got fish?

Have you got anything here to eat? A simple, reasonable request. Coming at an extraordinary time. Jesus had just been through one of the most painful and terrifying, and so far unique, experiences a human being has ever undergone. Three days earlier Jesus had been crucified. Thousands had been crucified before him. Thousand would be crucified after. That is not what was unique to Jesus’ experience. But no one of those thousands, except himself, had undergone what was probably one of the most terrifying and painful experiences a human being could undergo. He rose from the dead. Nobody had ever had that experience before. And so here he was a few days later, visiting his disciples. And he said, “have you got anything to eat?” Maybe that would show, per the Evangelist, that he was a real human person after all. All the times the gospels took pains to show he was more than human: now they show that he was truly human. Truly human: I think he was hungry. For three days he had not eaten. (Perhaps a good reason for our three days’ fast.) Before that he was up all night praying, then grabbed, interrogated, tortured, mocked, marched through the streets, and hung up on a cross. And then he was in a rock-hewn tomb. Three days. As promised, he had not eaten since the Passover meal he shared with his disciples. No wonder he was hungry. Wonder that he was. (Luke 24:41)

Children of the Resurrection

Children of the Resurrection

The service of Burial begins with, among other words, these:

I know that my Redeemer liveth,

and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth;

and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God;

whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold,

and not as a stranger.

Job (19:25-27a).

For me the key words in the Gospel lesson for today are “children of the resurrection” and, even more so, “to him all of them are alive.” 

As we approach the Lord’s Table we go to meet the Lord — who is alive and those too who are alive in Him, alive in the Resurrection. And even, I’ve been thinking, we go to meet those who are yet to come.  

Hope for the future, as well as peace about the past, and faith — both comfort and challenge — for the present, are all proclaimed to us in this gospel.

For in Christ we are in communion with all the saints, all who live and die and are raised with him. 

So as we go up to take communion we go up not for ourselves only but for all who share in the joy of the saints.

My professor Donald Nicholl worked this out while he was lay rector of the Ecumenical Study Institute in Jerusalem, a community comprising both Protestants and Catholics. He found that the Protestants would only be able to take communion with other Protestants, and the Catholics with Catholics. So at first his response was to take communion with neither. Then he realized, that will never work. I’m the leader of this community, and I’m never taking communion? So he decided, and said to the rest, that when he went up to take communion he would do it not just for himself but for everyone who could not come up themselves. 

Well, sometimes that would be all of us. And this is a sacrament that we take never so for much for ourselves as when we take it as members of the body of Christ: one bread, one body.

From Isaiah (25:6) we receive this vision of a feast at the end of time:

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples

   a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines,

   of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear.

The heavenly feast! Our practical idea of neighbors feeding neighbors is not far off. For what we do here on earth trains us for life eternal. Indeed, if we take resurrection seriously, a couple of things happen. 

For if we take resurrection seriously, we take each other seriously. How shall I regard you if I know you are an eternal being, that you will live forever, that in Christ you have a home in his heart? And how then shall I look at myself - at my own actions, at my self-regard or self- envy, my self-criticism or my downward looks, if Christ is real? 

“Eternal life starts here” could be written over the gates of your life - today, any day, as you enter the church, as you approach the communion rail, as you start again, today, to live life as you want it to be lived. 

***

Even the sorrow of life cut short — or spent badly — is redeemed in the resurrection. And its hope is in us, and we in it. So we can resist despair and live on, live now, in the fullness of that hope, the assurance of redemption.

Father Fuller (from St Frances Cabrini) said: “Our faith in our future resurrection must affect our lives now.” Knowing who we are and believing in the future changes how we treat each other, how we treat ourselves, how we approach life. 

We are called to live in the fullness of confidence that death is not the end — the end is in Christ — the finality of the goal of all life… as all things are gathered to him.

For love is strong as death (Song of Songs, 8:6). 

Death be not proud, the poet said, but death cannot conquer those whom Jesus loves. And that includes you in. 

***

To live now with the resurrection life before us means living now not only for ourselves but for others:

— in our sacramental life,

— in our workaday life,

— in our home life,

— in our social and political life…

How we treat one another, 

how we treat ourselves, 

how we live - 

is in the light of the life of Christ,

that frees us,

empowers us, and

leads us - into strange, new places.

Now, we may not all agree on particular actions — I’m thinking of the social-political realm — but we know of one another who sends us, why and what is behind our actions, the source of our motivations.

