Creation 3 C

Walk Lightly upon Me!

INTRODUCTION

There are these ancient words of wisdom, rumour has it that it comes from the Natives who were here long before us and who understood their connection to the world at a lot deeper level than we do… they said that we are not living on the land, we are borrowing it from our grandchildren.

I’ve always felt that that was an incredibly wise way to look at it… of course, that is not the way most of us do. If I was to discover oil in my backyard I would probably sell it and move to Beverly Hills… My land would make me rich.

Well, maybe I am a better person than that, but you see what I mean, we have, throughout history, mostly used the land for our own benefit, often ignoring the damage we are doing because of it.

Now we are talking about shale gas extraction without having any real idea what that will do to the water, the soil, anything…

I think that all of this comes from some very old beliefs. It comes from what we think our relationship to the land is, and what we think God wants of us.

Remember, if you look at the King James Bible Genesis as God telling Adam and Eve to go out and subdue the land, to take it over, to bend it to their will… and that is pretty much what we have gone for…

But are we forgetting about another way of seeing things… what if it was less about ownership, and more about that old concept of “stewardship”

ABRAHAM

Our friend Abraham has always been known as the most faithful of all the Biblical heroes… you might remember he is the one that always believed God’s promises, that always did what God asked him…

The idea was that Abraham and Sarah wanted children… and as they got older and older they saw their dreams dying…

But if you remember, God told them not to worry, that they would be taken care of, that their descendants would be as numerous as the stars in heaven…

So, trusting, or perhaps even just hoping, they set out to follow God. And eventually, God led them to the land of Canaan… a land that later would be called the land of milk and honey… and told Abraham, that all of this was his… all of this would be for him, for his children, for his children’s children.

And he prospered. He became rich and powerful and fathered millions, maybe trillions. But here is the thing. Abraham knew that he had started with nothing, he knew that what he had was a gift… and he saw it that way. He saw it as something that God had given to him; and so, I imagine he approached things quite differently.

What would you do with the day if you got up and thought it was a gift? What would you do with the garden in your back yard if you truly believed that God had blessed you with fertile land? How would you look at the trees out the window if you thought God had painted them just for you?

WALK LIGHTLY ON THE EARTH

Have you ever been to a park or campground that had a sign that said “Take nothing but pictures… Leave nothing but footprints.”

I think that is the same sort of attitude I am talking about… I am talking about how as stewards, as caretakers, we are meant to walk lightly on the earth… another good native saying. It is not “ours” but we are a part of it, and as such we are supposed to love it, take care of it, enjoy it, use it, preserve it, and see it as a gift.

Here is another image for you to think of… when Moses went up the mountain and turned aside to see the burning bush, he heard a voice in his head that said, “take off your shoes, for this is holy ground.”

In that moment was the recognition that there was some sacred connection, something holy about the actual dirt beneath his feet, and he needed to be connected, to honour it, to embrace it…

I have always found our Matthew reading today to be one of the most powerful readings in the bible. I know not everyone sees it as the cornerstone of their living and faith… but for me, it is the best advice Jesus ever gave….

I am always worrying, and I am rarely trusting that things will work out right. I try to plan, I try to manipulate, I try to ensure that things work out… And in the midst of that, I am certainly not seeing life, or the world around me as a gift…

But what if I relaxed? What if I asked myself, what is it like to be a flower, what is it like to just trust that the world will have sunshine and rain, good times and bad?

The thing about the rest of creation, from the mosquito to the Blue Whale, is that they pretty much just live… they don’t try to manipulate the world around them, they do not use more than they need, they do not worry… they trust… and what they find is that they have enough.

Here is another interesting thing about the Abraham story… when the burden on the land became too much… he just said to Lot, take what you want, you choose first, I’ll be ok. That attitude was certainly part of what led to him having everything he needed…

POSSIBILITIES

David Suzuki had this program in the spring. He suggested that Canadians really need to get back to nature, and so we should try, no matter how difficult, to spend half an hour outside every day for ten weeks.

I don’t know if any of you did this, but it was quite amazing how it made me feel. I love being outside anyway, but there are certainly days when I do not take the time to enjoy it… by saying I “had” to be outside, I looked around more, I took more walks, I sat on my deck and enjoyed the breeze….

The scientific studies showed that if you spent a half an hour outside you would have lower blood pressure, you would have less stress, you would sleep better… it is almost a miracle cure….

But I think there is something deeper going on than just standing outside. If you are intentionally spending that time out of doors, you are starting to get back to the feelings Abraham had, you are getting closer to living the way Jesus was suggesting, you are seeing the world, and consequently, life, as a gift.

