Come and Celebrate!

sermon by Carrie Eikler
Psalm 148
September 8, 2013

When I told Torin what I was going to talk about today, I said, this sermon is going to be a “come to Jesus” moment.  I have friend who uses this phrase- a “come to Jesus moment”- when she is talks about experiencing anything that is clear, to the point, don’t put too much time into explaining it, it’s important, just do it.  Come to Jesus.

I don’t give many come to Jesus sermons. 

Perhaps I like my sermons to be a bit more nuanced than that.  A bit more poetic and flowery. 

Today, I’m chucking that.

This is my come to Jesus moment.

Just come to Jesus. Come to Jesus and celebrate.

When we decided to take on a summer-long (at least a 7week long) series on Creation Care, I knew it would be something our congregation would appreciate.  After all, we are a congregation that takes this topic very seriously.  We have identified that along with Christian Community, creation care would be one of our two main foci when thinking of outreach, education, nurture, and so on.

As we identified at our congregational retreat in April, in this congregation we have gardeners, mushroom hunters, farmers, mountain advocates, diggers in the dirt and mudpie makers, and washerwomen and washermen of cloth diapers.  We are full of people who feel called to care for the environment.

And yet, this wasn’t a series on just environment.

It was a series on creation.

On caring for God’s good creation.

If it was a series on just the environment, it would have the potential of being a seven week

call to action, an almost two month long confessional

It would be like Lent, in the middle of summer.

Repent. and Renew.

So you will have noticed that every week wasn’t about the environment.  We looked at what creation means, who is our creator, how we are as part of the creation.  Yes, we talked about our responsibility to change our habits and our hearts, but today is what it all leads up to.

Today, oh you good people of faith, is a day to celebrate.

Today, oh you responsible Anabaptists who value service so much…today is a day to remember goodness.

Come to Jesus people!  Come and celebrate!

I think we need the reminder sometimes to celebrate, don’t we?  We can take ourselves and our “responsibilities” so seriously that we forget to find joy in the simple fact that God made us and called us good.

Last week Torin gave you a Biology 204 insight into ecological terms such as neo-Malthusian and cornucopian.  And he used the Psalmist as showing you a middle way between the two

I didn’t major in Biology or environmental studies.  I was a sociology major.  I love people, and the study of people.  I’m an extrovert (in case you hadn’t realized).

So instead of looking at the world through a lens like Torin or other science-minded folks might, I look at the world and am fascinated by behaviors, motivators.  What makes us tick.  Why we do things.  How we shape society and how society shapes us.

It’s a good lens to take into looking at the religious life, and it has been great to try to understand the peculiarities of what I see in many Mennonites and Brethren, and many socially-conscious people of faith.

So here is my own interpretation of some dualistic extremes I see among us in our world

It is easy to see where the American lifestyle is one of what I call “extravagant entitlement.”  We believe we have the right to anything we want.  In any quantity that we want.  Whenever we want.  Forget about the consequence. 

Now when we realize the folly this lifestyle, there is a tendency (at least mentally) to swing to the opposite side, to a place I think of as “fearful responsibility .”  Now, I’ll use myself as an example, and I’ll say I see this a lot around me, maybe here.  The consequence of every choice is agonized over.  Everyday living can seem to be a series of “Oh, but there are starving people in (fill in the bank) so I shouldn’t eat this cookie.”  We embrace our call to simplicity with such mental rigor that we become cynical, skeptical, even unloving towards our neighbor who lives differently than we do, more extravagantly than we might.  We live in fearful responsibility about what will happen if we live the “wrong way.”

Now these are extremes, I realize.  But I have certainly felt it.  When I was a earnest, contentious seminarian, I remember having a conversation with another student named Keith.  Keith was a Quaker who grew up Mennonite and had lived for sometime in Portland, Oregon.  I myself had lived in the Northwest for a year, in Olympia Washington, so we were  chatting about familiar places in the area.

And I had said to him (it’s kind of embarrassing to say this now), something along the lines of “You know it is so beautiful out there.  But I couldn’t help feeling, as I looked at the Pacific, and saw houses and roads and all the white people “Wow, our ancestors destroyed and decimated the people of this land and this was as far as we could go.  I look at the ocean and think of all the destruction took place for me to stand here.”

Now, I thought I’d have a sympathetic ear in my good liberal friend Keith.  I thought he’d give me an affirmative “Oh, I know.  Isn’t it horrible.”  But I’ll never forget the look he gave me, an incredulous look, and he said “Really?!  When you looked at the beauty of God’s creation  all you could see was humanity’s tragedies?  How sad for you!”

Now of course, I did see the beauty of the gorgeous coast.  But he was right!  How sad for me, that I took our call to love, nonviolence, service, care, and all those good Come to Jesus things…how sad that I couldn’t see deep beauty because liberal guilt or Christian righteousness or my quest for virtue was more important.

So I’ve been setting the stage of extremes, extravagant entitlement versus fearful responsibility.  And it’s not that we live in all of one or the other, we all probably have some of both. 

The psalmist says you are part of creation.  And creation is to celebrate.

Perhaps the best way to restore ourselves in creation is to listen to God calling us

to shout praises.  To laugh joy.  To be delighted in life.

Perhaps we can find healing when we recognize that, yes,  things may seem desperate but we can use joy as antidote to destruction.  We can use prayers of praise as a defiant act against antipathy and discontentedness and entitlement

The Scottish hymn writer John Bell said on one of the videos we watched last year something to the effect of humans shouldn’t be so haughty as to believe we are the only one who could possibly sing God’s praises.  The river when it runs, the birds when they sing, when the coyotes howl and the cicadas chirp.  When the wind rushes through the branches, creation sings it’s praises to God.

Ask creation to teach you how to celebrate.  How to banish fear and entitlement from your life and to speak God’s praises.

So here it is, friends.  My come to Jesus moment.  We are called to responsibility.  We were called to till and keep and worship and serve in the garden.

But just as importantly, we are called to celebrate and praise our Creating God. //

Perhaps celebrating creation and our Creator is the first steps towards reconciliation with creation.//

So come to Jesus, children!  Come celebrate God’s creation.