This is a sermon by Jessica Ketola from September 15, 2024 @ The Practicing Church.
GENESIS 1:26-31
Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.”
So God created human beings in his own image.
In the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.” Then God said, “Look! I have given you every seed-bearing plant throughout the earth and all the fruit trees for your food. And I have given every green plant as food for all the wild animals, the birds in the sky, and the small animals that scurry along the ground—everything that has life.” And that is what happened. Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good!
Over the last few weeks, we have contemplated this Creator God both transcendent and immanent whose breath is in our lungs and whose image we bear. We are crowned with glory and honor, love and compassion. We are wonderfully made, our bodies, souls, and minds are formed by God and deemed very good. And this morning, we contemplate this God who has made us from the dust. What is the significance of this? I believe it reveals our interconnectedness with all of creation, with the land, with our place.
“Isn't it something that in Genesis, God makes a home for things before God makes the thing? Not the fish first but the sea. Not the bird first but the sky. Not the human first but the garden. I like to think of God hunched over in the garden, fingernails hugging the brown soil, mighty hands cradling mud like it's the last flame in a windstorm. A God who says, Not out of my own womb but out of this here dust will I make you. Place has always been the thing that made us. We cannot escape being formed by it.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
This earth, this ground, this place is sacred, meant to be a home for the community of creation. For if we look here at Genesis 1, we see that God put humanity in a place, the garden of Eden, and this place, this creation, was integral to their vocation. In this story of Genesis, God creates a home for humans to thrive in. For as the 2nd century theologian, Irenaeus has said, “The glory of God is a human fully alive." Here we see this thriving occurs within a context, within a community of Shalom. Shalom is this Biblical concept meaning the webbing together of God, humans and all creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.
So core to our human vocation is this idea of stewarding the earth within this community of creation as ambassadors of God’s goodness on the earth. We see God has placed us within this context of creation in which all of the trees and plants, fish and animals are given to us as gifts to steward and enjoy.
“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
― Wendell Berry
Yet today, we live largely above place. In the midst of globalization, technology, and hyper mobility, place has become invisible. Our lives now revolve around the automobile where we have the ability to drive out of our neighborhoods and find life wherever we choose. We can hop on a plane and be half way around the world tomorrow. Most of us have lived in many different houses and places, we’ve moved across the country for jobs or school. By some estimates, Americans now change residences an average of fourteen times in their lives. And this has profoundly shaped the church. Where folks used to find a church in their neighborhood, now people travel out of their neighborhoods to church shop for the church with the best programs. So we as a society have become displaced.
We spend much of our lives on screens where we chat with our clients and colleagues from all over the country and world. Social media creates this virtual reality where we have thousands of friends on social media and we have never been more lonely. We can be voyeurs and consumers of experiences from all over the globe, yet we have never been more empty. We have bought into this myth of individualism and self-preservation. We are a culture who has traded the real for the virtual, the local for the global, embodied wisdom for artificial intelligence. And all the bedrocks for human flourishing in our society such as good nourishment, rest, movement, healthy relationships, meaning, and rich spirituality are being compromised by the gods of empire, greed, narcissism, and exploitation. As a society, we are terrified—profoundly anxious suffering from deep fragmentation. For when we abdicate our God-given vocations, harm comes to our communities and neighborhoods. Today, we are seeing the great unraveling of the fabric of our society.
Yet if this anxiety is caused by alienation, it can be remedied by a return to belonging.
Have any of you ever had a panic attack or sever anxiety? You may have been encouraged to practice the grounding technique of the five senses. What’s one thing you smell? Tell me two things you hear. Riley says, “There is a mysterious entanglement between our welfare and our capacity to ground ourselves in a particular place. We are meant to be connected to it.” The simple beholding of place can slow your heart and steady your breath.
Riley goes on to say, “I used to romanticize a nomadic existence. I used to think it was a requisite for “finding myself”—to travel around untethered until I stumbled upon a realness in me. It makes me wince to think that I thought I could learn myself by untethering. I’m very skeptical of this today.”
“For those of us whose sense of place speaks more of trauma than of belonging, it is understandable to think that the sole and sacred solution would be to belong nowhere at all. But this is alienation masquerading as freedom. It is a dangerous conflation. French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil said, ”To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” Alienation and trauma of place are best met not with dislocation but with belonging, with a defiant rootedness, even if those roots stretch out to new and safer places” (19).
