Good News to the Creatures

 You might wanna listen to this one so you can hear me howl: https://mpcfamily.org/sermons/good-news-to-the-creatures/
Easter meets Earth Day 

Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Didn’t you know that today is also Easter? It’s Orthodox Easter, due to some quirk of ancient calendars, and although over the years we’ve gotten churches together to make agreements on all kinds of things like whether we recognize one another’s baptisms or share in communion or hire one another’s ministers and priests, we’ve never had a convocation of the churches to settle on one date for Easter. So, again, today, Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! And, many of the Orthodox churches are tied together in language groups - Greek, Russian, Armenian, Ethiopian or more. I won’t make you do them all -- but today, church family, let’s learn one in Greek:: I’ll say Kristos Anesti, and you respond “Alithos, anesti”  Kristos Anesti! Alithos Anesti!

In the gospel of Mark’s longer ending, Jesus is said to say: “Go therefore into the world and preach the good news to all creation.” You might never have heard these words before - since we don’t often read the longer ending of the book of Mark. Scholars deem it unlikely to be original. But this message has a lovely phrase in it: preach the gospel to all creation. If you were reading along in a King James Version, you’d find that it said “preach the good news to every creature,” a poetic if inexact translation. No, it’s not authentic; you’ll notice the brackets around it in your pew bibles. The ending was added on later by scribes who were more or less scandalized by the fact that the book ends saying “they didn’t say anything to anyone, for they were all afraid.” But just because it’s inauthentic doesn’t mean it’s not useful; in fact, there are several books in the Bible ascribed to authors that couldn’t have possibly written them, but the councils of the churches decided, long ago, that even though they could tell they weren’t authentic, that didn’t mean they weren’t useful, so they kept them in. Some parts with brackets, some without. What the brackets should signal to you is that these words were late additions - a few generations perhaps after the book of Mark was itself written, but still written in that ancient time period before the Bible was codified into one set of texts. 

But original or not, here we have a very ancient image of Jesus telling the disciples to set aside their despair and disbelief, and to go out into the world and preach the good news to all creation - tell the gospel to every creature. And on a week containing Earth Day, Arbor Day, and not one but TWO EASTERS all together, we need to hear the message that calls us to get up and go share some good news with creation. Not just in Greek, English, and Armenian and Russian, and Ethiopian, but also in the languages of all creation. Go preach the good news - in terms that can be understood across the lines of language. So today, church family, let’s practice some other creatures’ languages in case English Greek and Armenian aren’t enough. 

Kristos Anesti! Alithos Anesti!

***** Christ is Risen, in wolf! HOWWWWL!**** 

The idea of preaching to all creation pairs with the reading from Romans as well. The passage from the Romans comes from Paul’s writing about the implications of the resurrection. “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,” Paul writes, “then he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” And this new life is experienced as freedom and fulfillment. And not only we, but the creation - in the King James poetry,  even the creatures - all groan with sighs too deep for words, longing for freedom, longing for fulfillment, which comes ultimately in the good news of Christ’s resurrection. Have you ever heard a creature sigh in frustration and futility? Have you yourself- you one of God’s beloved creatures – have you ever sighed with those groans too deep for words? And have you ever rejoiced so gladly that words were not enough? 

I wonder if these sighs too deep for words were what the early Christians thoughts, when they heard these words “Go and preach the gospel to all creation.”

I wonder if this is what St Ambrose of Milan meant, in the fourth century, when he preached “In the resurrection of Christ, the earth itself arose.”

And I wonder if this is the mystery St Francis knew, when he wrote his famous canticle of praise, calling brother sun and Mother Earth to sing praises - joining in with sister flower and brother tree.  

I wonder what it could mean - for you - to preach the good news of Christ’s resurrection to all creation. 

The gospels are in agreement on this: Jesus did not come back from the dead to say “I am risen, so therefore believe these five essential things, and build me a church, and worship me.” He came back from the dead to say “I am risen, and I am with you, and you have work to do, so go and proclaim the good news!”

Many branches of the church, in which I will include Presbyterians, have held too tightly to one part of Christian belief: the idea that Christ’s rising from the dead proves our sins are forgiven. This is a helpful belief, but we can get tied up and limited in it. We could start thinking that the good news of Easter is a very internal and psychological thing - a personal experience - that Christ rising from the dead means we can feel better about ourselves. But it’s so much more than that. 

Since today is Orthodox Easter I’d like to hold up a belief that many Orthodox churches have held onto more vibrantly than we have: the idea that Christ’s rising from the dead is a cosmic victory of life over death itself. Easter is a celebration of the defeat of death. In the resurrection of Christ, according to John Chrysostom, our enemy death, tried to swallow up humanity, but choked, instead, on God. It’s not that the resurrection put an end to our struggling, our groaning along with all creation, but the resurrection lets us know that ultimately, love wins, and life wins. The good swallows up the bad, and the bad cannot swallow up the good. Christ is risen - Christ is risen indeed - and life is triumphant over the power of death. 

