The sun may dance

5 Easter A 2008 (RCL)
Earth Day Weekend
(Acts 7: 55-60; Ps 31: 1-5, 15-16; 1 Peter 2: 2-10; John 14: 1-14)


In ancient Christian Ireland, they believed that the sun would dance in the sky on Easter morning.

Beneath this lovely romantic tale lies deep wisdom. Believe or don’t believe that the sun can dance at the Easter dawn. This story proclaims the truth that the God of the Bible is not concerned solely with the well-being of human beings. The Celts loved to call God the King of the Elements, God of water and fire and earth and air. God inhabits creation, participates in it, loves it and delights in it. God endows creation with dignity and its own reasons. Grand space nebulas, hulking gentle manatees, majestic whales and fierce tigers, towering trees and harshly beautiful deserts—all does not exist just for us to use and then discard. This too is an Easter message.

The sacred creation does not exist outside of us. Many of us are attracted to the ancient Celtic Christian way of seeing. We want a faith that brings us closer to the earth, healing the strange imaginary wedge driven between us and the earth, the sea, the sky. The Celts did not view the sacred creation as an anxious problem, as something apart from themselves. They did not have the option to sit in a comfortable room with food processed so it no longer looks like the animals and plants from which it came, with an array of buttons at hand that gives us the illusion of easy control over life. They loved the rising of the sun and the coming of the rains, the phases of the moon and the run of the salmon, the lambing and the shearing and the harvesting. They knew they were part of the sacred cycle, the divine dance filled with the fierce, endless energy of the Holy Trinity. Just as the vigorous endless knot-work filled their manuscripts, so they believed the endless energy of God took form again and again in the rhythms of life.

They often chose to live on the edge of harsh, wild beauty, lovely lonely valleys like Glendalough or mad fierce islands like Iona or Skellig Michael, so they could know God and know themselves. Know God—the grand glory of the Lord of the Elements. Know themselves—grace-filled but small, frail, gently caressed by a summer breeze or dashed to death in an instant by a towering Atlantic wave. That’s why we Oregonians head to the coast or up the gorge or up on the mountain. No matter what our heads think about God, we long to know God and to know ourselves by walking and breathing in the dance of creation.

But times have changed. Columba and his monks did not face their responsibility in killing the salmon and poisoning the air, stripping the heavens of the protective ozone layer, filling Iona and the sea with the discarded trash of their community. But we do. Only today the headlines are filled with the collapse of the salmon run and the abuse of the Sacramento River far away that may be one thing to blame. But we as a people all have our share of the responsibility and the result.

We have also a gift that Columba did not have. We may repent and learn again how to love the earth and sea and sky made and indwelt by the Holy Three. We may change our hearts and mind and habit. It is not by listing facts but by changing hearts that we shall love and preserve the sacred earth.

We may do so this Eastertide, as the nation observes Earth Day. We may ask the good God to help as we seek a new way to love the ancient creation. If we do this, we love the Lord Jesus himself who dwells at the heart of creation as true God and truly human. The risen Lord dwells in God, and we dwell in him. The Risen One dwells at the heart of creation, and we with him. To love and cherish the sacred creation is to love the risen Lord and the Holy Three who inhabit the created world. And in that love, the sun may dance, and we may see it.