“To seek to serve Christ in all persons” — and uphold their dignity as children of God, affects how we conduct our public lives - not just how we vote, but in how we speak to others with whom we disagree. Our attitude of certitude or frustration or despair or even anger over public policy must be leavened with hope — with knowing that we are children of God.

How are we then to live? 

— as God’s children, 

— as transcendent beings of infinite value, 

— as creatures of dust and glory whose mortal acts of the moment are significant in light of 

our immortality, 

of the hope of the resurrection, that is, 

of our presence now in Christ. 

And this presence of Christ in us, which we enact and celebrate as we go up to communion, motivates us, not only to kneel or stand before him Sunday morning, but to stand with him in all the moments of our lives.

***

Last Wednesday evening at Grace Saint Paul’s church a representative of Sea-Watch, a humanitarian aid group working for refugees in the Mediterranean Sea, talk about the externalizing of frontiers, from Europe across the Mediterranean to the borders of Libyan territorial waters. 

And Scott Warren, a cultural geographer from Ajo, told us about the separation of people in that small community into American Town, Mexican Town, and Indian Village. 

But — one bread, one body. 

In Christ we are all one people. Using desert or water to separate us does not, ultimately, work. For we know that our redeemer lives, and on the last day he will triumph — and we with him. 

We begin to realize, as Christ draws all people to himself, that we are already one in the Spirit, and those boundaries we may seek to draw will all evaporate, dissolve, and blow away in the wind of the Spirit. That Holy Breath that in the Beginning moved across the face of the waters has not been still since creation’s dawn — it is still moving. And as it moves, what the world puts up against it will not stand.

***

http://edgeofenclosure.org/proper27c.html

https://sea-watch.org/

https://cdn-prod.opendemocracy.net/media/images/1_yJRNMyB.2e16d0ba.fill-1200x630.jpg

https://www.nps.gov/articles/hohokam-culture.htm

https://www.tucsonsbirthplace.org/tucsons-birthplace/history/

Cui servire est regnare

Re: “To Serve is to Rule” essay by Doug Henwood, Harper’s Magazine, November 2019, p. 37-45. https://harpers.org/archive/2019/11/to-serve-is-to-rule-wasps-doug-henwood/

One a day early in 1882 a dust-covered young gentleman, newly arrived by rail from the East, rode the stage from Benson to Tombstone, regaled en route by the driver’s tales of a holdup on the line the previous year and a gunfight that past October behind a corral only a block from where that young man would build his church. He was Endicott Peabody, seminarian on leave from Episcopal Theological Seminary, whom the town fathers had invited west. And he saw that church building to completion by the fall of that year. (“The oldest Episcopal Church in Arizona, and the only Adobe Gothic Revival church in the world”--current advertisement.) He had a fine time introducing muscular Christianity to the magnates and miners of the boom town at the height of its prosperity. Then, feeling his talents better deployed as rector of a boys’ school than of a parish, he went home and founded Groton. Readers of Henwood’s essay will be pleased to learn that Endicott Peabody Day is now a feast day in the Episcopal diocese of Arizona, and its celebration this November 17th will be led by the Rt. Rev. Jennifer Reddall, and led by the current pastor, the Rev. Heather Rose. As one who has served in the same pulpit as Peabody, for the same length of time, -- only 135 years later -- I wouldn’t miss this celebration. P.S. Peabody presided at the wedding of Eleanor Roosevelt to her cousin Franklin, the latter of whom paid tribute to his former schoolmaster by saying: “I’m still afraid of the old son of a bitch.”

The Rev. Dr. John R. Leech

Tucson, Arizona.

October 21, 2019.

“Preacher in Helldorado” by Henry Walker, Journal of Arizona History, 1974

Thomas Peterson, MA thesis on Tombstone stage lines. 

HONEST WEIGHT

The passage from Amos reminds us of something we may experience from time to time. A chance to stand up on a scale and weigh oneself : HONEST WEIGHT and perhaps a fortune, on a slip of paper, for a nickel or a quarter or a dime. This principle of honest weight is old: in the legal code of Hammurabi of Babylon the idea of honest weights and measures is installed. People need to be able to trust each other, to count on one another, and so tricks like keeping two sets of measuring weights, passing off smaller amounts as larger, or fixing the scales, were early and often condemned. Amos uses this passage to do more than reinforce society in its sense of values. His prophetic denunciation carries through the marketplace and beyond it.

What kind of a scale of justice, how disproportionately applied, are the human measures by which we judge our treatment of one another? How honest a weight do we give to our actions?