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. We are meant to be rooted—to belong to a place and a people.
"Place is primarily a relational concept. When the Creator made our world, he was creating the place for relationship between God and all of creation. From that relational place on the earth comes a model of contextualization. God always gives the good news of the welcoming desire for relationship in a particular place.” – Randy Woodley
We are meant for connection, to be at home in our bodies and in our place in harmony with the community of shalom. Yet we know that in the story of humanity, this Shalom was disrupted. Adam and Eve chose to mistrust God by seeking to transcend their humanity and their creaturely limits. They wanted to become God. Even though they lived in paradise with every good thing, they believed this lie of scarcity that God was holding out on them, that the grass was greener outside of their place. Immediately, they began to experience the pain of rupture and shame as the goodness, trust, and harmony of relationship was shattered. And what do they do? They hide in shame, blame the other, and avoid their God-given responsibility. And in doing so, they are displaced from the garden.
We have the same temptation today. We either try to transcend our human limits – trying to be everywhere, everything, all at once, driving ourselves to exhaustion and burn out. Or we avoid responsibility. We fail to be faithfully present in our places—to love our neighbors, to care for the land, to steward creation for future generations. Through Jesus, this rupture of shalom is now being redeemed.
“There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” ― Wendell Berry, Given
“Western peoples need to develop a more honest history and a shalom-oriented theology, in practical partnership with the indigenous peoples of the world, to gain a better understanding of place. I suggest that the way forward is both structural and relational, requiring honest historical and theological rethinking and a coming to grips with the following concerns: colonialism and neocolonialism; the way current forms of capitalism resist shalom; the way racism affects our thinking and relationships; the practical implications for living on stolen land; how violence is thought to be needed in order to maintain the present system; what true reconciliation looks like. We need to find ways to share power, and we should seek to understand what justice issues are still unresolved among indigenous and other disempowered peoples." – Randy Woodley
How do we return to faithful presence?
I believe we return to awe, to wonder. Poets like Wendell Berry and Cole Arthur Riley and Mary Oliver remind us of our vocation to worship, to be full of gratitude and wonder. When I get out in nature, it is not long before I realize that I am but creature in complete and total awe of the Creator who has created this beautifully complex and interconnected world. As I spent time on retreat, I would stare hours at the huge evergreens, the Salish sea, the hummingbirds. As Mary Oliver writes, “To notice the sunflowers, the hummingbird, the blue plums, the clam deep in the speckled sand, to recover my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.” In doing so, we remember that we are but dust, and to dust we will return. We remember our human frame and limits.
Simultaneously, we remember our vocation, our responsibility to our neighbor and this family of creation. We quit abdicating our responsibility as citizens and neighbors, and we begin to care about the local economies of our place, trading mindless consumption for intentional cultivation, planting gardens, caring for the land, and co-creating communities of shalom. For there is no shalom when our neighbor is hungry or without. Faithful presence means we become responsible to the flourishing of our neighborhoods.
Wendell Berry talks about his path toward faithful presence.
“Until modern times, we focused a great deal of the best of our thought upon rituals of return to the human condition. Seeking enlightenment or the Promised Land or the way home, a man would go or be forced to go into the wilderness, measure himself against the Creation, recognize finally his true place within it, and thus be saved both from pride and from despair. Seeing himself as a tiny member of a world he cannot comprehend or master or in any final sense possess, he cannot possibly think of himself as a god. And by the same token, since he shares in, depends upon, and is graced by all of which he is a part, neither can he become a fiend; he cannot descend into the final despair of destructiveness. Returning from the wilderness, he becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forebears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy. ("The Body and the Earth," 95)” ― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
This has ramifications for how we are to be as the church. We believe that the Spirit is inviting us to return to faithful presence in the particularities of our places and neighborhoods. In the model of Jesus, who moved into the neighborhood, to show what God was like, we are invited to get proximate (Jn 1). Jesus, who being God, humbled himself, giving up power and privilege, to enter into our world in order to heal the great ruptures of sin (Phil 2). We too, are invited to give up our power and privilege, our transcendence and our avoidance, to join in God’s work of shalom in our places.
Reflection //
What does this look like in our everyday lives?
What does it mean to embrace our limits to become rooted in a place?
