Creation Sunday

Psalm 24: 1-2

The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; 

the world, and they that dwell therein. 

For he hath founded it upon the seas, 

and established it upon the floods. (KJV)

To God the Father, who created the world;

To God the Son, who redeemed the world;

To God the Holy Spirit, who sustains the world;

Be all praise and glory, now and forever. Amen.

(David Adam. The Rhythm of Life: Celtic Daily Prayer. London: Triangle/SPCK, 1996. 26.)

About 795 years ago a poor little man died in central Italy, surrounded by friends he called his “little brothers”. Worn out with work, travel, illness, and excessive self-deprivation, he died exhausted, as he had driven his frail frame beyond its ordinary powers. 

Indeed, at the end of his life he admitted, “I’ve been too hard on Brother Ass.”-- He called his body Brother Ass, like an overburdened burro. 

He called all created things his brother or sister, not just humans, though surely those, but the sun, the moon, the elements, animals … and at last even death.

He himself was known to his friends as Brother Francis, though as soon as he died he was acclaimed as a saint. 

Saint Francis is known for several things: his passion for the gospel, his embrace of poverty, his leadership of the religious orders known as Franciscans, his love for creation, and of course birdbaths.

We celebrate Creation Sunday on a Sunday close to October 4th, the feast of Saint Francis.

And it is only right. As we look at creation around us, all creatures, each other, ourselves, we look at them in part through Francis’ eyes. 

He regarded all things through the lens of his devotion to his Lord and because of that he embraced what is holy in all things.

This was not an easy road. 

Early in his career he asked God to grant him to know the pain and the love Jesus felt on the cross. And perhaps he did. 

What we remember today - without forgetting the pain of the passion - is the love that surrounds it.

The love of the passion: paradoxical, all-embracing. 

Today that love we particularly remember as we look with gratitude, hope, guilt, and a deepening desire to care, upon our fellow creatures, especially this fragile earth that is our home, and our creaturely neighbors, from fish and birds to sky and sea. 

How can we love our fellow creatures as God would have us love them - as family? Maybe seeing through the eyes of the little poor man of Assisi - Saint Francis - will help.

And so our hymn of the day - that we will sing together shortly - is based on his own song, the Canticle of the Creatures.

This morning we:

• Offer praise and gratitude for the ways God’s creation inspires, nourishes and heals us.
• Name our laments for the ways creation’s current crisis affects us and we pray for its healing.

Here is one such lament:

“Our Burning World” is a cry for help and a call to action about the global climate crisis, by Malcolm Guite:

Our burning world is turning in despair,

I hear her seething, sighing through the air:

‘Oh rouse yourself, this is your wake up call

For your pollution forms my funeral pall

My last ice lapses, slips into the sea,

Will you unfreeze your tears and weep from me?

Or are you sleeping still, taking your rest?

The hour has come, that puts you to the test,

Wake up to change at last, and change for good,

Repent, return, re-plant the sacred wood.

You are my children, I too am God’s child,

And we have both together been defiled,

But God hangs with us, on the hallowed tree

That we might both be rescued, both be free.’

Performed by Jonathan Rennert and the Choir of St. Michael's, Cornhill.

Music (c) Rhiannon Randle 2019-2020.

Text (c) Malcolm Guite 2019. Read more about the poem here: https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2020/02/15/our-burning-world-a-collaboration-with-rhiannon-randle/

The hour is late. The world is changing. And yet there is hope.

Among the poems that celebrate Creation, there is one that stands out. 

By Gerard Manley Hopkins, it is called “God’s Grandeur”:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

 Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

 Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

  And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

 Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

 And for all this, nature is never spent;

  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

 And though the last lights off the black West went

  Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --

 Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. [1844 (Stratford, London) – 1889 (Dublin)]

https://www.poetry.com/poem/15857/god's-grandeur

https://youtu.be/HaFXYPGVcs8 

https://soundcloud.com/rhiannonrandle/our-burning-world-live

As much as we despair of further individual or common action to save our planet from the worst of extreme weather events, changing times of drought and flood, of hot weather and cold, indifference will not insulate us. 

There is hope. The game is not over yet. There is action we can take. 

And so this morning let us carry forth into the world our resolve to:

• Explore spiritual practices that help us notice God’s presence in our interaction with the outdoors.
• Consider ways that God may be calling us to be a part of restoring health to our planet, whether air, water, soil, plants, or animals.

