Partnering with Ravens

Partnering with Ravens

Honoring God in Creation Sunday

Twenty-Second Sunday After Pentecost | Proper 25 | Sunday, October 29, 2023 | St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Sedona, AZ

Job 12: 7 – 10, Psalm 24, Acts 17: 23 – 28, Luke 12: 22 – 29

Introduction

1 The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, * the world and all who dwell therein. - Psalm 24: 1

Today’s scriptures are appropriately resplendent with nature images on this Sunday when we honor God in creation. In Sedona, we celebrate and relate to many of these images as we worship amidst the beautiful red rocks of the high Northern Arizonan desert.

One particular local connection from today’s gospel is Jesus’s reference to Ravens.

Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them.(Of how much more value are you than the birds!) - Luke 12: 23

Locally, we get to see these creatures in action. Raven’s capture our imagination because of their size, their infinite blackness, and their majesty when in flight. They can also be quite intimidating, and frightful as aggressors. It’s no wonder they are found in literature from around the globe and are often associated with spirits or have religious meaning in various traditions.

Being a Midwesterner, living in this Arizona landscape, I was excited when Greg (my spouse) and I moved here in 2018 and got to experience ravens. There are a few who live seasonally in the pine forest behind our home, and they like to congregate in the ponderosa trees on NAU’s campus. In fact, there are few who love to hold loud conversations right outside the classroom windows where I teach, especially when I am trying to lecture.

The first time we went to the Grand Canyon, I was awed when viewing many of these soaring birds flying around the cliffs.

Then I had my first up-close experience with one. It was near a food stand. He was sitting on a picnic table, eating a hot dog! Apparently, he pulled it out of the dumpster on the side of the building and was thoroughly enjoying himself.

This image puts a whole new spin on Jesus’s statement: “they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them.”

All kidding aside, there is something to this, even in our modern fast-food tourist culture. This raven didn’t wake up worrying about his meals. This is the point of Jesus’ message in today’s Gospel: God provides. God fed the raven, or lead him to food (a hot-dog), or circumstances unfolded providing for his or her daily needs.

When considering the selected gospel today, we see the main point of Jesus’s nature metaphors are about trusting in God’s providence. He’s pointing to what we can learn from God’s created. He’s telling his hearers to not worry about what they are to eat, or what they are to wear. He does this by making reference to ravens, lilies, and the grasses of the field.

Consider the lilies, 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.

The anxieties Jesus addresses are real for the hearers of his time, as well as for us. This is the core message of today’s Gospel. But I would like to address an anxiety which is the subtext of today’s celebration: creation, or the spirit of Creation-Care.

None of us can hear the word creation today, without thinking about the environment. We all hold anxiety about creation in our day. With rising global temperatures, and storms that set new world records, we all pause, and ask ourselves, what is going on? Is climate change real? Is this a set of natural variations within the ecological/biological systems or planetary cycles? Have we contributed to this? Are we the cause? Have we not fully understood our call to stewardship?

All of these questions haunt us and cause a kind of anxiety in our relationship with creation. These anxieties are real.

Scripture can help us frame a response to these anxieties. In the Book of Job, one of my favorite books, Job responds to his accusers (in the passages that precede today’s pericope). He explains that we can learn from the created order about God, and the nature of ourselves and the world. He argues, when looking at creation,

Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?

In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.

Job expounds a humble recognition of the power of God, and a hope or belief in God’s sustenance of all creation. The passage opens with him saying “but ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you.”

So let’s take his advice, and let’s ask the birds. Let’s look again at ravens. Ravens appear in many places in the Hebrew Scriptures. In Gen. 8:7 Noah sends a raven out to look for dry land, and in 1 Kings 17:4 Elijah is fed by ravens. In Christian history, St. Benedict is often presented holding a raven. The first time I visited a Benedictine monastery for a retreat at St. Meinrad’s in Indiana, I was struck by a towering figure of St. Benedict, with a raven on his shoulder.

