This sermon was preached on the 28th of April 2024, the Fifth Sunday of Easter, in the Anglican Parish of Kalamunda-Lesmurdie
Texts:
There are a lot of shrivelled up plants up here in the hills at the moment. The rain hasn’t come when it usually does. It’s affecting even the huge, old trees in the forest. Trees that are centuries old are turning brown, and starting to die.
And it’s affecting farmers: there’s a shortage of water, and a shortage of feed for animals. Farmers are looking for the soil in which to plant this year’s crop, and instead they are finding lifeless dust.
Things are out of kilter. The land, the countryside, is withering.
This strange drought is starting to get to me a bit. It’s both pleasant and unpleasant at the same time. It’s like a strange, eery, perpetual spring.
If I were to be very direct in applying today’s Gospel, I might say that it tells us that something has gone deeply wrong: that what we are witnessing right now in the land tells us that the relationship between ourselves and God has been impaired.
The land is withering, and I feel withered watching it, day by day. And we just heard that that which withers, that which does not flourish, is out of relationship with its Creator, out of relationship with Christ.
That thought takes me into uncomfortable territory. God offers us abundant hospitality: God does not desire the trees to die, nor the creatures that make those trees their home. God does not desire the collapse of the environment. God doesn’t withhold the rain that we need.
That kind of thinking is, I believe, too easy. It’s easy to blame God for this drought.
It’s far more difficult to acknowledge that we are dependent on our environment, on this world, to feed us, nourish us, and clothe us. It’s even more difficult to admit that we have erred in our stewardship of the world: and that the chickens are starting to come home to roost, more and more visibly.
Day by day, the trees continue to wither. And they’re just the most visible sentinels of the distress in which our land stands. It seems like all any of us can do is to prune that which has withered away: and soon, here in the hills, we will literally begin gathering it together in pyres, and burning it.
The world of the parable Jesus tells us today seems to be very close to our own. Something has gone wrong, things are out kilter, things are out of right-relationship.
“Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.” (John 15.4)
We are absolutely dependent on Jesus, we are absolutely dependent on God.
In his parable, Jesus uses a vine as his image. A plant, that grows out into the world with long, slender, probing threads. No part of the vine can survive without being connected to the whole: without, in the end, being grounded in that from which it emerged.
The idea that we cannot survive on our own, that we do not exist on our own, that we depend on the other: this is deeply, deeply countercultural in our modern world.
We don’t forge our own destinies, alone. We are reliant on each other. And together, we rely upon God.
Creation does speak to us of God. We can learn of God from what we see and observe; we can look for God in that. We can reflect upon that which we see, and try understand where God is in our lives, in our world.
Creation in this place, at this time, is telling us something. This dry spell, the driest six months since records began a hundred and fifty years ago, tells us something. In the same way that we cannot thrive without God, we cannot exist without the creation that God made for us.
This world, this precious world, provides us with food, clothing, all that any person could ever need, if we could only open our hearts to share its abundance. And we have not been good stewards of the world. We have treated it not as a world to be nurtured, but as a resource to be exploited.
We have looked to short term gain, and let go of custodianship.
In the last two or three hundred years, technology has got to the point where we human beings can dare to think we have achieved mastery over the world. We grow more crops than ever before: we live, at least in the rich nations, in a plenty and abundance that human beings have never before seen.
And with this, we’ve lost sight of our dependence upon the world. And furthermore, we have lost sight of our dependence upon God. As we have grown in apparent mastery, for many people God has become an optional extra.
Yet God is very real. And God created us to till, and to keep.
We’ve turned away from this calling, this appointed task. We’ve failed to model ourselves upon Jesus Christ. We’ve distorted the role that we were appointed to play in creation. And this failure is being written upon creation. Almost every year, temperature records are broken. Almost every year, we hear of one in a thousand year, and one in ten thousand year climate events.
At Easter we heard of the Risen Christ, appearing to Mary Magdalene in the garden outside the tomb. And Mary at first mistakes Jesus for the gardener. But of course, it is no mistake at all. The Risen Christ is the gardener, because the Risen Christ represents that which humanity was meant to be.
A people who till, and who keep. A people who know that they are dependent on the land, on creation, in order to survive. A people who know that this dependency points on to one that is greater: our dependency upon God’s creation, shows us our utter dependency upon God, upon Jesus Christ.
If we acknowledge this dependency, if we acknowledge our lack of control, then we will be changed. We will no longer take our daily bread for granted. We will no longer take our daily water for granted. We will have a proper, humble gratitude for these things, the things that we need to live.
And we will marvel at God’s abundance. At the kind of right-relationship that we will grow into. The kind of relationality that the Johannine community so powerfully witnessed to, in the Gospel of John, and the First Letter of John. That community offers to us a vision of a world of right-relationship, where we abide in God, and God abides in us.
And necessarily we will come to see one-another in a different way. All thoughts of exploitation, of profit, of private gain, of greed and selfishness, all of that will become a nonsense. Something that we could never even apprehend.
This is the Kingdom. This is the transformation that we are invited into. And with transformation will come a flourishing: a return to Eden. The world will be a garden for all, once more. This is what we can play our part in.
Someone at the first service, responding to this sermon, suggested that planting more trees in the wheatbelt might bring rain. What a hopeful prospect that is. And this is a community which through the Men of the Trees has planted tree upon tree upon tree. We’ve done it before, we will do it again.
The Lord be With You.