Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 16, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Flora and fauna
Thus says the Lord God, I will tear off a tender shoot of the cedar tree and plant it on a high and lofty mountain of Israel.
When we stepped out of our white car into the Illinois summer, the forest of our backyard consumed us. Purple spiderwort (tradescantia leonora), nearly seven feet high, burst over the walkway toward our picnic table – my outside counseling office. Heavy bending branches bowed down from every tree, green and green, so incredibly green.
Brushing them aside we stepped into our own little paradise, flush with gazebo and yellow aluminum lawn chairs, a couple of grills unused for months, a long red shed and a possum, or groundhog, who looked up once at us and waddled away. And though they are elsewhere now, we remembered our eight chickens and I thought I heard them cry.
My tree shall put forth branches and bear fruit, it shall become a majestic cedar. Birds of every kind shall dwell beneath it.
Our own wild birds sang and sang, welcoming us, or perhaps they were irritated at our invasion of their green world. Flora and fauna lapped up on our shores like ocean waves. I was overwhelmed.
All of the trees of the field shall know that I, the Lord, bring low the high tree, lift high the lowly tree, wither up the green tree, and make the withered tree bloom.
Ezekiel had something important to share with his listeners about their own lives, not just the lives of the trees.
As I, the Lord, have spoken, so will I do.
God brings all his children equal into the world. After the fall we find it impossible to maintain that kind of fairness because we see God’s world of abundance through an uninvited, satanic lens of scarcity. Suddenly we must protect our own world from our neighbor’s, because there is never enough to go around. So we make sure our own trees are lush and tall and full of fruit. Who cares about our neighbor’s?
God does not intend for us to live in a world like that, a world of our own making, a world where we kill as much or more than we nourish.
Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.
Subdue. The Hebrew is kabash. Christopher Page rescues us from awkward intolerant translations of the word which imply treading down, putting into bondage. He reminded me that we are made in God’s image, and that “subduing” in God’s image means protecting and loving, giving, sharing and remembering that we are all part of something much bigger than ourselves.
When we attempt to dominate creation using it only for our own interests, we miss the nurturing emphasis of God’s dominion and create chaos in contradiction to the call of kabash.
Always keep in mind, Christopher says, that on each day of God’s creation, He “saw that it was good.”
When we fail to recognize the goodness of all creation, we foul our nest and create suffering. When we recognize that all of life is sacred, we will live with reverence in the face of the beauty and mystery entrusted to our care.
We have a job to do. To understand this work we must discern “the deep intent of the words of the sacred texts (like Genesis 1) in which we seek guidance and wisdom.”
We are always courageous, although we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, and we walk by faith, not by sight. We aspire to please the Lord, whether we are at home or away.
(1 Kings 19, Psalm 27, Philippians 2, Matthew 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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