6th Sunday in Easter, Year B, Psalm 98
Message shared on Sunday, March 6, at Brookmeade Congregational Church, Nashville, TN
Worship service held at Edwin Warner Park beside the Little Harpeth River
Today May, 6 is known in the United Church of Christ as “Rural Life Sunday.” Did you know, it derives from a very old tradition called Rogation Days? I didn’t either.
But stay with me here. Rogation comes from the Latin rogare which means to ask. Rogation Days were dedicated to supplication to God on the days before Ascension Day, which is Thursday of this week. During Rogation Days, there would be fasting and prayer and on Sunday, a procession outside where the whole congregation and priests would go outside to bless the fields for a good harvest.
As you can imagine, this would have been likely a welcome break from worshipping inside an old, dark stone church building where the light could hardly get in. And when I learned more about the Rogation Days procession I learned that it was indeed a time that people clearly enjoyed.
Sometimes they enjoyed it a little too much, according to the church officials. The Roman Catholic Church tried to tone it down a bit and just have respectable community leaders take part because the people were engaging in too much drunken revelry during the solemn procession. Sometimes there was a practical purpose to the procession as well, because it would be used to remind people in the community of agricultural boundaries – where you could farm and where the common space was. In other words, “Remember, that’s where your side of the field begins.”
By the time the Reformation came about, this tradition was deemed improper. But the history of Rogation Days, though the official church tried to suppress it, survived because many communities continued to value it and today in the United Church of Christ we have Rural Life Sunday, the day when the UCC celebrates rural ministries and its rural heritage.
Regardless of its many uses, the tradition of Rogation Days has a wisdom inside of it that the land around you matters, and that the story of the land is intimately connected with the story of God.
The memory of this tradition those of us who have a tendency to forgot where we are standing, to forget where our water comes from, or how we are connected to frogs that chirp in the night, or the wood duck, or wild turkey, or the field mouse, or even the opossum that invades your garbage.
A biblical studies scholar named Ched Myers talks about something called watershed discipleship: he suggests that in an era of intense planetary crisis, what it means to be Christian is to become disciples of our watershed.
A watershed is an area of land where all of the water that falls in it and drains off of it goes to a common outlet, sustaining all life that inhabits it. Depending on where you’re standing in Nashville, you’re either in the Middle Cumberland watershed, or the Harpeth River watershed where we are now, which means that all water whether it’s from rain or snow or streams all flows into the Harpeth River. The indigenous inhabitants of this watershed are the Cherokee people, who still have unceded rights to this land, even though white people forcibly removed them from it. Myers tells us that to be watershed disciples means not only understanding the reality of the land and water around you, but the people’s history of your watershed, and how that story is playing out today.
Knowing about our watersheds is a radical act in a world that tries to make us pay more attention to our phones or Trump’s tweets or what the stock market is doing than which way the water flows. Watersheds are the original place of abundance, the places where we can notice what it feels like for rivers to clap their hands and the mountains to shout for joy, the images from our psalm text this morning.
There is a Senegalese activist named Baba Dioum who says: “You can’t save a place you haven’t loved, you can’t love a place you haven’t learned.” The idea of Psalm 98 is that the wonder and justice of God is expressed in the natural world. And indeed if we stop to observe, we can learn a lot about how we can live as humans by looking to how nature gets by.
One of the biggest sins in Western history and the history of the Church is our forgetfulness that as humans we are part of the natural environment surrounding us. You remember I told you the last time I preached about adrienne maree brown, who did a workshop in Nashville about emergent strategy, which means that we can looks to nature for lessons about how to create a better, more just world. adrienne is a facilitator for social justice movements and black liberation.
One of the lessons of emergent strategy is about fractals. A fractal is an occurrence in nature where what is happening geometrically on the smallest scale is embodied on the largest scale: A fern, a pineapple, a snowflake, a honeycomb. When it feels overwhelming because so much is not right about our world, it can be important to remember fractals. Even as we work to change systems, we can practice the patterns of how we believe it is right to live in our own lives, our local communities, our watersheds.
Before you leave this place today take a few minutes to walk on the river path and try to notice the patterns you see. How the trees grow on the side of the river. How the root systems supporting different forms of life. How the spiders have woven their webs. The diversity of wildflowers and weeds.
And then as you are driving home notice what kinds of patterns you see in place in terms of humans environment with the natural world and with each other.
Do you see patterns of exploitation where the resources are flowing in only one direction or only certain people have access to the abundance of the earth? Do you see patterns of reciprocity and interdependence and resources being stewarded responsibly not only for now but for future generations?
Thinking about what kind of fractals we will choose to embody is also what it means to be church. About being part of the movement that an itinerant rabbi named Jesus began after he was baptized into the Jordan River watershed.
So mind the honeycomb. Pay attention to the fern. To the way the birds fly and how the chirping choruses of frogs rise and falls. Listen to the waters clapping their hands, the mountains shouting out that there is enough for everybody…if we would only believe it.
Listen for what the Spirit is saying to the church.
Amen.
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