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I have no idea whether or not the committee planning this network gathering on stewardship knew that we would convene the event on the eve of Earth Day, 2004. For all I know it is planned every year to coincide with this day of honoring our planet. Somehow, I suspect that is not the case. Nevertheless, there is something prescient in the timing of our worship this evening and the topic of our program over these next three days.
To my way of thinking, if we are serious about "Equipping Stewards" — and I suppose we are, since we are here — then we should pay attention to the invitation from the secular calendar to celebrate the beauty of the Earth and our place in it. After all, our stewardship begins deep in the human consciousness where we remember that we are, indeed, part of this creation, and that God has somehow wondrously and mysteriously - and perhaps foolishly — charged us with its care.
Our forbears understood this in a way we post-modern, techno-types can only approximate. For the long-ago Celtic people of Scotland and Ireland, creation - and particular places in it - offered the best way to approach and comprehend the presence of God's own being. They called them "thin places" - those locations in creation where the luminous frontier between the terrestrial and the heavenly come close to disappearing.
Tonight in our worship, we have sought to make use of that tradition, in song and word, in order to awaken in us the memory of our belonging to the earth. If we cannot locate ourselves, at least at some level, as bearers of the Genesis tradition, then our stewardship will be forced and half-hearted.
If, however, we can rediscover, as Scottish poet Edwin Muir writes, that we have "one foot in Eden," then we might find our way to the humility and gratitude required by genuine biblical stewardship - stewardship not only of the biosphere but of the products of our labor, our time, and our financial resources, as well. When we lose touch with our own earthboundedness, our lives drift away into meaningless grasping after things that do not last.
Here's the poet Muir again: "Yet still from Eden springs the root, as clean as on the starting day." (from J. Philip Newell, One Foot in Eden [New York: Paulist Press, 1999], p. 1).
This week, in our Westminster Gallery (right outside this Chapel) a new exhibition opens, entitled, "For the Beauty of the Earth." It features photography by church members young and old. Among the numerous submittals lent to the church for the exhibition, one from a woman in our church particularly caught my eye. It is of four photos, placed vertically in a single frame. They are not, of themselves, spectacular shots or subjects: a rose, a butterfly, some stones, a bird. But when you read what the photographer wrote below her photos, suddenly the innocuous pictures take on huge meaning. This is what she wrote: "Despite the terror in New York City on September 11, 2001, 10 a.m. there was beauty and peace in our backyard."
At the moment when horror and violence convulsed our nation, this woman sought shelter in her garden. She went back, as Muir says, to "the starting day," and there found capacity to face the anxieties of this age as they broke upon us all that day. She was instinctively reclaiming her place and her role as a steward of God's creation and all its goodness.
Remember, the creation is not neutral in value; our texts endow it with goodness. We are stewards, first, of goodness. Perhaps that feature of the Genesis story echoes in the Apostle Paul's observation that we are "stewards of the grace of God." (Ephesians 3:2)
There is something primeval and provocative about our church member intentionally choosing a garden as the place where she would make her stand against the darkness that covered the earth that day. Our Minister of Music and the Arts, Melanie Ohnstad, saw the piece and observed that the photographer had moved that morning in her garden from the chaos of chronos, to the hope of kairos. She chose to defy the descending shadows by clinging to the light and beauty of Eden.
We would do well not to forget that the Hebrew word, adam, in the Genesis account, usually translated as "man" or, more generously, "humankind" is literally rendered "earthling." Its derivation is from the earth itself, in the Hebrew word adamah, or ground.
Then God said, "Let us make the earthling in our likeness, according to our likeness." (Genesis 1:26)
It is only and precisely because our image is both shimmering with divine reflection and scuffed by the soil that we would dare to accept what John Calvin called, "the stewardship of everything." Dominion does not mean exploitation but protection; according to Genesis, creation is given to us as a kind of protectorate - a territory, in which the keeping of integrity and beauty and goodness falls to us.
The problem, of course, is that the stewardship assignment came to us while we were still in the garden. As the story proceeds, we lose our birthright and are cast out of Eden. Perhaps, in the optimism of a Celtic poet, we still have one foot in the garden; nevertheless, the account of our expulsion from Eden is fundamentally a story of the cost of stewardship poorly assumed. Our first sin has us breaking the trust inherent in the stewardship of the earth and all its goodness. It is hard to exercise dominion when the territory over which you have it, is foreign to you.
Our impulse toward stewardship begins somewhere deep within, with a longing for Eden. That is what Celtic spirituality so profoundly understands and embraces. It is akin to wanting to return home. William Wordsworth writes, There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and freshness of a dream. (from "Intimations of Immortality")
The woman standing in her garden that morning in defiance of the threatening chaos, told me last week that she discovered there a deep gratitude in her heart. That struck me as being a profoundly Reformed Christian response to the darkness - gratitude. Here we owe a debt to our Celtic forbears. Like the Hebrews before them, they knew that in the light of the overwhelming power and goodness of God's creation one can do no thing other than offer praise and thanks.
"One generation shall laud your works to another," says the psalmist, "and shall declare your mighty acts."
"All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and all your faithful shall bless you." (Psalm 145:4, 10)
Gratitude is at the heart of our spirituality in the Reformed tradition. There is no other human response to God more basic than gratitude, a deep thanksgiving that wells up from within. As our church member stood there in her garden that morning, she was standing in a "thin place," brushing up against the holy presence just on the other side of the gossamer veil. All she knew in that moment - while the rest of us were reeling - was gratitude for the goodness of God, and that was enough. She had become a "steward equipped."
Our churches and those who inhabit them need such a rekindling of biblical stewardship, where we learn again what once we knew so well: "The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof." (Psalm 24:1)
God simply lends to us responsibility for creation, and only for a time. We lost our way when we thought we had been given a proprietary interest in creation, when God's desires took a back seat to our own, when reverence for creation gave way to our sordid, utilitarian urges.
William Sloan Coffin is right when he says, "A new doctrine of stewardship will have to become more important that doctrines of ownership." (Credo [Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004], p. 113)
Which brings us back to the garden, where it all began. There, "as on that starting day," we discover again our vocation as stewards of the created goodness of God.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.
For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. |
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