FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Sermon by Dr. George Bryant
Wirth
Founders’ Sunday
January 12, 2003
One
of the oldest stories I know is about an over zealous preacher and a hard
working farmer who were at odds with one another because the farmer didn’t come
to church and chose instead to work in his fields on Sunday mornings.
One
Sabbath day after worship, the preacher drove out to see the farmer who was
picking ripe peaches off the rows of trees that he had planted and pruned and
carefully protected from the frost. The
preacher spoke out in his most pious voice, “We missed you at church today,” to
which the farmer replied as he wiped the sweat off his brow, “Well, somebody’s
got to harvest these peaches.” Looking
out over the field and then up toward heaven, the preacher intoned as if he
were in the pulpit, “Isn’t it amazing what God can bring forth from His good
earth!” The farmer answered with a
not-so-subtle smile, “Yep, it sure is, but you should have seen this patch of
earth when God had it all to Himself.”
As
I said, that’s an old, timeworn story which no doubt Georgia farmers have been
telling for a long time. But it has
profound implications which lead us back to the oldest story we know from an
even longer time ago. It is a story
about a garden that God created and never wanted to keep for Himself. So he chose instead to share it with the
human beings He had made, intending that that they and all of us ever since we
would be fruitful and multiply and enjoy that garden until the end of
time. But that is not the way the story
turned out.
I.
In
the Book of Genesis, chapter 2, the Bible says that God planted a garden in
Eden in the east, and there He put the man whom He had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to
grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, and the tree
of life also, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis
2:8-9).
The
story says that the rivers which converged in that garden included the Tigris
and the Euphrates (Genesis 2:13-14), thereby locating it, as best we can
determine, in what is now called Iraq nearby to the city of Baghdad.
So
the Lord God put the man in the Garden of Eden to till and to keep it…and said
to the man, “You may freely eat of every tree in the garden; but of the tree of
knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of
it, you shall die” (Genesis 2:15-17).
Well,
we know how the ancient story goes.
Adam, soon thereafter joined by his partner Eve, they were tempted by
the serpent, ate the forbidden fruit and had to face the consequences for their
sin: expulsion from the garden, pain in
childbirth, hard labor for the rest of their lives and eventually, instead of
living forever in that perfect garden, they would surely die.
John
Steinbeck, in his 1952 novel “East of Eden,” and more recently, John Berendt’s
book made into a movie entitled “Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil”
(1994), those authors have given us updated versions of what the painful
consequences look like today: broken relationships, suffering and sorrow,
families struggling to survive and the undercurrent of darkness threatening to
destroy the lives of people who hope that somewhere, somehow there is a way
back toward the light.
And
all we have to do is pick up the morning paper or tune in the evening news to
realize that the whole world is watching and waiting to see what will happen if
war breaks out again in that middle eastern region – a place where the Bible
tells us there was once a beautiful garden, the cradle of life and home place
of civilization.
II.
That’s
a southern phrase, you know – “Home place” – which means where your people are
originally from. And it seems to me
that we have a longing deep down in our souls to go back there to that garden
where it all began, to an idyllic life of peace and joy which God offered to
that first human family on earth. In
fact, I believe that each of us has imprinted on our hearts the original stamp
of approval when God called us “good,” and that we can somehow remember what it
was like in that garden – our home place – and a world that might have been,
except for the invasion of sin.
In
his classic book “Longing For Home,” Frederick Buechner describes something
that happened to him and his family during a visit to Sea World in Orlando,
Florida. Together with a delighted and
dazzled crowd of people, they were watching the whales perform in a huge tank of
crystal clear turquoise water on a bright and beautiful day. “And suddenly,” writes Buechner, “I was
astonished to find that my eyes were filled with tears…for we had caught a
glimpse of the peaceable kingdom…For a few moments we had seen Eden and been
part of the great dance that goes on at the heart of creation. We had seen why it was that ‘the morning
stars sang together and all of God’s children shouted for joy’ when the world
was first made…and we shed tears because we were given a glimpse of the way
life was created to be and is not.”