The people Amos denounces include those who cheat the poor into a state of desperation so frightening that they will give up their own freedom to pay off their debts. Debts, incurred we just heard, through the unjust practices denounced throughout ancient society.

Hair-raising fear at the prospect of insurmountable indebtedness has not died with Hammurabi or Amos. It is alive and well in predatory lending practices that eat away at the substance of American lives. And it has its cousins in the burden of debt people take on for the sake of their families’ health or their children’s education.

So we turn from the prophet to the rabbi. Jesus tells an outrageous, shocking story. A man, he says, who had bungled the stewardship entrusted to him, has a bright and sudden idea. I know what I’ll do. I’ll go to each of my master’s debtors with the bills they owe and tell them to reduce them. That will get them on my side and they’ll look after me after I’m (inevitably) fired.

Take a moment to find a pencil and a pledge envelope in the pew rack in front of you. Write down a hundred. Now scratch it out and write fifty. Or write a hundred, draw a line through it, and write eighty. Don’t you think I’m your new best friend? Don’t you think the treasurer is going to have me drawn and quartered? Of course this exercise means nothing.

What does mean something is what we do with the wealth that is given us. Are we as adroit as this shrewd steward at using the treasure with which we are entrusted?

We can hardly grant indulgences! This is a Lutheran church! And this is not about reducing our waiting time for paradise. We cannot pay the debt we owe … we can only use what is given us rightly.

What does it mean, as the gospel passage goes on to warn us, to make the best use of Mammon (that in which we put our trust) on this earth so as to gain a seat in paradise?

Maybe it means that whatever contingent wealth we put our trust in — whatever is Mammon to us — we should regard as temporal. And remember what is eternal. And live for that.



Dove of Peace Lutheran Church
Tucson, Arizona.

This very night…

In the name of God, source of all being, eternal Word, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

When my father’s aunt Virginia died he was at her bedside. At another time her lawyer assured me he’d had all the property assessed so each of the four heirs received an equal value, in property or money. My father and his three siblings were the four equal sharers in their aunt’s fortune. Much of the legacy included artwork - Japanese woodblock prints - and other valuable movables. My Dad told the others he’d take what was left after they’d made their selections: some of the ordinary furniture and kitchenware, and ‘whatever was left in the storage closet down in the carport.’ *

Uncle Dave and Aunt Virginia had had some wonderful things as a result of their prewar life together in Pearl Harbor, China, and Singapore. They had friends among the Nationalist Chinese leaders and with them had experienced the terrible inflation of the mid-1930s in Shanghai, when a wheelbarrow full of money would buy a head of lettuce. 

They had saved some of that hyperinflation currency as souvenirs, some of it still wrapped in printers’ bundles, thinking it would make a decorative covering for a room divider screen. Then they realized their old friends, now in exile in Taiwan, might feel offended by the reminder of what they’d lost. So Dave and Virginia stored away the money - a story we knew well.

*And so we went down into the carport, my father and I, and opened the door of the storage shed - and a fecund effulgence of peat, fertilizer, and lawn mower oil came forth. We looked in the back and pulled out a large cardboard box - a bushel carton - and looked inside it. And looked at each other, and laughed. And laughed again. He who laughs last laughs twice.

The gospel story begins with an inheritance - with a family, at least two brothers. Approaching Jesus as an arbitrator one brother says Master tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me - but Jesus will have none of it. 

That’s a story: a one-sentence parable. Don’t get hung up about your stuff. 

Here’s a story within the story: a man had a rich harvest and said to himself, “I’ll pull down the barns…”

Thinking he had piled up for himself a pretty good load - the 1st century equivalent of canned goods and shotguns, or a 401k, or self-righteousness, the 1st century moral equivalent. (It’s not about your personal sense of security. If you think it is, your Horizon of Security is too small.)

But “You fool!" This very night your soul itself will be taken from you. 

Marie Kondo, the best-selling novelist of self-organization, bids you ask this key question of every one of the material possessions in your closet: Does this object give me joy? Does it give you joy? Does an object give you joy? 

Are you on the right track with these questions? The wealthy farmer in our gospel story asked similar questions and answered them with a resounding yes! Yes, he told himself, you can relax, eat, drink, be merry: you will have abundance stored up for many years ahead. Sort of like the United States.

And then the reminder comes. God, no less, at the end of the story, says, “You fool! This very night your life is required from you.” It echoes the passages from Ecclesiastes and the Psalms that we might review here.

