What a wondrous week! Even by Wednesday!

Wonderful to behold – like this first week of Spring!

Genesis, the first book of our Bible, begins with the later of the two stories of Creation, the poetic Priestly tale that was written down around 500 years Before Christ. Hearing just the first three days, we already begin to enter the rhythms of its beautiful literary structure, celebrating the creation of light on the first day, the waters and the sky the second day, and on the third day, dry land and all fruits of the land.

Today is Earth Sunday. An occasion to celebrate Third Day creativity. Today, let’s appreciate the earth bringing forth vegetation, plants yielding seeds of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit. Such goodness! Alleluia! Let’s look for the sprouts of green emerging around us and, for Creation’s sake, be Green.

In our minds, let’s enter gardens and forests, raising our eyes to the treetops. Let’s sense this place on earth with clear sight and tender touch and loamy smells inhaled. Won’t our minds be drawn naturally to pondering the unimaginable Mystery, the Source of it all – the Creator, creating still!

Nothing so easily illicits our sense of God’s presence as attentiveness to Creation. According to our Christian tradition, Nature is God’s second book of Revelation. Nature is the face of God that is often more accessible to us than the Bible. Today Nature sings God’s glory as loudly as ever, but there is a new chorus, borrowed from an ancient psalm. The earth is groaning. If we but look and listen – to every endangered plant, every patented seed withdrawn from production, to every lumbered ancient tree, our Souls hear the Creator calling out to us for help. Calling us to do our co-creative, healing part. To take up our earth-saving work.

On this Earth Sunday, let us reverently approach the Creator’s canvass, the earth, hearing God’s invitation to us, to take up our brushes too. We are called to paint our part of the global mural, fostering fruitful beauty here, incorporating every one of the infinite varieties of green we can imagine. God said, It is good.

Like any calling, earth-saving is fearful and wondrous work, but work for which we humans are fearfully and wonderfully made. The roar of this calling today is too daunting if faced alone. The solutions are invisible to a lonely mind. But the human imagination in service of co-creation is never alone.

We have all of Creation and the Creating Force on our side. Our allies in nature will never cease to surprise us – like the ancient Ent tree people of the forests of Middle Earth, we are joined in our battle to save the earth, by entities too mighty too lose. Remember, we are promised: Everything is possible with God.

Because we are a part of Creation, Earth sparks our human creativity. We can make more beauty and recover fruitfulness. The Earth is so much more than the consuming forces of ecological destruction. In our time, we can take our cues from the Book of Evolution, finding our page in a climactic chapter about a new order of creative change. The new earth day consciousness is rising in us, as we are provoked by evolution’s imperatives, to become a new humanity. We are evolving into instruments of God’s saving grace. We are discovering our power t-operate with God’s creativity on this tender earth.

In Art and Science and Ecology, nature’s infinite varieties and adaptations and evolutions inspire and energize our creativity. Seeing where earth hurts, where Creation groans, we can imagine new ways to do good works together, to co-create with the eternal Creating Force, to become sustaining forces for this Eden Earth.

We can do it, because we choose to act in accordance with our wisdom teachings. We are an integral part of this Creation process. We are both fruit and seed of God’s creative intention on Earth. We may have arrived on the final Day, but we are here to embody the message of Genesis. So we can make it so. Everything on Earth that is good, is possible with God.