And when you do that, when you start to see it as a place of beauty and wonder, as a place that supports not just your, but countless life, when you start to understand that we are part of something bigger, you treat it differently.

In that moment, you start to walk lighter and you start to see why we should be preserving things for our grandchildren.

So what would it take? How can we really get back to feeling like Abraham and trusting God, how can we follow Jesus advice and let go of the worries? How can we be at peace in the world and see it all as a gift from God?

Maybe it begins by just experiencing… by being able to see it a little differently, by being captivated in the beauty, by just enjoying.

CONCLUSION

We know there is wisdom in the world out there, we know that there is beauty. But do we know that there is responsibility? I guess that is where we come down to after four weeks of listening for the voice of creation.

We are responsible to see it as gift, we are responsible to understand the world around us as fragile, we are responsible as stewards to take care of it all for God.

One of the first short stories I read in High School English was Ray Bradbury’s The Sound of Thunder it gave me an appreciation for the power and elegance of not only language, but of science fiction, which tries to warn us of how the world could be…

To over simplify the story, someone goes back in time and steps on a butterfly… when they get back to their time, everything has changed. One small act… one huge result.

Scientists have said pretty much the same thing… that a butterfly flapping their wings in china can change the weather in the Miramichi… we are all connected, we are all in a relationship, creation is one huge web of life where we find ourselves having the power of life and death.

So how are you going to see it?

Creation 2 C

THIN PLACES

Introduction

There is something sacredly special about mountains … In biblical times, mountains were seen as places where we could be closer to God; it was even seen, in a way, as God’s home. Think about other religions and the same is true, The Greeks believed the Gods lived on Mount Olympus, for example….

There are more than 200 references in the Bible to mountains and hills…. And those references help us to see that there is something about a mountain that brings rest, escape, wisdom, and learning….

Today, mountains are still experienced as exceptional places, worthy of pilgrimages. And even if we are not talking about literally climbing mountains, we believe in mountain top experiences… those times that just seem special, and wonderful, and full of life. We might even have religious mountain top experiences… those moments when you know, in your heart, that God is there…

Have you ever had one? Have you ever just felt that God was speaking to you through the very place you were standing? Have you ever had that moment when the world just seems to come together and you know, just know in your heart that everything will be all right?

Moses goes up to Mount Sinai and is given the ten commandments, Jesus was on the mountaintop to pray when he chose the disciples, the prophet Ezekiel talks about God as the good shepherd who takes his sheep to graze in the best grass which happens to be on the mountaintop…

So today we continue to think about the world around us; where last week we talked about the songs that creation sings, this week we are talking about the wisdom it offers – and where that might be found.

Celtic Thin Places

The ancient Celts of Scotland and Ireland already had a nature loving religion long before Christianity came to their shores… what was interesting about that is that this was the one place where the faith did not take over, it was just adapted… So when Christianity came to the Celts, it was Christianity that changed… It became more mystical, more rooted in the practical, more about experiencing God in nature…

Now, for the Celts mountains were the place where heaven and earth come closer; that was because they literally believed that Heaven was up there somewhere in the sky… If you went up on a mountain you could, perhaps, reach out your hand and touch heaven…

They called this a “thin place” a place where the wall between heaven and earth is really, really thin… and you know in your heart you are standing right next to God.

But they did not think that mountains were the only place that was thin, that was holy – there was the seashore, and the glade deep in the woods, the bottom of a waterfall and the face of a cliff… anywhere that brought the feeling that God was there, that God was good… Thin places are the places that inspire us, that make us want to take a picture or paint….

Eric Weiner - NY Times Travel Writer says this:

I’m drawn to places that beguile and inspire, sedate and stir, places where, for a few blissful moments I loosen my death grip on life, and can breathe again. It turns out these destinations have a name: thin places.

They are locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, or the transcendent or, as I like to think of it, the Infinite Whatever.

Travel to thin places does not necessarily lead to anything as grandiose as a “spiritual breakthrough,” whatever that means, but it does disorient. It confuses. We lose our bearings, and find new ones. Or not. Either way, we are jolted out of old ways of seeing the world, and therein lies the transformative magic of travel.

It’s not clear who first uttered the term “thin places,” but they almost certainly spoke with an Irish brogue. The ancient pagan Celts, and later, Christians, used the term to describe mesmerizing places like the wind-swept isle of Iona (now part of Scotland) or the rocky peaks of Croagh Patrick. Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter.

Thin places are often sacred ones —St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul — but they need not be, at least not conventionally so. A park or even a city square can be a thin place. So can an airport. 

