Sermon: Paradise Home – Rev. Eric Banner

I grew up in Kansas, and lived most of my life there. It’s the kind of place that a lot of people choose not to live in, so much so that even the locals joke about it. “The only people who ever stayed traveled through in May and September,” we say, joking about the extreme weather, the blistering hot summers, the cold, bitter winds blown over the wide open prairies of December.

But 3 million folks call it home, and twice as many cattle. As far as I know no one has ever written a song titled “Kansas dreaming.” I mention all this because I’m told that, from time to time, it’s useful for ministers to share their story with the people they serve, but also because there is something that gets hidden in the stereotypes about places, a truth that is more complicated, more grounded in the lived experiences of places.

For most Americans Kansas is a fly-over place, or here in Colorado a drive through place. If there were a place that was paradise, Kansas wouldn’t be it. Hawaii, maybe, but not Kansas. Even President Obama’s grandparents took the one way journey from Kansas to Hawaii. If you went looking for paradise in our nation, and you asked where it was, Hawaii is probably as close as you can get. Beautiful beaches, sunny weather, warm ocean, and sweet tropical fruits.

But whether you can find paradise, whether you can ever find paradise, depends a lot on what it is you are looking for. If you are looking for streets paved with gold, or a land where we never grow old, you’re likely to miss the world you live in.

A friend of mine argues that one of the most transformative moments in the history of the world was when the first astronauts to land on the moon brought back the picture of an earthrise.
A picture that shows this small green and blue globe, dusted with clouds, swimming in a sea of blackness, of emptiness. A haven in an otherwise inhospitable universe, where our small planet offered up a place where life is. She says that picture changed everything because it became clear then that what we had was not so much a world of limitless abundance, to be used forever without exhaustion, but instead a small gift that was given to us as our home, which we are called to tend.

Rebecca Parker, the former president of Starr King School for the Ministry, where I went to seminary, and her longtime collaborator Rita Nakashima Brook, co-director of Faith Voices for the Common Good wrote about the idea of paradise in the here and now a few years ago. In the wake of another book they wrote, Proverbs of Ashes, they realized that simply tearing down the edifice of the crucifixion as the central metaphor of Christianity was not enough. They knew that taking away someone’s framework of meaning, pulling it out from underneath them, without something else to offer in its place was dangerous, for it left people without a that thing we all need, something to hold on to.

So they wrote Saving Paradise, and they wrote about thousands of years of history, thousands of years of faith. They wrote of a new way of seeing Paradise, or perhaps it was a very old one. A sense of paradise not as the place to go in the bye-and-bye, nor a place that we have been ejected from in the far past, or walked out of. Paradise as something else entirely. Paradise, not as perfection, but as goodness in the here-and-now.

“Paradise,” they wrote, “is a place for the brokenhearted. Its accommodating environment can hold the sharp pieces of shattered lives, allowing sorrow and despair, incompleteness, rage, and struggle. Within the embrace of paradise – the realm of God’s ongoing creativity, the realm of the Spirit’s all-permeating breath – those who suffer may find balm. The brokenhearted victims of violence, neglect, or abuse may find recovery. Life in paradise does not mean that conflict or despair or injustice are eliminated. It means that being present, fully feeling, and passionately engaged is possible and the struggle for life can be sustained.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but that’s not a definition I’d ever heard offered for paradise. The Bahamas, sure, images of heaven with many mansions, check, but a place with rage and sorrow, violence and neglect? No, none of that has ever showed up in the paradise I know. In my life, sure. But in paradise?

But then I remembered something. A story I heard some years ago. There’s a writer back in Kansas who goes by the pen name William Jennings Bryan Oleander. He styles himself as a resident of “Here, Kansas.” He was the invited lunchtime entertainment at a conference I was at when I was 25 or so.

Now, as I said before, I spent most of my life in Kansas. Born there. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college. Went to work as a professional there, too. A water scientist. I was steeped in Kansas, if you will. So it took my by complete surprise when this man stood up and told me something no one else had ever told me before. He told us all there was more to our state song than I had ever heard of.

Truth be told, a lot of us don’t pay any attention to state songs. Even if, as is the case here in Colorado, one of our state songs, “Where the Columbines Grow” was written by a member of First Universalist, more than a century ago.

That is why, normally I wouldn’t presume that people would know the state song of any state, but I’ve learned in my life that Kansas’ state song has currency outside our borders, so a lot of people know “Home on the Range.” In fact, I bet a lot of you here today know how to sing it. Would you join me in singing it now?

Oh give me a home
Where the buffalo roam
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
and the sky is not cloudy all day.
Home, home on the range,
where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the sky is not clouded all day.

