Radical Amazement! Rogation Sunday
For over a thousand years, Christians have gone out and blessed the earth and the fields, as we will do later in our Pollinator Garden. And more recently, Rogation Days have also recognized the contributions of human labor, hopefully in alliance with the environment, without which we would not exist, let alone be here today. And in our daily prayers, most especially Compline, we recognize our dependance on one another, and upon God’s outpouring of love through creation: the miracle of the Big Bang banging at just the right moment to make carbon-based life on Earth in an otherwise challenging and foreboding universe. A universe beautiful to behold, and at the same time hostile to human and animal life as we know it. We who are stardust are blessed!
In our Creed, we acknowledge that the totality of creation is composed of things seen and unseen. Science confirms that the universe is comprise roughly of 70%, Dark Energy, 25% Dark Matter (dark only means unseen), leaving a remaining scant 5% Visible Matter – which itself is made up of particles and atoms which themselves are not visible to the human eye without the extraordinary assistance of devices that can detect these building blocks of all sorts of carbon-based life: plants, animals, waterways, insects, and of course, human beings. When we stop to think about it all, and how it appears it all came to be, and continues to evolve all the time, it is all a source of what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel would call wonder, or radical amazement. Heschel insists that such wonder and radical amazement “is the chief characteristic of a religious attitude toward life and the proper response to our experience of the divine.” [i]
Living with such radical amazement makes possible for “great things happen to the soul.” Our lectionary offers three lessons and a psalm which work together to bring to our awareness of all things seen and unseen, and commentary by God, the author of the First Letter of Timothy, and Jesus Christ to flesh out our role as stewards of all creation, and the inevitable unhappiness that occurs to our soul when we ignore our connection and responsibilities to God, Creation, and One Another – what we commonly refer to as Sin; from the Greek that means “to miss the mark.” The “mark” being that we are to be stewards and co-creators’ with God.
The voice of YHWH comes from a whirlwind to Job and his companions who, lacking all humility, portray their hubris in claiming to understand God and all of God’s ways, particularly as relates to the environment in which we live, move and have our being – so far the only such environment we have found in all the created universe. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? … Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this.” There is much that science has divined about all of this, but even science stands in wonder of it all, falling short of any sort of ultimate answers, let alone a yet unknown Grand Unified Theory (GUT) to describe why there is something instead of nothing! Lucky for Job that he accepts his chastisement, and thus enters into a closer relationship with his maker. [ii]
Then there is Psalm 104:25-37, which speaks of the interplay between the labor of humankind, the creatures of land, air, and sea, with their Creator, all of whom make important contributions to life on this planet, even if Leviathan was just a creative thought of God’s “for the sport of it!” The psalmist urges us to sing with wonder and radical amazement, “I will sing to the Lord as long as I live: I will praise my God while I have any being. May my meditation be pleasing to him: for my joy shall be in the Lord. May sinners perish from the earth, let the wicked be no more: bless the Lord, O my soul; O praise the Lord.” Praising and singing to God in thankfulness for the fruitfulness and utter fecundity of creation is soul-making at its finest!
Then the First Letter of Timothy reminds the listener that we come into the world with nothing and we leave this world with nothing. Food and clothing are to be the basic elements of contentment. It is when greed for more overtakes us, when we become trapped in many senseless and harmful desires, we find ourselves headed toward ruin and destruction. Note, it is not money that is the root of all evil – but rather, the love of money causes us to wander from our responsibilities as stewards of God’s good gifts all around us, causing us to stray from the faith handed down to us, and to cause injury not only to our own souls, but to the many others we tend to trample on our way to what we think is wealth. That said, it is all right to be rich if one is not haughty, or setting their hope on “the uncertainty of riches,” rather than on the God who seeks and loves to provide us with enough for everyone. Therefore, the rich are to “to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.” To share the wealth is soul-making. To hoard it is the ruin of many. [iii]
Which leads us to the many who devote every moment of every day building bigger and bigger barns to store more and more stuff. The advent of the “Self-Storage” industry where we are to store all the excess things we think define our “self.” We continue to accumulate stuff until one night, Jesus says, like the man in the story, we discover that First Timothy was right: we, all of us, will leave with nothing. In his total devotion to accumulate more and more stuff, he throws himself a party where he offers a toast, “Self! Soul! Look what grand things we have done, all stored in all of these barns.” Note, he is alone. All by himself. To which unexpectedly the voice of God responds, “Self? Soul? You have no soul. You are no self. You are a fool. Look around. As you celebrate what you have done. You are all alone. No time for friends. No time for family. And tonight, you will lose it all, including your life, pitiful as it is!” Jesus concludes his story saying, “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God.” [iv] This story is meant to help us imagine: what could the man with all the barns have done for others? How might he have used his wealth more productively for others? For other creatures? For the very soil upon which his barns are just taking up potentially fruitful space?
These texts appointed for Rogation days are meant to guide us to return to the world of wonder and radical amazement, so that we might truly see, and appreciate, and sing, and give praise for all the miraculous good things that surround us on all sides, if only. If only we spend more time soul-making than soul-breaking. If only we would consider how each decision we make as stewards of God’s creation reflects and makes an impact, for better or for worse. As one Stephen Holmes in Edinburgh, Scotland, preached a year ago, “So, our faith gives a depth to our care for creation and an urgency, because the desecration of nature is an offence to God’s praise just as much as killing an angel would be. It should be possible for all people of good will to work together… Christians, however, have a special insight which comes with a responsibility, so, finally, we can say: ‘We pray for a blessing on this good earth, that it may be fruitful… bless our common life and our care for our neighbor, that in harmony we may praise our Creator.’” [v] Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment