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

Last Sunday we considered remembering who we are and what we're called to be. This morning we focus on rediscovery—rediscovering our place (and God) in creation.

The bible passages for today all speak to our place. The story from Genesis reminds us of the covenant God makes with Abraham and Sarah who live, despite their profound doubts, in the promise. That promise concerns offspring—what must, at their advanced age, have felt to them the most ridiculous piece. But it also carries promises of land—an abiding place in which their families may dwell.

Paul writes of the promise of salvation and invites his readers to abide in that promise, exhorting us to "stand firm in the Lord," claiming the blessings of our place in God's continuing story of salvation.

And Luke depicts our Lord speaking judgment upon those who reject the prophets of God even as he promises to complete his work among us and for us. We begin in this passage to follow our Lord to the travails of his final week.

As we consider these biblical promises and the travail of our Lord on the cross and of God's creation, we are also put in mind of our place in the long story of God's engagements with our world-a process that started long before even Abraham.

Here's one way to grasp our place in time, in the history of the universe and the earth. Begin by imagining a ten-volume encyclopedia set. This represents the 5 billion-year history of the earth, which followed 8-10 billion years of the universe's development.

Each of those ten volumes of earth's history holds 500 pages; each page represents 1 million years. In such an encyclopedia set, life-in the form of the first cellular life—doesn't appear until volume 8, with much of that volume devoted to plants, though reptiles reach their peak about page 440. Humans come along fairly late in this story—page 499 of the last of the ten volumes! In this model, the time of organized human civilization (the past 6,000 years) is represented by the final two words on the very last page.

Larry Rasmussen, a Lutheran ethicist and theologian, writes, "The astonishing thing is the last syllable of the last word of the last volume. Here humans turned the great tide against life itself. Here the process of slowly closing down major life-systems began at human handsIt is astonishing that an organic world aeons in the making could be so easily jeopardized by the species that claims to master its secrets and care for it as a watchful stewardAlongside our miniscule tenure the thing most astonishing is our gargantuan imprint. (quoted in Winchell, "Awakening to God's Call to Earthkeeping," ELCA, 2006)

Our national bishop, Mark Hanson comments: "We cannot escape the interconnectedness of the earth's fabric of life. Creation is the matrix of all our activities, both as human beings and as Christ's church. God gives us and all creatures life through the water, air, food, and all the other gifts that come to us from the earth. Everything we do both depends on these gifts, and has some kind of impact upon them. If these gifts are treated with contempt and abused, people, animals, and plants suffer together. If they are graciously received and cherished, people will flourish with the rest of creation. We cannot love God or our human neighbor without caring for creation. The question is not whether the church will engage what our society calls the environment, but how." (Excerpt of a November 2003 Letter, commemorating the 10th Anniversary of the ELCA's social statement: Caring for Creation: Vision, Hope & Justice)

And so, we recognize the vastness of God's creative presence and creative work over billions of years-and our small yet overwhelmingly significant place—as those with whom God established covenants, along with the earth. Lent brings us awareness of God's awesomely immense and transcendent power; the psalmist writes in praise of God: "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,..what are human beings that you are mindful of them? (Psalm 8: 3-4) And yet, Lent brings equally poignanly to mind God's magnificent saving presence in the one we call Lord and in the glories of both salvation and creation.

It is not a simple matter to know our proper place. We seem puny in the scope of time and space. Still, we have caused huge impacts to creation in our brief time on the earth.

Scripture provides perspective. We are the inheritors of promise and place. God covenants to bless, to multiply, and to entrust us with the earth. We were created to tend and to till. God made us to be powerful, so that we could exercise our abilities for the "care and redemption of all" that God has made. God's word joins promise with place to make holy our relationship with the earth.

We make these observations knowing that our national church has led the way. "Caring for Creation" is a social statement of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, adopted all the way back in 1993. The prologue to that document sets the theological stage in a way that speaks to the matter we consider today-our place in the world.

"Christian concern for the environment is shaped by the Word of God spoken in creation, the Love of God hanging on a cross, the Breath of God daily renewing the face of the earth.

"We of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America are deeply concerned about the environment, locally and globally, as members of this church and as members of society. Even as we join the political, economic, and scientific discussion, we know care for the earth to be a profoundly spiritual matter.

"As Lutheran Christians, we confess that both our witness to God's goodness in creation and our acceptance of caregiving responsibility have often been weak and uncertain. This statement: offers a vision of God's intention for creation and for humanity as creation's caregivers; acknowledges humanity's separation from God and from the rest of creation as the central cause of the environmental crisis; recognizes the severity of the crisis; and expresses hope and heeds the call to justice and commitment. This statement summons us, in particular, to a faithful return to the biblical vision."

Rev. Sally Bingham, director of the national group Interfaith Power and Light, writes: "This entire journey of religion and the environment isa story in hope. Ten years ago, little was being discussed and the church had not even entered the dialogue significantly. Today, things are very different. Congregations all over this country are serving as examples to the community. Protection of Creation has reached every mainstream tradition in America. We have earth liturgy, earth friendly practices, and adult education happening everywhere. Seminaries are teaching environmental ethics. Young people are hearing more about environmental issues than any generation before us. The ecumenical Patriarch, leader of 50 million Orthodox Christians, called degradation of the environment a sin. Recently the Pope added pollution to the list of sins in the Catholic Church. And in his address on World Peace Day he said, "If you want to cultivate peace protect Creation." Sadly, though, the nature of the crisis is far more complicated than any one issue, one disease, one case of drought or flood or the extinction of one species. The problems today are vast, complicated and mostly interrelated. It's about the entire community of life...

"Science can give us all the facts and figures, but science cannot do it alone. It is religion and our faith that provides transforming power and a new way of being in the world. It is religion that transforms our hearts. There has got to be a sacred relationship between humans and nature. When God made the world and said it was 'good,' we were given the job to keep it 'good.'"

It is our spiritual relationship with God's good creation that can help us to know our place and our role as earthkeepers. Even Martin Luther so long ago had inklings of the spiritual truth here. He wrote "The power of God is present at all places, even in the tiniest tree leaf. God is in all creatures, even in the smallest flowers!"

Many other saints of the Church have understood such things. St. Gregory of Nyssa (335-395) spoke forthrightly: "For when one considers the universe, can anyone be so simple-minded as not to believe that the Divine is present in everything, pervading, embracing, and penetrating it?"

And Mechtild of Magdeberg (1210-1279), "The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw—and knew—all things in God and God in all things." That quote is so close to the one I keep coming back to as I ponder these matters. It is from Colossians: "Christ is all, and in all." (3:11)

If we truly and humbly knew our place, and in reverence before God more faithfully fulfilled our role as custodians, caretakers, tenders and tillers of God's earth, our spirits, our lives, and the earth would be more whole.

I'll close with a simple vision of our precious place, informed by a caring and well-grounded spirituality.

"If the earth were only a few feet in diameter floating a few feet above a field somewhere, people would come from everywhere to marvel at it. People would walk around it marveling at its big pools of water, its little pools and the water flowing between the pools. People would marvel at the bumps on it, and the holes in it, and they would marvel at the very thin layer of gas surrounding it and the water suspended in the gas. The people would marvel at all the creatures walking around the surface of the ball, and in the water. The people would declare it precious because it was the only one. And they would protect it, so that it would not be hurt. The ball would be the greatest wonder known, and people would come to behold it, to be healed, to gain knowledge, and to know beauty and to wonder how it could be. People would love it, and defend it with their lives, because they would somehow know that their lives, their own roundness, could be nothing without it. If the earth were only a few feet in diameter." ("Earth Ball" by Olaf Skarsholt)

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.