Today we are celebrating Earth Sunday, and so we get the joy of that wonderful passage from Romans 8 which always gives me goose-bumps. One translation puts it like this, “The entire universe is standing on tiptoe, yearning to see the unveiling of God’s glorious sons and daughters!” Isn’t that thrilling? The entire universe is standing on tiptoe, yearning to see the unveiling of God’s glorious sons and daughters!
That’s you and me. People of God, the cosmos is waiting expectantly for us to get our act together. We can hear that on two levels, so let’s start with the pragmatic. The climate is overheating and we need to be making radical changes so that our children and grandchildren will have a life even approximately like ours. But it’s a slow burn and we are wired for quick, immediate emergencies. So most of us drove here in our own cars this morning and didn’t consider car-pooling. We are still dependent on oil and gas for energy and plastics. We are still polluting the oceans and ignoring litter that will flow down to join the great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Thank you to our Earthcare group who remain faithful in reminding us that we are the stewards of God’s creation and it is up to us to live lightly on this planet. Thank you to the Abundance Shop which provides a way for the community of Los Osos to reuse and recycle clothing and stuff of all kinds. Thank you to the Landscape team for their work in keeping our own grounds sustainable and beautiful. And thank you to our partners in Rotary and EcoSlo for this year’s projects of creating a bioreactor, and planting more trees.
We still have a long way to go as a faith community and so the Parish Council, at the request of Earthcare, has made it a priority this year to work with EcoSlo towards becoming one of their Green businesses. But we have an even longer way to go to get our country to take this seriously. The current administration has been unable to get the political will and support to make the big changes that we need to make, that we should have made long ago. And the war in Europe only adds to the degradation of the planet as well as taking our attention away from the big goal – keeping the earth safe and livable.
Friends, we have a responsibility to *take action. We have a responsibility as the people of God who are called to be stewards of the earth to keep putting pressure on our elected representatives at every level to care for the environment. This is not an optional extra. Without the land the people perish. The Dust Bowl is only a generation away, we of all people should be working tirelessly to protect not only our little patch but the earth everywhere.
And we have a responsibility to use the land we have for the purposes that God intends – so that all beings may flourish. I am saddened that we can no longer co-exist safely with the ever-growing ground squirrel population and have asked them to move before we force them to do so.
I am proud of those of you who have the ability and time to be growing gardens and especially of Steve Cake who works with SLO Glean to liberate fruit and vegetables that will not be sold commercially and make them available through the Food Bank to those who need food assistance, and to Jenn Smith who heads the board of the Firstfruits Farm which grows food for the Food Bank and other food distribution groups. Jen could use some help planting seedlings on Saturday so please talk to her about how you can participate.
One of the ideas I have been exploring with you recently is that the inner world, the spiritual world, is where life is truly happening and that this world, which is no less real though impermanent, is being brought into alignment with the reign of God. Which is why we can talk about resurrection as a here and now thing rather than a future after we die thing – though I’m sure it is that as well. It is like the first parable we heard this morning – the wheat that grows in the earth and we don’t see what is happening – so the reign of God is here and now but still veiled from our eyes.
So how is our relationship with creation a spiritual issue? Let’s go back to that verse which we started with – “The entire universe is standing on tiptoe, yearning to see the unveiling of God’s glorious sons and daughters!”
If we are God’s daughters and sons, how will we be unveiled and how are we glorious? If you are like me, you did not look in the mirror this morning and notice any gloriousness in your early morning face!
Yet we are baptized into Christ’s death and have been raised by him into this life. My friends, we are already sharing in, we are already participating in the life of Christ. So much so that we talk about being the Body of Christ. This is not just an empty symbol but a statement of the truth as best we can understand it – we are already part of the cosmic Christ.
I think the unveiling comes when we really get the truth of this – when we start to live as if God really loves us and Jesus really died as a victim but was raised as a conqueror so that we too have already conquered all the stuff that holds us back – we just don’t know it yet.
It’s difficult to talk about all this because it takes a different vision. It’s like one of those optical illusions where you can see a vase or two people. Probably you have all seen the picture enough times that you don’t have a problem now seeing both, but the first time it’s a real puzzle. This is the difficulty with talking about the deep mysteries of our spirituality – we think we have them but then they shift and something else is revealed. Elizabeth Stuart, a welsh theologian, once said that whenever we think we are catching up with God, she has turned a corner and we are left with the lingering scent of her perfume.
If the apostle Paul is right, and “The entire universe is standing on tiptoe, yearning to see the unveiling of God’s glorious sons and daughters!” then we have a responsibility and a joy which has nothing to do with recycling or carpooling. For the cosmos to become what it was intended to be, we have to become who we are intended to be.
As we read in the first letter of Peter, we are “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that [we] may declare the praises of him who called [us] out of darkness into his wonderful light.” (1 Pet. 2:9) We are intended to live our lives praising and worshiping God – because that is the basic energy of the Universe – the Trinity is in a constant state of mutual love and adoration and we are invited and encouraged to join the Godhead. That is where our gloriousness lies – not in how we look or in how we recycle – but in how we enter into the joy and love and constant unfolding which we call God.
People of God, these things are not mutually exclusive – we still get to do all the things we know we should – turn off the lights, don’t use paper plates, walk or cycle rather than drive – but at the same time, we are participating in Christ, praising and worshiping the God who is in all and beyond all, Creator, Word and Holy Spirit and the whole creation rejoices with us.
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