What does it mean to stop avoiding but to be responsible to our places?
GENESIS 1:26-31
Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.”
So God created human beings in his own image.
In the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.” Then God said, “Look! I have given you every seed-bearing plant throughout the earth and all the fruit trees for your food. And I have given every green plant as food for all the wild animals, the birds in the sky, and the small animals that scurry along the ground—everything that has life.” And that is what happened. Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good!
Over the last few weeks, we have contemplated this Creator God both transcendent and immanent whose breath is in our lungs and whose image we bear. We are crowned with glory and honor, love and compassion. We are wonderfully made, our bodies, souls, and minds are formed by God and deemed very good. And this morning, we contemplate this God who has made us from the dust. What is the significance of this? I believe it reveals our interconnectedness with all of creation, with the land, with our place.
“Isn't it something that in Genesis, God makes a home for things before God makes the thing? Not the fish first but the sea. Not the bird first but the sky. Not the human first but the garden. I like to think of God hunched over in the garden, fingernails hugging the brown soil, mighty hands cradling mud like it's the last flame in a windstorm. A God who says, Not out of my own womb but out of this here dust will I make you. Place has always been the thing that made us. We cannot escape being formed by it.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
This earth, this ground, this place is sacred, meant to be a home for the community of creation. For if we look here at Genesis 1, we see that God put humanity in a place, the garden of Eden, and this place, this creation, was integral to their vocation. In this story of Genesis, God creates a home for humans to thrive in. For as the 2nd century theologian, Irenaeus has said, “The glory of God is a human fully alive." Here we see this thriving occurs within a context, within a community of Shalom. Shalom is this Biblical concept meaning the webbing together of God, humans and all creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.
So core to our human vocation is this idea of stewarding the earth within this community of creation as ambassadors of God’s goodness on the earth. We see God has placed us within this context of creation in which all of the trees and plants, fish and animals are given to us as gifts to steward and enjoy.
“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
― Wendell Berry
Yet today, we live largely above place. In the midst of globalization, technology, and hyper mobility, place has become invisible. Our lives now revolve around the automobile where we have the ability to drive out of our neighborhoods and find life wherever we choose. We can hop on a plane and be half way around the world tomorrow. Most of us have lived in many different houses and places, we’ve moved across the country for jobs or school. By some estimates, Americans now change residences an average of fourteen times in their lives. And this has profoundly shaped the church. Where folks used to find a church in their neighborhood, now people travel out of their neighborhoods to church shop for the church with the best programs. So we as a society have become displaced.
We spend much of our lives on screens where we chat with our clients and colleagues from all over the country and world. Social media creates this virtual reality where we have thousands of friends on social media and we have never been more lonely. We can be voyeurs and consumers of experiences from all over the globe, yet we have never been more empty. We have bought into this myth of individualism and self-preservation. We are a culture who has traded the real for the virtual, the local for the global, embodied wisdom for artificial intelligence. And all the bedrocks for human flourishing in our society such as good nourishment, rest, movement, healthy relationships, meaning, and rich spirituality are being compromised by the gods of empire, greed, narcissism, and exploitation. As a society, we are terrified—profoundly anxious suffering from deep fragmentation. For when we abdicate our God-given vocations, harm comes to our communities and neighborhoods. Today, we are seeing the great unraveling of the fabric of our society.
Yet if this anxiety is caused by alienation, it can be remedied by a return to belonging.
Have any of you ever had a panic attack or sever anxiety? You may have been encouraged to practice the grounding technique of the five senses. What’s one thing you smell? Tell me two things you hear. Riley says, “There is a mysterious entanglement between our welfare and our capacity to ground ourselves in a particular place. We are meant to be connected to it.” The simple beholding of place can slow your heart and steady your breath.
Riley goes on to say, “I used to romanticize a nomadic existence. I used to think it was a requisite for “finding myself”—to travel around untethered until I stumbled upon a realness in me. It makes me wince to think that I thought I could learn myself by untethering. I’m very skeptical of this today.”
“For those of us whose sense of place speaks more of trauma than of belonging, it is understandable to think that the sole and sacred solution would be to belong nowhere at all. But this is alienation masquerading as freedom. It is a dangerous conflation. French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil said, ”To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” Alienation and trauma of place are best met not with dislocation but with belonging, with a defiant rootedness, even if those roots stretch out to new and safer places” (19).
