Sermon for 30 June 13 Gen1:9-13, Isaiah 55:8-13; Ps95:1-7a This week President Obama gave a major speech on climate change, laying out steps his administration can take to reduce our carbon pollution, to mitigate disasters that are already on the way, and to spur a desire to offer global leadership. As I have, many of you have been advocating, asking for this sort of response from government and feeling like the speech and the resulting actions were a long time, probably too long of a time, in coming. With that awareness of the issues facing our planet, we’ve realized that while reducing our own consumption is important and formative and does indeed make a difference, the scale of the problem (or, the challenge, as the president called it) requires a response on the scale of being addressed by something much more than isolated individuals. But it’s not really any of the details of the response on my mind as we are in worship today, but rather on how the president began the speech. He referred to a moment on Christmas Eve 45 years ago, December 24, 1968. That evening, there was a live television broadcast, and some of you may remember it; at the time, it was the most watched thing ever to have appeared on TV. Here’s the audio from that broadcast, a message from outer space: commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AApollo_8_genesis_reading.ogg Those words were sent back to earth from the first humans ever to orbit the moon. They were aboard the Apollo 8 spacecraft, and from this vantage point that none of us had ever seen before, they found a fitting reflection in the same words we heard this morning from Genesis. A bit later on the same voyage, those astronauts took what has become one of the most famous and best-loved photographs ever. It is known as “Earthrise,” a view of earth over the horizon of the moon. There are those of you who remember when those first images and reports from this new vantage point were coming out. I’m among the group who didn’t experience this originally. I first learned much about it three years ago on my sabbatical. As I was dedicating those 10 weeks to thoughts of our place on earth and to caring for creation and finding hope amid crisis, over and over the books I was reading spoke of how moving those first images were. They present earth, a small “blue marble,” surrounded by the enormous blackness of space. Sure, the pictures had scientific value, like for helping to understand how weather systems functioned and such, but the primary response was emotional. All we know of life and all our resources was visible in one small place, an island earth, not nearly so vastly unbounded as we feel when we’re standing on the planet. It might occur that the view from above and seeing all the world at once could be elaborated as a God’s eye view. I’m not so sure about that, about thinking of God primarily as watching from afar. And, most basically, we don’t really know God’s perspective. But for us today, the verses from Genesis being tied to that distant all-encompassing view is consequential. For us this morning and throughout these summer weeks of a season of creation and on and on in our lives this view of the earth emphasizes our own perspective. More and more these weeks, I am unexpectedly delighted at the value in actually noticing the world around us as God’s creation. When we’ve gotten ourselves confined to faith being mostly about ethics or distant unearthly salvation or some sort of internal reflection and meditation of individualized prayer and your one-on-one relationship with God, then we miss out on this apparent abundant goodness that God spreads out all around us. That’s a tragically impoverished perspective. The first photographs to return from space shocked us and gave us fresh, spectacular perspective, but as those images became familiar, our awareness was dulled. Genesis 1 may be among the most familiar parts of our bible, so much that we may not really need to listen to what is described for us. So the gift of the reading this morning, of gathering together in the awareness of God’s blessing, is of again opening our eyes and hearts and faith, expanding our awareness. As the Earthrise image reminds us of the finite beauty and limited capacity of our home here, Genesis speaks of God’s caring intention, that the earth is good not because we’re here but simply because that is how it is when God calls it into being. Our Psalm tells it more physically and intimately, that God has molded the shape of the lands and the seas belong to God because God made them and God holds onto them. These words aren’t for nothing; they should certainly direct us to notice flooded shorelines, the boundaries between waters and land. It may call us to notice the surprising constructive powers of volcanoes, and tectonic plates, and earthquakes. We’ll see not just power and might, but how delicate and fragile this earth is, and lament when rich soils which took eons to develop are so quickly washed away or killed by chemicals. These words may prompt us to rejoice in a gross compost pile, as we did at Vacation Bible School, that ends not with waste but organic restoration. Genesis also begins to call to mind the abundance of vegetation, but it’s interesting that that’s fairly limited. I read once someplace that what is mentioned is agricultural, is food, that plants yielding seed meant the barley as their grain crop and the fruit with the seeds in it was their olive tree. With stunning poetry, the prophet Isaiah is much more expansive, looking to a wilderness that blossoms like a crocus, a spring flower coming out of what seemed like dead ground. Isaiah favors a beautiful flowering myrtle shrub and evergreen cypress tree, but also notices briers and thorns, which surely have their place. And in some of my favorite language in all of scripture, it is proclaimed that the mountains and hills sing and that the trees of the field clap their hands. Wow, right? So I had the benefit this week of working on this sermon while at Lutherdale Bible Camp with our 6th grade girls. The raspberries were slow this year, so I sat working one afternoon on a bench made from a former tree’s growth under the shade a maple tree was providing, noticing the variety of forms to the leaves, and red pine needles with developing cones, and white clover flowers amid the grass. I wondered how the ash trees in Walworth County were faring against the emerald ash borer. I wandered past carpenters working on cabins and docks along the shore. But with Genesis in mind, I had to recall that the earth and vegetation and wood is not here first for us to work with, but to observe as God’s work. So my favorite was hearing the wind, blowing along through treetops, carrying birdsong with their rustling. And I have to tell you, we sang some great camp songs. We’re singing beautiful hymns glorifying God this morning. Our voices are pretty pale praise in comparison and can’t and shouldn’t always sing solo, but this attunes our song to the hymn of all creation, joining in as those trees of the forest clap their hands.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Jun 2013 17:05:58 +0000
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