Christmas Joy

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

(Hymn 100)

We celebrate the birth of Christ, God’s coming to live among us, during the darkest time of the year in the northern hemisphere. Our often glorious sunrises and sunsets this time of year, the stars on a cold, clear night, and the Christmas lights shining through the darkness in the open country all help us to understand John’s Gospel (John 1:5): “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

We Episcopalians celebrate Christmas for twelve days. With “Joy to the world” in our hearts and minds, I invite you to join me in looking each of these twelve days for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation, especially through experiencing the beauty and wonder of God’s world.

Our Christmas Gospel from John (John 1:1-14) begins by articulating the connections among God’s creation of the world, Christ, life, and light:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

The wonders of the world around us not only help us stay connected to joy; they also remind us that God is God, the creator and sustainer of all that is in the entire universe, and they help to strengthen our connection to God.

Joy to the world! The Savior reigns; let us our songs employ, while fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains, repeat the sounding joy.

Reading Paul in Early Spring

An Observation

Today’s warmer temperatures in central Nebraska made it possible to sit outside on our porch this morning to read the Daily Office lessons. The warm and humid air smelled and felt like spring, and songs from a variety of birds sounded like spring.

It was a good setting for today’s Epistle lesson, Romans 1:16-24. In this letter to the Romans, Paul states that knowledge about God is available to everyone: “Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.” (Romans 1:20) God isn’t visible to us, but the world is there for us to see and experience. Paul is saying that thinking about the order and wonder of the world that we can experience through our senses can help us understand something about God’s divine nature and power; we can reason from what we can know through sense experience to some knowledge of God.

On a fine spring morning, I’m inclined to agree with Paul.

Like the First Morning...

 Sometime in July I came across a book called Earth Gospel: A Guide to Prayer for God’s Creation. Sam Hamilton-Poore, the author, has set  it up in such a way that it can be used for daily personal prayer in the morning, midday, and evening in a four-week cycle. I bought a copy and set it aside to use this month, beginning today, with the dual intention of deepening my own prayers for creation and of sharing my experience with this book on this blog after using it for a couple of weeks or so. I still intend to do both things, but the way today’s morning readings and prayers resonated with the Gospel lesson in our Daily Office cycle led me to share something of today’s experience.

Today’s Gospel lesson was John 1:1-18: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Scripture passage for the first day of Earth Gospel is Genesis 1:1-5: “ In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth… ”

Before introducing the Genesis passage, Earth Gospel began with a quotation from Joseph Renville’s hymn “Many and great”  (Hymn 385 in The Hymnal 1982), followed by the hymn “Morning has broken” (Hymn 8)  which suggests that each new morning is “God’s recreation of the new day", of the first morning God created.

Sitting outdoors on a warm but pleasant morning hearing a variety of birdsongs and seeing flowers in bloom and squirrels chasing each other up and down the trees, I thought about “Morning has broken/Like the first morning” and about Genesis 1:5, “And there was evening and there was morning, the first day”.  I tried to think about the first time something we would recognize as a bird sang something we would name as birdsong, the first time something we would name as a flower bloomed, the first time creatures we would call squirrels chased each other up and down something we would recognize as a tree. When did the first bird sing, and what was that like? In some way, surely, that first birdsong changed everything! When did the first flower bloom? When did a human being first stand on a beach and play in the surf? When did we first name the sorts of birds I hear in central Nebraska, and how long did they sing before anyone named them?

It is as difficult for me to imagine the “first morning”, the first of all of these things that feed my soul now, as it is for me to imagine the last of them. Thinking about the last birdsong is especially poignant to me, as their songs have brought joy to me since my earliest memories and since we know the birds are in trouble. Loss of habitat, pollution, and climate all endanger a variety of bird species. (See also the March 17 2010 post State of the Birds.) There may be in my lifetime, as I continue living, a last time I hear certain bird songs in my location.

It’s impossible and yet wonderful to try to think about that beginning John describes with the Word that both was with God and was God. Part of the difficulty of that effort is the abstract nature of the Word before the Word became flesh and lived among us. However, that may be a small part of the difficulty, as it seems equally impossible and yet wonderful to try thinking about the beginning of the things we can see and hear around us.

There is some hope in remembering that thinking about both the first and the last brings a profound sense of wonder, despite the first bringing wonder at unimaginable joy and the last bringing wonder at unimaginable grief.  By bringing us to a place of wonder, both remind us of the profound importance of environmental stewardship. The beginning and the end are beyond our understanding, but not so far beyond our minds as to prevent our growing in wonder and gratitude at God’s creation and at our responsibility to join God in the holy work of sustaining the beauty and goodness of creation.