I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me -- and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity. So I turned and gave my heart up to despair concerning all the toil of my labors under the sun, because sometimes one who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by another who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil. What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity. 

(Ecclesiastes 2:18-23)

4 Why should I be afraid in evil days, *

when the wickedness of those at my heels surrounds me,

5 The wickedness of those who put their trust in their goods, *

and boast of their great riches?

6 We can never ransom ourselves, *

or deliver to God the price of our life;

7 For the ransom of our life is so great, *

that we should never have enough to pay it,

8 In order to live for ever and ever, *

and never see the grave.

9 For we see that the wise die also;

like the dull and stupid they perish *

and leave their wealth to those who come after them.

10 Their graves shall be their homes for ever,

their dwelling places from generation to generation, *

though they call the lands after their own names.

11 Even though honored, they cannot live for ever; *

they are like the beasts that perish.

(Psalm 49:4-11)

Of course who is going to get your stuff then? —is a question that tells us we are on the wrong track altogether.

Our possessions may not store in barns - they may be merit or status, righteousness through works or validation through achievement and recognition.

Jesus tells the parable of the self-satisfied farmer, the Parable of the Rich Fool, that recapitulates and extends the teaching of the Preacher and the Psalmist. For it is not only that we strive and then we die and the wealth we may have accumulated pass on to another, it is that we have entirely missed the point of life. All this time we have been striving, anxiously, to achieve self-security, satisfaction with meeting our anticipated needs and desires, we have lost out on the real riches. The riches that come from life with God.

Maybe we need to look a little larger, beyond ourselves, to whence real security - and real abundance - lies: in joining in the life and love of God.

Donald Nicholl used to quote the saying that ‘in the end the only tragedy is the tragedy of not becoming a saint’. (Léon Bloy)

You have heard it said that Jesus died for our sins - but Jesus lived that we might be saints: people who live in faith, who trust in God for their daily bread, and all else.

Jesus was willing to accept the consequences of witnessing to the truth with absolute integrity. He would not back down in the face of fear or terror. And that is why we remember him in times when we need someone we can completely rely on, that we can absolutely trust, not because he wasn’t afraid but because he was and he stayed, and he’ll stay with you.

“The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod. Yet let us pray for but one thing—the marvelous peace of God.” (Hymn 661)

We are called to the service of love. “Love in reality, as opposed to love in dreams, is a harsh and dreadful thing.” (Dostoevsky) 

And yet it is in that service that we find perfect freedom, in that in-security that we find hope.

Thérèse of Lisieux, who didn’t have much, knew that she had obedience… and something more: she had love. 

A young nun in a tubercular convent in northern France, she realized what matters is not what we have - good or bad - but what we do with it; that the duty of the present moment is the freedom of the present moment, because it is in the present moment that we encounter LOVE - the divine love of God. 

This comes whether we have much at all in the way of possessions, for we have all that matters. 

Thérèse of Lisieux lived to the age of 24, the last two years with TB, and hoping to receive what she finally lost - a feeling of God’s presence. Instead she kept faith while in the desert of unknowing, and in the end reached joy.

How can we give joy? What gives us joy? Collectively it is easy to plan our bigger barns, to put poles around their edges and put up the side walls, satisfying ourselves that we are snug within our self-made enclosures. But perhaps like the rich fool we have too limited, too narrow, a horizon of security. 

We have barns, big barns, and we are building bigger: but in the doing we may pull down on our heads the security that really matters. We may say to ourselves, it is our toil and knowledge and skill and pain that has gotten us this inheritance, and we do not want to split it with anybody. Brother or no.

And yet we treat our world as if it were ours not only as stewards but as owners. As plaything or resource bin, not as our home and our care. 

As if we made it out of nothing. As if it were not the legacy we have received - that we are to pass on. The judgment - no, the consequences - of seeking our own security at the expense of others, is beyond our comprehension. 

What we do know is that we are called to something more than possession, more than self-security or ease: we are called into the fellowship of the living God, and there we will find real treasure, real peace, real joy.

May today there be peace within you.

May you trust in God

that you are exactly where you are meant to be.

May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith.

May you use those gifts you have received,

and pass on the love that has been given you.

May you be content knowing that you are a child of God.

Let this assurance settle into your bones,

and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love.

Amen.

— St. Thérèse of Lisieux

(http://thereseofdivinepeace.org/ accessed August 2, 2019.)

Thanks to Gildas Hamel and Suzanne Guthrie for insights included in this sermon.