Mircea Eliade, the religious scholar, would understand what I experienced in that Tokyo bar. Writing in his classic work “The Sacred and the Profane,” he observed that “some parts of space are qualitatively different from others.” An Apache proverb takes that idea a step further: “Wisdom sits in places.”

You don’t plan a trip to a thin place; you stumble upon one. But there are steps you can take to increase the odds of an encounter with thinness. For starters, have no expectations. Nothing gets in the way of a genuine experience more than expectations, which explains why so many “spiritual journeys” disappoint. And don’t count on guidebooks — or even friends — to pinpoint your thin places. To some extent, thinness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Or, to put it another way: One person’s thin place is another’s thick one.

Contemporary Reading:  "The Signs that God is With Us"

From:  Dorothy McRae-McMahon 's Echoes of Our Journey. Liturgies of the People (1993)

In desert and bushland, mountain and water,
we see the signs that God is with us.

In grass that grows through cities of concrete and brick,
we see the signs that God is with us.

In the faces of people whom God so loves,
we see the signs that God is with us.

In our brokenness,
there is the hope of wholeness.

In our emptiness,
there is the hope of fullness.

In our deaths,
lies the hope of resurrection life.

This is the Word in Christ to us.
The flame of the Holy Spirit
lives in this place
and travels with us. 

Biblical Thin Places

The earliest people could recognize these sacred places.  Often they were on mountain tops… but you hear of others in the ancient writings… the Garden of Eden where we had a direct connection with God, the Temple for the Israelites as it was considered to be God's house, the desert, where Jesus first went to pray and Moses escaped the Egyptians, the rivers and the seashores…

We all have our thin places, I told you one of mine was the seashore… another is the midnight blue light of a starry night. Or walking alone in the forest… there is something about water, and trees, and light, that just makes me feel differently…..

Creation gives us these places...these opportunities...to connect with God and with the whole world. You can search for thin places but eventually they will find you. Someone once called them “Ports in the storms of life.”

They are the places that make us open up and think differently, they are natures ways of speaking for God and giving wisdom…. They almost force us to ask questions about what is important in life and why…. And they help us to hunger for something more… to believe in goodness and beauty… and, well, God…

So which places are especially thin for you? Where can you go to feel God?

It doesn't have to be a calm and relaxing place.  It could be in the middle of the city.  It could be noisy and confusing.

You don't have to travel to far off places to find thin places, to discover the holy.  But you do need to be aware of where you are.  You do need to be focused and awake to that which surrounds you.  Recognize the sacred where you are.

We find wisdom in these places.  Wisdom that helps us to go on with our lives.  Wisdom that helps us to live better lives.

Conclusion

I want to read you a quote to finish today, it is from a writer named Jim Burklo in his book Time with God:

Walking in the early morning on the Lizard Head trail under the red cliffs of Sedona, Arizona, last Sunday, I repeated the mantra I often use while taking hikes: “Am I here? Am I here? Am I here?”

Was I really present, really awake, to the crunch of dirt under my feet, the calls of small birds flitting among the junipers, the glow of sun on walls of bright stone?

Or was I adrift in thoughts of yesterdays and tomorrows? The question brought into the present my thoughts of the past and future. The movement of my body, the changing scenery, the slow rise of the sun in the sky, the rising and ebbing drone of cicadas, reminded me that now is not a fixed point, but rather is attentive consciousness of a constant flow.

In other words… listen to what nature says, be open to experiencing the holy all around you… This week, be present, be open, be aware, and let the thin places find you.

  

Creation One

What Is Creation Saying to Us?

Opening Quote:

God creates the universe and with it the possibility of being and relating.

God tends the universe, mending the broken and reconciling the estranged.

God enlivens the universe, guiding all things toward harmony with their Source.

Grateful for God’s loving action, we cannot keep from singing. (A Song of Faith)

Introduction of Theme

I have trouble falling asleep. I always have. My mind races a lot and I think of far too many things. One of the things that has really helped me is sound. Ali thinks it is crazy, but I play these background sounds of waves, campfire burning, crickets calling in the night, wolves howling the background…. And the combined music of these natural nighttime sounds shuts my mind down…

The sounds of nature are beautiful. I don’t know if you have ever sat on the seashore and listened to waves crashing, or been in a meadow when the grasshoppers are chirping, or listened to the leaves blowing through the poplars… but these sounds are relaxing, they just feel right, and beautiful….

For me it is a moment of harmony, it is the closest I feel to actually hearing God speak… All of these things that make up the world we live in are part of the dance, part of the song, part of the celebration that is life around us.

And today, as we return to the normal schedules of school and work, as we see the nights getting colder and the seasons begin to change, as we sample the jams and jellies, the beans and tomatoes from our gardens… today we are taking a moment out of all of that to listen to the whispers of God that are found all around us.

