Green Blades Preaching Roundtable

Every fourth Wednesday of the month, at 10:30 AM, the worship committee meets in the basement conference room here at Our Savior’s. There are usually some small business items to cover but the main purpose of our small but dedicated group is to select hymns and songs for upcoming worship services. It’s often thankless but important work. The usual debate at these meetings sounds something like this, “You know pastor, we need to pick familiar hymns so the congregation can really sing out.” I don’t begrudge this sentiment. I know these lovely folx hear it when someone criticizes a lesser-known hymn. Nevertheless, they have become more and more daring when it comes to hymn selections. We’ve even integrated All Creation Sings into the regular repertoire. I am thankful for their willingness to try new things.

This cautious willingness came in handy when SundaysandSeasons.com recently integrated a new feature into their Music module. Our committee puts the site up onto a large screen for our meetings. At one such meeting we all noticed these strange codes alongside each of the hymns and songs. Right away, one of our team asked me, “Pastor, what do those letters mean?” 1R, HG, PS, and 2R. It didn’t take too long to figure out. These were lectionary readings! 1R represented the first reading, PS the Psalm, and so on. As soon as we figured that out, I exclaimed, “This is so cool!” And it is cool. This added another impetus to be brave and to select hymns and songs that may not be familiar but that are deeply connected to the themes of the day and, as a bonus to me, songs that can preach!

With that, I want to begin my reflection in the suggested hymn for the day, ELW 342 There in God’s Garden.  This is a hymn that preaches. The first verse establishes Jesus as a tree in God’s garden. What happens to this tree in subsequent verses is horrific yet true to the way Creation is treated yet today. Depicted in song are scars upon the branches, scars of suffering. This is followed by perhaps some of the most graphic lyrical phrasing, “see where the tendrils of our human selfhood feed on its lifeblood” (verse 2). “Thorns not its own are tangled in its foliage; our greed has starved it, our despite has choked it” (verse 3). Then the final three verses exclaim the gospel, all this contextualized in the Passion of our Lord! This hymn masterfully opened up for me that Jesus’ Passion is for all Creation. Give it a try. This hymn preaches.

Once I connected the Passion to all Creation, I couldn’t help but hear our Psalm in a completely different way. I imagined the words of this lament Psalm as being cries from the earth itself. Could this psalm be from an abandoned strip mine or from a lone, remaining tree where once there stood a forest? Perhaps these are thoughts from the last few living members of a quickly diminishing species. Is humanity the enemy? Where we were meant to be stewards, has sin twisted us into the enemy called out within this Psalm? Perhaps a message of repentance lies here. Is this our own betrayal of Christ? Tough stuff, to be sure. Still, if done well, this could tease out another dimension of Christ’s Passion that many may have missed to this point.

I will wrap up my reflection both in our Philippians and Matthew texts. I’ve been re-reading one of my favorite books, The Wisdom Jesus by Cynthia Bourgeault. In her chapter titled, The Passion, she helps us better understand the concept of kenosis, or self-emptying love. Perhaps the most famous words depicting this self-emptying love is found in our Philippians text beginning in verse 7:

    [Jesus} emptied himself,

  taking the form of a slave,

  being born in human likeness.

 And being found in human form,

  8he humbled himself

  and became obedient to the point of death—

  even death on a cross.

By itself, one may struggle to connect these words to Creation Care. We humans do tend to be quite self-centered after all. But, if we connect this to Matthew’s depiction of the Passion, particularly to Jesus’ prayer in the garden at Gethsemane, then a preacher may be able to describe kenosis as something meant for all Creation. I would certainly play up the natural beauty of a garden here. It could be helpful to posit upon why Jesus chose such a place for this prayer to take place. I would definitely point out that Jesus protects the garden from the interlopers who come to arrest him although this tidbit is depicted more clearly in John’s gospel. Still, within this beautiful and heartbreaking prayer, we find a connection to Creation. At the end of his prayer, Jesus says, “your will be done.” Then, as if to accentuate this specific part of his prayer, Matthew’s gospel depicts Jesus repeating this part of his prayer a second time. Bourgeault describes this as Jesus’ final realization and acceptance that his kenosis was about to be completed. This kenotic climax is easy to connect between Philippians and Matthew, but the beginning of this self-emptying love, it’s very genesis can be cloudy. We may assume that it begins with the incarnation, and there is nothing wrong with that, unless we view Christ’s kenosis as being strictly for humankind. To help avoid that trap, we can find a clue here in the garden that may help us better understand kenosis as being meant for all Creation.

The end of Jesus’ prayer harkens back to Creation itself. This translation, “your will be done” is but one possible translation. It could just as easily as the Latin does, “Let it be.” These same words are those which call Creation into being in Genesis. All of Creation is God’s will be done. Humanity is only a part of God’s great, “Let it be.” We aren’t even the beginning of God’s great, “Let it be.” All of the Created world came before us. And now Jesus’ own, “Let it be” is his self-emptying, his giving himself over to be subject to God’s will both here in the garden and at Creation. The Passion is for all of Creation, humanity inclusively but not humanity exclusively. And that, my friends, is good news. Without the woods and the waters and the beasts of all kinds, without clean air and natural seasons and specific temperatures, all these things we take for granted, all these things on which we are wholly dependent, without them we are lost. But Jesus’ self-emptying love is for the salvation of all Creation! Now we are freed and empowered to do the same. My friends, let it be. Give yourself over to God’s will. Let go of all the fear, let go of the ego, empty yourself as Jesus does so that we may love one another and love all of Creation as ourselves.