Let your continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend your Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without your help, protect and govern it always by your goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

2019 August 4
Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 13. Year C.
Luke 12:13-21.

Grace Saint Paul's Episcopal Church, Tucson, Arizona.

The Prodigal Son, Gerrit Van Honthorst, 1622 (the young man's new "friends" prey on his wealth.) Eating, drinking, and making merry... [http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/proper13c.html]

King Midas. [http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/proper13c.html]

about me

The Rev. John Leech is an ordained Episcopal priest. He preaches and celebrates at Episcopal churches in Tucson, and serves on boards of community organizations. Previously he was pastor of an Episcopal church in the Seattle area, and before that served on the staff of the cathedral in Sacramento. His theological education began in the religious studies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and continued at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Seattle University, and San Francisco Theological Seminary. He joined the on-call chaplain staff at Tucson Medical Center in spring 2019.

That's not my Tombstone.

The New Yorker magazine posted a story online on June 3rd, 2019, about modern-day vigilantes and re-enactors of the old days of the Wild West. The author visited Tombstone as a tourist, and paid her way into such tourist attractions as Boot Hill Cemetery, the Bird Cage Theatre, and the reenactment of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. 

That's not my Tombstone.

Visitors come to the southwest and they find what they are looking for.

It's an old story. These days, we call it confirmation bias.

In the case of Tombstone it's a place easily associated with a colorful past. For many visitors Tombstone is a place of stories of the old, wild west. Of rustlers and gunmen.

And that is what they expect to find when they visit. That, and some modern-day vigilantes.

Put the two together and call it a continuum.

There is some explanation for that equation, but that is not my Tombstone.

Let me tell you about my Tombstone.

For six months a couple of years ago I was the vicar of Tombstone. That is, I was the priest who served Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in Tombstone. Like many a predecessor of mine I arrived from the direction of Benson. Approaching from the northwest the first sight I had of town was of the steeple of its church. For 137 years that has been a prominent feature of the town.

And I'll tell you about it through its people. Four sets of them.

First, the pastor and people of Saint Paul's Episcopal Church. When the town was new, things were a little dusty, and leaders of the community called a young seminarian to lead the effort to organize and build a building for the church. Over six months of effort, using plans by Richard Upjohn and with the aid of resident mining experts, the congregation laid a solid stone foundation. The members of the congregation, including their young minister,  made adobe bricks on site, and put them in place. They've been there ever since. And the church, the living church that is composed of its people and its leaders, thrives. Their pastor now is the Reverend Heather Rose.

As vicar I used to pull on my boots and put on my hat and walk down the wooden sidewalks of the old town. "Here comes another one," I heard once. Apparently some visitors thought I was a re-enactor. An understandable mistake - but I was just walking the bounds of my parish. On Sunday morning sure enough you could find me at the liars' table in the O.K. Cafe on Allen Street. There is a picture over the table - I'm the one in the black clericals, my hat is on the table. In that group is someone whose family has been there since before the church was built. My closest relative in town has been there a much shorter time than that.

Second, the founder of the Tombstone Hearse and Trike company, Jack Feather. A few years ago he called my cousins in Eureka, California, and invited them into an extraordinary project. Two crews made almost entirely of veterans, in northern California and southeastern Arizona, built a replica of Abraham Lincoln's hearse. They delivered it for the 150th anniversary reenactment (there's that word) of the funeral procession to the 16th President's final resting place in Springfield, Illinois. It's in the museum there now.

Third, the single parents I met who work in the businesses on Toughnut Street and Allen Street. You wouldn't know it, as they serve you a beer or a sarsaparilla, but they have children to raise that are growing up in the local schools. They drop them off on the way to work and pick them up at the end of the day.

And fourth, there are those guys at the liars' table at the O.K. Cafe on Sunday mornings. Dressed up, some of them, as the period characters they portray on weekends, they get together and, well, tell stories. They are part of the town. Don't be surprised to see the mayor, or the tourism director, thereabouts, discussing what next to do for the community.

These people are all part of the living community. They are my Tombstone, the town I came to know in six months as vicar of Tombstone, one in a long line of ministers that continues. This fall that town, and the church, will celebrate Endicott Peabody Day, celebrating that young seminarian who came to town on a dusty stage 137 years ago, and the people who built the church, and the building they built, and the town so blessed it thrives.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/10/the-wild-west-meets-the-southern-border

Photograph by Jon Donahue. Used with permission.

