Sunday, April 24th: "A Prayer from the Earth"

 

Watch the sermon here

The First United Presbyterian Church of Loveland

“A Prayer from the Earth”

Rev. Amy Morgan

April 24, 2022

Genesis 2:4-9, 15-20

This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground, but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. 

Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.

“If I spent 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 week, I very nearly took this advice from the medieval Christian mystic, Meister Eckhardt. We might all have been drawn closer to God if I’d collected specimens from the natural world for us to marvel at instead of sitting in my office thinking about humanity’s relationship with God and creation. But since most natural specimens I have collected in the past seem to perish in a matter of hours, I thought it best for the creation if I leave it well enough alone. 

But Joseph Campbell, the scholar of comparative myths and religions, shares Eckhardt’s belief that every creature is full of God. But not only creatures – caterpillars and lightening bugs and platypuses. Campbell wondered if the whole universe is not merely the product of God, the creation of a Creator, but also the manifestation of God, what he called a “eucharistic planet.” 

Author Barbara Brown Taylor also agrees with Eckhardt and Campbell, and from a biblical perspective. She writes in her book, “The Luminous Web,” “I believe in an incarnate God, which is to say, a God who has chosen to be revealed in physical form. In Hebrew scripture, the first form of that self-revelation was the universe itself.”

From medieval mystics to modern mythologists and contemporary Christian writers, there seems to be strong consensus that the creation is not, as Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis says, “a platform for human activity nor a repository of resources to be mined for our convenience.” It is full of God, the manifestation of God, the revelation of God. 

From the molecular to the cosmic, everything is an expression of God. 

There is no way I think I can express this better than through a children’s book by Douglas Wood, illustrated with beautiful watercolors by Cheng-Khee Chee. It is titled “Old Turtle,” and I’d like to share it with you today. 

Watch Pastor Amy read “Old Turtle” here

There are times, I hope, when God smiles. Today, as we celebrate Earth Care Sunday, as we exchange seeds to plant in the ground and nourish their growth, as we hike in the mountains and marvel at the beauty of all God has created, of all that is God in the world. 

But we also are living in that long, lonesome, and scary time, a time when people forget that we are “a message of love, and a prayer from the earth.” As Ellen Davis writes in her essay for the Green Bible, “The loudest and most authoritative voices in our culture, including the advertising industry, have persuaded us that we are autonomous beings, powerful and smart enough to bend the world to meet our present desires… We have fallen short of God's intention that we should enact our resemblance to God through the exercise of benevolent dominion over the creatures.”

Davis reminds us also that “We belong to the fertile earth more than it can ever belong to us. Because we have no life apart from the health of soil and water, we must care for it as one would care for a beloved family member.” According to Genesis, we are connected to the earth genealogically. We are derived from the dust. Reading Genesis 2:7 in Hebrew makes this connection explicit. “The man,” Adam in Hebrew, is formed from the dust of the ground, “adamah” in Hebrew. The earth is in our blood and bones, it is our relative, our neighbor, and therefore, according to Jesus, we must love it as we love ourselves. 

All of this is by God’s design. God doesn’t inaugurate the creation of trees and plants until there is someone to take care of it. And as soon as humanity is created, God places us in the garden to till it and keep it. In Hebrew, the word translated as “till” means to work or serve, it indicates a subordinate position, not a dominant one. The word translated as keep is the same word used at the beginning of the Jewish prayer the Shema. Shemar, in Hebrew, means to hear, to keep, to watch, to observe, to be attentive to. The first line of the Shema is usually translated, “Hear, O Israel, the LORD your God, the LORD is one.” Shema is a word that alerts us to make the object of this verb the center of our attention, to listen to it and obey it and learn from it. So to till and keep the garden of the earth means to serve it and listen to it and learn from it. 

Later on in the Shema, it quotes Deuteronomy 6, saying, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” If it is true that the whole creation is the expression of God, then the commandment given to the first humans in the garden is no different from the commandment in the Shema. Serving and caring for the creation is loving God with our whole selves. As Ellen Davis puts it, “Land care itself is a primary religious obligation.” 

So we, as children of God, as those created from the dust of the earth and commanded to love it, as Christians who follow the incarnate God in Jesus Christ, take seriously that obligation to care for the earth. It is not part of our political agenda or scientific principle or crisis response. It is our religious obligation. It is our responsibility as commanded by God from the very beginning of human existence. It is our loving response to the love of God. It is our prayer from the earth. 

To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.