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| Catching Fish |
Earth Sunday – Christ on Capitol Hill April 19,
2015
Alleluia! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Here’s what I’ve learned about the earth through gardening
experiences in Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota… by the third year,
plants are beginning to be established. By the fifth year… wow!
The first year, some plants don’t really take to the spot
I’ve put them, or I’ve tried to plant things from greenhouses rather than
transplants from neighbors nearby... and the transplants always do better. But
as time goes along, the garden grows, more and more beautifully with each year
of tending. So this year, we have rhubarb coming up, and lamb’s ears… and finally,
the bleeding hearts, first planted in Wisconsin and transplanted in Illinois,
and then planted at my parents’ home in Iowa while we moved from place to
place… and divided and replanted in our backyard now… finally, the leaves have
come up!
Somehow this is a metaphor for me about how much we have to
learn from the Earth—from gardening, from caring for the creation. From trying,
failing, and trying again with unfailing patience, endurance, persistence,
learning again how to be stewards, caretakers of God’s gifts. In a culture that
does not support us being in touch with the rhythms of the Creation, this
Sunday, the Sunday closest to Earth Day, in the season of Easter—new life,
resurrection—and with Spring unfolding all around us (I even saw wasps on the
hot days this week!), we’re invited to be grateful for each opportunity to tend
and care for the Earth, and see what we can learn. It’s one of the ways we’re
called to be witnesses.
One day last spring, I visited the home of a couple to bring
communion, and I saw a massive patch of violas in their rock bed alongside
their house. “Volunteers!” the woman said. “All I did was just shake the
flowers over the rocks when they had gone to seed last fall.” And here they
were, a truly glorious patch of deep purple. Such beauty reminded me to be
grateful, for the flowers… and for volunteers of all kinds, people and animals
and plants who give themselves for the benefit of all.
Earth Day is certainly also a day when many voices, many
organizations, very legitimately call us to be accountable for the ways that
particularly wealthy countries, industries, economies, corporations, and
citizens are over-using and abusing the Earth and all its creatures. There are
both massive things that need to be done to repent and turn around our short-sighted
ways in the world, and there are many small things that each one of us can do
to be more conscious of what we use, what we throw away, and how to conserve,
protect, reuse, recycle… how we can live more gently and sustainably with one another
on this Earth.
But perhaps even more powerful than critique is the power of
gratitude.
And I think that is the primary focus of the biblical
witness that we hear in Genesis today.
In the days of Creation, described in Genesis, we hear how
inter-related everything is. We hear about the distinctiveness and goodness of
all the different parts of creation—light and dark, water and sky and sea, all
kinds of plants and animals, birds and fish. On the sixth day, God creates adam – an earth person – and Elie
Wiesel, a prolific Jewish writer, comments on this timing something like this:
Why did the Creator wait until the sixth day to give life to adam—why didn’t [God] do it at the very
start? Answer: … well first God prepared a place for the human and only then
created the person. Another answer: To keep the person from taking himself too
seriously… for example, if a person is too proud, he could be asked: What are
you boasting about—even mosquitos preceded you in the order of creation![1]
So, according to this perspective, humans are created not so
much as the crowning moment of creation– as we have so often been taught – but
humans are created in inter-dependence and in relationship to everything else.
And what is the “best for last” thing in the whole story of
Creation?… It’s Sabbath. On the seventh day, God rested… giving permission to
all of us to rest.
Giving us permission not to have to be busy or earn or steward on that seventh day of rest… but simply to be in the love of our Creating, Saving, Renewing God so that all the other days of the week, we’ll know what that is like.
Giving us permission not to have to be busy or earn or steward on that seventh day of rest… but simply to be in the love of our Creating, Saving, Renewing God so that all the other days of the week, we’ll know what that is like.
Don’t you think that being busy or too overworked to care or
to be able do things differently, is at the heart of our brokenness in caring
for the Earth? So many of the “improvements” to make life easier, cheaper,
quicker, simpler are not good for us… but it’s incredibly hard to change our
ways when these patterns are all we’ve ever known or what we’ve fallen into
over time.
This week, part of the church staff: Angie, Joy and I had
the opportunity to go and hear a wonderful presentation at the office of the
Saint Paul Area Council of Churches about nutrition and how we can encourage
our congregation members in practices of “eating clean,” avoiding four major
things that we put into our bodies that end up being toxic to us because of
their impact at the cellular level … and how making changes can make a big
difference in the health of our bodies. One of the things the doctor who was
presenting told us was that it makes him so angry when he sees someone filling
their car with premium gasoline but filling their body with unhealthy garbage.
And this brings me, finally, to Jesus who as a resurrected
body asked for something to eat… a food basic-to-life for his culture, on the
shores of a lake… some broiled fish… and how that was a marker to followers of
Jesus, then and now, that he was really among them. He was really a body, alive
and needing basic nourishment, food re-creating the risen Christ as it
re-creates us.
Abraham Heschel writes in The Sabbath, “Creation, we are taught, is not an act that happened
once upon a time, once and for ever. The act of bringing the world into
existence is a continuous process. God called the world into being, and that
call goes on. There is this present moment because God is present. Every
instant is an act of creation.”[2]
So… we continue to witness the creating work of God; we
continue to be invited to the model of work and rest; we continue to need basic
nourishment.
We gather to tend and honor the Earth, to share a meal and
receive basic nourishment, to encounter the Creator and the risen Christ… and
in all this, the Spirit calls us to be witnesses, not only seeing for ourselves
but sharing the good news of what God has done for us… and not only for us, but
for the whole Creation.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!
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