Sermon preached at St. Thomas' Church, Bath, New York on Ash Wednesday, March 2, 2022: Psalm 51
Almighty and Everlasting God, you hate nothing you
have made . . .
This year during Lent
our emphasis as a community of faith is to explore our place in the
creation. At first glance it may seem
that this does not have anything directly to do with the traditional emphasis
of Lent and its traditional devotions. Isn’t Lent a time to explore our relationship
with God, using tools such as self-examination and confession, fasting, prayer,
and self-denial, and reading and meditating on God’s Word in the Bible?
What we are lifting up
is that our relationship with God and our relationship with the creation are
intertwined. We are saying that one of
the ways we sin against God is by sinning against creation. We are saying that our continued abuse of the
creation is a sin, and that our self-examination and repentance of this sin
against creation is urgent. We are
saying we must be clear-eyed about how God relates to the creation and how God
expects us to relate to the creation. We
are saying that the work of conversion has not only a vertical aspect but a
horizontal one as well.
Our spirituality must deepen
its earthy aspect. For too long we have
assumed that the work of religion, of spirituality, was about getting right
with God, ensuring our salvation, ending with eternal life in the presence of
God. We thought of the earth as a gift, yes, but a temporary one, one given for
our benefit while we live on it, to use as we need to use it, but ultimately to
escape from, to leave behind.
We cannot afford to
believe this way any longer. We need to
re-examine our assumptions, to re-learn what the Bible, for instance, has to
say about the creation and our relationship to it, about the future of creation
and its participation in eternity. What
are the ramifications, for example, of the vision of the last two chapters of
the Bible, from the Book of Revelation, a vision of eternity that involves “a
new heaven and a new earth?”
In one of his first
public pronouncements after becoming Pope, Francis wrote,
Everything is related, and we human beings are united
as brothers and sisters on a wonderful pilgrimage, woven together by the love
God has for each . . . and which also unites us in fond affection with brother
sun, sister moon, brother river and mother earth. (Laudato Si, 2015)
Lent has always been
about the cultivation of the virtue of humility. Humility—that word that itself comes from the
humus, the Latin word for “earth.”
To hold up humility is why on Ash Wednesday we take a good long look at
our mortality. “Remember that you are
dust, and to dust you shall return.” To
some this seems like a bizarre act. Why come to church to be reminded that you
are going to die? To seemingly embrace, if not celebrate, that grim truth?
We do it because without
the remembrance that we will one day die, we forget how much a part of creation
that we are. And this amnesia leads us
not to humility but to arrogance. We forget that we are not God. We forget that
we are responsible and accountable. We forget that our human dignity is part of
a web not only of humanity, past present and yet to come, but a web of
creation. We forget . . . forget . .
.forget . . . and the world around us pays the price. And the last thing we forget is that when
others—including the creation—pays the price, eventually the price comes back
upon our own heads.
We are not saying
do not bother with your relationship with God during this Lent. Quite the opposite. Do work on your relationship with God
this Lent. Do the work of conversion. But, pay attention to the horizontal work
of conversion. Examine your relationship with God through your relationship
with God's good creation. Examine the
ways you participate in human sin against the creation. Find new ways to participate in the renewal
of the earth and its creatures. Embrace
the humility without which the creation around us will continue its precipitous
slip into crisis.
Have the creation and
your place in it at the front of your mind and spirit when you say with Psalm
51, “Create in me a new heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”
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