Loading...Today we have read a familiar teaching of Jesus, the parable of the sower. When studying or preaching on this passage we usually end with asking ourselves questions like, which type of soil am I. Have I allowed to myself become rocky or thorny where no seed can grow or flourish or am I rich soil, has my life been fruitful?
We can also apply this parable to our collective selves and ask questions like what are the things in our community, our society or even in the world that inhibit God’s Kingdom, preventing it from flourishing. Where is the soil so rocky with hatred and violence that no seed could grow. Where is the soil so thin that people cannot live in safe or stable environments? Where have social, economic and political pressures become so thorny that no one flourishes. Then the parable could lead us to ask, how am I helping to create a world in which there is enough good soil for everyone.
I going to leave those questions for you to ponder because today I want to sow a new seed, and see what kind of soil it will land on.
Are you familiar with the term marginalized? It’s not a new word but I have just become aware of its use in the last year or so.
The original meaning of the word came from the practice of making notes in the margins of a book or document. We pencil in the margin, thoughts or comments that have been left out of the printed text.
Now the word marginalized usually refers to a person or a group of people, a concept or thing that is treated as if they are insignificant and not important, they are excluded and relegated to the fringes of society and thus have been rendered powerless.
Women and girls, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, migrants and refugees, and the LGBT community are examples of those who have been marginalized and not valued in our society.
We all know how these groups have been treated unjustly. Marginalization is not a new concept it is just another word we are using to talk about the injustices that these groups have endured.
And whether or not we like to admit it, history tells us that the church, and yes even our Episcopal church, has been complicit in this marginalization and in some cases still is.
Many of us in this room lived through the struggles that the Episcopal Church went through to move these groups out of the fringes and into their rightful places in our worship and faith communities. Of course there is still more work to be done and we should be proud that our church continues in the forefront of this work.
But now, back to the seed that I want to sow today.
Would it surprise you if I said that we, humankind, has marginalized the rest of creation? It shouldn’t surprise us. We know that the earth’s resources have been abused. The air, water and elements we need for our very lives have been polluted and over used. Whole species of animals are now extinct because of our life styles. We have pushed care of creation to the margins, ignoring its importance excluding it from our thoughts and plans.
We have treated the earth, God’s creation, as if it were given to humankind for our pleasure and for our use, without regard for its care. The Bible tells us that we were commissioned by God to be stewards of all of God’s creation — To care for and protect it. We are not doing a very good job.
Unfortunately the church has also marginalized the non-human part of creation. We do not regularly include the earth, animals and plants in our worship, our liturgy, our hymns, or our preaching.
There are many places in our Book of Common Prayer where the whole of creation has been excluded. We have excluded it for so long that we don’t even notice that it is not there. By keeping nature in the fringes of our worship and our life together as faith communities, we do not perceive it as an integral part of our spirituality.
Let me explain further.
We spend a lot of time talking about love. In particular, the second Great Commandment, “love your neighbor”. In some way every time we worship and pray together we talk about loving each other. I believe we are all trying to love our neighbor. We follow that commandment because we hear about loving each other every Sunday. It’s in our prayers, our songs, our liturgy and our sermons. We have heard it all our lives and it has become part of us. It is still not easy to love every one but we are trying to love each other and to see Christ in the face of those who are different from us. Loving one another has become a part of our spirituality and thus a part of who we are.
The problem is that we have marginalized nature by holding to a very narrow definition of neighbor. Our neighbor is not just our fellow human, our neighbor is all of creation. The earth is not a gift given to us humans for our pleasure and use but we are an integral part of creation, equal in importance to our neighbors of plants, animals and the elements. We all need each other to exist. We are kin to the air, the water, the rivers and the mountains. We are kin to the hundreds of thousands of different plants on this earth and kin to the millions of different animal species. We humans are only a small part of God’s creation. Without our brother and sister plants and animals and our neighbors the earth, the air and water, our lives would not be possible.
Einstein once said that if honeybees disappeared off the face of the earth, humans would have only four years to live. Creation is a kinship and all of creation needs to be in the center and none of it in the fringes.
If we had heard about loving all creation as often as we hear about loving our fellow humans maybe we would think about creation in a different way. What a difference it would have made if we had grown up understanding that when the word ALL is used in our worship that it meant all living things instead of just all people.
What if instead of saying we respect the dignity of every person we said we respect the dignity of every living thing. If we begin to include the whole of God’s creation every time we worship or pray, every time we come together to make decisions for our church family and our buildings, every time we get together for fun, it would become a part of our spirituality, Then loving and caring for all of creation would come to our minds as easily and as often as loving one another does.
I do want to give you an example of how we can exclude most of creation without even realizing it. Take a look at the mission statement of St James. We are all very proud of this statement. Unlike most mission statements that are written then filed away never to be seen again, we love ours. We use it all the time. It appears on all our documents and communications. We hear it in our announcements and it is often included in our sermons.
But look at it again. Do you see all of God’s creation in this statement “Loving People, Serving People”? This statement does not even fully address what we do here at St. James. It doesn’t include our newest ministry, the Animal Care Ministry, whose patron saint St Francis, by the way, talked to the birds and called them brothers and sisters. He didn’t marginalize creation but recognized our kinship. Our mission statement doesn’t include the gardeners among us who take on the ministry of caring for our beautiful grounds and gardens. A few simple word changes to this statement would make it inclusive of all creation and all of our ministries. And it could tell the world that we love all of God’s creation.
Leaving creation out of our mission statement was not done intentionally. I do not believe that the marginalization of creation by the church has been done on purpose or with malicious intent but it will take a lot of intentional work to bring creation back from the margins and to the center of our spiritually.
There is so much more can be said about the marginalization of creation and I hope that we will devote some time to learn about it and how our parish can intentionally include all of God’s creation in our worship and life together.
There is opportunity here for every group in our parish to learn to be inclusive of nature and to care for it. The Altar Guild, the choir, those responsible for our grounds and buildings and hospitality as well as those who plan our worship.
I encourage each of us to really pay attention to the words we hear, read and sing. Look for ways that nature has been left out, relegated to the fringes. Notice our surroundings, in and outside our buildings. Where have we excluded the non-human part of creation and how can we bring it to the center?
Today I have sown the seed.
The questions we now could ask are what are the rocks and thorns in our current consumer driven life style that will prevent this seed from germinating? What will stop us from making the necessary changes that are needed to nourish this seed?
What can we as individuals and as a faith community do to grow this seed and allow it to become fruitful as God intended creation to be?
