"Creation flavored" thoughts on the lectionary texts
Date: Sept 21, 2008
Text: Psalm 105.1-6,37-45
Thoughts
"the cloud for covering" - to keep them frost free at night! It's a big issue in my area this time of year.
"water from the rock flowing out into the desert" - but you can only pump up so much water before the aquifer runs dry
and the stream in the desert ends in a puddle of mud. I'm sure there is plenty of water for drinking if we are careful
and thoughtful with it. I'm not sure there is enough for irrigating vast stretches of desert!
"the fruit of the people's toil" - I am not a gardener. I approve of gardening, but I am not a gardener.
I eat the fruit of other peoples' toil. At best it's from Jeff and Jeff, our CSA farmers. Or from the Farmer's
Market or the Co-op. If it's from an agribusiness farm, then I'm more worried about chemicals and conditions (living
and working) for the laborers who pick and process it.
Text: Exodus 16.2-15
Thoughts
"hunger in the wilderness" - interesting how there is often a wider variety of food in the urban stores
- shipped in from all corners of the world, but good simple food is more dependable in the rural areas.
"What is it?" - how do we decide what is good for food and what isn't? Sometimes by giving it
a new, more palatable sounding name. Sometimes just by what our culture eats and doesn't eat? Sometimes because
we just can't think of eating Kermit? But we can think of eating The Little Red Hen? Why fish and birds and
some mammals - but not bugs? (That's right - I don't eat bugs, although I understand some people do!)
While not quite as directly as the quail or the manna, our food still comes to us through the working of
God's Creation. On "The Splendid Table" (NPR - I listen on the way from one church to the other on Sunday morning!)
they were talking about heirloom tomatoes - "a tomato of value that breeds true, that produces offspring like the parents,
so that you can save the seed for another generation."
Text: Philippians 1.21-30
Thoughts
"Let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ" - which includes living gently in, and caring for, the same
Creation Jesus walked around in.
"Strive side by side" - life is meant to be a "together experience", not rigid individualism and isolation.
A good piece by Bill McKibben in the Christian Century about a town in Sweden designed for minimal impact and community building.
It's not on the website (
www.Christiancentury.org) yet, but might be in a week or so.
Prayer
God of animal, vegetable, and mineral Creation -
your world works so well all by itself.
Give us the wisdom not to take too much water from the rock,
or to ignore food that would be good for us,
or to ship food so far that it loses too many nutrients or uses too much energy,
or to interrupt the chain from one generation to the next.
Help us learn from your Creation,
before we reshape it irreversibly after ourselves.
One Thing to Do This Week
Think of one resource you could use on a neighborhood or even community level instead of on an individual level.
Some people wash their clothes at the Laundromat instead of devoting a room of their house to the task. A town (Munising)
near mine has a community oven.
