Sermon for April 22 - Earth Day

The Scripture Reading for this sermon is Luke 24:36b-48

Meister Eckhart once said, “If I spend enough time with the tiniest creature – even a caterpillar – I would never have to prepare a sermon.  So full of God is every creature.”  This sounds like a great idea to me.  How perfect is it that I won’t ever have to write a sermon again.  And since, as many of you know, I love watching nature documentaries.  I watch them avidly, I figure I’m a step ahead.

The last time I saw a caterpillar, however, was in December.  And there was something quite tragic about that.  A caterpillar in December in Manitoba.  The little guy was in his full furriness, inching its way across the road.  There was melting snow all around it, but the possibility of spring was still very distant.  I’m not sure how this happened.  I don’t know whether the caterpillar was late in arriving, or whether it was early, hatching from an egg, its body somehow fooled by the warm weather.  Nevertheless, it would not survive until spring.  I pondered the idea of squishing it, I imagined that would be a quicker way to go than freezing.  But I didn’t.  I moved it off the road, and hoped that a hungry bird would see it. 

That I remember a simple encounter with a caterpillar 4 months later, I think speaks to Meister Eckhart’s words.  “If I spend enough time with the tiniest creature – even a caterpillar – I would never have to prepare a sermon.  So full of God is every creature.”  I say this with all seriousness, and all gratitude, but I built a little relationship with that caterpillar.  It was able to evoke feelings within me, feelings of joy and sadness.  That was its gift to me.  And I do still at times wonder what happened to my little friend, knowing full well that whatever it was, it probably was not good.

This seems so far away from our scripture story for today, where we once again find ourselves in the company of Jesus’ disciples.  Rumors are starting to fly among them.  They talk about the empty tomb, they hear about an encounter on the Road to Emmaus.  Excitement is building, but they don’t know what it could mean to them.  Finally, the Risen Christ appears before them, and their response is the most normal response I can think of.  They are terrified.  They think he is a ghost.

As in the Thomas story, Jesus then invites the disciples to reach out and to touch him, to feel his wounds.  He is no ghost, he walks among them, he breathes among them in the fullness of his body.  And sure enough, he eats among them, he physically needs nourishment.  Whoever wrote Luke is really emphasizing that the Risen Christ has a body.  This is incredibly important to the author.  This is not a story about some transcendent being.  This is not a story about an ethereal Jesus, a ghostly Christ who dwells in our hearts and minds, a heavenly presence that whispers from far away.  This is a story about flesh and bones, which we all have.  It is a story about physical bodies, about creation and the world around us where we all live.  It is right here.

So often we want to put God far away.  We want to put God in the heavenly realm.  When we do that, the purpose of Christianity becomes about getting somewhere else, about leaving creation.  This world becomes a sort of proving ground.  It becomes a world that doesn’t really matter in the long run.

But the emphasis on the body in this story, says something entirely different.  Christianity is not a faith about heavenly places and superbeings.  Christianity is about this world.  Christianity says, if we want to encounter God, we can do so right here, right now, in creation, not outside of it.  When I use a word like incarnation, that’s what I mean.  That God is incarnate, to me, means that God dwells here.  That God has a body, that God is physical, that God can be touched, and seen, heard, smelt and tasted.  This is the wonder of the Incarnation.

Today we are celebrating Earth Day.  I think this is an important day to celebrate in the Christian calendar.  It is a day where we are reminded that holiness exists all around us, that to spend time with a caterpillar is to spend time with God.  And so I’m going to invite you to do that.  Spend time with a caterpillar, or a fly, or a shrub, or even a blade of grass.  Take a seed before it is sown and marvel at it.  Just marvel at it.  Today is an invitation to the fullness of our faith as Christians, a faith that does not look for God far away in the future, but a faith that knows God right here, right now.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

The Awe of the Forest

The scripture reading for this sermon was Acts 17:22-28

I remember as a child, going for long walks in the woods.  I don’t know if I was an especially willing participant in these long walks.  I imagine I kicked up quite the fuss when mom or dad would come into the room to say that we were going for a walk.  I’d roll my eyes, gripe and grumble, and we’d be off.