That’s what I knew. But Oleander opened my eyes that day, opened them to a record of a paradise present, a record that had been lost to me, and to so many. He wove a tale of a summer’s evening when a young man strummed on guitar and played what I had always known as Home on the Range. The verse we just sang. And then Oleander, noting that the musician had stopped singing, said simply-

“Short song.” But his story continued, as he told of how he and the other elders gathered round lifted their voices in song and kept on singing. He said “We sang about the bright diamond sand, the glittering streams, the white swan like a maid in a heavenly dream.” Say what? White swans? What song was he talking about?

Oh, give me the land where the bright diamond sand
Throws its light from the glittering stream
Where glideth along the graceful white swan,
Like a maid in a heavenly dream.
Home, home on the range,
where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the sky is not clouded all day.

And then, he kept on going. He kept telling a tale of a song I was as sure as could be that I knew, but that it turned out I did not. Oleander said “We sang the chorus, then the gale of the Solomon vale where life streams with buoyancy flow and the banks of the Beaver where no poisonous herbage doth grow.”

Oh, give me the gale of the Solomon vale,
Where life streams with buoyancy flow,
On the banks of the Beaver, where seldom if ever
Any poisonous herbage doth grow.
Home, home on the range,
where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the sky is not clouded all day.

“Most everyone dropped out,” at that point old Oleander said, and all I could think was to wonder how anyone had made it that far. “But Elmer and Claude Anderson and Mabel Beemer and me sang about the bright heavens, the twinkling stars, how their glory does not exceed that of ours. Then the verse about the wild flowers, the curlew’s scream, the antelope flocks on the hillsides so green.”

How often at night, when the heavens are bright
With the light of the glittering stars,
Have I stood here amazed and asked as I gazed
If their glory exceeds this of ours.
Home, home on the range,
where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the sky is not clouded all day.

I love the wild flowers in this bright land of ours;
I love too the wild curley’s scream,
The bluffs and white rocks and antelope flocks
That graze on the hillsides so green.
Home, home on the range,
where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the sky is not clouded all day.

“For the final verse it was just Mabel Beemer, in a high, wavering voice,”

The air is so pure, the breezes so free,
The zephyrs so balmy and light,
I would not exchange my home here to range
Forever in azure so bright.
Home, home on the range,
where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the sky is not clouded all day.

I’d never heard the verses he was talking about. Never seen them. Never sang them.

For Oleander the story he was telling was one of the past. When the young man with the guitar asked how he could remember all those verses he said it was because he could remember the place they described. The song was written by a physician, Brewster Higley, who had lost three wives to tragic circumstances, and a fourth not long before in a divorce. He had moved west looking for a place to get away from his troubles, and as I listened to Oleander that day, while we ate lunch, he spoke of a place that had been part of his life before it was bulldozed, poisoned, or filled. And he offered this closing thought:

“We need to know what we’ve lost. We need a blueprint for what Kansas can be. I’m not suggesting a return to the past. I’m looking towards a future, when Kansans, as friendly with the ground as earthworms, can sit in a July night surrounded by lightning bugs and remember all the words to a song we’ve made come true again.”

And the more I got to thinking about it, the more I remembered what I had forgotten. The way that for a long time people came to places thinking they were going to find paradise. Cities of gold to plunder. Untrammeled land to settle on. Sometimes folks even believed they found it.

We know it because they named the places paradise.

Paradise, California.
Paradise Park, Paradise Hills, Paradise Cove, here in Colorado.

And yes,
Paradise, Kansas.

Now maybe that was just a bit of aspirational boosterism by the speculators of the day. Financial fraud and misrepresentation are hardly new. But I don’t think fraud was on their mind. I think they knew something all of us too often forget, that paradise can be a place we live, if we’re willing to live there.

You see, Paradise, Kansas is a real place. Hard to find, though. Take the exit from I-70 at Russel, childhood home of Bob Dole & Arlen Specter according to their billboards, and go north for another 20 miles. It’s a real place, and one that is slowly dwindling away. 35 people as of the last census, 9 children and not a single young adult to be found. Lost 80% of the population since the town reached it’s peak back in the early 20th century. Most folks haven’t been willing to live in Paradise, Kansas they’ve been slowly moving out as the farms got bigger and the businesses smaller for a hundred years now. At the same time people have been fleeing small towns, they’ve been moving to the big cities, the magical, sunny places.

The California dreams.
The Florida dreams.
The Colorado dreams.

But now we’re finding that dream of a paradise of never ending growth seems to have been more gold plating and less solid than we dreamed. And the thing about plating is that it wears off.

