Sunday, 23rd February - 2nd before Lent: Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-end, Revelation 4
and Luke 8: 22-25
Do you long for the refreshment and space of the natural world? The labour of your own garden or allotment; finding beauty in the changing seasons; trees and hills, vast open spaces and familiar parks.
Are you drawn to the movement of water and waves? The hypnotic ebb and flow of tides; rush of waterfalls and coolness of shallow pools; the serene beauty of reflected skies; its overwhelming power and force.
Do you crave the bright lights and creative energy of urban life? Streets full of people - commuters, shoppers, tourists; cultures, households, faiths; the restlessness, loneliness, and longing for stability; vibrant, tense, unequal.
Today we dwell in all three: moving from garden to lake to city.
Divine goodness combines with the work of our hands.
Life comes forth from water; water puts life in danger.
The creator’s love, with us in Christ, speaks peace, casts out fear.
Dazzling brightness, thunder and lightning combine with songs of praise.
Our hope is cast in earth and sea, stone and human hearts.
In the words of the poet, farmer and essayist Wendell Berry, we might:
Imagine Paradise.
O Dust, arise!
Today, a garden is tended and made fruitful, and a stormy sea is calmed, fears subside. We find ourselves caught up in the story of God’s ways with the world.
We are also given a glimpse of our destiny as a dazzling, noisy city is consumed with praise.
We imagine paradise.
Genesis takes us to the beginning. Dust arises as breath brings life to clay.
The world teams with creaturely diversity and a pleasing fruitfulness. It is good and sustainable.
This is a world bound together in a delicate eco-system.
Yes, humanity is blessed by delight; but we are also entrusted with responsibility.
In this world, it is not good to be alone. We need helpmates.
The creature does not just depend on the creator and creation.
There is a fresh creative act: companionship emerges from flesh and blood.
There is goodness - in support for each other in the creative work of tending the earth.
Side-by-side, face-to-face, we learn joy and tenderness, compassion and patience.
The biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann expands our interpretation beyond marriage to how we live together. He writes that ‘the place of the garden is for this covenanted human community of solidarity, trust and well being. They are one! That is, in covenant. The garden exists as a context for the human community.’
All this is gifted freely to us: human companionship - the sharing of life and work, responsibility and creativity.
Such freedom is risky.
Life and knowledge lie on a tree that is out of our reach.
We lay claim to it nevertheless: testing and twisting the limits, going beyond what we need to seize what we want.
Goodness is distorted as we trade faithfulness for willfulness, trust for disobedience, other for self, interdependence for fragmentation.
When we take the mysteries of life and knowledge into our own hands - apart from our maker and sustainer - our freedom to act and interact becomes the desire to coerce and control.
As hearts turn inwards, we no longer labour side-by-side: our nakedness and vulnerability become a source of shame.
We exchange a garden paradise for stormy seas.
In his novel Playground, Richard Powers talks about curiosity and creativity but also power and coercion. He describes the impact of story, imagination, memory and song and the ways in which human exceptionalism consumes. He explores the richness of friendships, compromise and forgiveness and the new empires of wealth and influence driving isolation and otherness.
He takes us to the depths of the wonder of this world - in oceans and emotions - and opens up the risk of how we escape it through the risk of social media and an increasingly gamified life.
Humanity has played games - cards, chess, and the open-ended go. Now he says: ‘mobile games that consisted of little more than tapping on the screen when a box popped up were destroying people’s lives’.
The plot of Playground names the wonder and the beauty, the playfulness and the hope, the sheer abundance of life; but also the greed and exploitation, the rifts that open up between us, the sadness.
‘We make things that we hope will be bigger than us’, he writes, ‘and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.’
No wonder the prophets cried out for justice and mercy when we struggled to know how to live well together; no wonder they called us back to the commandments to love God and our neighbours as ourselves.
The struggle of how to live well needs a new act of solidarity: but the creator draws alongside as a helpmate, refusing to refuse love and choosing to dwell with us.
Powers writes, ‘Your sea is so great and our craft so small, O Lord.’
Jesus knows the greatness of the seas - not just the depth of the oceans but the depths of our anxieties and fears; not just the richness of the creatures but our capacity for selfishness and self-protection; the greatness of the eco-systems and their fragility and our smallness.
Our craft feels so small: we wound and want to heal, we are wounded and want to be healed.
In today’s gospel, Jesus steps into that small craft - that ordinary boat - to be with us. He gives in to his need for rest. He is like that first helpmate, flesh of our flesh. But he is also God’s Word, abiding in the Father’s heart in peace.
Storms when they arise from the depths are ferocious, surging waters threaten to overwhelm both boat and crew. Disaster looms, fear rises, Jesus sleeps.
He only awakens to the cries of humanity.
His rebuke clams the waves and subdues the wind.
Jesus has mastery over creation.
Who then is this?
This is love, casting out fear.
This is breath, bringing peace.
Here is God in the storms we most dread: grief and fear, loss and betrayal; in the games we cannot win and the times where faith waves.
God is with us.
God is acting for us.
God is loving us. Still.
The one who said ‘dust, arise’ in the creation of Adam becomes one of us. The one who made a helpmate out of bone, comes to us in flesh and blood.
His body heals, touches, feeds and teaches.
His body is anointed, spat at, wept over and buried.
His hands break bread with us as his body breaks for us.
In his body, we are drawn into a new kinship. Here, though we are many we are one body. As we share in fragments of bread, we are called by name. We begin to imagine paradise as we share this bread of heaven, on earth.
As we participate in this Eucharist we are led through stormy seas from a garden to a city, from creation to new creation. We share in the song of heaven - holy, holy, holy. We come near to the refining power of God’s love - the one who was and is and is to come.
We long for that place beyond darkness and dazzling, of one equal light as John Donne puts it. A place beyond fears and hopes, ends and beginnings; of oneness and joy.
To long for it is not an escape into an artificial world or alternative reality: it is instead to embrace the renewal of the covenant of love. As that happens, we are invited not only to find delight and beauty, pleasure and satisfaction - but to seek to labour for a fruitful garden and help others navigate stormy seas.
In a world of chaos, noise and pain, we are to be people whose hearts turn outwards towards the other: breathing peace, acting with compassion, giving with generosity.
In a world of contention, exploitation and gamification, we are to be creative; to be fearless in seeking equity and justice; to be committed to the earth’s sustainability.
Stormy seas might be crossed or be calmed. We might find in our urban lives places where gardens grow.
It might be the care we show to our churchyards and grounds; it might be encouraging others into green spaces or helping all ages connect with nature. It might be helping with Hendon’s own Tiny Orchard - sandwiched between the pharmacy and alms houses on Church Road.
As we do so, our work turns grief to joy; our work is joined to heaven’s gift. In hope, we imagine paradise, as dust arises.
Wendell Berry’s “Sabbath Poem VII” might become our prayer:
The clearing rests in song and shade.
It is a creature made
By old light held in soil and leaf,
By human joy and grief,
By human work,
Fidelity of sight and stroke,
By rain, by water on
The parent stone.
We join our work to Heaven's gift,
Our hope to what is left,
That field and woods at last agree
In an economy
Of widest worth.
High Heaven's Kingdom come on earth.
Imagine Paradise.
O Dust, arise!
© Julie Gittoes 2025
