"See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!"
--II Corinthians 6:2
Come, take a walk in the gardens around the church, and you will see paradise, now. Close your eyes, inhale deeply, and you will draw in the lilac-scent of God's breath. Consider the bumbling path of the bee, drunk on nectar, deliriously content with life, and you will witness deep peace.
There was one stream of early Christian thought which rejected the material world, which viewed the earth as a deeply flawed creation of some lesser god. Marcionism, as it was called, was rejected as heresy in the third century, but unfortunately its ghost still haunts some philosophies of religion. The view that "life is hell"-- that would be Marcionism.
But Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, was not naive. "Now is the day of salvation," even if we continue to suffer illness, persecution, arrest, and trial. "Now is the day of salvation" even if we are dying.
As the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is grown in it to spring up, so God's salvation comes. We can see it, now. Look!
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