Grace to you and peace from our loving God, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

On this third Sunday of Easter, we are confronted by images of physicality. After the death of their Lord, disciples discover a vital presence among them—along the road to Emmaus, and then again at a shared meal.

Jesus confronts their sorrows, fears, and doubts with wonder and invitation: "Why are you frightened?" "Why do you doubt?" "Look at my hands and my feet." "See that I am myself." "Touch me and see." "Watch me eat, as all living beings do."

Don't you love that sentence the leads into this further narrative? "And he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread."

The physicality, the accustomed gestures, the manner of his movements, the characteristic expressions of the resurrected Jesus all evoke recognition. And the same thing happens today at the meal spread out before us. Our Lord will be made more fully known to us in our breaking of the bread and our pouring of the wine.

The divine is revealed in the earthly, the spiritual in the physical.

Matter is holy. God uses the stuff of this world to communicate things that transcend this world. What God has made is holy, and if God is revealed in what God has made, does it not also deserve our careful attention and loving preservation?

That gets us to the sub-theme for today. Earth Day and Earth Week have been much in evidence these past days. Media events and organizational programming all work to capture our imaginations and to call us towards behaviors that are healthier both for us and for the Earth. The secular motivations may not be as grounded in a faith perspective, but people of faith (I believe) ought to be (and often are) in the forefront of any efforts to preserve and restore this holy planet.

It is encouraging to me that many among us are working at this. I commend to you the invitations of our Earth Care group to cut your production of carbon emissions and to walk, bike, or take the bus to worship-even if their motto is a bit unwieldy ("Walbicus"?!).

In our life together, Marie and I are constantly trying to find ways to further reduce our impact on the environment. In a few weeks, we will be attending a continuing education event. It's a course on Permaculture. You may not have heard the word before. "Permaculture" combines "Permanent agriculture" or "permanent culture" and is a term coined by Australians David Holmgren and Bill Mollison in the 1970s. It describes a design system for creating human settlements that function in harmony with nature. Incorporating traditional knowledge, modern science, and the ecological patterns of the living world, permaculture design is applicable to farms, gardens, organizations, housing developments, towns and villages, or city neighborhoods. It should be interesting to learn more about it and to apply its principles to our lives.

You may not know that I'm also planning a sabbatical for next year of about three months in duration. It will focus my reflection, reading, learning, and travel on this same matter—Earth Care, or what I call "Repairing the Earth."

I believe that it will be through our living "in communion" with the world God created that we will discover a transformation—that God will bring a new resurrection. In today's gospel, it was through being in communion with Christ that concerns were allayed and new possibilities were opened to the disciples.

This is theology in action. Resurrected life. New creation. A transformed life. These are Easter themes—themes that are sorely needed as we face ecological challenges.

"It is often the case that in the midst of death, resurrection explodes on the scene. In the midst of despair, suddenly there is a capacity for joy. A family is grieving the loss of a loved one, then suddenly in the midst of grief, the family remembers and laughter is born. In the midst of war, seemingly out of nowhere, someone offers a gesture of peace. In the midst of failure and shame, from the blue comes grace and acceptance. In an atmosphere of racism and prejudice, unexpectedly, someone speaks a word of truth and an honoring of persons. Spontaneity appears amidst rigidity. Order comes in the chaos. Life in the midst of death. Resurrection life." (David Rhoads,"Resurrection and Wilderness")

It is a theme poignantly applicable to the growing crises faced by our planet—global warming, pollution, over-fishing and dying oceans, over-consumption, climate change, peak oil and energy decline, species extinction, deforestation, loss of topsoil, desertification, and diminishing water supplies.

On Tuesday of this week, MSNBC posted an article entitled "Travel's most endangered destinations: Put these special wonders on your must-visit list before they disappear" (by Peter J. Frank). Among the wonders: the glaciers on the Alps (likely gone by 2030), the lions of Africa (population down from 200,000 to fewer than 50,000 in the past three decades), Central America's cloud forests, the orangutans of Borneo, the Florida everglades (already half its earlier size). Such articles are appearing with greater frequency and testify to the troubles that call for action and for a resurrection.