Apparently, as the legend goes, according to Gregory the Great, writing in the sixth century, St. Benedict often shared his bread with his pet raven. A bond developed, and when someone tried to poison Benedict with a bad loaf of bread, Benedict had a sense that there was something wrong. He asked his black feather friend to take the loaf and dispose of it where it could not be found so that no one would be hurt. The raven complied, disposing of it in a far-removed bush. He then returned, and Benedict shared some of his corn and bread with his friend.

What can we learn from these beautiful, intimidating black birds? The ravens who assist Noah, who feed Elijah, and who assist Benedict.

Partnership.

These raven stories, as part of scripture and christian narratives, invite us to see ourselves as part of God’s creation and as partners working within the created order as our vocation. In each of these stories, the relationship with raven (or creation) proves to be reciprocal. When in partnership, good emerges. It is through our relationship with God, and with the created order that we find the depths of our vocation, and that we discover a difference. We participate in the life of creation, and move towards the hope of the new creation in Christ (as disciples).

The anxieties addressed by Jesus in the Gospel, help us to see where we miss this call or vocation. It is often our anxieties about life, sustenance, and existence that pervert our relationship with creation. We all have a natural concern for our day-to-day livelihood. This is natural. Yet, sometimes our aspirations, or our misdirected anxiety, about living, saving, planning or building can prompt us to make decisions that negatively impact the world around us. Or we make decisions that isolate us from that living created order, and we miss our vocation to engage.

Additionally, we have a legacy of some unhelpful Christian narratives that could use some correction. Narratives which have placed humans above creation rather than seeing ourselves as part of it.

There is a rich christian history of authors in this regard who can help us.

St. Maximus the Confessor, writing the sixth century, draws attention to the idea that humans are not “beings isolated from the rest of creation” rather, they are “bound up with the whole of the universe.”[1] Thus, we are called to live into our role as stewards, not dominators, of creation.

St. Hildegard of Bingen, eleventh-century German Medieval saint, prophet, mystic and Doctor of Church offeres many helpful prayers and reflections.

Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth’s greenings. Now, think. What delight God gives to humankind with all these things . All nature is at the disposal of humankind. We are to work with it. For without we cannot survive.

In our own era, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople eloquently frames this argument when he addresses the environment. He is the spiritual leader of the Eastern Orthodox Christians worldwide, is also known as the ‘Green Patriarch’ because of his strong leadership in addressing the environmental crisis from a perspective of faith. Patriarch Bartholomew I has contributed to many initiatives including the education of the faithful in works like Toward an Orthodox Ecological Education. This initiative is similar to our own Creation-Care initiatives. In this work and others, he articulates a soteriology from an Orthodox perspective when he writes,

The world was created and recreated in Christ….the world is not autonomous, but theonomous, because it comes from God and it returns to God, who preserves an inner connection with his creation.[2]

For Bartholomew, this theological reality demands that Christians wake up. He argues that the ecological crisis is less about environmental awareness and more about spiritual consciousness and how believers perceive and interact with the created order.

Conclusion

On this Sunday, when we celebrate God in creation, let us appreciate Jesus’s call, which invites us to put our natural worries into a proper balance. A balance with our relationship to each other, and with the created world. In so doing, let us step more deeply into praise and thanksgiving of our God, and the wonders of creation. But also into the our vocation as stewards and partners with all of creation, moving towards the realization of God’s hope and intentions for all creation, in the now, and in the new creation.

And finally, I’d like to close with a prayer for a charitable heart by St. Isaac the Syrian, who was a 7th-century Syriac Christian bishop and theologian. I think his prayer beautifully encompasses the spirit of our liturgy today.

We pray for a heart, “which is burning for the whole of creation, for [humans], the birds, the beasts, the demons – for all creatures….In union with God, [humans] in no way leaves creatures aside, but gathers together the whole cosmos disordered by sin in [their] love, that it may, at last, be transfigured by grace.”[3]

AMEN.

[1]Bruce V. Foltz, The Noetics of Nature, x. [2]Ibid, 265 n.49.

[1]Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 110. [2]Ibid, 265 n.49. [3]Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 111.