IN the past months, in fact, for most of 2016, our little community has celebrated several funerals; retirements to aged care; some few baptisms and a good deal of sickness. As the pastor I spend my days doing what I can and value my nights to reflect and pray.
This year’s Cardinal Knox Lecture”, given by Archbishop Mark Coleridge, a Melbourne man, intrigued me with its title: From Wandering to Journeying. Reading it corresponded with my re-reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In fact the word ‘Paradise’ kept coming to mind as I prepared homilies for different funerals.
My reflections followed the story of Cain and Abel (Gen 4:1-16). This is a crucial story in the biblical narrative. It is the first story of the human being outside the Garden after the self-exile from Eden recounted in Genesis 3. It is the first story of you and me out in the desert far from home.
It tells of brother murdering brother and, at its end we are told that Cain goes off to live “in the land of Nod, east of Eden”.
For the reader today, the land of Nod is where you go when you are having a snooze: we nod off. But in fact the Hebrew word for nod has nothing to do with nodding off. It means “wandering”. So the Scripture tells us that, having murdered his brother, Cain goes off to live in the land of wandering.
At that point, the prime task for Cain and for human beings is to turn all our wandering into journeying. When we wander, we have little or no sense of purpose and direction. But when we journey we know where we are going: we have a sense of purpose and direction
In fact, as the Bible sees it, our task is to journey home to Paradise, out of the desert, back to the Garden; and the great homecoming starts to happen once Jesus, first-born from the dead, rises from the tomb (in the garden). He is the first one home to Paradise.
We, the Christian people of Greythorn, have no lesser a task that to discover or recover that fundamental story from scripture, back into our struggling lives. ‘
If we are parents we need to live and help shape the lives of our children into a journeying to God and not a wandering aimlessly through a materialistic and pleasure devouring society.
As we grow and age we need to keep that vision of Paradise and homecoming alive to sustain the sometimes difficult journey we make.
And, along the way, we should encourage each other in faith and hope. Welcome to what Nicholas Lash calls “Easter in Ordinary”.