In seminary I had a Missiology professor who had very high standards and very odd teaching methods. He’d assign enormous amounts of heavy reading for homework and then when we got to class he would sit us in small groups to discuss questions that seemed unrelated: “Tell one another about the dining room table in the home you grew up in.” He always had a reason for why his lesson connected, but he was hard to follow and even harder to please. He had a particular love for the liturgy of the Orthodox Church, which is kept alive in an eccentric way at his church and Marcia Roy’s church, St Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco. Anyway, we had our mission class over here in Berkeley and many of us Presbyterians would ride a school van back and forth from San Anselmo each week, and sometimes  Dr. Wickeri would ride with us and continue his teaching on the van. We Presbyterians were sorely lacking in ancient prayers according to him - and as we rode the van he would fill us up with the resources we lacked. He did this by singing ancient Orthodox prayers very loudly and telling us to sing along. Christ is risen from the dead trampling down death by death and on those in the tombs bestowing liiiiiife, bestowing life. Faster, he said. Christ is risen from the dead. As the van swayed its way across the Richmond bridge he kept telling us to sing faster and he stomped (STOMP) on the floor of the van and I couldn’t stop laughing as I sang along. Christ is risen from the dead trampling down death by death — OK, this time in Greek. Sing faster! Christos Anesti ek Nekron! Jesus is risen and death. Is. Trampled., in these ancient orthodox prayers. 

I don’t know about you, but I like the idea of trampling death. And I think it’s easy to understand. When we tried to explain our mother’s chemotherapy to our nephew, age 4, he nodded sagely and said “it’s like a plant that you step on it and it dies.” Trampling cancer is a language a 4 year old can understand. So, church family, let’s proclaim the victory of life over death in the language of trampling

 (STOMP)

Yes! 

Christ is risen!

Kristos Anesti!

Woof woof! woof!

There IS a good place for silliness in the celebration of resurrection. It’s joyful news after all, even when Easter doesn’t fall on April Fool’s day. But howling and barking aside, because to be honest we’re actually not very good at that, how DO we proclaim the good news of resurrection to all creation? How do we communicate the victory of life over death in terms that a creature can understand? 

Romans says the essential struggle of creation is futility and decay. Futility meaning - we can’t do what we naturally want to do and need to do – we can’t flourish - we are blocked - we are like the polar bear that now swims endlessly and cannot find an iceberg to rest on. The cure for this futility is redemption and freedom – God liberating us from our frustrated struggle - and in terms a creature can understand, that simply means having what they need to live life the way they were meant to live. It’s OK to struggle — struggling can be life-giving as you grow and learn — but when your struggle becomes futile, that’s when the Holy Spirit groans with us, in sighs too deep for words. And that is also when we are called to proclaim victory over death in terms creation can understand. 

We know that it’s good, generally speaking, a kind and moral thing to do, to care for creation. But seen in a deeper way, your acts of loving and caring can be a way to proclaim the victory of life over death to God’s creation. Maybe it’s planting native species and ensuring their growth. Protecting habitats and cleaning up polluted streams. Taking a sick animal to the vet. Growing your own food or buying from local farmers who care for the earth in a way that corporate agrobusiness never can. Divesting from fossil fuels to slow climate change. Marching, striking and agitating for the political will to stop heating and start cooling our planet. All of these are essentially ways we proclaim we believe in the resurrection of creation itself. We will not be stopped by a little death, or a little despair.  

 Wendell Berry writes in his poem “Manifesto: the Mad Farmer Liberation Front” :

Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

 

That is a proclamation that can keep us going. That is resurrection in the language of a forest, of a tree, of the insects who live in the soil. 

But one final question. It’s all well and good to proclaim victory over death in a cosmic sense. What do we do when a particular person dies? When a community of people are struck down by tragedy? Or even, to talk of creation, what do we do when a whole species goes extinct? Does the victory of life over death mean we stop mourning, cut off all our sad feelings, and go straight to a celebration of life? You are welcome to do that if you like, but if I may speak from my professional experience, I do not recommend it. It is so important to grieve; to stop, reflect, hold a funeral, and cry. Some of us walk around with backlogs of old grief because of the times we were handed a pack of tissues and told to stop crying. The groaning of creation is real. Please do mourn. Just – as you mourn – remind yourself that you do not mourn alone; and that you are part of the web of life which is ultimately bigger and stronger and more final than death. Each individual death hurts; but those hurts do get healed by the power of life itself, which is the power of God. 

I have to give the last word to Wendell Berry. A few more words from the Mad Farmer Liberation Front: 

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.