Easter Joy

Early this morning we had sunshine in central Nebraska. I walked outside as the carillon at a church a few blocks away started playing “Jesus Christ is risen today”; the neighborhood birds provided a background chorus. In the center of our lawn, the sun was shining down on a bunch of daffodils in full bloom. Easter joy!

One of our hymns at St. Stephen’s for both the Great Vigil of Easter and Easter Day was Hymn 178: “Alleluia, alleluia! Give thanks to the risen Lord.” The first verse of this hymn reminds us that while we tend to focus on the Easter message of renewal and salvation for humankind -- looking at what the empty tomb means for us -- the resurrection of Christ is much bigger even than human salvation; our renewal and salvation is connected to the renewal or newness of all creation! And so we sang: “Jesus is Lord of all the earth. He is the King of creation.”

The snow that covered the ground for months this winter in Nebraska has melted away, the grasses and trees and other plants are greening, sprouting, in bud or beginning to bloom. Birds, squirrels, rabbits, and other animals are active. Everything has suddenly come to life! In such a springtime, the proclamation of the renewal of creation resonates with us; it’s easy to feel the interconnection between God and us and the rest of creation. We feel energized by the increased light and warmth in our part of the world and by life and growth of the plants and animals around us.

As a deacon, the words of the Exsultet remain with me in these days following the Great Vigil: “How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined and [we are] reconciled to God.” That image of the realms of earth and heaven being joined together in unity, and the linking of that joining to the restoration of a good and holy relationship between God and humankind get to the depths of the Easter message: in Christ, the chasm has been bridged. All of creation is infused with God’s Holy Spirit; the spiritual and the physical are intertwined.

We rejoice in God and in God’s creation, and we have a sense of God’s joy in creation. With Easter joy in our hearts, our work as humans in the care of creation is both an obvious duty and itself the source of profound joy.

The Exsultet ends with an entreaty for God to accept the offering of the Paschal candle: “May it shine continually to drive away all darkness. May Christ, the Morning Star who knows no setting, find it ever burning – he who gives his light to all creation, and who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.”

 

[Note: In the Episcopal Church, the Great Vigil is the first service of Easter Day. In our parish, we celebrate it Saturday evening. The Book of Common Prayer says it may be celebrated at any convenient time between sunset on Saturday and sunrise on Easter morning. The words to the Exsultet are found on pp. 286-287 of The Book of Common Prayer.]

All Things Bright and Beautiful...

As the impact of humans on land habitats, on oceans, rivers, and lakes, and on the overall climate increases, we hear more about species extinction. It’s difficult to grasp the true meaning of the extinction of an entire species. It’s one thing for us to see fewer individuals of some species or another than we used to see, but quite another thing to realize that no human being will ever again see an example of that species. Some scientists think that if there is no great change in the way humans care for creation, half of all species of living things on the Earth will be extinct by the end of this century.

This post talks about species that live primarily on land or in the air. Next post will look at what is happening in the oceans, and a final post in this set will look at some of the things we humans can do to minimize species extinction and keep these grim predictions from becoming fact.

A few days ago, I was sitting outside listening to the morning bird chorus in my neighborhood – cardinals, doves, and a Carolina wren among them – and suddenly thought about what it would be like to sit outside and never hear any birds. What if these birds became extinct? What if they disappeared not only from my neighborhood, but I knew there was nowhere in the world where I could go to hear these familiar songs? Wouldn’t it seem lonely to lose that background of song, chatter, and splashes of color?

Some of the more familiar birds in North America have declined greatly in numbers. Using numbers from annual bird counts since 1967, the Audubon Society has compiled a list of twenty common birds in decline, including the Eastern meadowlark (cousin to our state bird), the common tern, and the whip-poor-will.

Besides the birds, there are all the other animals: from polar bears to the Tasmanian devils in Australia, from the Caspian seal to Holdridge’s toad in Costa Rica (not seen since 1986), we face the possibility of losing some of our companions on this planet, maybe during our own lifetimes.

Scientists know some things about how the disappearance of entire species of animals and plants affect the remaining species in a habitat. At some point, depending on the habitat and the sorts of things that become extinct, this can have a cascading sort of effect. Something that feeds on a plant, insect, or small animal that has become extinct also becomes endangered; something that was the prey of a now distinct predator increases in numbers, perhaps endangering another species by an upset of the ecological balance in the habitat. Ultimately, of course, the survival of our own species is linked to the survival of others.

The question of human survival alone should be enough to make us pay attention to what is happening and find the will to make changes to help avert this ecological disaster. But apart from that, there is the question of our charge from God to care for creation, for the other animals and the plants. The possibility of losing a large number of species of other living things impacts our spiritual health as much as our physical survival. This is God’s creation; experiencing the wonder and beauty of God’s creation can connect us with God, revealing the presence of The Holy. The other animals and plants are more than a means of physical survival; they are companions that can reveal something of their Creator, something of God. Without them, the world would be a very lonely place even if we were able to find a way to survive.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) publishes an annual list Red List of Threatened Species. Their website includes a section of case studies of particular animals, including a few encouraging stories of animals whose survival chances increased after strong conservation efforts were begun. A video from the 2008 World Conservation Congress opening summarizes the challenge and lets the viewer see many of the endangered species.

