Themes:     Joshua 5:9-12 - Entering the Promised Land

Psalm 32 - Confessing Transgressions

2Corinthians 5:16-21 - Being Reconciled to God

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 - Parable of the Father’s Love for All His Children

Prayer of the Day

God of compassion, you welcome the wayward, and you embrace us all with your mercy.  By our baptism clothe us with garments of your grace, and feed us at the table of your love, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

Hymn Suggestions

Gathering:                     “Mothering God, You Gave Me Birth”  (ELW 735)

                                        “Come to Me, All Pilgrims Thirsty”  (ELW 777)

                                        “Hope of the World”  (ACS 1085)

Hymn of the Day:           “Our Father, we have wandered”  (WOV 733, ELW 606)

                                     “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy” (LBW 290, ELW 588)

                                     “I heard the voice of Jesus say”  (ELW 332 or 611)

Offertory Response:        “For the Wholeness of the Earth”  (ACS 1067)

Sending:                        “God of the Fertile Fields” (ACS 1063)

                                        “Touch the Earth Lightly”  (ELW 739)

                                       “O Living Bread from Heaven”  (ELW 542) (see revised st. 4 below)

                4.       Oh, grant me then, well-strength-ened with heav’n-ly food, while here

                           my course on earth is length-ened, to mid-wife, free from fear;

                           unto that bless’d com-mu-nion where none can peace de-stroy,

                           a new-ly birth’d cre-a-tion of bound-less love and joy.

Overview

Consider these emphases for the upcoming EcoFaith Summit of the Upper Midwest:

HEAR God’s call through the cries of Creation.

NAME the powers destroying Creation and holding us captive.

STAND WITH Creation through bold community action.

HELP GIVE BIRTH to creative resistance for the healing of Creation.

Each of these are spiritual disciplines (to hear/discern, to name/confess, to stand-with/suffer, and to mid-wife/bear witness) that has its biblical foundations, rich Christian history, and practical guidance on which volumes have been written for personal spiritual growth, for cultivating faith in community, and for fulfilling the church’s purpose in the world.  This is likely no startling insight, except that now we are asked to consider these things in the throe of an ecological crisis, in the midst of governmental collapse, in a maelstrom of disinformation, artificial intelligence, cultural warfare, and economic distress.  Perhaps as Christians and as a Church, we are finally “coming to ourselves” (like that prodigal in the parable at Luke 15:17)—finding ourselves sick and dying of the dissolute sins and systemic evils we have selfishly pursued—no longer able to deny the styes and the cries we have wrought, but finally brought low enough to confess our transgressions, to be welcomed and restored to beloved community, and be bold about the business of resisting the oppressive powers, of healing the wounded, of feeding the hungry, of sheltering the refugee, of reclaiming the lost, of incarnating the divine commitment to shalom, healing.

Becoming Doulas of a New Creation

Having come to ourselves, though, it’s the dying that overwhelms us:  all the grief and guilt and fear and misery and loss that dying imposes.  Perhaps we are finally learning the hard way (viz., it turns out, the only way) how compassion must be primary, joining in solidarity with those who suffer, with a creation that groans (all of which the Incarnation embraces, and the Crucified re-presents), that opens up all the other spiritual disciplines we had heretofore aspired to fulfill, but could not.  (I just read something by Richard Rohr along these very lines:  “if we have never loved deeply or suffered deeply, we are unable to understand spiritual things at any depth.” (The Universal Christ, p. 207). Through compassion, en Cristo, we become doulas of a new creation.

On their wilderness journey out of Egypt, out of its slavery and disgrace, the Israelites finally found themselves encamped on the border of something new. They had been (and in many respects, still were) refugees—not just in the physical/political sense of being displaced, hungry, vulnerable and oppressed, but refugees in the spiritual sense of feeling dis-graced (i.e., more than just alienated from God, but abandoned by their God, YHWH), and despondent.  Now Joshua was leading/delivering them into what would hopefully be a better place, a place of satiety and security, a land of kept-promises—in a word, a place of shalom. I think what gets missed in this observance of a passover to this new life (at Joshua 5:9-12), however, is how the people begin to practice again what had always been humanity’s old sacred calling: bringing forth in partnership with the water and the earth (cf., Gen. 1:20, 24) the flourishing of life across every diverse and beautiful biome—a symbiotic communion/coordination of all creatures that YHWH deemed to be very good. (Gen. 1:31). And perhaps this is the deeper meaning of the traditional observance of the ritual of Passover by Jews and of the Eucharist by Christians.

The introduction of “bread from heaven” (Ex. 16:4) was given the Israelites as a visible means of grace to sustain them physically in the wilderness, to remind them of YHWH’s accompany-ment on their way, and as a daily discipline of learning humility and trust in the faithfulness of their God. The subsequent withdrawal of manna upon entering Canaan, therefore, should not be interpreted as God’s sanction of the peoples’ colonizing of new territory, their extracting a living from the land, or their securing for themselves and their progeny the means of production and self-sufficiency (all presumptions we have seen put to disastrous effect throughout human history and in the United States), but better interpreted, I would suggest, as that kairos moment of the people having become reacquainted with their God who did not abandon them, a people that had learned through their exodus experience the blessings of indigeneity, of being in life-giving and life-sustaining communion with air, land, water, and every other living creature.

In his new book Life After Doom, Brian McLaren proposes an indigenous reading of the text such that, “The wild, the land, the Earth itself becomes their teacher for a generation, to help them deprogram from the brainwashing and miseducation of Egypt and its pyramidal econ-omy.” (pp. 109, 117 fn. 7) “Again and again,” McLaren avers, “the Bible shows itself to be the work of indigenous and oppressed people…in the genre of indigenous wisdom, the tribal wis-dom of the Hebrew people.” (pp. 109, 112)  I believe he’s onto something profound, risking in his book to “lay aside [colonial] immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.” (Prov. 9:6)  So, McLaren turns to the indigenous wisdom of Cherokee author and theologian Randy Woodley:  “To accept our place as simple human beings—beings who share a world with every seen and unseen creature in this vast community of creation—is to embrace our deepest spiritu-ality.” (cited on p. 102, from Woodley’s book Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Recon-necting with Sacred Earth) Woodley elaborates further, “Indigenous creation narratives invari-ably reveal human beings as the cooperative partner with the rest of creation, participating with creation in an important role, usually as caretakers…The biblical concept of shalom, salvation, or healing in many ways can be equated directly with the Native American concept of restora-tion or harmony. The Creator’s plan for harmony concerns all of creation, the whole community of creation, not just humanity.” (Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview, p. 68)

Accordingly, when Paul entreats the Corinthians “be reconciled to God,” (2 Cor. 5:20b), what he is urging is a reappropriation (this side of Incarnation and the Cross) of humanity’s original indigeneity and vocation as blessings—not reliving a curse (“By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19)), but compassionately reviving a loving partnership with Christ and every other creature in a “ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18b), incarnating by their solidarity the divine commitment to shalom, becoming thereby doulas of a new creation.