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ELEMENTAL CHRISTIANITY -- EARTH As the culture around us begins to pay more attention to spiritual matters, I have tried to pay attention to what's going on. If you see me in a bookstore, you are as likely to find me in the New Age section as the Religion section because it is important to me to know and understand the spiritual climate of the world around me. As I have done this, one of the things I have noticed is that almost all spiritualities... from Native American to Wicca to Feng Shui to the monsters and spells in the bestselling computer games Baldur's Gate and Diablo all have a strong emphasis on the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. They are both symbols and realities that resonate with us at a very basic level, even for those who don't claim to be spiritual at all. When I thought about that, I realized that in the Christian faith it is no different. Those primary symbols are strong ones for us as well, and across the four of them, they represent both the completeness and the balance of the Gospel. So...for the month of May....we will focus on a different one of those elements and what they mean for Christian faith. For this week, we go to the beginning of life as we know it...to the mother of us all...to the Earth. Mother Earth is not just a quaint phrase or solely a Native American term. In our own Scripture, God forms us in the womb of the earth. We are made from the dust of the ground by the Hand of God. This body that we seem to both love and hate is earth itself. Our bodies are part of the created order and we remind ourselves of that every Ash Wednesday when we smear ashes on our foreheads and say "dust you are and to dust you shall return." We are mortal, we are creatures. We are made from the earth and in a very real sense are one with it. What is done to the earth is done to us and the salvation of the earth is tied into our salvation. No, that's not New Age ideas. That's Paul in Romans 8:19-22: "The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time." Basic Christian theology begins with the Earth, and when we desecrate the Earth..when we defile and pollute and ravage, we have sinned. We have harmed ourselves. We have violated our own mother. Until we understand that our bodies are the very stuff of the Earth we walk on, we will never really grasp the Gospel of Jesus Christ. To understand who God is and what God has done, we must first understand who we are. We are earth. When we truly understand that half sentence in Genesis 2:7 that says "the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground" then the second half of that sentence will almost knock you off your feet. "The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." What is life? Life is the joining of Earth and Air...flesh and spirit...our bodies and God's breath. The Christian term for what happens to Adam is "inspiration" from the Latin in spire...the entering of spirit. The Christian term for what happens to the breath of God in this passage is "incarnation" from the Latin in carne...becoming flesh. From the very beginning, God has had an intimate connection with the earthly, the human. God did not create us as toys for amusement, but as beings to be joined with the divine in loving relationship. Our bodies are earth, but our life comes from God's own breath...the two are joined from the beginning. And that is why we should not be
surprised later when God does this more directly. The Gospel of John tells us
the creation story again, reminding us that in Genesis, God created the world
through Word. God said "Let there be light, and there was light."
Again and again God said...and there was. John equates that Word which speaks
the will of God as Jesus, and pulls the Creation story right on through the
entire history of That event...the birth of Jesus...we call the Incarnation with a capital "I." What is hinted at in Adam is made fully manifest in Jesus. Paul saw this also and devotes an entire chapter of Romans to comparing Adam and Jesus, calling Jesus the second Adam. Both John and Paul want to be sure that we understand that God dwelling in human flesh is not a bizarre new idea. That has been God's tendency from creation onward. God takes what is earthly and mortal and human and fills it with light and with spirit and with truth. It is the two things together that make life. In Adam it is an earthly body filled with the breath of God. In Jesus, it is God actually becoming a human being. When we talk about Jesus being fully human and fully divine, that is what we are trying to get at. God really became human and lived our life and died a painful human death. He really was tempted to sin and he really managed to avoid it, despite his human limitations. The story of Jesus is not one of spirit possession. Incarnation is a very different thing. While remaining God, God becomes human, dies human, is raised from the dead human and ascends back into heaven with a human body. The difference can be seen in an old Hindu story about the god Vishnu. One day Vishnu is looking down from heaven and sees an old woman being forced to carry heavy loads of wood for a taskmaster. The taskmaster is harsh and beats her if she does not go fast enough or carry enough wood. Vishnu feels sorry for the woman, sees the injustice of the situation and decides to give her a break. So he fashions himself to look like the woman and takes her place carrying wood. It goes OK for awhile, because Vishnu is fresh and has a lot of energy. But in time, he grows tired and slows down. When he does, the taskmaster is angry and he feels the lash of the whip and the demands of the taskmaster. With the human limitations he has taken on, Vishnu cannot do more than this body can handle. He is beaten more. Finally he says in disgust..."I don't have to take this...I'm a god, not a mortal," and he heads back to his place in heaven and sends the old woman back to work. The good news of the Gospel is that Jesus never left. He did not come here to give us a break for a little while. Vishnu adopted human flesh temporarily and left when the going got rough. God made a commitment. God became human and lived it out...through the whips, through the tiredness, through the Cross. He didn't show up to give us a break for a time. He came to give us life forever. Even though what was true for Vishnu was true for Jesus...He was God...He didn't have to accept treatment like that...He loved us so much that he stayed. He didn't hand us back over to the taskmaster. He finished the task for us, so that we could live. The element of Earth reminds us that God is God and we are not. God is spirit, we are earth. But God did not look down from heaven and say "eeewww...earth...yuk." God looked at what had been created and saw that it was good. And God reached down and mouth-to-mouth breathed life into Adam. Grief and heartache followed. We polluted the earth, we polluted ourselves, we violated each other and God came dangerously close to throwing the whole messy thing on the trash heap. But somewhere along the line, God remembered that first kiss. God remembered that from the day Adam stood up and named the duck-billed platypus, that God's destiny had been tied up with ours. So...rather than destroy us completely, God jumped in with both feet and literally became us. God didn't cease to be God, but in Jesus God took on human flesh in a way that had been hinted at in God's past behavior, but had never been done so completely before. And that is why I think Jesus chose symbols of earth as the primary symbols for himself. "This is my body," He said as he held up a loaf of bread. Bread...made from grain, which grows from the earth. "This is my blood," He said as he held up a goblet of wine. Wine...made from grapes, which grow from the earth. "I am earth," he was saying. I have a body of the earth just as you do...grain and grapes and body and blood and it all comes from the dirt. And in these next few days, I will prove to you the legend of Adam...that although we have these bodies that can be beaten and broken and that return to dust, God has decided that such earth is good and beautiful and no matter how polluted it has become, that it is worth cleaning up and saving. "I am here," says God. I
have become the grain and the grapes, the body and the blood, and when I am
broken and placed back into the dust of the earth, I will create it all
again...not from the top down, this time, but from the bottom up. Up from the
grave he arose...the new Adam, the new creation, the first into the Our sermon meditation time and our prayer time will be blended this morning, and I have asked Barb to play through the entire time. As she plays, I invite you to prepare your hearts for our meal of earth...of grain and grapes, of body and blood, of death and life. You may want to come and pray at the rail, you may want to pray where you are, you may just want to sit and think or sit and listen. But use this time to think about the Earth your mother and God your father and how the joining of the two has produced you. You may want to confess to God the ways you have polluted either the earth around you or the earth within you and ask for help in living differently. You may want to make a commitment to bind your life to God, just as God has bound God's life to you in Jesus. You may want to offer thanksgiving for the events, people, and things of earth or you may want to implore God's help and healing for family, friends or world. There may be something else that is stirring in your soul that you need to give to God before any more time goes by. God is here. Then, after we have offered our lives and our gifts to God, we will come and accept God's gift to us in these symbols of the earthly body of Christ, taking Jesus body into our own so that we, too, become the Body of Christ. Enter the mystery of life and pray. Amen. (c) 2001, Anne Robertson Return to AnneRobertson.com |