This sermon opened with a cluster of readings, by various members of the community. These readings, except for the Bible text, were sourced from the book 'Praying for the Dawn', by the Iona Community.

 

The earth is at the same time mother,

she is mother of all that is natural,

mother of all that is human.

 

She is mother of all,

for contained in her are the seeds of all.

 

The earth of humankind contains all moistness

all verdancy,

all germinating power.

 

It is in so many ways fruitful.

 

All creation comes from it

yet it forms not only the basic raw material for humankind

but also the substance of the incarnation of God’s Son.

 

Hildegard of Bingen

 

 

I saw that God was everything that is good

and encouraging.

 

God is our clothing

that wraps, clasps and encloses us

so as never to leave us.

 

God showed me in my palm

a little thing round as a ball

about the size of a hazelnut.

 

I looked at it with the eye of my understanding

and asked myself:

‘What is this thing?’

and I was answered: ‘It is everything that is created.’

 

I wondered how it could survive since it seemed so little

it could suddenly disintegrate into nothing.

 

The answer came: ‘It endures and ever will endure,

because God loves it.’

 

And so everything has being because of God’s love.

 

Julian of Norwich

 

 

Apprehend God in all things,

for God is in all things.

 

Every single creature is full of God

and is a book about God.

 

Every creature is a word of God.

 

If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature -

even a caterpillar -

I would never have to prepare a sermon.

So full of God

is every creature.

 

Meister Eckhart

 

This we know

The earth does not belong to people

people belong to the earth.

 

This we know

All things are connected.

Whatever befalls the earth

befalls the children of the earth.

 

This we know

If we continue to contaminate our own bed

one night we will suffocate in our own waste.

 

People are strands in the web of life

Whatever we do to the web

we do to others

we do to ourselves.

 

Testimony of Chief Seattle (adapted)

 

 

He is the image of the invisible God,

the firstborn of all creation;

for in him all things in heaven and earth were created

things visible and invisible,

whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers -

all things have been created through him and for him.

 

He himself is before all things,

and in him all things hold together.

 

Colossians 1.15-17

 

 

Hear the wisdom of our mystic forbears:

 

‘Everything that is created endures and ever will endure because God loves it.’

‘Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things.’

‘Whatever we do to the web, we do to others, we do to ourselves.’

‘For in him all things in heaven and earth were created...in him all things hold together.’

‘The earth...forms the substance of the incarnation of God’s Son.’

 

I am hearing, in these lines, a consistent story about God's relationship to this world that we live in, and our own place in that world.

 

And this is a story that is quite different from the way many of us have been taught to understand God, creation, and reality.

 

What many of us have assumed is that all of life occupies its own category, its own separate place in the cosmos. And that God is set apart from all of that. Many of us believe in some part of our brains that a God 'out there' set all life in motion and then stepped back. We may believe that God occasionally, or often 'reaches in' and intervenes. Or we may not. Either way, our beliefs on God's intervention still assume a God essentially separate from the universe. The flow on effect from this primary separated-ness is a whole host of other separations. I am separate from you. The different parts of my body and mind are separate from each other. We in New Zealand are separate from the people who live in other countries. I am separate from the earth, and the non-human creatures who live in the earth. The earth is separate from the ocean, which is separate from the sky.

 

What the mystics of the Christian tradition have always known, and what we in the church and in wider scientific exploration are beginning to understand, is that this separateness is not reality. The deeper reality is connection.

 

The readings we heard today have different names for this connection. Hildegard calls it the mother earth, Julian calls it God's love. Chief Seattle calls it a web in which we are all strands. Meister Eckhart apprehends it as presence – God in all things. The Apostle Paul calls it Christ – all things holding together 'in him'.

 

What these views share is the idea that while God is Creator, while God is beyond all that we know of as 'our earth' or 'the universe', everything that exists has its being within God and manifests God, and is sustained in every moment by the personal attention and love of God. The flow on effect of this way of seeing is unity, rather than separateness. I belong to you, and you to me. My body and mind are an organic, communicating whole. I share humanity and God's image with people in Australia, Africa, Asia and America. I am of the earth, born from the same elements as the earth, and when it suffers I also suffer. Everything interpenetrates. The identities of people, animals and things do not reside within the bounds of their visible edges, but in the spaces between – in relationship, and in invisible bonds of care or neglect, love or hostility.

