Grace Episcopal Church
Sermon for April 27, 2008
Celebrating Creation Sunday
Ps. 148; Genesis 9:8-17; Colossians 1:15-20; John 1:1-14
Martha Kirkpatrick
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Celebrating the rebirth and renewal of creation is easy at this time of year. Everywhere you look there is a lightness in peoples’ step. Kids are on their skateboards, old people who have not dared to venture out on the ice unless absolutely necessary are out walking. I’ve been out in my yard a few times this week; raking leaves that I never got to last Fall is a joy. Every morning I see some new green shoot bursting forth claiming its ray of warm sun. I just noticed last Wednesday the beautiful pink bush that is flowering in the yard on the corner of Edwards and Washingon. I heard my first white throat a few days ago. The birds wake me up now, which is far and away my favorite alarm clock (even if I might wish their idea of dawn coincided with mine). After the winter we’ve had, the coming of Spring does indeed seem to be a miracle. We think “we’ve made it through another Maine winter” and this one was a doozy.
All of this gets me thinking about the earth and its cycles, God’s providence, and our future. We love being outdoors again, we love the earth again. It is a lot easier than it was say, in late February, to sing hymns of praise for the beauty and bounty of the earth. We mean it, and we feel it.
It is important and necessary that we remind ourselves to be awed by the beauty of creation and the blessings that God has given us. And it is tempting too, perhaps to stop there. But we can’t. We cannot take the earth’s bounty and renewal for granted, because that blessing comes with responsibility. The evidence and reality of how the earth and its creatures – human and non-human -- are suffering and dying at our own hands is too overwhelmingly obvious to ignore.
The crisis state of our planet has been recognized for decades as a problem that has implications public health, the visible pollution of our air and water and its effects on people and other living things, massive waste dumps, tenfold increases in asthma rates. For the last 40 years the problems have involved scientists, engineers, lawyers, government at all levels, business, nonprofits, hospitals, schools, architects, urban planners, writers, poets, artists, ethicists. Practically everyone, in fact – at least institutionally -- but the Churches.
The Churches have too long failed to take account of our destruction of the environment and recognize it as the profound issue of faith that it is. Happily this is finally changing, and churches across different faith traditions are stepping up. It is changing because we are learning that more than a public health problem, public policy problem, economic problem or even ethical problem, faith communities are recognizing the state of our planet as profoundly a crisis of spirit.
So we have a lot of catching up to do. Like the rest of society, faith communities have to learn to live responsibly, to reduce our ecological footprint, to consider the impacts of our daily living. But more fundamentally, the global community needs the recognition by all the great religious traditions of the earth that the environmental crisis as a deeply rooted faith concern. And we Christians have our own specific task. We are called to witness to the God of Jesus Christ, and to God’s love for all the earth’s creatures. I have looked at the environmental crisis as a faith concern long and hard, and I have come to believe that a Christian response calls us to go deep into the roots and traditions of our faith. The state of the planet is not a fringe issue for Christians. Nor is it some new age-y reversion to pantheism; God is not a tree. When we go back to the foundations of our faith we find ourselves at the incarnation, and we find that the incarnation of Jesus is deeply connected to creation. In the incarnation, God became embodied. The heart of Christian tradition has to do with a God who gives God’s self to us in Christ and the Spirit. Our faith is foundationally about God becoming of the flesh, and by doing so God reveals the sanctity of all life. Our ancestors got this; this is ancient Christian wisdom. But we modernists, like sheep, have gone astray.
So let’s turn to our texts and see what they might have to say to us. Our reading today is from Genesis, after a primordial-scale flood has destroyed the earth, a flood that recalls the watery chaos at the beginning of creation in the first book of Genesis. The mythical, sometimes storybook character of the great flood should not obscure the horror of the destruction, which was a response to widespread human corruption and violence. Noah and a remnant of humans and animals are all that remains, and the covenant that God establishes here formalizes a relationship of love and benevolence, and extends to every living creature. This covenant expresses the constancy of God’s love for and commitment to all life, human and non-human alike.
I’d like to tell you a little story. Sometime last Fall I was kayaking on the Medomack River at about 6 o’clock in the evening. As we were paddling back upriver we suddenly noticed bubbling in the water ahead of us, and a gaggle of cormorants swimming in the midst of it. The alewives were returning to the ocean, and the striped bass were lying in wait for them. It was supper time. This activity had attracted the cormorants, who were also feasting on the alewives stirred up by the bigger fish. Then an osprey flew overhead, circled slowly above the heads of the cormorants, and dove straight down, emerging with a striper between his talons. The next thing we knew a bald eagle soared overhead and dove at the osprey to get him to drop the bass, which he did. The eagle came right over our heads – he was not as high as this ceiling -- caught sight of us, decided he wouldn’t push his luck, and headed for the tree tops. You know, I was not so confident of my place at the top of the food chain at that moment. In fact I was grateful for my tubby little plastic red boat that probably didn’t look very appetizing. As we watch this life cycle playing out before our eyes, we realize that we are part of them and they are part of us. And all of us together reflect the limitless divine love that is our origin.
