by CCW | 21 May 2017 15:00
Today is known as Rogation Sunday. The days of rogation are days of asking, days of prayer, but with a particular emphasis upon the land. Rogation Sunday reminds us of the redemption of creation itself and our place in the landscape of creation redeemed. The resurrection is cosmic in scope. 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. What is overcome is sin, the world as turned away from God and as turned against God, the world as infected and stained by our sinfulness, by our forgetfulness of our place 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.
There are, it seems to me, three competing and contrasting contemporary approaches to our thinking about nature; they are the broken fragments of a more philosophical understanding captured in the Scriptures. First, nature is viewed merely as dead stuff, simply there for human manipulation. This assumes the dominance of our humanity over nature and our complete separation from everything else in the created order. It is a distortion of the Biblical idea of human dominance which emphasizes instead God as the Lord, the Dominus, and thus our dominance only as in the image of the Creator with the strong sense of stewardship of the world which is emphatically God’s world. Secondly, there is the view that collapses our humanity into nature altogether, such as the Gaia hypothesis, but in this view we are simply natural and material forces therefore what we do is natural. This makes it utterly impossible to account for human actions that are so destructive of nature. While it rightly reminds us of our creatureliness and thus a relation to everything else in the created order, it denies the distinctive features of the human creation. The first and second account contradict each other: the one asserting the separation from nature, the other denying the distinctive qualities of our humanity in creation.
Thirdly, there is the post-modern view that nature is only a social construct, simply words which we use that have no reality or meaning outside of our discourse. But then our humanity in this view is also nothing more than a construct. There is no nature and no human nature; in short, no creation. We can’t say what anything is. This third approach is anti-essentialist; language is completely separate from reality. This is the exact opposite of the Scriptural understanding of Genesis and John’s Prologue which is a commentary on Genesis. “In the beginning God … In the beginning was the Word.” God speaks creation into being. There is an ethical and intellectual understanding of the created order within which we find our place.
Each of these approaches represents a partial view of what is more completely united in the Scriptural understanding of our relation to the land, to nature through our relation to God. This is the meaning of Rogation Sunday.
It 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) and 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 rest of the story of salvation in the Old and New Testaments.
For in the pageant of salvation, the land is also signified as 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 even be all that much to look at. It signifies simply and more profoundly the place of our relationship with God. That is its most basic and fundamental sense.
In The Book of Exodus, the land is the place of revelation, literally, the “holy ground” (Ex.3.5) where God makes both 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.
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. As Gerard Manley Hopkins wonderfully puts it, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” for even in spite of our misuse and disconnect from nature, “nature”, he says, “is never spent;/ There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;/ … Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright/ wings.” It is a kind of prayer that recalls us to God and to our relation to the world, a world which we never love aright until we learn to love it in God (Traherne). Such is the radical meaning of Rogationtide.
Fr. David Curry
Rogation Sunday, 2017
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