[Some things to consider beyond celebration this morning (courtesy Elaine Dent, https://www.lss-elca.org/event/a-day-with-creation-as-companion/)] 

I’d like to ask you to join me in a litany, a proclamation of our care for creation:

Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.

Every part of the earth is sacred.

The air is precious, for all of us share the same breath.

Every part of the earth is sacred.

This we know, the earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth.

Every part of the earth is sacred.

This we know, all things are connected; like the blood that unites one family.

Every part of the earth is sacred.

Our God is the same God, whose compassion is equal for all;

Every part of the earth is sacred.

We did not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it.

Every part of the earth is sacred.

Whatever we do to the web we do to ourselves.

Every part of the earth is sacred.

For all belongs to our Creator.

(Adam, op. cit., 31. Adapted from a speech by Chief Seattle, 1854)

The holy and life-giving God,

teach you to reverence all his works,

to praise him in all you do,

to share in his work of creation,

and to live to his glory.

(Adam, op. cit., 30)

Creation Sunday sermon 2021 (October 3rd, at Lutheran Church of the Foothills, Tucson)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNBJzE95sKE&t=7s

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seeing and believing

During a plague year, in the midst of a pandemic, funeral bells rang continually across London. The dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral wrote this:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. 

[From Meditation XVII, John Donne, (1572-1631), and from the epigraph of Hemingway’s novel.]

I had not really meant to talk about this but the resurrection is really about death and then about resurrection. How to die, how to see a friend die, and then to understand how to live. That is the story of doubting Thomas really. Not about doubt at all but about how to grasp reality. His friend really had died. That is common fact, historical fact. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate (the Apostles’ Creed). “Jesus’ body decayed (.82 red)” - The Jesus Seminar’s consensus.

He had died. What did it mean? What did it mean, then, that he had lived, and how he had lived? That was the question, those were the questions, that occupied the disciples after Jesus’ resurrection. 

And so they began to understand. Who he really was, who they really were, what there was to do next, after there had been nothing to do because after all he was dead and we were all going to die. But now, how are we to live?

Jesus’ reality comes stronger, now, knowing that he ‘had’ to die, to fulfill his mission he had to stay true, even though that could and did mean accepting death, execution at the hands of another corrupt administration. The chief priests and the scribes, the leaders so-called of the people, the people they were betraying, with their every breath, handed him over oh so gladly to the Roman authorities, the occupying authorities, who were the means, the instrument, the engine of execution.

But he himself was the engine of understanding. He took, as the gospels give him to us, all of human experience, humanity, life itself, into himself, and made it whole and wonderful and sane even as it hurt beyond belief. Yes, others have suffered more, as many were executed his way, as he was executed, by the Roman authorities, in their thousands. And that may be exactly the point. 

He did not have to do it. He did not want to do it. He wanted to live and he wanted to live life in its fullness. And so he did.

And he did not keep it to himself. Miraculously he shared it with us.

And so we live. Knowing what it is at last to die, we begin to know what it is to live.

***

There is a book called "The Five Gospels" and a one-man play called "The 5th Gospel" - unrelated except by name, and perhaps by intention: to get to the human figure behind the stained glass or cultural images.

Craig McNair Wilson in his play imagined Jesus horsing around with the disciples, or doing other human things. 

The book, by historians and Bible scholars of the Jesus Seminar, tried to get at what Jesus really said and thereby get closer to what he was really about. And is about, for us now.

Scandalous, really, to think that we can know much about a man who lived 2000 years ago - and that it matters to us today what he said and did and how he was truly human. 

Seems to me that both play and book were trying to get at something that the first letter of John captures in a phrase: we speak to you of what we have seen and heard and held in our arms.  

That was then. But you know what? That is also now. We experience Jesus as real, in our prayers, in our fellowship, in the eyes of total strangers, in our inner selves.

And we can bear witness to him as first-century John did; we have not touched him with our hands but we can encounter him nevertheless. 

[On the road to Emmaus he appeared to two disciples in the person of a mysterious stranger, as he accompanied them on the way and in the breaking of bread.]  

There are so many ways to say we have seen the Lord.

Many years ago at a youth retreat weekend in the Santa Cruz mountains I heard a new song - new to me and new then: "Have you seen Jesus my Lord?" 