Exploring the Theme

What is your favourite sound?  Is it the birds singing in the morning as the sun comes up?

Is it the sound of a baby's laughter as they find amusement in life's simple things?

Is it raindrops on your window pane as you are snuggled up warm inside?

I thought about that a lot this week, and I have decided that my all time favourite has to be

the sound of the waves crashing against the shore.  When I find myself near the ocean,

I often sit for a very long time with my eyes closed just listening. I really find that it calms my soul.

Part of that is that the sound of water on rock reminds me home, of where I come from.

Part of it is the certainty that each wave that comes to shore will leave its mark with a sharp sound.

I really love how it is such a loud and powerful sound. It reminds me just how strong nature is.

It is also the type of sound that drowns out all other noise and lets me be alone with my thoughts.

Now, your favourite sound may be different, and I suspect it is. But I bet if you think about why you like that sound, you will find God there too. And, the neat thing is that, all of these sounds are a part of the song  that creation sings out into the world. Creation's song is a beautiful song that stirs the soul.

A Contemporary Reading

Muriel Strode – Creation Songs

I know the thrill of the grasses when the rain pours over them.

I know the trembling of the leaves when the winds sweep through them.

I know what the white clover felt as it held a drop of dew pressed close in its beauteousness.

I know the quivering of the fragrant petals at the touch of the pollen-legged bees.

I know what the stream said to the dipping willows, and what the moon said to the sweet lavender.

I know what the stars said when they came stealthily down and crept fondly into the tops of the trees.

Exploring the Theme

So, just what is Creation's song? Let me start at the beginning...

Since the beginning of time, creation has sung out in amazing ways. In the beginning, there was a deep dark nothingness. That is until... the Spirit of God swept over the void. Until the Spirit of God began the creative process that brought light, love and life to the world. And as the processes of science began to unfold, incredible creatures were birthed into being. And as each new creature appeared, it added a new note to the song of Creation.

Plants, animals, rocks, trees, water... all sang out and made their presence known. In quiet whispers, like the sound of tall grass swishing in the wind... in loud shouts,  like the sound of a flock of seagulls in a parking lot... all the creatures played the notes of this beautiful song.

Over the course of time, humans came to be... and we added our unique voice to the mix. Much of this is recorded in the Bible, where the people of Israel sang songs of joy when they were happy and dirges of sorrow when they were sad.

Moses sang out to God with hopefulness in his voice while Miriam played her tambourine with pure joy and thanksgiving for what God had done. The Psalmist spoke words of poetry to the Lord, sometimes happy, sometimes sad. Jesus sang songs to pass the time with his friends and he wept, offering a different kind of tune, when he faced the reality of death. Angels sang out in visions and ordinary folk sang out in worship.

So it is that we came to join the song that we still hear all around us every day. Every time we hear the loud clap of thunder in a lightning storm, we know that our all-powerful, all-knowing God is present with us. When we sit by a quiet stream and listen to the murmur of the water, we know that the nurturing God of love is beside us. In the cry of the lone wolf, in the moan of the whale song, God is there.

It's through Creation's song that we hear the very voice of God. We only ever get to hear bits and pieces of the song, a verse there, a refrain here, but what we have access to is magnificent.

Can you imagine if we heard the full song together? I'm sure that its beautiful harmonies would dazzle our ears.

Concluding our Theme

And here we are - you and me. We have our own notes to sing; our own part to play in this grand symphony.

Paul in the letter to the Ephesians tell us to let the Spirit fill us up until we can't help but want to sing, until we make melody to God with all of our hearts, until all we want to do is make our gratitude known to the world for all we have and who we are.

The prophet Isaiah tells us to Sing for joy!  Break forth into singing! Or, as it says in the Message Translation of the Bible, "Heavens, raise the roof! Earth, wake the dead! Mountains, send up cheers!" God is here for us.

These biblical writers aren't just encouraging us to hum a little humble tune to ourselves. The language they use implies a certain confidence in our singing out proudly about God's love for us.

Sometimes we literally sing. Our lips move and hymns of praise come out or we we whistle a happy tune. But the "singing out" can also be done in the way we live our lives, in how we show God to others through who we are and what we do.

Nevertheless, I think when we become those people, who feel so moved by God's presence

in the universe and in our lives that we cannot stop from singing, then our world becomes a very different place.

So, sing out, play your instruments, make a joyful noise today! Do not be afraid to praise God and to really feel that presence in your entire body.

During the season of Creation, this is the song that we celebrate. This is the song that we sing.

Let all things now living, lift their voices in thankful praise.