Wears off as schools decay. Wears off as we watch communities crumble slowly from infrastructure that isn’t repaired or replaced. Wears off as the topsoil washes away from fields plowed harshly, as though the rich ground is limitless. Wears off as we learn again and again that the hard work of our lives is that once you move to paradise, whether it’s in rural Kansas, or in the big city, or the suburbs beyond, you have to live there.

And it doesn’t really matter all that much whether you think that paradise is the kind of place that explorers thought they found when they came across the open prairies and fertile soil of Kansas, or if you think that paradise is an island getaway in the Caribbean, or just the promise of a good job and ever rising home values in Colorado. Once we get there, we have to live there, with all the complexity that entails. As long as we talk about paradise as a place that nobody lives, a place we can never actually get to, well, then we’re always locked out.

For many of us we imagine paradise as the kind of place we go to get restored. A retreat to head to when the demands of being part of a modern, urban civilization seem to much.

Rocky Mountain National Park, or the top of a 14er.

A trout stream flowing with ice cold waters from the melting winter snow.
Nature.

A place where the human footprint is not quite so deep.

A place of respite.

We divide our lives between the nature we are told we are in deficit of, and the communities we are part of.

Parker and Brock were having nothing of it. “’Nature’ and ‘wilderness’ were romantic categories,” they write, “separate from corrupting civilization, society and human institutions… Our longings for and personal escapes to ‘nature’ often substitute for our working together to shape our homes, workplaces, and cities to be integrated, sustainable, humane environments… As long as such efforts to imagine paradise as purification and salvation, as the ultimate and final separation of the pristine from the corrupt and the wild from the civilized, visions of paradise will foster disassociation from the present in all its complex demands… Life is actually sustained, however, by integration, interaction, and exchange in the present – it is ecological, not eschatological.”

Some time ago I was listening to the book “When No Thing Works” by the mixed indigenous and Chinese writer Norma Kaweloku Wong, influenced by her years of work in her home state of Hawaii. In it she tells the story of a community meeting trying to decide what to do about how hard it had become for the locals, the people who lived there, to get to the beaches near their homes because of all the cars from tourists who had come and taking the parking spaces. As some voices rose up insisting that the solution was to get rid of the tourists, other voices responding, noting how much their jobs, their livelihoods depended on the the revenue that tourists brought with them. The conversation continued for a long time, trying to figure out how to balance what it meant to live in the place so many of think of as paradise, not as some final, or ultimate separation, but home for so many people, who were just trying to figure out how to balance it all. It reminded me of the conversations about affordable housing and mountain communities here in Colorado.

I long ago stopped believing that paradise was a place I could flee to, and instead began to notice where it was around me all the time. I’ll be the first to admit that it often does take the place of being out of town. Up on a hilltop, or down in a wallow, next to a creek that flows through the bottomland forest of oak and walnut. But why, we might ask, should it be that way? Why should we have to go away from the world we live in, as if that were truly possible, to find the shelter and support we need?

Which brings us back to our reading this morning. From the farmer and poet and activist Wendell Berry.

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,

he opened. Our city is filled with places that once were filled with the kind of stories that Home On the Range speaks about. Cherry Creek, not the reservoir, but the stream. The South Platte, before it became an industrial dumping site. They were once, too, clear waters that sustained the people who lived here, and they could be again. If we will start asking why paradise must be somewhere else but here. We all live on that small blue dot on the background of blackest night, and it is our work to help build a future that holds enough for ourselves, and our children, lives filled with joy and possibilities, here, and for the many years ahead.

Berry closed that poem with this reminder-

The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.

So let me close with a clarification, a correction if you will. Parker and Brock aren’t arguing in their book that everything that is is paradise. Not by a long shot. Instead they suggest that what paradise is is the goodness that is always present, always bursting forth into the world. Sometimes of it’s own volition, sometimes by our hard work and dedication. For Parker and Brock paradise is what is accessible to us when we love, and live, we we accept joy and goodness in our lives, and use them to critique the parts that bring pain and violence and suffering.

It’s not that pain and violence and suffering are paradise, far from it. It’s that we live in a world that has both. Goodness and evil. Sorrow and surprise. Pleasure and pain. And if we want to live in paradise, we have to learn to see them both, and know what makes them real. Be wise as serpents and gentle as doves. And then we must choose.

Will we live in paradise?
Will we make it our home?
Will we make of our homes a paradise?

Will we defend the good that already is, and tend it like a seed that can grow into a tall tree of shade and strength and goodness?

If we find paradise, will we stay long enough to know it, to love it, to be part of it, for our lives and for those yet to come?

May you all find the paradise in your life,
and may you make of it your home.

Rev. Eric Banner
Senior Minister