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. We are meant to be rooted—to belong to a place and a people.
"Place is primarily a relational concept. When the Creator made our world, he was creating the place for relationship between God and all of creation. From that relational place on the earth comes a model of contextualization. God always gives the good news of the welcoming desire for relationship in a particular place.” – Randy Woodley
We are meant for connection, to be at home in our bodies and in our place in harmony with the community of shalom. Yet we know that in the story of humanity, this Shalom was disrupted. Adam and Eve chose to mistrust God by seeking to transcend their humanity and their creaturely limits. They wanted to become God. Even though they lived in paradise with every good thing, they believed this lie of scarcity that God was holding out on them, that the grass was greener outside of their place. Immediately, they began to experience the pain of rupture and shame as the goodness, trust, and harmony of relationship was shattered. And what do they do? They hide in shame, blame the other, and avoid their God-given responsibility. And in doing so, they are displaced from the garden.
We have the same temptation today. We either try to transcend our human limits – trying to be everywhere, everything, all at once, driving ourselves to exhaustion and burn out. Or we avoid responsibility. We fail to be faithfully present in our places—to love our neighbors, to care for the land, to steward creation for future generations. Through Jesus, this rupture of shalom is now being redeemed.
“There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” ― Wendell Berry, Given
“Western peoples need to develop a more honest history and a shalom-oriented theology, in practical partnership with the indigenous peoples of the world, to gain a better understanding of place. I suggest that the way forward is both structural and relational, requiring honest historical and theological rethinking and a coming to grips with the following concerns: colonialism and neocolonialism; the way current forms of capitalism resist shalom; the way racism affects our thinking and relationships; the practical implications for living on stolen land; how violence is thought to be needed in order to maintain the present system; what true reconciliation looks like. We need to find ways to share power, and we should seek to understand what justice issues are still unresolved among indigenous and other disempowered peoples." – Randy Woodley
How do we return to faithful presence?
I believe we return to awe, to wonder. Poets like Wendell Berry and Cole Arthur Riley and Mary Oliver remind us of our vocation to worship, to be full of gratitude and wonder. When I get out in nature, it is not long before I realize that I am but creature in complete and total awe of the Creator who has created this beautifully complex and interconnected world. As I spent time on retreat, I would stare hours at the huge evergreens, the Salish sea, the hummingbirds. As Mary Oliver writes, “To notice the sunflowers, the hummingbird, the blue plums, the clam deep in the speckled sand, to recover my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.” In doing so, we remember that we are but dust, and to dust we will return. We remember our human frame and limits.
Simultaneously, we remember our vocation, our responsibility to our neighbor and this family of creation. We quit abdicating our responsibility as citizens and neighbors, and we begin to care about the local economies of our place, trading mindless consumption for intentional cultivation, planting gardens, caring for the land, and co-creating communities of shalom. For there is no shalom when our neighbor is hungry or without. Faithful presence means we become responsible to the flourishing of our neighborhoods.
Wendell Berry talks about his path toward faithful presence.
“Until modern times, we focused a great deal of the best of our thought upon rituals of return to the human condition. Seeking enlightenment or the Promised Land or the way home, a man would go or be forced to go into the wilderness, measure himself against the Creation, recognize finally his true place within it, and thus be saved both from pride and from despair. Seeing himself as a tiny member of a world he cannot comprehend or master or in any final sense possess, he cannot possibly think of himself as a god. And by the same token, since he shares in, depends upon, and is graced by all of which he is a part, neither can he become a fiend; he cannot descend into the final despair of destructiveness. Returning from the wilderness, he becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forebears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy. ("The Body and the Earth," 95)” ― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
This has ramifications for how we are to be as the church. We believe that the Spirit is inviting us to return to faithful presence in the particularities of our places and neighborhoods. In the model of Jesus, who moved into the neighborhood, to show what God was like, we are invited to get proximate (Jn 1). Jesus, who being God, humbled himself, giving up power and privilege, to enter into our world in order to heal the great ruptures of sin (Phil 2). We too, are invited to give up our power and privilege, our transcendence and our avoidance, to join in God’s work of shalom in our places.
Reflection //
What does this look like in our everyday lives?
What does it mean to embrace our limits to become rooted in a place?
What does it mean to stop avoiding but to be responsible to our places?
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