Creationtide 3 Year A

May the God who laid the foundations of the earth, who commands the morning and gives the dawn its place, open our hearts to the wonder of creation. Amen.

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“If you will only obey the Lord your God….” A whole immensity depends on that “if” in Deuteronomy – if the people of Israel can obey, if they can hold to their identity as God’s people – in other words, if they can honour the relationship, the covenant that binds them to God and to one another – from that will flow an immensity of blessing.

“Blessed shall you be in the city…

Blessed shall you be in the field…

Blessed shall be the fruit of your womb, of your ground,
of your livestock

Blessed shall be your basket, and your kneading bowl

Blessed shall you be when you come in, and

Blessed shall you be when you go out.”

This is an ancient theological vision which other parts of scripture will question and complicate – not least the book of Job, which we heard a couple of weeks ago – but at its heart Deuteronomy offers a profound understanding of blessing as relationship rather than possession.

This sense of God’s provision – of creation being the very expression of God’s blessing – is intrinsic to the worldview of Jesus’ people. The land is their essential source of blessing and it is sustained by God’s providence and humanity’s tending of it. This abundant goodness of creation is echoed in Psalm 65 – “The waters of heaven brim over their channel: providing us with grain, for so you have prepared the land…”

Against that deep awareness of the dynamic ordering of the universe towards blessing, we can see why the grasping rich man of Jesus’ parable stands in excruciating contrast.

The farmer’s problem, in Jesus’ eyes, isn’t that he’s had a great harvest, or that he’s wealthy, or that he wants to plan for the future. The farmer’s problem is that everything he sees begins and ends with himself. The farmer has forgotten that blessing is gift, and is connected with the Giver – the Creator God.

Most of the parable is the farmer in his own inner dialogue. He’s not talking to a spouse or friend or parent or neighbour, but only to himself. “I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods…”

The farmer is trapped inside this egocentric conversation, and he is consumed by the notion that life – the good life – consists of amassing more and more for himself.

The uncomfortable thing is that the farmer isn’t some grotesque villain. His reasoning sounds remarkably ordinary. He has more than he needs, so he builds more space to store it. He assumes that what has come into his possession belongs entirely to him. And he imagines that accumulating enough will finally make him secure.

In that sense, his world isn’t very far from ours. We live within an economy that depends upon persuading us that we need more: more possessions, more consumption, more convenience, more growth. Creation becomes a collection of resources and commodities, rather than something received as gift and blessing.

We’ve all heard enough of the gospels to know that this materialism and consumerism is a kind of anti-gospel – because the life of faith that Jesus shows us is all about relationship, about connection – love God, and love your neighbour as yourself. And one of the fundamental assumptions of scripture is that the context for this relational way of being is God’s creation – the immensity of God’s provision and blessing.

One of the voices that has consistently called the church back to an awareness of the gift and blessing of the land, of creation, is the American poet, essayist and farmer Wendell Berry, who died just a few weeks ago at the age of 92.

For more than sixty years, Berry lived and farmed in Kentucky, writing about our relationship with the land and offering a sustained critique of industrial agriculture and consumer culture. His was a determined commitment to creating a lived alternative to an industrial system that treats the earth primarily as a commodity.

Berry was greatly concerned with the land and our connection with it. He writes,

“In this state of total consumerism – which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services… that we have forgotten how to provide for ourselves – all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.”

So, living in the midst of this city of Auckland, what do we do? How do we cultivate within ourselves this awareness of the goodness of creation and our profound dependence on it? There is an urgency now to this culture shift. 

This is a shift within us, in our hearts and minds, that involves lifelong work. It means noticing the nature of the waters we’re swimming in, noticing the habits of our hearts and minds, and unlearning them – and learning new habits, new attitudes. It means bringing our purchasing power, our voting power, our voices of protest to bear against the systems of materialism in which we are all embedded and which are destroying the blessing of creation on which we all depend. It was so heartening to see the strength of the March for Nature protest on Queen St yesterday, with some St Luke’s people amongst it!

The things Jesus teaches about in the gospels – our interrelationship with God and with neighbour, our community, the goodness of creation – when we practice noticing these in daily moments and give thanks to God, we are giving those things priority in our awareness.

One of the taonga of this place in which we live is te ao Māori and the language it gives us for understanding relationship with the natural world. The word whenua means both land and placenta: a linguistic connection which speaks profoundly of land not simply as property or commodity, but as that from which life comes and to which we belong.

For those of us formed primarily by Western ways of seeing the world, there is much here for us to learn – and much that can help us hear afresh the biblical insistence that the earth belongs ultimately not to us, but to God.

To return to Wendell Berry’s words,

“I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and dwelling in the world, summons the world always towards wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation… with God.”

Perhaps that is the fundamental difference between the farmer in Jesus’ parable and the vision of life that Berry spent so many years trying to recover.

The farmer looks at abundance and says, mine.

The scriptures invite us to look at abundance and say, gift.

And perhaps that profound change in how we see is the beginning of a very different way of inhabiting the earth.

I pray that we would be recalled to a deep awareness of the goodness and giftness of creation, and our place within it, and that we would learn again to honour that blessing.

“Blessed shall you be in the city…

Blessed shall you be in the field…

Blessed shall be the fruit of your womb, of your ground,
of your livestock

Blessed shall be your basket, and your kneading bowl

Blessed shall you be when you come in, and

Blessed shall you be when you go out.”

We are blessed indeed.

Amen.