Praying for the President

Michael Gerson began his June 3, 2019, Washington Post column, "Franklin Graham has played his ultimate Trump card," by telling us, 

'I pray for President Trump at least once a week. “Grant to the president of the United States,” says the Book of Common Prayer, “and to all in authority, wisdom and strength to know and to do thy will.”*

Granted this was the only lead-in, and the bulk of the column was about something really quite different from this prayer, but by the end of the piece, we come back to that same need.

Praying for the nation and the head of state has been part of Anglican tradition since the first English prayer book; American Episcopalians have been praying for the President since 1776, when the Rector of Christ Church Philadelphia got out his prayer book and where his prayer book said "king" he pencilled in "president."

That said, it is not always an easy prayer to say -- often those prayers are offered bemusedly or begrudgingly, with glad affection or through clenched teeth.

But perhaps when we least feel like saying them is when we need those prayers the most. For his sake, for the country's sake, and for our own.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/franklin-graham-has-played-his-ultimate-trump-card/2019/06/03/22a50b18-862b-11e9-98c1-e945ae5db8fb_story.html

 
________________________________________


*That's from the 1928 BCP. In the 1979 prayerbook, Rite II, Prayers of the People Form I, says,

For our President, for the leaders of the nations, and for all in
authority, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord, have mercy.

(BCP, 483)

Other forms have more inclusive intentions, such as

We pray for all who govern and hold authority in the nations
of the world;

That there may be justice and peace on the earth.

(Form III, 387)

Guide the people of this land, and of all the nations, in the
ways of justice and peace; that we may honor one another
and serve the common good.

Silence

Lord, in your mercy

Hear our prayer.

(Form IV, 388) 


Rite I has 

We beseech thee also so to rule the hearts of those who bear
the authority of government in this and every land [especially
                     ], that they may be led to wise decisions and right
actions for the welfare and peace of the world.

(BCP, 329) 

Creation Care

There was a landowner who put his top employees in charge of his holdings. He said to them, “Take charge of it – and take care of the place. Bring your families to live on the land, and enjoy its produce. Serve it faithfully, and from its care you will live abundantly.”

So the servants came on board. They lived on the land, and raised families there. They were as fertile as the land itself and they grew in numbers. And it was theirs for the taking – to take charge of, to take care of, or to take advantage of – and with the land they served as their home they would live in hope and abundance, or in fear and scarcity – it was up to them.

What will they say when the landlord comes? How will they be with him? As servants entering into joy, or as sad stewards with empty fields, exhausted resources, and mistreated fellow creatures, to show for their stewardship?

 

Let us remember our special mandate as human creatures to care for the earth: not just to multiply and fill it – but to tend it. We are the stewards, the workers in the garden, of this green and gold, and glorious, blue white planet. It is our home, but not as owners – not as exploiters – but as chief tenants. We are the live-in caretaker of the apartment house, so to speak, not the landlord.

We look forward to the return of our landlord, with joyful expectation but also some anxiety. Our anticipation is mixed with feelings of loss and grief – and even guilt. In our Christian hope we turn to that landlord and yearn for his presence.

We are deluding ourselves if we think our self-assumed pose of superiority to the rest of creation is something mandated in the Bible.

So what is in the book?  

 

Genesis 2:15 (CEB): The Lord God took the human being and settled him in the garden of Eden to farm it and to take care of it.

 

Take care of it - not wreck it! We are chosen, yes, and special, because we are called to self-understanding, to knowledge (as partial as it may be) of our place in the cosmos, and our role as stewards of the earth.

Genesis 2:15 (CEB): The Lord God took the human being and settled him in the garden of Eden to farm it and to take care of it.

In other words, we are both to cultivate the land and to take custody of it as servants of the Lord. We are stewards of the earth, caretakers and custodians.

We are God’s representatives, or images, in creation, so exercising that stewardship is a servant role, subservient to the true land Lord of the universe. We have power to alter the world but we depend on the earth and its life for survival.

Our “rule” is subordinate – submissive to God and God’s will for creation – God’s will, not our own.

Take care, take charge. Fill the earth, be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth. And delight in it.

Sunday May 26th 2019. Creation Care Pledge Workshop. Grace St Paul’s, Tucson.

In Genesis 1:26-28, God says, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth.” God created humanity in God’s own image, in the divine image God created them, male and female God created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it. Take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, and everything crawling on the ground.”

As the notes to the Common English Bible inform us, to take charge – to rule as a master over servants, or a king over subjects – is a way of characterizing human power and authority over the rest of the animal world. But that in itself does not say anything one way or another about how that power is exercised, whether in caring for creation or ruling harshly over it.