by CCW | 9 May 2010 16:52
Sometimes the smell of the land can be quite overpowering! You know what I mean – the odour of ordure, the smell of manure. It is a reminder of the realities of the land in a farming community. Perhaps, today that pungent aroma will be offset by the bouquets of Mother’s Day flowers! Yet, apart from the secular observance of Mother’s Day, this is the Fifth Sunday after Easter, commonly known as Rogation Day.
The days of rogation are days of asking, days of prayer, but with a particular emphasis upon the land. Rogation Sunday would remind us of the redemption of creation itself and our place in the landscape of creation redeemed. The resurrection is cosmic in scope. It concerns the whole world – the world as ordered to God.
Prayer is an activity of redeemed humanity. We make our prayers in the land where we have been placed. Our places in the land are to be the places of grace. How? By prayer. Rogationtide embraces the world in prayer. The world is comprehended in the relationship of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Nowhere is that more clearly signaled than in today’s Gospel where Jesus speaks of his going forth from the Father into the world and his return to the Father out of the world. The redemption of the world is captured in those words. What is “overcome” is sin, which is the world as turned away from God and as turned against God, the world as infected and stained by our sinfulness, by the forgetfulness of our place and so of ourselves in the landscape of creation redeemed. The consequences are our disrespect for the land and the sea, for the world in which we have been placed. We make a mess of it. We forget the place of creation in the will of God; we forget about the redemption of creation.
Rogation Sunday recalls us to a kind of theology of the land. In the story of Creation, the earth, the dry land, is said to be good (Gen.1.9, 10). And we, who are made in the image of God, are also formed out of the dust, “from the ground” (Gen.2.7). We are placed in the garden of creation. The garden is the land of paradise.
In the story of the Fall, our disobedience not only alienates us from God but also from the land. The land of paradise becomes the land of sweat and toil. “Cursed is the ground because of you … In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to the dust you shall return”(Gen.3.17,18). “And the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken” (Gen.3.23). In the story of Cain and Abel, the land becomes the land of blood. Cain slays Abel in the field: “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” God says (Gen.4.10). These stories are altogether fundamental to what unfolds in the story of salvation in the Old and New Testaments.
In the story of salvation, the land is also signified to become the “promised land,” the land of our renewed relationship with God. The promised land is variously described in the Old Testament. Its proverbial description is the “land flowing with milk and honey” (e.g. Deut.6.3), but in The Book of Genesis the promised land is just “the land which I shall give you” (Gen.13.15,17). It may not be all that much to look at; it may even smell funny. It signifies simply the place of our relationship with God.
In The Book of Exodus, the land is the place of revelation, the “holy ground” (Ex.3.5) where God makes his name, “I am who I am” (Ex.3.14), and his will for his people, known to Israel through Moses. The land is the place of liberation, the place of our liberation to God: “I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land” (Ex.3.8). It is in that sense of liberty and as given by God that the promised land is first called “a land flowing with milk and honey”(Ex.3.8). Yet it is not its paradisal elements, its echoes of Eden in material and descriptive terms, which make it the promised land. The promised land is primarily, as The Book of Deuteronomy puts it, “the place which the Lord God will choose, to make his name dwell there”(Deut.12.11), the place of our abiding in the will of God. It is the land which God gives you; the land where the truth of God is to be honoured and respected.
Jesus intensifies and clarifies this sense of the land as “the place which the Lord God (I am Who I am) will choose, to make his name (I am Who I am) dwell there.” He intensifies and clarifies the name of God into the names of spiritual relationship, the relationship of the Trinity. And he makes the place of our abiding in the life of God the place of redemption. The blood which cries out from the ground to God is the blood of the Only-begotten Son of the Father. The cry is his prayer. It is his prayer for us. He has gathered the whole world into his love for the Father. His spirit, which he places into the hands of the Father, carries all of the meaning of our misuse of God and the world back to God in love. The overcoming of the world in its opposition to God is accomplished in prayer on the cross, in the prayer of the Son to the Father in the Spirit. It has its fullest expression in the homecoming of the Son to the Father in Christ’s Ascension.
All prayer is nothing less than asking the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Spirit. Out of the land of blood, sweat and tears comes the prayer which redeems the whole world: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Lk.23.46). And so the land becomes the land of grace, the place of our abiding in the spiritual fellowship of the Trinity, the place of prayer and praise to the living God.
There is the promised land which Moses looks upon and sees, the land which he does not enter, but to which he has brought the people of Israel (Deut.34). In the preaching of Paul, the promised land extends to the world which hears and receives the good news of God’s redemption, namely, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (Acts 13.30ff). In between Moses and Paul, there is, we might say, the prayer of the crucified Christ.
We learn to listen to Jesus’ teachings in order to act upon what he says; only then will we be “doers of the word and not hearers only” as James in this morning’s epistle puts it (James 1.22); only then will we dwell in the land where God is honoured and respected, the promised land of our abiding in the life of God (cf. Deut.6); only then will we enter into his embrace of the world in prayer.
On Mother’s Day we give thanks to God for our mothers. There is not one of us who is not born of woman. It is often from our mothers that we learn the love of God for us in Jesus Christ. Just so, it is the purpose of Mother Church to nurture us in the knowledge of God’s love for us in the land.
We are given not only to see the promised land but to enter into it. It is the land where we are placed and where we are called to honour God and serve one another, the land of prayer and praise, the land made holy by Word and Sacrament, the land of grace. It is the whole world as gathered to God in the liturgy of redemption.
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church
Rogation Sunday, 2010
(adapted 99)
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