Christianity and the Survival of Creation

During Sunday's sermon, which probably sounded more like a labyrinth than an organized thought (if you can say a labyrinth has a "sound") I wondered whether we might consider the 2x4 we buy at the lumberyard as a holy object. As I indicated in the sermon, much of my thoughts, which had the pattern of flying birds, came from Jesus' admonition to "look at the birds and consider the lilies" as well as Wendell Berry's essay which serves as the Title of this blog entry.

"A second reason why the holiness of life is so obscured to modern Christians is the idea that the only holy place is the built church. This idea may be more taken for granted than taught; nevertheless, Christians are encouraged from childhood to think of the church building as 'God's house,' and most of them could think of their houses or farms or shops or factories as holy places only with great effort and embarrassment. It is understandably difficult for modern Americans to think of their dwelling places as holy, because most of these are, in fact, places of desecration, deeply involved in the ruin of creation."

Just one week prior to this past Sunday my sermon was a reflection on the fact that the response to having "church outside" (along with a crayfish boil) was so popular we wondered whether we'd have enough room to accommodate all the visitors to the garden. During the sermon I asked a hypothetical question, one that arose after having several people ask me, somewhat facetiously, "Can we do this every week?" My question was: "What, exactly, are we doing and could we, in fact, do this every week?"

Truth be told more people came for crayfish than for communion but the joy was palpable - might it have been holy too? One visitor told me that they had grown up in the Episcopal Church and the sermon made them consider for the first time in their life, the fact than an "outsider" could come to an Episcopal service inside a church and have absolutely no idea what we were doing...

You can find Berry's essay here: http://www.crosscurrents.org/berry.htm