Mary asked such a question at the tomb, on the morning three days after Good Friday. "If you have taken him away, tell me where I can find him."

She is expecting nothing more than the pious duties of grief, to prepare the body for its long rest in the tomb. And perhaps as Michael Curry pointed out on Easter not even that: for who would roll away the stone? And yet - she went.  

She is not seeking and does not expect to find the man she knew. Not as he was. 

And she does not. For God is doing a new thing.

Resurrection, as Marian Budde reminded us on Easter morning, is - for us - a process, not a moment. Even if our life with Jesus begins with a moment of decision it continues as a process. A whole new way of living.

Mary is the first to experience this, to have it dawn on her that the resurrected Lord is more than the man she knew. He is not revived but remade. Born anew, as it were, into the fullness of life in God's house.

How are we to begin to live as if this is real? Some clues follow. Mary goes and bears witness to the men, the skeptical apostles, but they too come to believe, as they experience Jesus as real.

I first experienced Jesus as real not long after that weekend in the mountains. I had listened to the message, received from preachers, in songs, and in the gentle witness of an older friend. And even in the quiet hospitality of a neighbor. But it was when I woke up on Holy Saturday morning that he became real to me. And that is when I began to pray.

How are we to begin living as if Jesus is real?  

Witness, yes, Mary did that first. He is alive! He is risen! He really is the Lord.

Then action. And that is when we collect together to  - commiserate? - no, to celebrate, and to figure out what this means and what to do and to begin to encourage one another to live it out.

In the stories of acts of apostles we find them gathering all together, like a big family, every night, and still going to the Temple every day as they had when he was alive among them as a fellow human being, teacher, and healer. Now however a new era now begins, with these few, these befuddled, scared, and hopeful few, reborn themselves and calling others into new life. 

It is as if they had to begin again. As if everything they knew now had a new significance, new meaning.

When at last Thomas showed up, he expressed doubts - the pragmatical dog! How can you know what he really said and did unless you were there? And he was not: so he says, I need to see him and hear him and touch him with my hands again. The Jesus I knew. But he does not meet the same man, not as he was, and for all we know, all his prerequisites for believing were thrown aside, as he met not the resuscitated man but the living Lord.

My Lord and my God.

Now he is here among us. What shall we do?

***

Christ with Us

The Love of Christ

Surround us

The Light of Christ 

Lead us

The Peace of Christ

Fill us

The Power of Christ

Aid us

The Joy of Christ

Thrill us

The Presence of Christ

Be with us evermore.

David Adam, Tides and Seasons, SPCK, 1989, 76.

Resources: Commentaries by Herbert O'Driscoll, Fred Craddock, Stevan L. Davies, Arthur Dewey, and Raymond E. Brown, S.S. Prayers by David Adam. Self-guided retreat by Suzanne Guthrie, At the Edge of the Enclosure (http://edgeofenclosure.org/).  

(All this came to me in part as I was listening to the comments halfway through the second episode of “Hemingway” the PBS series. One of the writers got it right, one got it wrong, about what “for whom the bell tolls” means: I think the latter had not understood where it came from. Albert Camus did, or would have. The plague. That is where it came from. John Donne, Meditation XVII, the epigraph to “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, as I memorized it in eighth grade (but had yet to understand). John Donne was writing about people dying in an epidemic, a pandemic, the plague, as it hit London in the 1660s, - as Pepys memorialized it in his diary - and so “the bell was tolling for all of us, in Europe and the United States” is wrong: it is about death, it is the mark, the memorial, the moment, the announcement, of some one particular dying. And Hemingway got it right, and his character Robert Jordan got it right, and John McCain reading it got it right, it is about that particular death and therefore, therefore, about our own, our own humanity, and therefore our own life.) 

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Hemingway. NPR, aired April 2021. https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/hemingway/

Psalm 133,Acts 4:32-35,1 John 1:1-2:2,St Paul's Tombstone,BEaster2,John 20:19-31,Doubting Thomas.