(From “Longing For Home,” by Frederick Buechner, Harper Collins
Publishers, 1996, pages 126-127)
Now
I’m wondering this morning if that has ever happened to you – perhaps it was a
purple-orange sunset where the ocean met the horizon, or the breathtaking
beauty of azaleas and dogwood trees blooming in the spring, or an exquisite
hummingbird buzzing in your backyard feeder, or holding a little child in your
arms whose open eyes looked up at you and somehow you knew that you were seeing
something deeper, more majestic and mysterious than you had possibly
imagined. I think those glorious
moments, given to us by God, are echoes of Eden and remind us of a wonderful
garden – our original home place from which we have come and to which we all
long to return.
III.
And
so it is in our own homes and families – the places where we grew up and the
people we love who love us and have helped us become the women and men we are
today. Sometimes we look back at the
way it used to be and tears of joy fill our eyes with happy memories. But there are other times when we cry out of
sadness or sorrow, remembering painful moments from days gone by.
A
little girl and her mother got into an argument about the daughter’s messy
bedroom. As the conflict escalated, the
mother began to shout and then the daughter, with tears in her eyes, cried out
“Why don’t you just leave me alone!”
The mother answered, “Because when I was a little girl, my mother and I
got along so much better. We laughed and
played games together, and oh, I was so happy then.” The daughter reached out to embrace her and said, “Mom, I just
wish I had met you earlier.”
Well,
we know we can’t re-live the past, neither can we erase those hurtful things
that happened to us long ago…nor can we go back to the Garden of Eden to try to
recover that perfect place of joy and peace which still lingers in our
memories.
But
by the grace of God and through the love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ, our
hearts can be healed, our lives can be restored and we can discover, right here
and right now, joy for the journey, as we trust in the Lord to lead us.
Linda
Brand Jones put it this way:
“Yesterday is history,
Tomorrow is a mystery,
But today is a gift.
That’s why they call it the present.”
So
if you have come here today, looking for hope, praying for peace of mind or
trying to find the healing you need in your heart, then you are in the right
place at the right time to listen to the promise which has been given to all of
us. It’s found in the Book of
Revelation, chapters 21 and 22, beginning with God’s proclamation, I will
dwell with my people and wipe the tears from their eyes, for the former things
have passed away. Behold, I make all
things new! (Revelation 21)
And
then the vision for the future intermingles with the memory of that garden long
ago, which has become a city with a river flowing through it. And the Bible says that beside the river,
there is the tree of life with twelve kinds of fruit, and the leaves of the tree
are for the healing of the nations.
Nothing shall ever be cursed again, and all of God’s children shall see
His face and be with Him forever
(Paraphrase of Revelation 22:1-5).
Do
you know what that promise means? I
think it means that God has never given up on us, and that through His Son, our
Savior Jesus Christ, He has redeemed what went wrong in the Garden of Eden and
welcomed us home into His eternal kingdom.
So we have been promised abundant life here on this earth and
everlasting life with the Lord forever in heaven. And that, Christian friends, is the greatest promise of all!
Following
the Benediction, we are going to dedicate the Chapel Memorial Garden. It will be a sacred place, where the ashes
of those whom we have loved and lost a while shall be scattered, and there will
be a nameplate on the wall to help us remember them, one and all. Today we honor and recognize 19 men and
women whose names are already recorded on the wall – they are:
Austin Patterson Kelley
Wingfield Ellis Parker
William D. Ellis
Frances Tennent Ellis
Constance Furman Westbrook
John Joseph Westbrook
Virginia Byers Turner
Alfred Henry Lloyd
Mildred Jones Lloyd
Rufus Harry Brower
Richard Bradford Fogarty
Norma Crum Fogarty
Stevie (Mary) Murdoch Knox
John McIver Gillespie, Jr.
James L. Haines
Eunice H. Fugitt
Alice H. Caldwell
Wilber R. Caldwell
Everett G. Couch
They,
each and every one of them, are now joined together with the 19 founders of
this church in 1848 and the cloud of witnesses who have followed them in the
faith down through the past 154 years of our church’s history. We remember and honor all of those forbears
today, giving thanks for the foundations they laid and the great tradition of
faith which has been passed on to all of us in our generation.
And
I feel certain that as we go back to that memorial garden over and over again,
our hearts will be healed, our lives will be strengthened, and we will know
beyond the shadow of a doubt that God’s great promise is true: “In life and in death we belong to the
Lord! And when the former things have
passed away, God will make all things new”!
In
the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.