are golden
caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Both versions of the ballad were performed at the moment when the dreams and aspirations of the sixties were already in tatters and shards through the forms of discord and violence in sex and drugs still all too present with us now. The title “Woodstock” awakens organic “associations of forest and stalk or lineage” just as the lyrics, too, invoke the idea of a quest for self-knowledge. “I don’t know who I am/ But life is for learning,” learning something more than what a machine-like world of smog and pollution seems to offer. “Then can I walk beside you,” the narrative voice asks, in an image that evokes Christ walking with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus? “I have come here to lose the smog/ And I feel to be a cog/ In something turning,” as if just trying to get away from“a synthetic culture of plastics and pesticides,” Paglia notes, alluding to Joni Mitchell’s other hit tune, “Big Yellow Taxi,” where “they paved paradise/ and put up a parking lot/ … Hey farmer farmer/ Put away that DDT now.” And yet the Faustian awareness of “the devil’s bargain” means a certain awareness that “we own everything in nature’s garden but are blinded by ambition and greed.”

An elegy, a lament, a self-critique of a generation, especially in her own rendition, the ballad has a certain power and beauty. But is the goal “to get ourselves back to the garden”? Not in the Christian understanding. We forget that Paradise, the garden of Eden, “is and was always meant to be, a starting-place and not a stopping-place,” as Dorothy L. Sayers wisely remarks in her commentary on Dante’s Purgatorio of the Divine Comedy. Lady Mathilda explains to the pilgrim Dante in the earthly paradise of the poet’s Purgatorio that “The most high Good, that His sole self doth please,/ Making man good, and for good, set him in/This place as earnest [pledge] of eternal peace.” There is no getting back to the garden. There is only the long, long way of journeying to the Paradise of God through a learning in the wilderness of who we are in the sight of God. To put in another way, there’s no getting back to nature without getting back to God.

Here in today’s Gospel from St. Mark, we have one of the several accounts of the miraculous feeding of the multitude by Jesus in the wilderness desert of Judea. The story not only looks back to the loss of paradise that results in the wilderness of human experience but also to the stories of God’s provisions for us in the wilderness wanderings of the Hebrews.“Life,” indeed, “is for learning.” But learning what? Learning about sin and grace. Learning about the providential goodness and care of God for our wounded and broken humanity. He is “the Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things,” as the Collect puts it. This is what we are meant to learn and to know.

God in his infinite goodness makes our way to him even out of our sin and evil. He nourishes us with all goodness even in the desert wildernesses of our lives when we are lost in our own insecurities, self-absorbed in our vanities and empty in our conceits. Left to ourselves we can only faint by the way. Yet, Mark tells us, the multitude was “very great” and they are in the wilderness “having nothing to eat.” It is a telling image of the human condition. We lack the means of our own self-sufficiency because of our sin and pride, our arrogance and ignorance. The wilderness is within each of us. But to know that is a kind of starting point. The crowd, after all, are in the wilderness with Jesus.

Why? Somehow something is seen and sought in Jesus being with us. He is God with us, as the story suggests by its obvious allusions to God’s provisions for the children of Israel in the desert wanderings of the Exodus with “manna from on high” and “water from the stricken rock.” Not much, it may seem, and, of course, we complain, wanting ‘surf and turf’ even to the point of looking back longingly to our captivity in Egypt, murmuring against what God provides. The lessons are hard but necessary. In the wilderness, the people of Israel learn the Law. It is not about getting back to the garden from which we have exiled ourselves. No. It is about learning the will of God for us wherever we are.

God makes a great abundance out of our little things; a mere seven loaves and a few small fishes. Yet it is enough. We are fed in the wilderness. It is a foretaste of heaven. The imagery is clearly and unambiguously eucharistic: he “took [bread], gave thanks, and brake and gave to his disciples to set before them… So they ate, and were filled.” There is more than enough. “They took up of the broken meat that was left seven baskets.”

A miracle. Yes. But what is the miracle? It is the compassion of Christ. “I have compassion on the multitude,” Jesus says, “because they have now been with me three days.” In our quest to know and learn, we are fed and nourished by Word and Sacrament. Our satisfaction in not found in our utopian projects, vainly trying to get back to the garden. It is found instead in Christ who alone can satisfy us here in the wilderness. Our satisfaction is nothing less than his compassion. In him we find the Paradise of God.