This covenantal love that God has for all life takes on new meaning in the incarnation of Jesus. We understand God as the source of all being. But more than this, God’s love of creation was so great that God entered into it Godself. In Jesus, through the cross, God partakes, one might say, of the worst of human experience. The incarnation – God becoming of the flesh – may be understood as the supreme act of God’s love for creation. In the Gospel passage we just heard from the first chapter of John : “and the word (logos, wisdom) became flesh and dwelt among us” we see that Christ, with us from the beginning as the word, as wisdom, becomes embodied. God so loved the world that God became material. And Paul in his letter to the Colossians reminds us that Christ is the firstborn of all creation, that through him all things in heaven and on earth were created, that he is before all things, and in him all things come together. To put this colloquially, there are no “Jesus things and non-Jesus things.” The vocation of Jesus Christ is to serve, not just humans, but all creation. This is Christ eternal, who with the spirit of God is moving all creation toward its fulfillment.
Drawing on ancient wisdom for this vision of a life renewed is not a plea to return to some kind of pre-technology primordial paradise. Fredrica Thompsett, a professor of Anglican History at EDS, says that we look back in order to look forward. We can harness and direct our technology and our creativity toward production processes and manners of living that are harmonious with a thriving, healthy planet. This is happening all over the place.
“Speak to the earth and let it teach you,” it says in the Book of Job. When we understand ourselves as part of creation, we, like Job, can learn a new humility that can reveal new insights. We realize that we stand not above, but in the world, and are subject to nature’s laws and must live within its limits. Nature can be seen as a model to design sustainable practices and new ways of living. We can let the earth teach us by example. The intricate web of life of God’s design is abundant, mutually dependent, and interconnected. Everything affects everything else; we know this from science. There is no “away.” Nothing is produced that cannot be cycled back into the ecosystem, to again become part of nature’s bounty. The earth’s economy depends on diversity, thrives on differences, and perishes in the imbalance of sameness. All of this makes especially foolish any idea that we have to choose between ecological wellbeing and human wellbeing. Environmental devastation and social injustice stem from the same source – a lack of regard for life in all its forms. Human societies will not suffer equally from environmental damage; the poor will and are suffering first, and most acutely. But it will affect all of us. The justice implications heighten the imperative for Christians and demand our response. The challenge to find the living God in solidarity with the poor of the earth remains an enormous challenge for Christian faith. Commitment to the poor and commitment to the well-being of life on this planet must go together as two interrelated dimensions of the one Christian vocation.
Christians are called, in honor and obedience to God, to commit ourselves to reflecting God’s care for creation in our life, work and worship. When we partake of the bread and wine during the Eucharist, the central expression of the incarnation in worship, we are embodying our relationship with Christ and with all materiality. When we gather for the Eucharist we bring creation with us. Every Eucharist can be understood as the lifting up of creation to God, the living memory of both creation and redemption, the sacrament of the cosmic Christ, the participation in solidarity with all God’s creatures in the communion of the Trinity. The redemptive promise of the Eucharist empowers us to go forth to do God’s work in the world.
God’s defeat of human sin and suffering through the cross is a transformative power that enables creation’s renewal. As followers of Jesus, we are called to participate in this renewal, to work for the coming of God’s kingdom on earth. Far from letting us off the hook, the incarnation calls us into union with God, to bear witness to the damage we have caused and to participate in God’s redemptive plan for all life. Neither escapism nor passivity is possible for us.
And neither is despair. Despair and hopelessness are very real possibilities as people confront the enormity of the global challenges facing us. It may be that the most important task for Christians in the face of environmental devastation is to believe in a vision of restoration for all creation, and to know that with God’s help, it is possible. Human creativity and effort are necessary, but insufficient. Nor can we expect that God will rescue us from our own folly. Our moral imperative is enabled and compelled by what God is able to do and is doing, through our inseparable connection to all of creation, under the embrace of the redemption of Christ. We are called to work, with hope and in prayer, toward God’s vision of life renewed, to a vision that honors all life in all its forms. We can reclaim ancient wisdom and orient ourselves to an understanding that we, and this wounded earth, are all gathered to Christ and in Christ, and called to work for a new creation.
AMEN