Exsultet! Rejoice!

The Great Vigil of Easter is celebrated between sunset on Holy Saturday and sunrise on Easter morning. The determination of the time of the service according to the times of sunrise and sunset is significant, as the entire liturgy in its lessons and prayers and use of light, water, oil, bread, and wine points to the integration of spiritual things with the order of nature.

This first service of Easter Day begins with the lighting of the Paschal candle from the new fire. The deacon carries the Paschal candle into the church, and then sings the Exsultet (beginning on p. 286 of The Book of Common Prayer): “Rejoice now, heavenly hosts and choirs of angels…” As a deacon, I practice the Exsultet throughout Lent, and get very familiar with the words – a necessity when singing an important piece of liturgy by candlelight. The Exsultet is in my head and on my lips as spring begins, the days get longer, and the first tiny green leaves appear on bushes and trees. “Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth, bright with a glorious splendor, for darkness has been vanquished by our eternal King.”

Some of my non-Episcopalian friends, both believers in other traditions and non-believers, comment on the connections to the Earth season as if they suspect that either our joy in the coming of springtime might somehow eclipse or diminish the appreciation of the Resurrection, or that the Gospel story is a sort of culturally approved and maybe even a slightly shady cover for a pagan celebration. What this tells me is that there are lots of people both in the Church and outside of the Church who want to keep the physical and the spiritual well separated: dualism has many devotees in today’s world.


Among the many gifts of the Holy Night proclaimed in the Exsultet is this one: “How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined and [we are] reconciled to God.” That image of the realms of earth and heaven being joined together in unity, and the linking of that joining to the restoration of a good and holy relationship between God and humankind get to the depths of the Easter message: in Christ, the chasm has been bridged. All of creation is infused with God’s Holy Spirit; the spiritual and the physical are intertwined. That’s why the things around us can serve as signs of God’s grace; it’s why we believe in the sacraments, and also in sacramental living in a wider sense.

The Exsultet ends with an entreaty for God to accept the offering of the Paschal candle: “May it shine continually to drive away all darkness. May Christ, the Morning Star who knows no setting, find it ever burning – he who gives his light to all creation, and who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.”

May we remember throughout the year that Earth and heaven are joined, and that the world around us is God’s good and holy creation.

The Feast of the Epiphany

The Feast of the Epiphany

Today is the Feast of the Epiphany, the day we mark the manifestation or appearance of Jesus to the Gentiles.

The Gospel reading for this day (Matthew 2:1-12) is Matthew’s story of the wise men following the light of a special star, a natural object that they understood to be a sign of the birth of a king. We don’t know the exact location of “the East” that was home for the wise men. Wherever it was, it was a foreign land; Matthew tells us that they returned to “their own country” by a different route when a dream warned them not to return to Herod. We can only guess at what their native religion or belief system might have been. Still, even though the star didn’t point to the birth of new king in their own country, they noticed the star in the sky and knew it signified something of great importance. More importantly, it touched their hearts; Matthew says that when they saw that the star had stopped, they were “overwhelmed with joy”. The star and the distant event to which it pointed had a deep effect on them.

People who pay attention to the sky, the changing seasons, the incredible variety of life on our planet Earth, often experience joy and wonder and wholeness. Spending time outdoors paying attention to God’s creation leads us to open our hearts in gratitude. We don’t need to be able to name these experiences as ‘God’ for them to have a deep effect on us, and for us to know they point to something more. Those of us who do use traditional religious language describe such experiences as ways to connect with God. Being outdoors and taking the time to look around and listen is one of the most accessible doors or openings to the Holy. Such experiences not only give us a sense of God’s presence, but they often change us in profound ways.

As we talk about the light of the Epiphany star and connect it to the light of Christ in the world, the hours of daylight in the northern hemisphere are slowly increasing. On the plains, the angle of the sun and the weather conditions on some days combine to produce beautiful colors in the sky at sunrise and sunset. Cold, clear nights result in starry skies that make it easy to imagine following a special star night after night to see where it leads.

Launching this blog seems to me like a fitting way to mark the Feast of the Epiphany. Environmental issues directly affect the traditional social concerns of the church such as poverty, disease, hunger, and social justice. During Epiphany, the Church talks about bringing Christ to the world, about revealing Christ’s power to bring healing and wholeness. To bring Christ to a world where environmental issues have come to be understood as fundamental to all our economic, social, and political concerns, the Church needs to bring these issues into the center of our conversations and our work.