Do you Have A Sacramental Imagination Regarding Creation?

Do you Have A Sacramental Imagination Regarding Creation?

 

Good Morning Friends,

 

Yesterday the people of Immokalee experienced the joy of Pepper Ranch Preserve at an Earth Day Celebration. A couple of years ago the Pepper Ranch land was purchased by Conservation Collier and now part of it is included in the County’s park system…open to the public. The Preserve is located on the Northside of Lake Trafford and is an ecological hidden gem in Collier County. It is the site with the lake of the majority of work related to Everglades’ restoration efforts. For decades the Ranch had been the focus of Immokalee stories about ghosts and hauntings…keeping people away. But before that more than a hundred years ago it was the site of community wide fish fries on Sunday afternoons for the people of Immokalee. And yesterday many rediscovered it as a place of great beauty where free meals were once again provided to the community. But now it was a spiritual food of chicken, rice, beans, and tube fish. Yesterday a bit of Immokalee was redeemed for wellness and health as a creative act of community in singing and art and dancing and exploring God’s creation. Do you Have A Sacramental Imagination Regarding Creation?

 

Scripture: He said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.

 

Ezekiel 37:3 (KJV)

 

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

 

Genesis 1:1-5 (NRSV)

You shall worship the Lord your God, and I will bless your bread and your water; and I will take sickness away from among you.

 

Exodus 23:25 (NRSV)

 

 

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

 

Isaiah 11:6-7 (NRSV)

 

You shall come to your grave in ripe old age, as a shock of grain comes up to the threshing floor in its season.

 

Job 5:26 (NRSV)

 

Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they divided up his clothes by casting lots.

 

Luke 23:34 (NIV)

 

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

 

Revelation 22:1-5 (NRSV)

 

Message: God creates out of our chaotic lives something beautiful. In the randomness and creative destruction of how we live there are patterns but perhaps new patterns are needed. When we face catastrophes, God’s creative hand can and will work in and through us to bring both complexity, coherence and creativity out of confusion. God picks up the pieces of our lives and brings restoration and regeneration. Out of the little deaths we experience each day God is forming and molding His new creation. In Him, out of the dry bones of the Old Testament is breathed the new life of Jesus the Word made flesh. The natural attributes of God…His immutable, eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient qualities of character and His very personality is reflected in creation itself and in the continuing unfolding of His continuing creation in the stream of Holy History. God made a world…He made man and He made life so that we might share in the abundance. But we are crucifying God’s creation.
Science tells us we are growing at an accelerated rate with greater population and economic activity but that this sense of progress is making changes to the core systems of our planet. We are in our desire to be like God creating Greenhouse gases, surface temperature changes, coastal zone flooding, loss of woodlands and a reduction in biodiversity. The planet is now dominated by human activity and there is no previous time in human history that we have as humans been able to create a different world. Nature has changed course. We are in an epoch of mass uncertainty and perhaps the ending of a period of ecological Grace. And it is if we are crucifying the earth we have been given as we did Jesus on the cross. And I wonder when Jesus is coming back to save the Earth as a continuing act of grace in helping us experience the sacredness of the miracle that there is life on this planet…the miracle there is human life on this planet and the miracle that God is continuing to create in you and me. And so yesterday I witnessed that there is a reality in blessing someone or a place or even an animal or plant that can be redemptive. The act of blessing helps us to remember the power of grace and the need to extend this grace to others…to the world itself. Sacredness in not increased in the process but it is an act that helps us experience the sacred. And friends, the planet we are on…the goose that laid the golden egg is in need of much grace for we as a species now hold its future in our hands. Almost 500 years ago Martin Luther challenged the sale of salvation and the argument today has been won. But a new reformation is in order for we still live in a world where human beings are for sale and the reality that the earth itself is for sale is killing the planet and making it difficult to recognize the sacred in what we are selling for profit. The economic reality is that the value of anything is its value to human beings. Perhaps we need to imagine listening to those not at the table for we are not very good at hearing the voice of future generations, and the natural world groans only in statistics and for the most part the poor people of the world and even the earth made poor are silent. Friends, we need to take our worship to the world. We need to realize that all our work at understanding the origin and development of the universe is pointless without an ecology that keeps our species alive. For too long what and where we worship has been limited to church buildings. Faith and creation in praise is often done in churches. The need to reform our experience of the sacred needs to change otherwise we will be singing a requiem for a dead planet. Friends, we are the garbage of the stars made sacred. Our salvation is not up for sale, our fellow humans are not to be up for sale…creation itself is not to be up for sale. And yet we are so entrenched in the sale of creation I wonder if we can see that nature is not just a resource it is a relative. The spirit of capitalism is piling trash at the feet of the divine and we still think it progress. There is a storm blowing into paradise. And the economic order is being determined with an irresistible force. But can technology end poverty, ignorance and war? I think not if it is at the price of the sacredness of our very planet because we have sold it. Perhaps we are like a moth drawn to a light that is our death and in a way God’s death for Jesus was human too. Perhaps though we might repent of our sin of arrogance and be saved by Jesus.

 

Pray we acknowledge the hopelessness of our plight. Pray we believe in the blessedness of His plan. Pray we rejoice in His precious promise. Pray we believe in the power of the Spirit and the Word. Pray that we not be here today and gone tomorrow. Pray that God is with us, guiding, molding and protecting us. Pray He brings us home on the appointed day to live with Him forever. Pray we begin seeing the sacred in a way that changes our behavior. Pray we are saved. Pray we realize that creation is a sacred gift. Pray we realize that God is not just touching the hand of Adam in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel rendition of creation but also that of Wisdom.

 

Blessings,

 

John Lawson