April 14, 2013: 

We know the creation story well:  in six days God made the world and all its creatures, pronounced it all good, and then turned over the keys to human beings, charging us to be caretakers of creation.  “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, the wild animals, and over every creeping thing.”  And so we became co-creators with God, entrusted with the right and the responsibility to enjoy and care for the earth.  Human dominion over the creatures, the story implies, is meant to be like God’s dominion over us:  benevolent and gracious.   Because we are made in the image of God, we are made to be like God:  to create as God creates, to care as God cares, to rule as God rules, wisely and lovingly.

But imitating the Creator is a tall order for us creatures.  Who are we to imitate God, you might say?  What business do we have being God-like? And who wants that kind of responsibility?

The truth is that in one respect, you and I are more like God than all the human beings that have preceded us for tens of thousands of years.   All of us have achieved some measure of immortality.  When we die, our bodies will go back to the dust of the earth, but the artifacts of our lives will exist long after we are gone.  Garbage we have disposed of will outlive us by hundreds or even thousands of years.  Our carbon footprint, rather than getting washed away by the rain as our human footprint does, changes the natural cycles of the planet in ways that will impact future generations long after we are forgotten by everyone who knew us.  The psalmist lamented the impermanence of human beings, saying, “You sweep them away; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning; in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.”  But that was then, when the greatest artifact a human being could leave behind was a clay pot or an iron tool.  Our relics will be plastic bottles, broken toys, discarded electronics and their heavy metals, and elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

So if we have already achieved a dubious form of immortality by our membership of a modern industrial society, then imitating the Creator is something we need to learn more about.  We are already doing it, like it or not, so we might as well do a better job of it.  What are we to make of this assignment to be partners with God in creation?  How are we to understand this kind of power and this kind of responsibility?  To help us make sense of our charge, let’s look at what the passages we heard today tell us about how God cares for creation.  What kind of Creator are we imitating?

The first thing we learn from the psalm we heard is about the fragility of life, the dependence of all creatures on their Creator.   When I hear “These all look to you to give them their food in due season” I picture baby birds opening their mouths to receive food from their mother.  “When you give to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things. When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.”  Likewise the sparrows and lilies of which Jesus speaks depend entirely on their Creator to provide for them.  We also know what it is like to have others depend on us.  Any of us who has had a young child or an animal to care for knows what it is to always be thinking, “when did they last eat?  Do they have enough water?  Is it too hot for them?  Too cold?”  We are called to care for those who depend on us, the same way we depend on God.

The second way in which we are called to imitate our Creator is found in Jesus’ sermon from nature.  He draws our attention to the sparrows and the lilies, and points out how much care and attention God lavishes on them.  “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.”  And yet this plant that God so extravagantly adorns will be plucked and burned for fuel. 

Annie Dillard’s book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is an extended meditation on the extravagance and intricacy of creation.  Like Jesus, she considers the magnificence of the most ordinary of creatures, such as the caterpillar, which has 228 separate and distinct muscles in its head alone.  Or the tree which every year creates absolutely from scratch 99% of its living parts, which for a big elm, might include six million leaves.  She considers her pet goldfish swimming in its bowl.  “This fish,” she writes, “cost me 25 cents.  He is a deep red orange, darker than most goldfish.  He steers short distances mainly with his slender red lateral fins; they seem to provide impetus for going backward, up or down.  It took me a few days to discover his ventral fins; they are completely transparent and all but invisible.  He also has a tail that is deeply notched and perfectly transparent at the two tapered tips.  He can extend his mouth, so that it looks like a length of pipe; he can shift the angle of his eyes in his head so he can look before and behind himself, instead of simply out his side. . . this fish, twenty-five cents worth, has a coiled gut, a spine radiating fine bones, and a brain.  Just before I sprinkle his food flakes into his bowl, I rap three times on the bowl’s edge; now he is conditioned, and swims to the surface when I rap.  And, he has a heart.”

When we pause long enough to pay attention to any living creature, we will be amazed.  The Creator lavishes attention on them all, allowing through the process of evolution a million tiny and intricate variations, a million surprises to be found right before our eyes.  So imitating the Creator means paying attention.  It means paying attention to the world around us, caring to notice what God has cared to make.  We pay attention when we notice the tree that just bloomed this morning.  We pay attention when we work in a garden, noticing which plant needs more sun or needs pruning.  We pay attention when we observe an animal, noticing their subtle behaviors and what they communicate.  We pay attention when we read the labels of what we’re putting on our grass, what we put in our mouths.  We pay attention when we take the time to throw a bottle in the recycling bin that’s over there instead of the trash can right here. 

Now, you may say, isn’t my time worth more than that?  Don’t I have more important things to do than walk 10 feet in the opposite direction to recycle a can?  Maybe you do, but perhaps, occasionally, you do have the time to pay attention, not because recycling a can is going to change the world, but because the practice of paying attention to the world you live in will change you.

Paying attention is one of the greatest, and hardest, spiritual disciplines.  This card we’re asking you to fill out today naming one way you will care for the earth, it’s just another way of saying, “how will you pay attention” in a new way, noticing something that before you never stopped to think about? 

I can name one sermon that I’ve heard in a lifetime of going to church that literally changed my life.  I was in high school, sitting in church with my parents, when our associate pastor told us that we should start recycling.  Now recycling back then was relatively new and involved a bit of effort, sorting your bottles from your cans and taking it all to the recycling center at the high school.  But the minister said to do it, and we did it; the only time I can ever remember immediately implementing the advice I heard in a sermon.  Recycling, turning lights out when you leave a room, running fans instead of air conditioning, adding insulation to your house, these are just ways of paying attention to the world we live in, showing respect for it, stopping to consider, if not the lilies of the field, then the environment that allows those lilies to thrive.

And here I just have to stop and tell you a joke.  Garrison Keillor tells this one about Ollie and Lena.  Ollie is on his deathbed, looking around at his family gathered around him, and he says, “Lena, is everyone here?  Are the children all here?  The grandchildren?  My sister?  Your brother?”  “Yes, Ollie,” she replies.  “We’re all here.”  “Then why is there a light on in the kitchen?”

If we imitate God when we care for those who depend on us and when we pay attention to the world around us, the third way in which we imitate God is in our freedom.  God’s creation is wildly free, developing countless unpredictable variations through the process of evolution.  As Annie Dillard says, “Look again at the horsehair worm, a yard long and thin as a thread, whipping through the duck pond . . . Look at an overwintering ball of buzzing bees, or the fruit of the Osage orange tree, big as a grapefruit, green, convoluted as any human brain. . . Look, in short, at practically anything—the coot’s feet, the mantis’s face, a banana, the human ear—and see that not only did the creator create everything, but that he is apt to create anything.  There is no one standing over evolution with a blue pencil to say, ‘Now that one, there, is absolutely ridiculous, and I won’t have it.’  If the creature makes it, it gets a [stamp of approval].”

“Why so many forms?  Why not just that one hydrogen atom?  The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, on millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font.  What is going on here?  The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork—for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl—but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle.  Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.”

We too have this boundless freedom:  freedom to discover, create, invent, and improve.  In exercising our freedom we impact the world in countless tiny ways and in large ones too.  The world is changed now not only through the course of evolution but through our creative intervention, for good or ill.  So claim your freedom–to do the good you want to see happen in the world.  Claim your freedom–to pause, look around you, and notice the astonishing world you live in.  Claim your freedom–to exercise dominion over the portion of the earth and the creatures entrusted to your care.  Claim your freedom to imitate God, and thus pay the highest form of flattery to the Creator of our bright and beautiful world.