Vocation

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

April 12, 2015

Vocation

Genesis 2:15

The Lord God took the man and

 put him in the garden of Eden

to till it and keep it.

************************************

In the beginning God created.

God created the heavens and the earth.

Stop for a moment and listen.

Think about those words:

God….

created.

Do you hear?

God… created.

We should be in awe,

marveling at the very thought.

You and I can be creative,

but we cannot create.

God creates.

Only God creates.

We know, of course,

that the Bible is not a book of science,

so we need not get caught up in the literalness

of what we read in that first chapter of Genesis.

The point of those who wrote those words so long ago

wasn’t to say, “Here’s just what happened.”

Their point was to teach us:

God creates.

        

The stars in the sky,

the sun, the moon,

the vastness of the universe,

the concept of time,

the birds, the trees, the fish,

you and me:

God created;

God creates.

How?

We’ll leave that to God.

We’ll stay with, “God creates!”

It is in spring when we seem to be

most aware of God’s creation

as the earth reawakens from its winter slumber.

The trees are budding,

the grass is greening,

birds that wintered far away have returned.

Judging by how frequently

I’ve had to refill my bird feeders

to satisfy their ravenous appetites,

they traveled a long way to get back here.

                                                              

The flowers that filled our Sanctuary last Sunday

made some of us reach for Benadryl or Claritin;

but still, our sneezing and sniffling

couldn’t detract from the beauty of those flowers,

the colors, and the fragrances.

Who but God could have created such beauty?

God created;

God created all;

and God called it all good.

And what God created,

God created for himself.

                 

In our pride and arrogance

we often think God created the world for us.

But the psalmist understood, writing,

“The earth is the Lord’s

and all that is in it,

the world,

and those who live in it.”

(Psalm 24:1)

Yes: The earth is the Lord’s

and all that is in it,

including those who live in it: You and me.

“O Lord, how manifold are your works!

In wisdom you have made them all;

the earth is full of your creatures.”

(Psalm 104:24)

The earth is the Lord’s.

And all that is in the earth is the Lord’s.

We too are part of God’s creation.

And we’ve been given a special responsibility

in God’s creation;

we’ve been called to a special vocation

in God’s world.

We heard it in our lesson,

that one simple verse:

we are to care for God’s creation,

we are to keep God’s creation,

look after it,

so it always and forever

remains a delight for God.

It’s too easy to skim past our text

as we race to the scandal

that draws our attention:

the scandal of disobedience,

the scandal of our ignoring our vocation,

our call, our responsibility;

the scandal of our walking off the job

given us by God,

in favor of doing what we wanted to do.

We know the end of the story, of course:

Humankind was sacked,

fired,

summarily removed,

shown the door,

sent out;

because we failed to listen.

We failed to do what God had told us to do.

But God, like the loving father

in the story of the prodigal son,

waits patiently,

waits patiently for us to return to

lives of obedience.

And God waits patiently for us

to reclaim our vocation,

our very first vocation

of caring for God’s creation.

God waits patiently for us to realize

that caring for God’s earth

isn’t something that should be politically divisive,

as we’ve made it.

God waits patiently for us to make

caring for God’s creation a priority,

because we recognize our call

to that responsibility,

that vocation;

that it isn’t politics or economics,

it isn’t ideology,

it is theology,

it is God,

it is God’s will.

Thousands of years later and God is still waiting

as we stumble in our disobedience,

stumble in our pride and arrogance,

treating God’s earth as something

that we can do with as we choose,

We focus not on the word “vocation”,

not on our call to “care for” God’s earth,

which is what the original Hebrew says:

“care for”.

                          

We focus instead on that word that comes later:

“dominion,”

and then we reinterpret that word,

not using it as it was intended 3,000 years ago,

a word that in the Hebrew means “responsibility”;

No, we prefer our contemporary meaning: power.

But how can we have power over God’s creation?