St Paul's Church, Tombstone. [https://www.facebook.com/stpaulstombstone] April 11th 2021. JRL+

Celtic reading

With an Eagle's Eye: A Seven-Day Sojourn in Celtic Spirituality by John Miriam Jones, S.C. (Ave Maria Press, July 1998)

The Music of What Happens: Celtic Spirituality - A View from the Inside by John J. Ó Ríordáin CSsR (Dublin: Columba, September 1996; Saint Mary's Press, December 1996)

How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe by Thomas Cahill (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, February 1995)

The Wisdom of the Celtic Saints by Edward C. Sellner (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1993; revised and expanded edition, Bog Walk Press, February 2006)

The Celtic Way of Prayer: The Recovery of the Religious Imagination by Esther de Waal (Doubleday, August 1997)

Every Earthly Blessing: Rediscovering the Celtic Tradition by Esther De Waal (Morehouse, July 1999)

The Celtic Vision: Prayers, Blessings, Songs, and Invocations from the Gaelic Tradition edited by Esther De Waal (Saint Bede's, July 1990; revised edition, Liguori/Triumph, November 2001)

Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom by John O'Donohue (Cliff Street Books/HarperCollins, October 1997)

Celtic Inheritance by Peter Berresford Elis (London: Constable, 1985; New York: Dorset, 1992)

Soulfaring: Celtic Pilgrimage Then and Now by Cintra Pemberton, O.S.H. (Morehouse, October 1999)

In Search of Sacred Places: Looking for Wisdom on Celtic Holy Islands by Daniel Taylor (Bog Walk Press, 2005)

Celtic Threads: Exploring the Wisdom of Our Heritage by Padraigín Clancy (Dublin: Veritas, 1999)

Celtic Christian Spirituality: An Anthology of Medieval and Modern Sources edited by Oliver Davies and Fiona Bowie (SPCK & Continuum, 1995)

Celtic Spirituality edited and translated and introduced by Oliver Davies ; with the collaboration of Thomas O'Loughlin (Paulist Press, 1995)

A Doorway in Time: Memoir of a Celtic Spiritual Journey by Herbert O'Driscoll (Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1985)

Man of Aran by Pat Mullen (E. P. Dutton, 1935; M.I.T. Press, 1970)

George MacLeod: Founder of the Iona Community by Ronald Ferguson (London: Collins, 1990; Glasgow: Wild Goose, April 2001)

Glendalough: A Celtic Pilgrimage by Michael Rodgers and Marcus Losack (Morehouse, February 1997)

I Will Arise and Go Now, memoir by Herbert O'Driscoll (Church Publishing, 2021)

Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Spirituality by J. Philip Newell (Paulist Press, January 1997)

David Adam, The Rhythm of Life: Celtic Daily Prayer (SPCK, 2007)

JRL+

Easter Day

Christ with Us

The Love of Christ

Surround us

The Light of Christ 

Lead us

The Peace of Christ

Fill us

The Power of Christ

Aid us

The Joy of Christ

Thrill us

The Presence of Christ

Be with us evermore.

David Adam, Tides and Seasons, SPCK, 1989, 76.

 

• Acts 10:34-43
• or Isaiah 25:6-9
• 1 Corinthians 15:1-11
• or Acts 10:34-43
• John 20:1-18
• or Mark 16:1-8
• Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Easter/BEasterPrin_RCL.html

Forward to Freedom: From Exodus to Easter

You are invited on a journey of the spirit -

Forward to Freedom: From Exodus to Easter

David Adam has written a wonderful book for Lent. In a series of forty meditations, one for each day of Lent, he invites us to reflect on the story of Moses in the book of Exodus.

The people of God set out from bondage in Egypt to follow the promise of God to a new place. On the way through the wilderness they experience God in new and profound ways. The story of this great journey provides inspiration for us to follow the Israelites’ example – to launch out into new adventures, freeing others and ourselves from slavery and seeking God’s Promised Land.

Containing a Scripture reading, a short meditation, and a prayer for each day of Lent, this is a book to challenge our relationships to the world, to each other and to our God.

David Adam was vicar of St Mary’s Church on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, and writes prayers in the Celtic stream of our common faith.

We have chosen “Forward to Freedom” as our Lenten theme this year. We will use the book to start our conversations in the adult education hour between services. Please join us for the discussions – and consider making this book your Lenten reading for the year.

If you would like a copy of the book you may find one through a lending library or buy one from a used bookseller in person or by mail order. Look online (www.bookfinder.com).

–Fr. John, Eric Hanson, and Karen Ford

(Amazon.com lists many used and new copies at low prices; so does amazon.co.uk)

http://stalbansedmonds.org/2011/02/forward-to-freedom-from-exodus-to-easter/

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