Joe Sittler was a renouned Lutheran theologian, and a wonderfully creative one. He was asked "What are the signs that lead you to think that God exists?" It was shortly after the Three Mile Island disaster, the radiation leak at the nuclear plant in Pennsylvania that destroyed every sign of life for some area around it. After some reflection, Joe said, "Just five days after the leak at Three Mile Island, there were already flowers blooming right next to the nuclear facility. It is this incredible 'urge to life,' this impulse for life to emerge in the midst of the bleakest existence, that is the sign of God's existence." An urge to life in the midst of the bleakest desolation. Life in the midst of death. Resurrection life. (Rhoads)

"In the Eucharistic images from Luke today, we discover further evidence of resurrection and motivation for helping it along. If we look at our basic 16th century Lutheran documents of faith, we gain clarity by noting what we're opposed to in the ways some Christians think of communion. We're basically opposed to three positions:

The view that bread and wine are not good enough to bear the promise, that they have to be changed in some way, transubstantiated. This is the idea that nature cannot carry the promise—it's too weak.

The second view we reject is that bread and wine are only bread and wine, carrying no particular promise. This idea squeezes any possibility of promise right out of nature.

The third view insists that the presence of Christ in the bread and wine is a spiritual presence, not physical. This is the idea that the promise cannot be contaminated by contact with nature—it has to remain "spiritual" in the sense of being immaterial.

"We learn a lot about what we believe about nature when we think carefully about these views that we reject.

"We hold that in God's sight bread and wine are united to God's word of promise as the human Jesus was related to the divine ChristThis all happens in a way that we cannot fully comprehend, but we insist that the human person was really human, and that the God was really God...This is all our traditional way of saying that nature can carry the blessing of God and in this Eucharistic liturgy we insist that nature does indeed carry that blessing.

"Nature is the prime vessel, the ordinary vehicle for God's gracious promise-nature with the word of promise, used in faith. It is that way in Genesis 1, where the wind or spirit or promise of God brooded over the waters—and we call that particular unity of nature and promise the creation...

"The resurrection of Jesus that we celebrate even now is the resurrection of the body-an explicit and powerful repudiation of any notions either that our bodily selves are incapable of becoming more than dead dust or that we must become disembodied before we can receive a spiritual home. The Gospel accounts take great pains to say that a body, recognizable as Jesus of Nazareth, conquered death in the resurrection.

"In Saint John's version of Pentecost, in which Jesus breathes the Spirit upon the disciples, Thomas is present as one who must make contact with the body of Jesus before he can acquiesce to the resurrection [that's the story that immediately precedes our gospel for this morning, as told by Luke]. In a marvelous exchange of words and touchings, Jesus seems to say to Thomas 'Now you have seen and touched my body; you know it is the bearer of resurrection promise. But you are the last one so privileged Thomas; henceforth the promise must be borne by your body, if people are to believe in it.' We believe that in encountering the very natural community of Christians, future generations will meet Christ himself...

"What's the point? That in the sacred past and also in the present, God works through nature that has been blessed with a promise, with God's word, with the outpouring of the Spirit of God...The promise of the Spirit is not real unless it is embodied in a natural element...

"I hope that we see that in this sacrament-image our calling with respect to nature is defined. We are called as natural beings placed by God in a natural world—and the whole natural process is intended as a vessel of grace. The bread and wine becoming the vessel of promise reveals to us what all of nature, including our own bodies, is designed to be...

"I hope that we see that in this sacrament-image our calling with respect to nature is defined. We are called as natural beings placed by God in a natural world-and the whole natural process is intended as a vessel of grace. The bread and wine becoming the vessel of promise reveals to us what all of nature, including our own bodies, is designed to be...

"Earth Day, care of the earth, befriending the planet—it all depends on how you look at nature, what you think it's all about. We will never come closer to nature's essential character than when we eat this bread, drink this wine, and accept the promise God has placed within them. (Philip Hefner, "The Sacramental Paradigm of Nature")

Our care of creation is an act of worship. And our worship is an act of caring for creation.

Everything we do to stop our contribution to global warming is a spiritual discipline and a practice of resurrection. Every time we walk rather than hop in the car. Every time we turn down heat. Every time we advocate for laws that reduce emissions. Every time we advocate for businesses and corporations to change their practices for the sake of the planet. Every time we change from incandescent to CFL light bulbs. Every time we plant a tree, we contribute to bringing life out of death. We practice resurrection and honor the sacrament.

Amen.

May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep our hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord unto eternal life. Amen.