The Sermons at Calvary
By Father Richard Humke
A ROGATION MEDITATION
May 25, 2003, 6 Easter B, Calvary
Church
Helen
Keller, the woman who very early in her life became blind and deaf and who yet
learned to do more with her life than most of us could ever imagine doing, was
walking in the woods with a friend one time.
As they walked along, the friend said to Helen Keller that she hadn't
noticed anything exceptional during the walk; and in thinking about her
friend's remark, Helen Keller later wrote (and this was quoted in an article
about her in THE NEW YORK TIMES):
I
wondered how it was possible to walk for an hour through the woods and see
nothing of note. I who cannot see find
hundreds of things: the delicate
symmetry of a leaf, the smooth skin of a silver birch, the rough, shaggy bark
of a pine.
I who am
blind can give one hint to those who see:
use your eyes as if tomorrow you will have been stricken blind. Hear the music of voices, the song of a
bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra as if you would be stricken deaf
tomorrow. Touch each object as if
tomorrow your tactile sense would fail.
Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if
tomorrow you could never taste or smell again.
Make the most of every sense. "Glory in all the facets and pleasures and beauty which the
world reveals to you." (April 12, 1992)
We
who live in Kentucky may find it very easy to take the beauty of creation for
granted. We surely live in one of the
more beautiful parts of God's world. It
isn't as startling as the Grand Canyon or the Rocky Mountains because it is an
understated beauty. I seldom travel
anywhere, in this country or elsewhere in the world, that I do not return home
and think (and often say), "Aren't we fortunate to live in this beautiful
part of the world?"
Where
does all this come from, this beauty, this nature, this land we enjoy? How do we show gratitude for it? To whom do we show gratitude? Who has given it to us? Or is it just there? When you receive a gift from someone, if you
have had any upbringing at all, you write a note of thanks. But whom do you thank for this profusion of
beauty?
We
people of God ascribe creation to the Almighty One: "We believe in One God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of
heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen." It is an ancient statement, far more complex
than its terse wording might indicate.
Yet in another sense, it is a very simple statement as well, a statement
of ascription that most of us do not need to dissect theologically and
historically. We say those words each
week and we mean in saying them that we, the Church, believe in a God who has
created all things. Surely that basic
understanding of the Creed is sufficient understanding for most of us.
So
it is God to whom we give thanks.
It is God from whom all that is, comes. It is God who has blessed us so richly with all the bounty
of nature.
Today
would have been called Rogation Sunday in the old Church Calendar, and the
three days to follow the Rogation Days (which they still are called). They are times to ask God's blessing upon
the land so that there might be a plentiful harvest in the autumn. It's a kind of spring counterpart to
Thanksgiving Day when God is thanked for the bountiful harvest of the past
growing season.
The
observance of the Rogation season at this time of year began in the Church in
the 5th C., when a bishop in Gaul (that Gaul that was divided into three parts,
as some of you may remember from your 11th grade Latin) inaugurated these
Rogation Days with outdoor processions during times when his area was beset
with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
It was a kind of primitive (we would say) pleading with God for a
respite from such things.
Then
a few centuries later the Church instituted rogation processionals through the
fields at this time of year to take the place of an old pagan festival in honor
of a God who was thought to protect the crops from mildew. In time the days took on the character that
I have just described: as days to ask
for God's blessing upon the land. And
so they are still observed in some small way these hundreds of years later.
But
times have changed dramatically.
Abundant harvests can be an economic puzzle and a political
embarrassment. We have learned in a
country like ours to grow more grain than we need. We haven't learned, as a global village, how to distribute such
food so that people do not starve elsewhere.
Then,
of course, another dramatic change from the time of the institution of the Rogation
season, a change which has been so rapid in these past 100 years, is that fewer
and fewer people live close to the land any longer. Though there are some predominately agricultural parishes in the
Episcopal Church, most are not. Most
Episcopalians wouldn't know rye from wheat, though they might know rye from
bourbon.
