Love Is In The Air
This is our first week of six weeks this summer during which we will draw our scripture readings from an alternative set of lectionary readings that focus on Creation Care. In today’s homily, we pay attention to the multiple layers of the atmosphere, taking to heart that our own journeys are happening on many different levels at the same time.
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Transcript
Notes…not the musical kind that we absorb through sound waves that vibrate the tympanum of our ears or through the nerve endings in our fingertips that reach into our souls, but the kind of notes that are part of the atmosphere. Top notes, heart notes, and base notes. The first air I inhale when I walk outside on an early spring morning before the sun rises. It can be the same ambient temperature as a similar pre-dawn autumn morning. But 65 degrees in March smells like new green foliage; such a different top note from 65 degrees on an October morning, musky with the aroma of leaf mold.
Waking up early on a summer morning at my grandmother’s home in the heart of the East Texas Piney Woods, the air felt and smelled damp and ancient.
Whereas a summer morning in Dallas – where I lived — was more like a dry sauna, and always smelled like baking bread. I later realized that was because we lived downwind from a large commercial bread bakery. When the bakery closed, the scent of the native Live Oaks took its place — crisp and clean, like a starched shirt being ironed, those negative ions charging the air.
At my other grandmother’s farm near Waco, the atmosphere had an ambient flavor of the artesian springs that were all around the rural spot and fed the well water which we used.
Portsmouth, New Hampshire always smells like salty sea water, which the ocean breeze constantly draws off the Atlantic and wafts through the town.
Top notes, all of them, fading into heart notes. Heart notes are the layers in the atmosphere that are the essence of a place; you might call heart notes the atomized working sweat of a place. Soybean refineries, oil refineries, public transportation exhaust, commercial bakeries, or fisheries.
The final and longest lasting notes are base notes, and like the live oaks that replaced the aroma of baking bread, base notes are always from plants and trees – cedar, balsam, vanilla orchid, agarwood. Our skin actually absorbs these base notes, connecting our cells with those same sort of cells in the earth. “The Lord God formed us from the earth.”
“Have we not known? Have we not heard? Have we not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is God that sits upon the circle of the earth! It is God who blows upon our false foundations and withers them so that life’s whirlwinds carry them away like stubble.”
Praying our way through these creation care texts this summer promises to be a fascinating lens onto the dynamic story of God and us. It has been perhaps too easy to think of being created in God’s image, as something unique to us, as though every inch of land, every drop of water, every “thing” does not also bear traces of its Creator. How could it not?
And because they do, then all our movement through these days and nights and seasons, noticing the air we breathe, the soil we dig in, the trees whose canopy shades our way, all of this movement becomes a prayer of praise, a path of thanksgiving. We LIVE inside a psalm.
And the earth itself trains us to be prophets, poets, evangelists, advocates. Because the air, the water, the earth also signal their dis-ease. And it is our sacred obligation to pay attention to these signals. Because we are stewards of the largest land trust ever – the planet, which duty we share with other humans. Learning how to do that well begins with doing small things well, repeating them, and inviting others to join us.
Once we begin to pay closer attention to the atmosphere, we notice that it can also carry human distress signals. Think about how you can walk into a room and know what was just said…or NOT said. These signals can also accompany certain social transitions, like graduations or retirements, or new babies. Many parents are realizing that despite all their careful attention to raising children, their young adults seem to be suffering depression and anxiety at rates not seen before. Failure to launch is about more than just fearing a starting salary is less than they are used to. It also warns of a possible deficit in courage, which if not addressed, can develop into crippling social fear about trying new things or learning how to calculate risk in order to live full lives.
The Church has historically been charged with this virtue education, in support of the family as the primary laboratory for these lessons. And so Christian educators and families are constantly rethinking how to encourage early and frequent opportunities for young people to develop mature character. The current atmosphere here at Grace is charged with ideas and energy around the urgency of this issue.
We don’t have to be the loudest voice in the room when it comes to adding our notes to the air. Our song is not a solo. But like birdsong, call invites response, until the atmosphere is filled with praise, with thanksgiving, with intercessions, echoing off the cataracts and rebounding from earth’s canyons carried on the wind to the throne of God.
God…who sits upon the circle of the earth. God who calls all of creation by name because…God so loved the world. Yet this awesome God is not beyond our knowing, even though God may indeed be ultimately ineffable on this side of heaven. But anyone who has been married for decades knows that there is always something about the beloved that we have yet to learn. The fact that there is always more to know does not mean that we do not know them well. Otherwise, it would be impossible to love them or to love God. We cannot love what we are not at least committed to knowing better every day. The challenge is that, without practicing how to notice the Divine in everything, God is sometimes beyond our recognizing.
You will notice that beginning this week, there will be a new version of the prayers of the people that we will use in these weeks. We want to intentionally leave space in the intercessions for you to offer aloud your own thanksgivings or the names of persons for whom you are praying. Don’t worry about speaking “loudly enough” for all to hear. God will hear. Don’t worry that when you speak, others may also be speaking. Instead of imagining you are making an announcement, consider that you are floating petitions and thanksgivings into the oxygen that God inhales.
Creation care is not a project outside of ourselves that we elect to pick up during certain times and seasons. Rather, it is but another way of describing what it means to pay attention to how we live. And to know that we are among – but not alone among — the many wonders created by God, and which bear God’s image. The special emphasis of naming creation care is to remind us that when we pay attention, we can live more carefully and in closer communion and collaboration with our Creator.
Let us pray: Holy Spirit, breath of life, teach us to cherish the air we breathe; so that all our thoughts and actions begun, continued, and ended in you might glorify your Holy Name.
Amen.