Creation 3 C

Walk Lightly upon Me!

INTRODUCTION

There are these ancient words of wisdom, rumour has it that it comes from the Natives who were here long before us and who understood their connection to the world at a lot deeper level than we do… they said that we are not living on the land, we are borrowing it from our grandchildren.

I’ve always felt that that was an incredibly wise way to look at it… of course, that is not the way most of us do. If I was to discover oil in my backyard I would probably sell it and move to Beverly Hills… My land would make me rich.

Well, maybe I am a better person than that, but you see what I mean, we have, throughout history, mostly used the land for our own benefit, often ignoring the damage we are doing because of it.

Now we are talking about shale gas extraction without having any real idea what that will do to the water, the soil, anything…

I think that all of this comes from some very old beliefs. It comes from what we think our relationship to the land is, and what we think God wants of us.

Remember, if you look at the King James Bible Genesis as God telling Adam and Eve to go out and subdue the land, to take it over, to bend it to their will… and that is pretty much what we have gone for…

But are we forgetting about another way of seeing things… what if it was less about ownership, and more about that old concept of “stewardship”

ABRAHAM

Our friend Abraham has always been known as the most faithful of all the Biblical heroes… you might remember he is the one that always believed God’s promises, that always did what God asked him…

The idea was that Abraham and Sarah wanted children… and as they got older and older they saw their dreams dying…

But if you remember, God told them not to worry, that they would be taken care of, that their descendants would be as numerous as the stars in heaven…

So, trusting, or perhaps even just hoping, they set out to follow God. And eventually, God led them to the land of Canaan… a land that later would be called the land of milk and honey… and told Abraham, that all of this was his… all of this would be for him, for his children, for his children’s children.

And he prospered. He became rich and powerful and fathered millions, maybe trillions. But here is the thing. Abraham knew that he had started with nothing, he knew that what he had was a gift… and he saw it that way. He saw it as something that God had given to him; and so, I imagine he approached things quite differently.

What would you do with the day if you got up and thought it was a gift? What would you do with the garden in your back yard if you truly believed that God had blessed you with fertile land? How would you look at the trees out the window if you thought God had painted them just for you?

WALK LIGHTLY ON THE EARTH

Have you ever been to a park or campground that had a sign that said “Take nothing but pictures… Leave nothing but footprints.”

I think that is the same sort of attitude I am talking about… I am talking about how as stewards, as caretakers, we are meant to walk lightly on the earth… another good native saying. It is not “ours” but we are a part of it, and as such we are supposed to love it, take care of it, enjoy it, use it, preserve it, and see it as a gift.

Here is another image for you to think of… when Moses went up the mountain and turned aside to see the burning bush, he heard a voice in his head that said, “take off your shoes, for this is holy ground.”

In that moment was the recognition that there was some sacred connection, something holy about the actual dirt beneath his feet, and he needed to be connected, to honour it, to embrace it…

I have always found our Matthew reading today to be one of the most powerful readings in the bible. I know not everyone sees it as the cornerstone of their living and faith… but for me, it is the best advice Jesus ever gave….

I am always worrying, and I am rarely trusting that things will work out right. I try to plan, I try to manipulate, I try to ensure that things work out… And in the midst of that, I am certainly not seeing life, or the world around me as a gift…

But what if I relaxed? What if I asked myself, what is it like to be a flower, what is it like to just trust that the world will have sunshine and rain, good times and bad?

The thing about the rest of creation, from the mosquito to the Blue Whale, is that they pretty much just live… they don’t try to manipulate the world around them, they do not use more than they need, they do not worry… they trust… and what they find is that they have enough.

Here is another interesting thing about the Abraham story… when the burden on the land became too much… he just said to Lot, take what you want, you choose first, I’ll be ok. That attitude was certainly part of what led to him having everything he needed…

POSSIBILITIES

David Suzuki had this program in the spring. He suggested that Canadians really need to get back to nature, and so we should try, no matter how difficult, to spend half an hour outside every day for ten weeks.

I don’t know if any of you did this, but it was quite amazing how it made me feel. I love being outside anyway, but there are certainly days when I do not take the time to enjoy it… by saying I “had” to be outside, I looked around more, I took more walks, I sat on my deck and enjoyed the breeze….

The scientific studies showed that if you spent a half an hour outside you would have lower blood pressure, you would have less stress, you would sleep better… it is almost a miracle cure….

But I think there is something deeper going on than just standing outside. If you are intentionally spending that time out of doors, you are starting to get back to the feelings Abraham had, you are getting closer to living the way Jesus was suggesting, you are seeing the world, and consequently, life, as a gift.

And when you do that, when you start to see it as a place of beauty and wonder, as a place that supports not just your, but countless life, when you start to understand that we are part of something bigger, you treat it differently.

In that moment, you start to walk lighter and you start to see why we should be preserving things for our grandchildren.

So what would it take? How can we really get back to feeling like Abraham and trusting God, how can we follow Jesus advice and let go of the worries? How can we be at peace in the world and see it all as a gift from God?

Maybe it begins by just experiencing… by being able to see it a little differently, by being captivated in the beauty, by just enjoying.

CONCLUSION

We know there is wisdom in the world out there, we know that there is beauty. But do we know that there is responsibility? I guess that is where we come down to after four weeks of listening for the voice of creation.

We are responsible to see it as gift, we are responsible to understand the world around us as fragile, we are responsible as stewards to take care of it all for God.

One of the first short stories I read in High School English was Ray Bradbury’s The Sound of Thunder it gave me an appreciation for the power and elegance of not only language, but of science fiction, which tries to warn us of how the world could be…

To over simplify the story, someone goes back in time and steps on a butterfly… when they get back to their time, everything has changed. One small act… one huge result.

Scientists have said pretty much the same thing… that a butterfly flapping their wings in china can change the weather in the Miramichi… we are all connected, we are all in a relationship, creation is one huge web of life where we find ourselves having the power of life and death.

So how are you going to see it?