“Jesus shows us how to live with the Creator, with creation, and with creatures.”

That’s a line from my sermon this past Sunday, in which I compared the kind of Lord Jesus is to the kind of Lord we’ve too often made him into. I contend that – based on his birth, life, death and resurrection – Jesus as Lord is the giver of life. One implication of Jesus as giver of life is that all the world is good, important, sacred. All life matters to the Lord because the Lord is the giver of life. All life must also matter to we who strive to follow that Lord.

Too often that has not been the case. Too often we’ve taken the beautiful poetry of Genesis and tried to make a modern science textbook out of it. That has led us to claim crazy ideas such as the universe is only about 6000 years old. Sunday I offered Old Tjikko (seen above) as a contrary thesis, if you will. Searching around, I discovered there are even more amazing, ancient, living organisms than I even imagined! I don’t know about you, but I discovered that the more I read on that page, the more my reading morphed into praying. What a surprising, incredible world we get to inhabit! What wonders surround us!

Here are a few others’ thoughts on the intersection of faith and ecology:

New paradigms for saving earth by Philip Clayton

Why Christians are so bad on the environment by Tim Suttle

Discipleship, Worship, and Earth Day by Adam Hamilton

Sunday’s communion prayer included a significant amount of cosmology. (e.g. “You are the longing within the atoms for communion, the urge within each molecule for self-expression, the knowing within each cell of its dignity.”) That was, of course, on purpose. Sunday’s prayers were adapted from one of my favorite resources, If Darwin Prayed: Prayers for Evolutionary Mystics by Bruce Sanguin. Here’s another prayer from that book that I offer for this Earth Day week:

Living Earth’s Wisdom

We tune our ears to the wisdom of Earth. It is deep prayer, this listening to her cries, as Spirit’s sighs, too deep for words.

Unborn generations call to us from the future: what did you do when the planet could no longer bear your foolishness and began to break?

The growl of the grizzly – caught in the crosshairs of trophy hunters and policy makers, who seem to prize extinction – is a plea for the rights of all the disappearing ones.

Hear the bawl of the caribou asking us for room enough to roam and arsenic-free water to drink.

The cardinal’s whistle, once joy’s message, is now a haunting lament for the dwindling chorus of songbirds.

The topsoil – living organism and not lowly dirt – clears its thinning, chemical-burned voice, and speaks out for the biotic kingdom teeming within this dark body.

Mother Ocean beckons us to return to Her womb, that we might be born anew and know our salty tears to be Her own.

The willow drops her loving arms around our shoulders and brushes us with grace, whispering that it’s not too late. It falls to us, Wisdom’s pupils, to turn this dirge into a dance of the cosmos.

Let those with ears to hear, rise up.

Amen.