Tending the Heart of the Earth
Sermon, September 4, 2011
Rev. Dr. Craig S. Strobel
If you are a careful reader of the Bible, you have discovered by now that there are two stories of Creation in the Bible. The first account is couched in terms of seven “days” of activity in which everything is pronounced “good,” even humankind. The second account is more ambivalent. God seems to be improvising as he goes along. The creation of humans ends in disaster, which is basically the tone for the next several chapters.
These two stories are held together and seem to remind us how we are perched between the extravagance of creation and terror that can inhabit it. Annie Dillard speaks of this extravagance in her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: “If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness...The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.” (p.9)
Shortly after I arrived in Joseph in 2002 to serve the United Methodist Church there, a large and devastating mudslide came down BC Creek on Mt. Joseph, and swept away the dining hall and another building at the Boy Scout Camp, just up the road from our United Methodist Camp at Wallowa Lake. There were no casualties, but the mudslide changed the course of the Wallowa river and totally destroyed the dining hall at the Boy Scout Camp. This mudslide occurred during Young Writers camp at our UM camp in 2002. For the next two years, the Young Writers Camp revisited the site of the mudslide each year. We would reflect upon how one meteorological moment can totally alter the geological achievement of an eon.
In the second creation account in Genesis, the story of humankind’s fall from grace is just such a meteorological moment in the spiritual history of humankind. In fact, the Bible is one extended meditation upon how humankind vacillates between the extremes of its paradoxical nature. This is metaphorically represented in our creation from the dust of the ground and having the divine breath breathed into us.
We are as ordinary as dust – capable of immense cruelty, destructiveness and harm. We revel in our pettiness, savoring the many ways we can inflict emotional harm upon one another, or use others for our own ends. And yet, we are also animated by the Divine Breath. We are capable of incredible deeds of love, self-sacrifice, beauty, wonder and amazing creativity. Dust and breath. Extravagance and terror.
This extravagance and terror is reflected in how we relate to the natural world, the creation of which we are a part. We are creatures just the same as amoebas, great blue whales and the Pacific Ocean. We all owe our existence to One who is beyond us, but also intimately around us and even within us. We are not self-made. So we share this spinning globe with a teeming host of other beings and things who owe their existence to one another, and to a vastly interwoven web of relationships. For instance, we are dependent upon the activities of thousands of bacteria and microbes in the soil and in our own body. We look at these single-celled organisms and think of them as hitch-hikers and pests, but we are dependent upon them for our survival. And in turn, they look at us as one big growth medium.
But we are more than simply biological habitats for one another. The stories of creation in Genesis remind us that we are creatures together. This weekend, I had the opportunity to go to Park City with a special friend and take a ride in a hot air balloon. We soared up to 11,500 feet above sea level, higher than the highest peak in the Wasatch Front. High above the earth like that, the mountains, rivers, fields, rocky ridges, sky and clouds stretched out pieces of a vast and living quilt below us. From that angle of vision, the incredible beauty of the world is overwhelming, and its fragile preciousness is striking. Out toward the horizon, a pale grey-blue haze filled the valleys. It was a bad air quality day, and we had contributed to it partially by our drive in a petroleum-burning car. There I was, marveling at the tremendous gift of this creation – a creation of which I am a part – but what was my contribution to the blessing of life? How was I tending to the heart of the earth, to the heart of God’s creation?
We live in a very beautiful part of the world. This beauty is a blessing, truly truly. How we receive this blessing and care for it reveals the character of our own hearts. We owe our very existence to the earth. No other planet in the universe will provide us with the sustenance we need to live. But what are we doing to our home? Our technological and industrialized society has reduced the blessings of this world to commodities to be consumed and the leftovers to be discarded. We treat fellow human beings the same way. Gone and forgotten is the central message of the creation stories in Genesis: we are all creatures together, made for one another and made to be interdependent upon one another. What we do to the earth, we do to ourselves, and vice versa. When we care for the earth, tending to its heart, we tend our own as well.
In 2003, I counseled at the Youth Expressions camp at Wallowa Lake. We went stargazing one night, and looked through a 6-inch telescope provided by Ravi, one of the fathers attending the Family Camp. We were able to see Andromeda galaxy, several Globular Clusters, some double stars and a few other astronomical phenomena. We were even treated to an Aurora Borealis. At one point, as he was adjusting his telescope, Ravi began singing softly to himself, “The Heavens are telling the glory of God.”
Indeed, the heavens and all of creation. The glory of God, that does not stop at the completion of creation, nor is it deterred by the errancy of some of its creatures. This is the whole message of the Gospel of John. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son…” The whole world. The purple mountain majesties and sea-to-shining-seas, teeming with life. The splendid forests and every creeping thing upon the ground. Heaven and earth are full of the glory of God. Hosanna! Hosanna in the highest!
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