Reflections Feb 26, 2012 Creation Care

Reflections on the Season                                       Lent 1   February 26, 2012

Today’s readings are

Genesis 9:8-17, Psalm 25:1-10, 1 Peter 3:18-22, Mark 1:9-15

Imagine you’re college student and have signed up for a course called “ecology of snakes and amphibians in western Florida”.    I said “imagine”.   Then you find out that the “lab” in this course will consist of several weekend field trips.  You will be experiencing the tangled vine and mangrove wetlands and their inhabitants first-hand...in the water…mostly at night.  Hold that image for just a minute while we look at the readings for this week. 

The readings start with the legend of the great flood, Noah’s ark, and God’s blessing of every creature:  "As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth."

The Gospel reading is another water story:  In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild animals; and the angels waited on him.

The Epistle connects the two stories in a reading that may have been part of an early church baptism ritual:  “And baptism, which this (the ark) prefigured, now saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ…”

Now back to the swamps of Florida.  My daughter called from college last week in exactly this situation.  Her concern, however, was how to pay for the wetsuit and headlamp.  She couldn’t wait to get off campus and into the water.  Her passion is for saving as much precious wetland habitat as possible, and protecting the lives of each native species in them.  Her passion is shared by a large and rapidly growing number of young people around the globe.  There is an ark-like quality to the nature preserves and marine set-asides and humans-in-habitat projects multiplying around the globe.  It is interesting that the sciences of ecology and psychology now understand what the ancient story of the Ark is saying:  the human species really can’t live without the rest of Creation.  We can read the Gospel story “against the grain” of the usual interpretation of the wilderness as a fearful testing place.  Of course it is fearful for those of us who are separate from it and don’t know it.  But the Spirit moved Jesus right into that holy place of wild creatures, the undomesticated and free.    For growing number of Christians,  re-reading the Ark story, knowing an undomesticated Jesus  and experiencing the fullness of baptism means taking on God’s care of creation as a central tenant of faith.   

All I want to know is, are cottonmouth snakes nocturnal?

John+

Notes:

 Interfaith Power and Light, Green Cross, and Creation Care are just three examples of networks of Christians living to put this faith into action.