Rogation Sunday (“Anglican Earth Day”)
Preacher: The Rev. Heidi Haverkamp
Preached on: May 22nd, 2011
Audio:
No recordingScripture Text:
1 Tim. 6:7-10, 17-19
Sermon:
Well, a lot of you may have noticed that the world didn’t end yesterday. I think Pastor Harold Camping is perhaps the 803rd person to make a prediction of a day the world would end – Christians have been making these predictions for at least the last thousand years. In case you’re ever tempted to think you could do a better job, here are some reminders from the Gospel of Matthew:
Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour. (Matthew 25:13)
But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. (Matthew 24:36)
And from Revelation: Remember then what you received and heard; obey it, and repent. If you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come to you. (Revelation 3:3)
Why do people want to predict a day the world will end? And how do those people always end up discovering that Judgment Day falls just a few months or years away? Maybe some folks want the attention. But maybe some people really wish that the world would end, that God would come in with a shout and take care of everything, for once. Poof! All the good people whisked away and the bad people left behind.
What this is, at root, is a failure to love the world God has made. It’s a failure to love Creation and a failure to love our fellow human beings. It’s a decision that we don’t want to play anymore, and we’re going to take our toys and go home. Beam me up, Scotty. There’s no intelligent life on this planet.
Now, we can’t pretend that because we didn’t get suckered in by all the apocalyptic fireworks that we’re totally innocent of a little escapism now and then. I have a feeling that all of us have had times where we’ve wished we could live somewhere other than this world God made.
The world is hard to live in. There are many times I wished I live in Middle Earth, the land in The Lord of the Rings novels, or Narnia, or long ago in a galaxy far far away, or at Hogwarts: places where good and evil are so clear, where people don’t die of cancer or in car accidents, where every death is somehow noble or deserved, where every day or action has profound meaning and importance. Because the world I live in isn’t like that. It’s messy, complicated, and people drive like maniacs out on I-55. And sometimes, that’s very, very hard.
But this is the world God made. This is the world God loves. This is the world God has put us in, the world that, from the Beginning, God called “very, very good.”
Today we’re celebrating Rogation Sunday. The tradition of Rogation Days started a long, long time ago, probably even before Britain became Christian. People blessed the land they lived on: their fields and crops, rivers and streams, trees and buildings. And since ancient times, most of Britain has been divided into parishes – each church is identified with a particular geographical area. If you lived in that area, that was your church. The church belonged to the land and people around it. And so, every spring, the priest and church people would process around the parish and mark the boundaries, so that everyone would remember just where they were. They actually called it “beating the bounds.” Many people in England and Wales still do this.
We don’t beat the bounds of Bolingbrook here at St. Benedict, but we do stop and celebrate the place where we live. There’s a Saturday morning of cleaning and fixing up our building, caring for our trees and doing other outside chores, and on Sunday, there’s scripture, prayer, and reflection about this place where we live: our parish church and grounds, and this corner of Creation we call home.
God made the world, God made us, and we live here. And for those reasons, God asks us to take care of what we’ve been given. Sometimes I tell people that Rogation Sunday is like an Anglican “Earth Day.” But for us Christians, it’s not that the Earth is more important than we are or that we should stand up for the rights of animals and plants, exactly. God made the Earth and gave it to us, God loves the Earth, animals, plants, and everything, and God loves us, and God has put all of them and the fate of future generations in our hands. And so, the way we care for this church building, for our own backyards, and for all of Creation, is about our relationship with God.
So, recycle because it’s about the Earth that God made and gave to you, not because you feel guilty about it. Use less energy not just because it saves you money or reduces our dependence on foreign oil, but because it means less pollution on God’s earth and in God’s oceans, and in the lungs of God’s people. Treat the world with dignity and respect because God made the world and God loves the world.
In First Timothy we hear both that “we brought nothing into the world” and that “God… richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.” God has given so much to us, and so part of our relationship with God comes from how we use and how we treat what we’ve been given. We’ve been given dirt, water, air, animals, plants, trees, oceans, oil, and even the light and the darkness.
God made the world and God put us in it. It is not for us to try to escape it, to predict when it will come to an end, to imagine it’s disposable like a box of Kleenex, or to deceive ourselves into thinking that God doesn’t love it.
On Rogation Sunday we remember that this is the world God made. This is the world God loves. This is the world God has put us in.
Amen.
