Today, we are celebrating the beauty of God’s Creation. Our scripture reading today is the very first paragraph of the Bible, in which we hear the beautiful story of Creation.
In it, we hear that God created the land and the sea and proclaimed, “It is good!” God created the sky and the stars and proclaimed, “It is good!” God created the birds of the air and the fish of the sea and proclaimed, “It is good!” God created the flora and the fauna and proclaimed, “It is good.”
As God creates each thing, God says that it is good.
Did you know that “Good” and “God” are the same word? Our English word “good” derives from an Old German word for God. And, the Bible itself tells us (in Psalm 100) that GOD IS GOOD!
You may remember the story of Moses and the Burning Bush. In it, Moses asks God, “What is your name?” And God responds, “I am that I am” is my name.
“I am that I am.” That is God’s name. That is who God is.
The contemporary spiritual writer and author, James Twyman (in his book, The Moses Code) suggests there was a comma in there. That it’s “I am that (comma) I AM.”
That God looked at the flower and said: “I am that, I am.” That God looked at the ocean and said, “I am that, I am.” That God looked at YOU and said, “I am that, I am.”
God’s Presence, God’s DNA is in you and in all of Creation. So, why are we still looking for God “up there”?
In Luke 17:21, Jesus says, “The Kingdom of God is not up there or out there.” He says, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” It is here and now. With us and within us.
One of my favorite recent books on this subject is entitled Grounded by the Progressive Christian writer, Diana Butler Bass. In her book, she writes that we in the Christian church have been taught for centuries now that there is this 3-tiered vertical Universe: that the devil’s down below, we’re in the middle, and God’s way up there.
And, we’ve been taught that the purpose of religion – the purpose of our faith – is to make sure we get up there, and not go down there.
The subtitle of her book is Finding God IN the World: A Spiritual Revolution. Bass says we need a spiritual revolution in order to find God. We need to shift our perspective from vertical to horizontal.
In her book, Bass writes: “Christianity has imprinted a certain theological template: that God exists far off from the world. Most American churches teach some form of the idea that God exists in holy isolation, and that we, God’s children, are utterly unworthy to stand before the Divine Presence. The role of religion, therefore, is to act as a holy elevator between God above and those muddling around down below in the world. Because of this, church has become a struggle for me. I have found it increasingly difficult to sing hymns that celebrate a hierarchical heavenly realm, to recite creeds that feel disconnected from life, and to find myself confined to a hard pew in a building with no clear windows to the world outside. This has not happened because I am angry at the church or God. Rather, it has happened because I was moving around in the world and began to realize how beautifully God was everywhere: in nature and in my neighborhood, in considering the stars. It took me five decades to figure it out, but I finally understood. The church is not the only sacred space; the world is profoundly sacred as well. And thus I fell into a gap – the theological ravine between a church still proclaiming conventional theism with its three-tiered universe and the spiritual revolution of God-with-us.”
That’s the spiritual revolution she’s calling us to: Stop seeing God “up there,” and start seeing God “right here.”
God is not separate from us. God is not distant from us. If we are to grow spiritually, we must shift from the “Distant God” of conventional religion and experience an intimate sense of the sacred that is within us and within all of Creation.
The Christian author, Richard Rohr, writes: “We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.”
We’re already in the presence of God! We just need to open our eyes and to shift our perspective from vertical to horizontal.
God is here! God is in the soil, the water, the trees! God is in everything!
We just celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day this week. Our Native ancestors (who inhabited this land before we did) deeply understood the connection between the Creator and Creation.
Sadly, however, most Christians in America today show very little concern when it comes to caring for the environment. In a recent Pew survey, only 6% of Christians say that say that their faith influences whether they think there should be stronger laws protecting the environment.
I think it’s because many Christians don’t consider this Earth to be their home. They consider Heaven – up there – to be their home. And many Christian think that since God gave us dominion over the earth (as we hear in the Creation Story from Genesis) that that means we can use up all of the Earth’s resources. But the word “dominion” doesn’t mean to “dominate” but to “care for.”
In the Book of Genesis, God is calling us to be good care-takers (good stewards) of God’s creation. The word “steward” means “guardian.” God is calling us to be “guardians of the garden,” of this beautiful Eden, this beautiful Paradise, which God has entrusted to our care.
So, we, as people of faith, cannot turn a blind eye to things like air pollution, water pollution, animal abuse, and climate change. That’s why we, in the United Church of Christ, see caring for the environment as a justice issue, because we understand that when we hurt the environment, we are hurting God. When we ignore the cries of Creation, we’re ignoring the cries of the Creator.
And, so, on this Creation Sunday, let us not only celebrate the beauty of God’s Creation, but let us also recommit ourselves to being good stewards of God’s Creation. And may we begin to shift our prospective from God “up there” to God “right here.”
For as the Bible says: “The Earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” and “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”