Sermon: Holy Ground
A sermon preached at Rothwell United Church on September 3, 2023. Perfect for the first Sunday in the season of creation!
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Today is the first day of school for the kids in my area. It was an exciting morning in this house! However, as I walked my youngest to school, I was struck by the high heat and humidity. With a very “unseasonable” heat + humidex forecast of 41 degrees Celsius, we were confronted with the climate crisis as soon as we opened our front door to step outside. There is no air conditioning in the classrooms since the school was built in the 1960s at a time when cooled indoor air would rarely, if ever, be needed for the health and safety of the children and teachers. My daughter, her classmates, and her teacher were in for a very uncomfortable first day of learning.
I walked home thinking about what is needed for all of us, children and adults, to become motivated and energized to take climate action. One thing that we need, as people of faith, is to experience the Holy in the Earth community of which we are part. That makes my sermon from this past Sunday appropriate for today.
In the sermon, I invite us to reflect upon what it means to be standing on holy ground in our world today, based upon the story in Exodus in which Moses encounters God in the burning bush. How can we understand the Earth community as holy ground?
Scripture Reading
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. 3 Then Moses said, ‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.’ 4 When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ 5 Then he said, ‘Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’ 6 He said further, ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
7 Then the Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. 10 So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.’ 11 But Moses said to God, ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?’ 12 He said, ‘I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.’
13 But Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you”, and they ask me, “What is his name?” what shall I say to them?’ 14 God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am.’[a] He said further, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, “I am has sent me to you.”’ 15 God also said to Moses, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, “The Lord,[b] the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you”:
This is my name for ever,
and this my title for all generations. (Exodus 3:1-15 NRSV)
Holy Ground
Preached on September 3, 2023 at Rothwell United Church, Ottawa ON
Let us pray:
God of Life,
May the words of my mouth
And the meditations of all our minds and hearts
Lead us to deeper understanding of you
And the love you call us to live. AMEN.
The writer and environmental activist Terry Tempest Williams describes one of her earliest experiences in the natural world. When she was only four years of age, her mother and grandmother took her hiking up to a waterfall in Wyoming. With each of them holding on to her, they lowered her so that she could drink from the clear pool of water at the base of the waterfall. This was a profound experience for Williams who describes it as “an initiation into this fountain of knowledge, spirituality, vitality, life, curiosity.”[1]
Described as an early baptism, this transformative experience led Williams to “seek spiritual sustenance in the natural world.”[2] For her, returning to the natural world again and again would help to make her whole. This and other experiences in nature also convicted Williams to engage in environmental activism, as part of her vow to the sacred she experienced at that waterfall.
Williams’ experience is recounted in the book Turning to Earth: Stories of Ecological Conversion, in which the author F. Marina Schauffler explores the ways in which nature writers, such as Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Henry David Thoreau, and others, have had transformative, mystical encounters in the natural world that led them to lives of immersion and wonder in the natural world, and writings in which they sought to convey the mystery and importance of caring for the Earth community.
It's a valuable book in which I learned about how Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, the pivotal book about the dangers of DDT, was blessed with a lifelong love of nature from her mother, and experienced a direct sense of calling that came from the sea.[3] Aldo Leopold, a conservationist and developer of the idea of having a “land ethic” of relationship between people and the natural world, was transformed from his former utilitarian way of looking at the world through a profound encounter with a wolf and her pups.
This book, Turning to Earth, speaks about the early transformative experiences of nature writers, and because they have written about them, we know about them. But such experiences do not just belong to the published, or the famous. They are not the purview of the few, those destined to be in the public eye through their writing. Indeed, their experiences all happened in ordinary places in the world, to them as ordinary people.
It was just such an experience that happened to Moses.
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