But forests are whimsical places.  Places where magic, especially for children, still exists.  Once I’d moved through my “struggling to pick up my feet” phase of the constitutional, (I’m guessing that was around the time I’d figure out that my parents weren’t listening to me, and were continuing to go for their walk with or without me) I’d quickly find myself lost within the expanse of it all.  I remember we used to go to the Bruce Trail, a trail that runs through the wilderness of southern Ontario (and I don’t mean Toronto).  And there was a recreated First Nations village, complete with long houses.  I thought it was the coolest, and I would immediately get drawn into that world.

The woods around our cottage were no different.  Me and my buddy James would head out into the trees, playing either Robin Hood, or Lord of the Rings.  A part of me would like to say that ended when I grew up, but deep down inside, I’m glad I can say it didn’t.  This summer I went exploring with my niece and nephew, only for a few minutes, but I found myself drawn back into the magic of it all.  And as I sat under the massive trees of Stanley Park in Vancouver, writing this sermon, I couldn’t help but realize that the same thing which made forests feel magical as a child, continues to exist within them. 

Forests are wonderful.  They are places that can draw us out of ourselves while at the same time drawing us deeper into ourselves. They are places to pause, away from the racket of the world, or the racket of our own minds; to hear a collection of sounds, to see sights, we otherwise wouldn’t.  They remind us of the shear complexity of the biosphere.  How interdependent all of creation is.  Trees and other plants depend on the nutrients from their dead ancestors and from those animals which die and decompose into the soil.  And they are dependant on many of those same animals to pollinate, or to plant their seeds for them.  In return, they offer homes, they offer food, they offer the very air that all of us breathe.  Forests crowd us in, cutting off our sight, and surround us in the mystery of wondering what is just beyond those trees.  And though there probably won’t be orcs, there will always be the possibility of something new and exciting, maybe even terrifying.

Because, more than anything, forests fill us with a sense of awe, a sense of humility, and at times a sense of fear all at once.  They are places that through those very feelings bring us to our knees before the Holy.

Paul had just come from a long walk, and now he was surrounded by the sights and sounds of Athens.  People yelling across crowded streets, smells filling the air, every class from slave to noble, races from across the Roman Empire were gathered together.  Temples and statues to different gods crowded the streets, the markets, and the buzz of activity was in the air.

It was a different pace of life than what he had been used to on the road.  Chased out of Thessalonica, Paul had spent sometime wandering the way to Athens.  Undoubtedly throughout his many travels, he would have passed by any variety of wildlife, he would have passed through groves of olive trees and fields of wildflowers.  He would have seen life completely foreign to the great cities of Greece and the rest of the Roman Empire.

And so when he comes across an altar to “an unknown god”, he immediately starts speaking.  He says, “Do you know why this god is unknown to you?  Do you know why you cannot find this very god you claim to worship?  Because you are looking here!  Here amid human constructs, amid markets, amid temples and religion!  If you want to know this God, you need to experience this God, you need to be filled by the awareness and awe that God is not within your little structures, but is in all things!  God is the union of all things and beyond in which all of us live and move, and have our being.”

We have lost our sense of awe for the world around us. We who have conquered almost every corner of the globe, now see ourselves as standing apart from it, see ourselves as somehow above, distinct from the world around us.  Does anyone else see that as isolating?  Does anyone understand how lonely a worldview that is?  The idea that somehow we are detached from the world? There is something incredibly tragic about that.

This is one of the many reasons forests are so important.  I could list off their scientific and ecological utility, but today we’re talking about their affects on our spiritual side.  On that side of us that long for right relationship, on that side of us that longs for union and wholeness.  That opportunity to stand in the woods, to see, to hear, to feel the utter complexity and interconnectivity around us.  That opportunity to stand back, to look up at the enormity of a tree, and to see it surrounded by countless of its brothers and sisters, fills us with a sense of humility.  A realization that we are not above creation, but we are a part of something far grander than anything we could possibly comprehend.  To go to those places where we cannot continue the illusion that we are entirely in control, we need that!  We need that opportunity to ground us in reality and awe.

Paul understood that.  Paul understood that human creation, whether physical buildings, codified religions, or anthropocentric images of God, that cultures, that social structures, that nations and empires could not contain the eternal, though we perhaps like to think it is so.  Paul understood that all things live and move and have being their being in God.  And so he invites us to stand back and just experience and be awed by the holiness of all that is, rather than trying to construct it for ourselves.  Thanks be to God, Amen.