Apr 27th: Celebrating the Gift of Sacred Earth, with Rev. Sharon Edwards.
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Rev. Sharon Edwards
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Celebrating the Gift of Sacred Earth with Rev. Sharon Edwards. Series: This Sweet Earth A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon. Scripture: Genesis 2:1-3, Romans 12:1-2.
Feeling disconnected? Discover how you’re deeply woven into the fabric of creation this Sunday. Join us in-person or online as Sharon explores our profound connection to earth, each other, and the divine. Come curious, leave inspired.
Transcript:
[Rev. Sharon Edwards]: Sharon, hello. My name is Sharon, and I have just recently joined the pastoral team at First Presbyterian Church in Bend, and I’m so grateful to be here. I grew up hearing nuggets of truth from my parents. One God loves everyone, even if we don’t, cleanliness is next to godliness. You cannot hide liver and onions in your napkin. And from my mother, the ocean, salt water is good for anything that ails you. The human body is made up of 50 to 79% of water. Water plays crucial roles for all of our physiological processes, removing waste, regulating, temperature, cellular function, joint lubrication, organ protection and even brain functioning. We can only survive a few days without water. We are ocean. Trees have trunks and roots and veins, transport nutrients and water throughout the entire body of a tree. Trees transform through seasons. A tree breathes. We have trunks and veins and arteries and branching airway systems. There is a love affair between our lungs and plants. They release and we breathe in, and we breathe out, and they breathe in, our breath, we are trees. Our bodies are made up of the most common elements found in earth, hydrogen, nutrition, iron, 97% of our atoms we share in common with the Earth, and we are also told with the galaxies. We are Earth, soil, humus, Stardust. In Genesis two, thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all their multitude, and God saw that it was good. And on the seventh day, God finished the work that God had done, and God rested on the seventh day. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it. And from Romans 12, I appeal to you, Therefore, brothers and sisters, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship? Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good acceptable and perfect, often translated as whole, the climax or pinnacle of creation is not the creation of humankind day six, but rather the creation of the Sabbath day seven, when God pauses to savor, to delight in all that God has made, and breathes in the goodness of that creation. John Philip Newell is a very famous and leading teacher of Celtic spirituality and an advocate for more interfaith dialog and relationships. He is writes and lectures about an ancient form of Christianity that evolved far away. Way from the rigidness of Rome and is finding renewed resonance today, especially as we face the climate crisis. Newell writes Celtic Christianity views all of creation equally. All of Earth is formed from the substance of God. God’s own Son walked on the earth. So sacred is the soil and how we live and work in our own bodies, and the body of the earth reflects our care for God, and it seems there needs to be more care. Many of us humans have viewed the natural world as a resource, which it is. It does provide for our living. Of course, we have also come to view it as a commodity. Its value is only in what it gives us. There are many of us who live in beautiful places, who appreciate the beauty and experience the natural world as something that contributes to our mental and physical health. Yes, but there is something more we may be missing, and in our missing, we are doing harm as we experience the climate crisis, it is the view of many scientists, and in particular an expert in the environmental science field, Gus Speth, who says this, the top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists don’t know how to do that. Perhaps one of the ways we do that is to rediscover an ancient way of seeing. Richard Rohr is a prolific spiritual writer and the founder of the Center for contemplation and action, and in his book The naked now learning to see as the mystic See, he offers a way for us to not only practice the truth of our relatedness to creation, but also to deepen our experience of it, and therefore be transformed. He writes about three people standing at the ocean watching a sunset. One person sees the absolute beauty of it, like 80% of the world. Roar suggests this person likes dealing with what they can see and feel and touch and move and fix. This is the first eye seeing flesh. This is good. A second person enjoys the beauty, but also enjoys the power to make sense out of why the sunset is a lover of coherent and rational thought, technology and science. This is the second I explanation and reason. This too is good. The third person sees the sunset, knowing and enjoying all that the other two did. But this person is able to move through, seeing through, explaining to tasting, dwelling in awe before an underlying mystery, spaciousness and connectedness where though is no separation. This is the third eye, understanding or contemplation. Roar falls behind a long line of spiritual teachers from many traditions when he says, the third eye is best. This is the eye that creates poetry and music and lights the fire under people who transform the world. This way of seeing is reinforced by ecological and biological sciences. We are absolutely connected and deeply dependent with every part of the planet and even beyond without the third eye, way of seeing everything divides into oppositions or dualistic thinking. There is only this or this missing the beautiful, wise, gray space in between. Seeing with the third eye, brings us to the truth of our interconnectedness and all creation sacredness. It is a way of being a presence that dwells in humility and compassion, and it is a source of creativity and effective problem solving that honors the sacredness of all and opens new wisdom, or Some would say, old wisdom. You see, friends, creation was not just a one off event or just a long evolution of eons. Creation is not yet finished. Creation continues today. We continue to form the earth and the world. Creation continues to happen. We are co participants with the Creator and all of creation. We continue to create in the way we inhabit our bodies and the body of creation. We do this by how we live, how we breathe, the conversations we have, the choices we make, how we walk and how we walk our talk, what we eat or don’t eat, and how we eat, to how we move about in the world, to how we do laundry, how we spend our Money, our time, how we live, day in and day out, all of us together. It’s going to take a whole lot of us presenting our bodies, our lives, seeing with this third eye, way to transform this world. I have an invitation for you for this week and perhaps beyond, take a moment to use your third eye, perhaps go outside barefoot or look outside your window at something that is in the natural world, a plant, the sky, a creature. Take a deep breath. Feel your feet. Feel your breath. See, move to knowing, move to tasting, fully present, fully alive, your deep connection with creation, quieting your mind and being held by the beauty, or perhaps take a pause in the midst of your day and notice what You are creating by the decisions you are making transformed people transform the world, and science even tells us what happens in the micro affects the macro. Your little can affect the big. But that’s a whole nother sermon for a whole nother time. Pause for a moment. What are you hearing? What is stirring within you? I. What perhaps Are you being invited to? Oh, dear human, you are ocean, you tree, you river, you Earth, you soil, you stars, you created. You, creating you. May it be so Amen. Amen.
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