We
are so far removed from the land itself that our children grow up alienated
from the sources of their food. Some
children apparently are amazed to find that milk comes from cows and not
plastic containers!
It's
been hard to keep the Rogation season alive.
The best we seemed able to do years ago, when there was still a Rogation
Sunday, was to have the Sunday School chldren plant zinnia seeds. Somehow that didn't quite make the point.
All
of that, undoubtedly, is the reason that the Prayer Book reformers took
Rogation Sunday out of the calendar.
They left the Rogation Days, but how many people go to church on Monday,
Tuesday and Wednesday? I think they
made a mistake by removing Rogation Sunday.
Just at the time they decided to remove it from the calendar, we once
again began to be more aware of our need to respect the environment. Just as they decided it was not necessary
for this predominately urban Church to reflect on the crops, people began to be
aware once again of their ties, however tenuous they might seem, to the earth.
We
have, I think, a newly found appreciation of the created order, and you don't
have to be a "tree hugger," as some persons pejoratively refer to
environmentalists, to realize that we need the beauty and rejuvenating power of
nature in order to be complete human beings.
That, however, is not the created order's sole reason for being. It exists because God created it, and by its
existence and its beauty it praises God.
You might want to look sometime at the canticle called "A Song of
Creation" on p.88 in the Prayer Book, a beautiful hymn that comes from one
of the books of the Apocrypha, which some of us studied this past winter. All
nature, by its very being, praises God, this canticle says.
John
Muir, who lived mostly in the 19th C., is one of the great figures of the
American wilderness movement, "the preeminent American in the early
industrial era to identify himself with the shrinking wilderness..." (CHRISTIAN
ECOLOGY, p.51). He believed that
modern men and women needed the wilderness for their spiritual rebirth. He expressed his concern for this with a
God-centered view of life.
He
said one time.
I wish
you could come here (to Yosemite Valley) and rest in the simple, unmingled love
fountains of God. You would
return...with fresh truth gathered from pines and waters and deep singing
winds, and you would find that they all sang of fountain love as did Jesus
Christ and all of pure God manifest in whatever form.
He
saw the hand of God at work in the profusion of the created order, of
nature. He had an awe before the
wonders of that nature, an awe that is largely lost in our time. But he recognized that the gift of nature is
one expression of the love of God. Most
of us forget that, if indeed we have even realized it to be true.
For
years I disputed the persons who would say to me that they could worship God as
well on a beautiful hillside or on the lake as they could in church. (Give me a nickel for every time I've been
told that, and you will pay for my trip to the beach this summer!) I suppose I had something of a vested
interest in their being in church! As a
retired priest I really don't have that vested interest any longer, but I have
also come to moderate my feelings about such a statement as I have gotten
older. Now I am more apt to say,
"But do you worship God in the beauty of nature?"
You
see, I think you can do that, particularly if you have something of a
mystic bent to your make-up. You can
stand in awe (which, I believe, is what worship really is) -- you can
stand in awe before the beauty and profusion and diversity of God's
creation. But first you must know the
God who stands behind it.
Seeing
God and acknowledging God in nature is never enough for a Christian
however. The Christian is one who has
met God in the person of Jesus Christ, and that truth is a revealed truth,
different from the truths about God that we learn from nature. One can acknowledge a God of nature and
never know a forgiving God, a God who shared life with us, a God whose deepest
being is disclosed to us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
In
our Second Reading today we hear that God is love. And in today's Gospel we hear of Christ's love shown us in the
laying down of his life for us. The
implications of all this are that we, too, should love: "This is my commandment, that you love
one another as I have loved you."
No matter how beautiful nature is, it does not tell us that.
So,
at this Rogation time I encourage you to see the hand of God at work in the
beauty of nature, but to remember that there is a fuller, richer revelation of
God in the Lord we worship in this Easter season and always.
Richard
H. Humke