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Foundry United Rev. |
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Hope…Even for the Past “Creation Waits with Eager Longing” Earth Day Sunday, April 22, 2007 |
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Romans 18: 18-25
Rev. |
It has been a difficult week. I would like us to take a
moment this morning to pray together “A Prayer for Virginia Tech.” It is a
prayer written by the Rev. Joseph P. Monahan, pastor of Whenever I pray the words “God of love,” your response
is “heal us.” God of love, heal
us. Lord, we don't have words for what we've seen. There are
no words. There are only tears… God of love, heal
us. … tears for young lives lost, for promising lives cut
off, for loved ones whom we can hold no more. God of love, heal
us. A place we cherish, a quiet place of study, a place
filled with memories of friendships and laughter and learning has been torn
apart by gunshots and screams. God of love, heal
us. We heard, but we did not believe. We tried to
comprehend, but we could not. And now we ache… God of love, heal
us. … we ache with sorrow for eyes that witnessed what no
human eye should ever witness, for dinner tables with empty chairs, for lives
that took decades to grow but only seconds to extinguish. God of love, heal
us. We ache with fear for our own children, for the
knowledge that a decision to kill, a decision made in an instant, can never
be taken back, can never be undone. God of love, heal
us. And we ache with the emptiness that reverberates around
the drillfield, through every corner of campus, because we hear the voices of
our brothers and sisters no more. God of love, heal
us. God of love, God of blessing, God of life eternal, God
of life all-powerful, God of life beyond all words, beyond all hurts, beyond
all pain… …God of love, heal
us. Amen.[i] It has
been a difficult week. There
is another prayer about Virginia Tech on the United Methodist Board of
Discipleship website that touched me. It is written by Safiyah Fosua and entitled “Interrupted
Lives.” It says: Lord, I
cannot help but wonder I
cannot help but wonder Almighty
God, It has
been a difficult week. The Virginia Tech tragedy can have two possible and
different impacts on our lives. It can cause us to become more afraid of one
another or it can move us to be more determined to reach out in caring ways
to those who suffer from pain and despair. We decide. It has
been a difficult week. Last evening we held a memorial service here for a
40-year old Family
and friends told stories and celebrated his life. I hadn’t known Jeff,
although I have had the opportunity to spend some time with his partner Ran. Our
Scripture last evening, chosen by Jeff’s parents, was the later part of the 8th
chapter of Romans which says that nothing can separate us from the love of
God. What I talked about last evening was that depression can not separate us
from the love of God. I talked about how sometimes the church has tried to
separate some people from the love of God; nothing can separate us from the
love of God. Even though we know depression is a disease, you couldn’t help
but wonder if the churches’ attempt to separate Jeff and his friends from the
love of God had separated him from a resource that could have helped him in
the midst of his depression. The
prayer again: “I
cannot help but wonder It has
been a difficult week. And
today is Earth Day. Our theme for Eastertide – the 50 days of Easter – this
year is hope. Anyone who has seen An
Inconvenient Truth or paid attention to the growing scientific consensus
that global warning may be doing potentially irreparable damage to our planet
know that this is a difficult topic. Not a hopeful one. What hope is there
for our planet? What hope for creation? Someone
asked the question this week, in a group I was meeting with, whether we
thought God would interfere before we ruined the earth? Would God prevent us
from destroying it or poisoning it beyond recovery? I
wouldn’t count on it, I said. Virginia Tech, not to mention the holocaust and
all the horrors of human history, remind us that God appears to take human
freedom very seriously. Apparently God has entrusted the care of God’s own
beloved creation to us. It is ours to love and protect or to poison and
destroy. We decide. The
Book of Romans, however, suggests that it is not quite this stark. In Romans 8, the Apostle Paul asks the
question about hope and creation a different way. He turns the tables.