 

All of which, if you accept it, means that how we live matters much more than we may have assumed. Not because there's a big judge in the sky watching us and calling us to a final reckoning. But because all that exists does so in relationship to all else that exists. And so what I choose affects not only me, but the world around me. And things that I do not choose and do not want will still happen, and they will affect me for good or for ill.

 

While this is a huge responsibility, there is also hope and trust. Not just hope beyond this life or beyond this world, but hope in God's benevolence in this life. And not the benevolence of a God who 'reaches in' from time to time to sort things out, but a God who is present at all times to all situations, embracing all things - even situations of great sorrow or evil, with a love that makes life possible. If everything has being because of God's love, then we can trust that love is a bigger story in the universe than hate. Love is the animating force.

 

God has given us a glimpse of this truth. The Cosmic Christ 'in whom all things were created and hold together' has another identity – that of Jesus of Nazareth. The image of the invisible God. As Christians we affirm that God is not only present to all things and able to be apprehended in all things. But also that God,acting in love and for love, has entered into the physical and mental constraints of creaturehood. The Incarnation is an affirmation that this fleshy, messy, limited life we have as humans is something that God has shared with us, by choosing to live a human life. God's love does not only animate life in some ethereal sense, but in a very practical, physical sense. God's love took on skin and bone and flesh and touch and pain. God, who makes the earth, chose to be made out of the earth, and for a time, dwelled among us. Therefore our human life and our human physicality is not something to be spurned or transcended or humiliated or repressed. God has set out for us a pathway for our human lives to be transformed and unified with God's own life. And this is a pathway that we step onto when we unite our lives with Christ, and seek to be 'in Christ', body, mind and spirit.

 

How do we access all this – what does it look like in practice? I confess that what I understand to be the answer to that question is the thing I struggle the most to do and be in my own life.

I believe that we participate in the connectedness of all things as we come closer to each other, and closer to the earth. Recent Celtic Christian writers particularly love the disciple John. They see him as the one who leaned against Jesus at the dinner table, listening to the heartbeat of Christ. This leaning, this trusting, loving, closeness, gave him access to the loving heart of Christ – he became known as the 'disciple Jesus loved,' and he is the one who went on to say 'God is love'. The heartbeat of Christ that John heard, is also the heartbeat that pulses through all of creation, and gives each of us our life. As we lean in toward one another, and lean into the earth, we can begin to hear this beat, and know ourselves part of it, and held by it.

 

This means deliberately choosing to be open to one another, listening to the truths being spoken and hidden by our words and our body language and our conversational strategies. It means becoming aware of the subtle and not so subtle ways that we keep one another at a distance physically and emotionally. It means taking the risk of being vulnerable. It means noticing when we are braced, tense, and intent on putting up a barrier, and being willing to take that barrier away piece by piece even at cost to ourselves. As God comes near to us in Christ, and takes even death into God's experience, so we need to move toward one another, even if that means a death to our self-image, or our illusion of control over ourselves and the situations we find ourselves in. This is not easy, and I hope it goes without saying that for some of us, protecting our boundaries is new learning and means that we have to monitor our levels of openness, or disclosure, to keep ourselves safe. But for someone like myself, the reality is that distance is more of a habit than anything else. If it seems to you like I'm keeping you at arms length, that's probably because I am. And it's not about you. But my best self wants something different from that.

 

In relation to this earth of ours, leaning into the earth means not buying into the human quest that uses our science and technology to bypass the reality of our physical, earthy lives. It means acknowledging ourselves as creatures alongside other creatures, dependent on the earth for our survival, and for our wellbeing. It means not being hell-bent on transcending our animal selves, in the pursuit of a kind of spiritualised, disembodied existence. It means choosing not to kill off ecosystems and species in our desire for physical comfort and luxury, instead acknowledging the consequences of our consumer and political choices on the plants and animals and molecular structures with whom we share the web of life. Most of us find it hard to feel this sense of connectedness as an inner conviction, rather than something we agree to on an intellectual level. Spending time in the company of those who live close to the earth and who are long practiced at calling the earth their mother is one way that we might come to feel this sense of connection from the inside out. I have a hunch that the future for the church includes deliberately and humbly seeking the wisdom of indigenous peoples.

 

‘Everything that is created endures and ever will endure because God loves it.’

‘Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things.’

‘Whatever we do to the web, we do to others, we do to ourselves.’

‘For in him all things in heaven and earth were created...in him all things hold together.’

‘The earth...forms the substance of the incarnation of God’s Son.’

 

Let us lean into each other. Let us lean into the earth. Let us hear and feel the heartbeat of God.

Amen.