A Sermon for the 7th Sunday after Pentecost
I’m tired. I’m really tired, and not just because of the pandemic. The last couple of nights I have stayed up really late trying to find the comet. It only comes around once every 7,000 years, so this is kind of my chance. The first night I went all around Eugene trying to find it, but there’s way too much light. There was one moment I thought maybe that’s it, but no, and I didn’t have a camera with me. The next night I went out again. This time I decided to get farther away from the light and went out of town. I got a picture, and here it is: (photo displayed). It’s rather hard to see. It is faint because there is still a lot of light around. I hope you get a chance to get out even farther away from the light and try to see something like this (another photo displayed) that was taken by Carl, our own remarkable photographer from the Parish. He took this photo of the comet over Mt. Washington.
For centuries, for millennia, people have been looking at nature, looking at the creation and being inspired by it. Many people have described the feeling that in seeing something of the creation they are seeing something of the creator. In seeing the creation and understanding how it works they are seeing how God works. The early scientists all understood themselves as doing holy work, of trying to understand the creator better by understanding the creation better. It’s an ancient concept. We go back to the book of Amos that has the beautiful line “seek the one who made the Pleiades and Orion.” The constellations are remarkable, the stars are remarkable and behind that creation is a creator who made them. We have been looking to the heavens, we have been looking to creation in order to see the creator. That is good, and that is holy work.
Creation seems like a minor theme in Scripture. In terms of ink on the page, it doesn’t come up all that often. And yet is not all that minor when we think of where it is placed. It is there at the very beginning, the first few chapters of the very first book Genesis, and in the last book of Revelation. They are both about creation. All of Scripture is bookended by creation. First the original creation, and then the re-creation, the new creation in the new heaven, the new earth, the new Jerusalem. In everything in between, even though there is not a lot of ink spent on it, this theme keeps popping up, especially in the Psalms, the Book of Job, Jesus talks about creation: “if you don’t cry out, these stones will cry out.” Creation is there, popping up from time to time. But it is prominent because of its placement at the very beginning and the very end. Everything in between can be understood as commentary on that creation.
That is where we find ourselves today in the Epistle, another time when creation pops up. St. Paul is talking about creation groaning in pain. Creation has been groaning in pain since the beginning, St. Paul says, because creation is not complete. Creation is not complete because we have turned away from it. Creation is not complete because of sin, because of the ways we have rejected the Good News of creation. Creation is groaning in pain waiting for us to be restored back to creation, to be restored back to the creator. Created order is one in which creation and creator are in harmony with each other. Paul is saying creation is groaning in pain, waiting for us to get back to that moment. Paul is speaking from that position between the creations, between the original creation and the creation of the new heaven and the new earth. We are still in that moment of being in between the creation that has already happened and the not yet, the new creation that hasn’t happened. We find ourselves in between, where creation groans, waiting for us to be restored to this vision that God has for creation, one of wholeness, one of completeness, one of being in harmony with each other, with all of creation, and with God the creator.
This past week was Vacation Bible Camp, and our theme this year was God’s Dream. We studied a book called God’s Dream by Desmond Tutu, and in this book Tutu talks about God’s dream for this world being a world in which we love each other, we care for each other, we share with one another, are good to each other. The book ends by saying that every time we do those good acts of loving and caring and sharing, we make God smile like a rainbow. It is a beautiful image for children, but it is a beautiful image for all of us, this idea of God’s dream and that we are invited to be a part of that dream.
It’s the same idea that Paul is getting at in the Epistle, where there is a dream of what God created and this completeness. There is a beautiful image in Desmond Tutu’s book of all the kids in a heart shape. There is a missing spot that has kids rushing to it. The heart is incomplete until we all join into it. We are invited into this work of restoring creation, of restoring the way, the vision, the dream that God has for the world.
During Vacation Bible Camp we studied various components of it: the loving, the sharing, the community, and we asked the kids what they thought God’s dream was for this world. One of the kids said restoration. His family is involved in restoration work of rivers and forests, the kind of work our Faith Fund with the McKenzie River Trust is involved in, trying to restore creation to the way it should be, to work better, to be healthier, to be healed from the damage we have done to it. When he said restoration, I thought it was brilliant because the vision that God has is not just for us, but for all of creation, and it is the work of restoration. Restoring creation, healing creation from all the damage we have done to it. But also restoring ourselves to a right relationship with it, and a right relationship with God, the creator, the one who made the Pleiades and Orion, the one who made this comet Neowise passing by right now, the one we get a glimpse of every time that we stop and appreciate the creation that God the creator made, the creation that God the creator called good. God the creator invites us into that very creative work, invites us into the dream.
AMEN
