This sermon was preached for Rogation Sunday, May 5, 2024 at St. Mark's, East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were: 1 John 5:1-6, John 15:9-17, and Psalm 98.
This is not the sermon for today, at least not all of it. I hope today’s sermon will be preached to you not by me, but by the St. Mark’s grounds - by all of God’s creation that surrounds this church on either side - both the gardens we’ve cultivated and the natural gardens that have been guided only by God’s hands. We will be going out into the St. Mark’s gardens toward the end of our service to bless them, but also to be blessed by them. If you choose not to join us for whatever reason, then I hope sometime today or this week, you will go out into a yard or park to listen and look for the rest of this sermon.
This is a quintessentially Anglican exercise. Episcopalians are guided in faith by three sources: scripture, tradition, and our personal experiences. Sometimes we talk about them like they are three separate legs of a stool, but the truth is that each source is always interacting with every other source. Scripture tells me how to understand my own experience. My life story informs the way I read Jesus’s. Where we are in the circle of the traditional church year absolutely influences what parts of the Bible we read and tells us how to pattern our lives with fasting and feasting and prayer - and how to relate to the seasons and other natural cycles in the world about us.
I had a seminary ethics professor who argued that we should add in “nonhuman voices” as a fourth source of our theology. What she meant by nonhuman voices was no less than all of creation - animals and plants, but also rocks and minerals and landscapes. She wanted her students to see and appreciate all they had to teach us about God. I have to admit all her insistence had me rolling my eyes a bit at the time and yet here I am, encouraging all of us to do exactly that: to throw nature into the conversation, to consider the natural world as equally capable of helping us understand God, love, and who and whose we are.
Today’s experimental liturgy is super Anglican for another reason. Rogation Sunday comes straight from the old Anglican custom, where, on the sixth Sunday of Easter, the clergy, church wardens, and choir would lead the parishioners in beating the bounds - that is, processing around the outer boundaries of the parish. They’d bless the land for a good harvest and pray for the protection of its inhabitants. Recall that in the English tradition, the parish had a much more geographic, regional understanding - a parish was the local village and surrounding farms served by a particular church and minister. So it could be a pretty long procession, and it was accompanied by much feasting and celebration. This feast day and its traditions have faded away - it didn’t survive the transition across the Atlantic from the old country. And yet customs like Rogation Sunday have much to offer us today. Rogation Sunday reacquaints us with our immediate surroundings, reminding us that not only are we dependent on the land, but that it is dependent on us for care and protection. We belong to one another, and we all belong to God.
Today’s scripture urges us even further down this path. This Sunday and last Sunday, we’ve heard Jesus speak about bearing fruit. Abide in my love and you will bear fruit, Jesus says to his disciples. I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last. Not just fruit for this moment, but fruit that will last. What if we can do more than pray for a good harvest for this year? To bear fruit that will last means that we must not just focus on this season’s harvest, but rather to take the long view, considering all the harvests to come.
More and more, agricultural scientists are coming to appreciate that the most ancient farming practices the world over, including native peoples’ methods of gardening, forestry, and irrigation - they all have rhythms of rest and renewal baked into them, giving the forest, soil, and sea time to rest and replenish. Time to abide. These techniques may not optimize production or maximize profits for this particular year, or even this generation, but overall and in the long-run, they allow each place to bring forth enough again and again - enough to sustain, enough to live. That is fruit that will last.
If we love the land, the land will love us back. It will take exchanging exhaustion, extraction, and exploitation for mutuality, reciprocity, and balance. Replacing urgent greed with careful stewardship. It will take relating to the natural world in completely unfamiliar ways: no longer viewing nature as resources to be used, but rather as part of our extended family, to be cared for as we are called to care for one another. Through this sort of a relationship of mutual honoring and appreciation, God’s creation emerges as a spiritual guide to learn from and even, if we allow it, a teacher of Christian theology.
When people tell me they find God in nature, or that the outdoors is their church, I think they often mean it in a more vague, wholistic, sacred presence sort of way. But I have come to find more and more, as so many saints and theologians have long before me, that creation has specific things to say about the triune mysteries at the heart of the Christian Gospel. The animals and plants, rocks and trees, are continuously singing out the good news of incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection - birth, death, and renewal - if only we stop to listen.
Who better to know the holiness of sacrificial love than the mother spider whose carcass becomes her babies first meal? This is my body broken for you. Who better to illuminate the mystery of resurrection than the mushroom that lies dormant for years only to spring up anew from lifeless, underground spores? Who better to teach us that abundant life will always win over violent death than the new species now emerging in the radioactive wastelands of Chernobyl nuclear disaster?
In his ministry, Jesus was constantly pointing to trees and vines, seeds and sprouts, grains and water as he spoke of the kingdom of God. Could it be that they point us back to Jesus, too, even now? Today, could the grasses and trees and gardens and stream of St. Mark’s own grounds have more profound things to say to you about what it means to abide in love than I ever can?
After all, it is the natural world that unceasingly preaches to us: healing is coming, though it may be healing beyond one's individual self. New life will prevail, though it may be long in coming. Nature who insists that all of this, even this pain you are in right now, it will bear fruit that lasts, though it may be years from now, though you may never live to see it bloom.
Today we will celebrate and bless our creation care team, our St. Mark’s leaders who have been learning and contemplating how St. Mark’s can deepen our relationship with God’s creation. As this ministry develops, it will challenge us to love the land we have been given to steward, and in turn to allow our grounds to love us right back.
You know, Creation Care, all this talk of flowers and trees, it’s not about seeking out an alternate Gospel that doesn’t make us feel uncomfortable. Not about avoiding talking about God or Jesus so we can focus on an easier topic - nature, everyone loves nature! Creation care is fundamentally about love, justice, and hope. It’s about respecting that “nonhuman voices” have something to add to the story of God’s saving grace. For us Episcopalians, it’s about taking seriously that sixth baptismal covenant question: Will you cherish the wondrous works of God, and protect the beauty and integrity of all creation?
Our Christian scripture, our Anglican tradition, and our life experiences together prepare us to see that all of God’s creation is built on the fundamental promise that new, transformed life can arise out of suffering, death, and even violence. The devastating flood is never the end of the story; neither is the cross. All of God’s creation is patterned for love and cyclical renewal - and teaches us how demanding and difficult that love can be. Caring for creation - and allowing creation to care for us - will require us to face up to some pretty unloving, yet deeply ingrained forces: our individual and collective urge to focus on our immediate survival, our need to dominate and control, our desire to conquer the world and bend it to human will rather than the will of God.
To all this Jesus says, abide. Abide in my love. Bear fruit that will last.
May we hear his words anew together in creation this morning. Amen.
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