Yet, that is how we have acted over the centuries,

and in the process we’ve ignored our vocation

and abused God’s creation,

filling God’s oceans, lakes and streams with our poisons,

fouling God’s sky with toxins and dirt,

taking God’s magnificent blue

and smudging it with grays, blacks, and browns,

and then proudly saying, “that’s progress!”

And we’ve compounded our disobedience

by making “creation care” a divisive idea,

sneering at those who try to care for God’s creation,

mocking them as “tree huggers,”

without taking even a second to reflect,

on Who created the tree,

Who delights in the tree,

and Who gave humanity the vocation

of caring for the tree.

Creation care is is a matter of faith.

Not to care for God’s earth,

not to be a good and faithful steward of God’s earth,

is to live in disobedience to God’s will;

it is to live in disobedience to God.

The theologian Walter Brueggemann reminds us that,

the earth wasn’t created for humankind,

the earth was created for God.

It was created by God for God,

and our role was and is to care for it.

“From the beginning,” writes Brueggemann,

God [was] prepared to entrust the [earth]

to this special creature, this human.

From the beginning,

the human creature [was] called,

given a vocation,

and expected to share in God’s work.”

        

Creation care begins with acknowledging our vocation,

our call to look after God’s earth.

And it also includes acknowledging,

rather than denying,

how we can damage, destroy,

even push to extinction

life on God’s creation.

Our first great awakening came

two years before the first Earth Day,

when the astronauts of the Apollo 8 spacecraft

sent back pictures of our planet earth,

pictures taken as they completed their journey

around the moon,

pictures of the earth,

taken from 200,000 miles away

showing our island planet

set against the inky darkness of space.

                                                     

It is only in the movies that we colonize other planets;

this earth is all we have for 7 billion people,

or as our Lord Jesus would put it,

7 billion neighbors.

We have made progress in fits and starts

over the years,

acknowledging the impact of our actions at times,

while at other times, closing our eyes, our minds,

and our hearts to the damage we cause

to God’s creation.

                                                     

Lake Erie was thought to be too polluted

for safe swimming back when I was a teenager.

Industrial waste, as well as untreated sewage

poured into the Lake.

It’s much cleaner now,

as are other lakes rivers and streams

because we’ve acknowledged what we’ve done

and lived our vocation.

                                                     

But we still have a long way to go.

Google the term, “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”

to learn about what’s happened

to millions of tons of plastic debris

mindlessly, recklessly dumped in the Pacific,

God’s ocean.

We seem to be on yet another great awakening

as we are finally acknowledging our need

to reduce our carbon output.

Coal, so dirty to burn,

so dangerous to mine,

seems on the verge of becoming obsolescent,

much like whale oil in the 19^th century.

An article in today’s newspaper said,

“Coal is on the way out …,

and it is dying a slow death.”

Coal will be replaced by new technologies,

just as kerosene once replaced whale oil.

We’ll continue to replace the old with new,

the dirty with the cleaner.

                                   

Even here at our church,

there has been excited talk about

how we could and indeed should

consider installing solar panels

once we replace our rotting roof.

Doing so would, we hope,

save us money on utility bills,

and also help us to honor our vocation

to care for God’s creation.

God never said don’t use the resources

that are part of creation.

What God said was, care for my creation.

Care for MY creation.

The prophet Isaiah once painted a bleak picture

that could very well be prophetic for us

if we, like our ancestors in faith before us,

continue to live in disobedience:

“The earth dries up and withers,

the world languishes and withers;

the heavens languish together with the earth.

The earth lies polluted

under its inhabitants;
for they have transgressed laws,

violated the statutes,

broken the everlasting covenant.
Therefore a curse devours the earth,

and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt;
therefore the inhabitants of the earth dwindled,
and few people are left.”

(Isaiah 24:4-6)

That could be our future.

Or our future could what God wants for us,

what God intended for us:

humanity living joyfully, responsibly,

and harmoniously with all God’s creation,

all joined in the psalmist’s song

“Let the earth rejoice;

let the sea roar, and all that fills it;

let the field exult, and everything in it.

Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy”

(Psalm 96)

as God walks the earth,

God’s earth,

delighting in his creation.

AMEN