Instead of asking what hope we have for creation, he talks about the hope
creation has for us. He
says, “The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the
children of God…” (Romans 8: 19) He says the creation lives “in hope that the
creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain
the freedom of the glory of God.” (Romans 8:20) The
Apostle Paul says in Romans 8 that creation is not neutral…the universe is
not neutral…it is hoping for us, it is pulling for us, the children of God,
to establish a world of peace, inclusion, justice and love. The universe is
rooting for us. It is on our side. This is
very hard for me to talk about because I am very much a child of modernity
which has tended to see the universe as raw material. We have tended to see
creation as stuff that we needed to figure out how best to use. It is
not good science. Science has always understood the universe as more than
mere stuff. But it has been a good ideology to drive the industrial
revolution and capitalism. The
Apostle Paul suggests that the universe is more than raw material, more than
stuff, that it has an integrity of its own, that is has hopes and dreams of
its own, that it is rooting for us, that it is our partner and God’s partner
in birthing the realm of God. I am a
child of modernity, and it is hard not to see the earth as merely functional.
But modernity is passing away. And people are beginning to be able to see the
world in more connected ways than someone like me can. They
can see that everything is interrelated – that nature has its own identity
and integrity; that the universe has its own life and is not merely a stage
for humans to live on. Sometimes they can catch a glimpse of Gaia, the mother
who fills all creation and who like the Creator is full of love. All of
this is much closer to the Apostle Paul’s vision of a creation that longs and
hopes for its fulfillment in a world of peace, inclusion, justice and love…a
universe that longs for us to figure out how to live in harmony with God,
itself and one another. I am
not particularly good at this, but in the midst of a difficult week even I –
if my eyes are open – can catch glimpses of it. This
morning, walking across the Capitol grounds on my way to church, the dogwoods
were blooming, and someone had planted tulips. There were a few yellow tulips
but most of them were red and orange. Red and orange are the Virginia Tech
colors. A coincidence? I don’t know. And the
Capitol grounds this morning were full of robins. Lots and lots of red and
orange breasted robins. One started hopping towards me. I stopped and talked
to it, and then noticed that its real object of attention was not me but
another robin at the base of a tree that it was flirting with. And
this reminded me of yesterday morning at the Dupont Circle Starbucks. I was
in line waiting to get a cup of tea. There was a girl in front of me in
line…I guess I should say a young woman. She was dressed for spring in a sort
of frilly outfit that I don’t know how to describe really except that it was
very springy and fresh. The
clerk at the counter was a boy...a young man, I mean, just past, you know,
the acne stage. In terms of our society’s standards, he would not be
considered handsome. When
the young woman in front of me got to the register and order her drink, he
looked at her card and asked her where Jefferson bank was, and they exchanged
a couple of sentences of conversation. And the whole time we waited on me,
getting me my cup of tea, there was a smile on his face as broad as There
is an energy, a life force, a longing, a hope in creation that connects the
tulips and the robins and the boy behind the register of Starbucks and the
students of Virginia Tech and those who filled our sanctuary last night to
give thanks for the life of Jeff Shewey. This is
our source of hope. Creation is not neutral. It is on the side of life. It is
on the side of peace, inclusion, justice and love. I first
came across the poetry of Nikki Giovanni 30 years ago or more when I was
reading everything I could get my hands on by the gay African-American writer
James Baldwin. I got interested in James Baldwin because he had grown up in a
So I
have read Nikki Giovanni’s poetry off and on for more than 30 years. I had no
idea until this week that she taught at Virginia Tech. Nikki
Giovanni read a poem she had written the night before at the convocation held
at Virginia Tech this past Tuesday. The poem ended with thousands of students
chanting the Hokie cheer. She did
two things in her poem. She connected the suffering of the Virginia Tech
students with the suffering of others in the world…even with the suffering of
nature. She
said: “We do
not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but
neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible
children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army,
neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for
ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does
the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the
home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because
the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.”[iii] She
connected the suffering of Virginia Tech with the suffering of creation, so
that no one was alone in their suffering. The
other thing she did was to invoke the life force that exists within all
creation and within the human breast. She
ended her poem by saying: “We are Virginia Tech … “We are strong, and
brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite
what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities.
We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through
all our sadness. “We are the Hokies. “We will prevail. “We will prevail. “We will prevail. “We are Virginia Tech.” It has
been a difficult week. Lots of pain. Lots of grief. Lots of despair. But in
the midst of it, again and again, there has also been a spirit of life and of
hope and of love. I am
grateful for the work of our Green Mission. I am grateful that we will begin
recycling. I am grateful that we are renewing our commitment to care for the
universe. Creation
is on our side. Creation hopes in us. The universe waits with eager longing
for you and me and the realm of peace, inclusion and justice and love which
longs to be born through us. www.foundryumc.org |
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