Sixth Sunday of Easter

Today is Rogation Sunday, always the sixth Sunday of Easter, in which we pray for the putting in of the seed for this year's crops. It's at the other end of the cycle from Thanksgiving – just as we say thanks for the harvest after it's in, before it comes we pray for God's blessing on the earth and on our work to make it, as Genesis says, 'bring forth' the fruits that sustain us. Since ancient times the church has felt the need to pray thus, for the earth and for our stewardship - our management – of it, because this 'bringing forth' is a precarious business.

Even in modern times, with all that we know about how our earth works, things are still precarious. 'Mother' Nature is a cruel and feckless parent to us all. There is still an enormous amount that we don’t know. About climate change, for instance – we know it's happening, but we don’t know why. We know that we're responsible for some of it, but we don't know how much, or whether what we can do to change our own behavior will stop it or slow it down. (And, as one of you pointed out to me not long ago, that issue, like so many others, isn't only a matter of knowledge; it's also a matter of politics: with all the knowledge in the world, we still have to make decisions about what to do with our knowledge, and those decisions always depend on political and financial realities as much as scientific ones.) Harvests can fail, even in this age with so many technological aids to help things grow. We have no idea how long we can keep getting better harvests from the seeds we have genetically modified – we haven't been at that long enough to tell what disasters could befall us because of it. And we know all too well how many things can go wrong with the plants we've been working with for thousands of years. And even when the harvest doesn’t fail, it can be diverted soemewhere else – like to make fuels for our cars – so that there is still shortfall and even famine in our world.

And so there remains for us the need to pray, the need to be humble in our ignorance and vulnerability, the need to be grateful for what we have and what we might have. Human beings have always sensed that – all 'natural' religion is nature-religion, after all; and in these modern days we have things like Earth Day, reminding us of our dependence on the machinery of this fragile planet. Earth Day, by the way, although an entirely secular event, does always fall right around this Sunday in the spring, and the church can take credit, I think, for the sensibility behind it. Even in the long history of Judaism's and Christianity's war with the nature-religions, the church hasn't always just objected to their observances and rites – sometimes we baptise them and use them for our own purposes (like Christmas); and Earth Day is one of those cases.

What we need is to find our proper place in the economy of the earth, the planting and harvest, the natural processes on which our life depends, but which we still don’t understand fully. Genesis tells us two somewhat contradictory things about that place – the first account makes clear that we are just a part of Creation: we don't get a separate day all to ourselves; we're just made right along with all the other animals. This is corroborated more with every passing age, the latest information on the subject being that we share something like 90% of our DNA with fruit-flies, for heaven's sake. But the second Creation story says that we are given 'dominion' – lordship – over the rest of Creation; we get to call the shots. It's pretty clear from the context of that story, however, that 'lordship' doesn’t mean 'lording it over' the rest of the creatures. (We've done that; we're still doing it in some cases, and look where it's gotten us….) Rather, we're supposed to be 'lords' the way the Lord is – by taking care of it, tending and keeping it, like the garden of Eden.

In fact, our place in Creation only becomes clear when we get clear about God's place as the Lord of us and all things. We are creatures like all the others, but we are, as far as we know, the only creatures who worship. We can't say any more that the other animals don't think, don’t feel, even that they don't plan – but as far as we know, we're still the only part of Creation that recognises, and seeks a con-nection with, a power beyond Creation. We've been doing that a long time – the earliest artifacts we have of human history are representations of what we take to be gods, goddesses, something more than we are, outsisde of us and the world at large. When St. Paul arrives in Athens 2000 years ago, he finds a center of learning, to be sure, but also a center of worship, worship of gods created in our image, just as greedy, selfish and capricious as we are, just as demanding, just as irrational. And so when he looks around and says to the Athenians, 'I see you are very religious…'., I don’t think we're supposed to take that as necessarily a compliment (any more than it would be today, knowing what we know about the power of religion to hurt, destroy and kill). There are altars everywhere built to honor gods Paul despises (with good reason) – but he finds one opening in which to insert some truth, an opening we would do well to take note of.

Somewhere he finds an altar labeled 'to an unknown god' – and that's all he needs, just one little bit of ignorance for truth to creep into. The unknown is the place where revelation can happen. The people who are so dead sure of what they know have no room to learn anything; it's the ones who say 'I don’t know' whom God cherishes, because what they don’t know is the place where God can work. It's still a great idea for evangelism: find the opening in people's certainties, and just let the truth slither in. The message is simple, after all: you have a sense that there's something missing; I can supply that, the truth you have been groping toward all along but haven't got to yet. The message is twofold: truth and judgment. Here's how things are and how they got to be that way: God made all of us, the God of Israel, who is not like your gods, made in your image; he is the one is whose image you are made, as even your own poets have suspected. He made us for himself and for righteousness – it's what he requires of you (remember that the nature-gods didn't require anything of anybody except the stroking and petting and feeding their rituals included – forget any kind of moral demands; they didn't expect people to be any more decent than they were themselves). There is a standard of judgment – his name is Jesus of Nazareth – and he is going to be both judge and what you are judged against. He expects you to live up to that standard, not down to some lowest common human denominator.

Rogationtide is a good time to reflect on that difference between God and 'natural' religion. True religion brings us into connection with the true God, and enables us to find our true place in Creation. True religion affirms that we are part of the natural world, and, like it, need to be always green and growing – keeping our minds open and active, our souls nourished, our bodies fit and strong (insofar as we can do that), our hearts turned (so to say) 'up' to the light of Christ, even as our roots grow down and down more deeply into relationship with him. True religion turns us – and this is what the nature-religions can't reveal and challenge us with – turns us toward what is beyond the natural world, the God in whose image we are made to care for Creation – 'this fragile earth, our island home', the plants and animals who share its life with us, its beauty and productiveness, as well as each other. It's a paradox: the more we know of the intricacy and wonder of Creation, the more we are drawn to praise and thank and adore the God who made it all and made us out of the dust of stars; and the more we live in relationship to this God beyond Creation, the more we understand and seek to obey his command to live within it as his agents, his stewards, and care for it as he would do himself. In this Rogationtide, let us give thanks for his blessings upon this earth, and for those who work so hard to bring forth our sustenance from it; and let us pray for grace to understand with truth and act with justice as we rejoice in its bounty.