The Rocky Mountains have been raised up twice. Did you all know that? The Rocky Mountains have risen and have been worn down and have

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Philip Kelly
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1 1 The Rocky Mountains have been raised up twice. Did you all know that? The Rocky Mountains have risen and have been worn down and have risen up a second time. About 300 million years ago, the collision of two plates of the earth s crust pushed up a range of mountains where the Rockies stand now. They rose just to the west of here, like the Rockies do today, standing 6000 to feet over the shore of a great inland sea that started at about where the plains start now. These mountains rose up, and then they stood there in the wind and the rain and the snow and the sun, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year after year after year, century upon century, millennia at a time, until the elements wore them down flat again, until they were worn down into dust and rock, to a flat plateau and even into the sea. Then the workings of the planet s plates again, pushing together with incredible force, began to raise the Rockies up again, bit by bit, a millimeter a year, with a patience that transcends any human attempt to understand it. Winter after winter, summer after summer, millennium after millennium the mountains rose again, shaped by earth and glaciers and sun and rain, until at last again we have the Rocky Mountains as we know them today. See, says God, I am making all things new.

2 2 I first learned about these two risings of the Rocky Mountains a few years ago when I hiked to the top of Quandry Peak with some friends. Near the top, just below 14,000 feet, I spotted a rock, about the size of a suitcase. It looked to me like a sedimentary rock, and up there in the thin air and in the throes of my exhaustion I couldn t make any sense of that. How could a sedimentary rock be at the top of a fourteener? Had someone carried it up there as a joke, I wondered, gasping for air? Was it the remnant of some abandoned WPA project to build stairs or something? Was I just seeing things? I got back down the mountain, and I called my second cousin who has a PhD in geology. Oh yeah, he said, as if everybody knows there is sedimentary rock at 14,000 feet. There are lots of sedimentary rocks at the top of the Rockies, he said. That s because what s now the top of the Rockies was once a seabed. One of my favorite theologians is named Sallie McFague, and she writes a lot about metaphorical theology. Most of the way we speak about God, she says, is metaphorical; in fact, if you think about it, maybe all the ways we speak about God are metaphorical. God is a rock. God is a father. God is a spirit. God is love, God is a force, God is a warrior, God is a mother, God is a shepherd, God is a friend. When people who are finite

3 3 try to speak about that which is infinite, when we try to talk about something that by definition cannot be directly described, we are reduced to metaphors, or better yet, we are elevated to metaphors. Since we speak about God in metaphors, Sallie McFague says, why not get better, more useful metaphors? And so she came up with a new one, a new metaphor for God: the earth, she said, is the body of God. The earth is the body of God. What she means by that is that insofar as we know God, we know God here. We don t know God anywhere else but here, we don t experience God in any other place than this one. With this metaphor, we can think of this planet this earth as the physical embodiment of God. Now, this sets off all sorts of alarm bells for a lot of people. Isn t she claiming pantheism, they ask, that all things are God? Pantheism is the idea that everything is God, and God is everything, which, you might notice, makes the concept of God almost meaningless. This rock is God, this bird is God, you re God, I m God, and so on. But that s not what Sallie McFague is suggesting; she s not arguing for pantheism. She s suggesting something closer to panentheism that all being is contained within God. Everything that is, is in God. Or, as Paul put it two thousand years ago, we live and move and have our

4 4 being in God. If you were to draw panentheism as a diagram, the world we know, everything that is, would be a circle inside of a much larger circle called God. Everything we know is within God, but God is not confined just to the things we know. If the earth is the body of God, McFague writes, or at least, if it s the body of God we know, then we have to think differently about how we relate to the earth. And we have to think differently about how we relate to God. Have you ever been out by yourself in the world somewhere and suddenly had the sensation you weren t alone? You know, have you ever been hiking, or working in your garden, or on the beach, or just by yourself in your house, and suddenly felt like there was some other presence there, such that the hair on the back of your neck stood up? The ancient Greeks called that feeling Pan. They said that when you get that strange feeling that you aren t alone, it s because you aren t alone it s because the god Pan is nearby. Pan was a playful, impish god, living just on the edge of human perception, sometimes making himself known, and sometimes only noticed indirectly by shepherds and travelers and others who spent time alone in nature. The ancient Greeks

5 5 understood that there was something about the divine that couldn t be accessed through logic or reason or books or sermons it had to be felt. Through the ages there have been many Christians who have called attention to this feeling, and who have called it God. The Christian tradition is full of mystics and hermits who find God in nature, and who describe the ways God speaks in silence and wild places. Even the stones will cry out, reads scripture. The heavens declare the glory of God. But this message has been ignored by many Christians, if not most Christians. We are still more comfortable turning to creeds and doctrines and churches to find God, and having found God, we are most comfortable when we can pin God down there like a butterfly on a board, preserving something that once was alive and free but cannot be alive or free any longer. But what if there were another way? What if we called the earth the body of God? What if we all agreed that God lives here? And I don t mean lives here in the way that we mean when we ask God to be present in our midst or when we tell each other God be with you. I mean really lives here. What if this were God s home, the place God inhabits, as

6 6 Genesis says, the place where God walks in the cool of the evening? What if God saw the rise of the Rockies 300 million years ago and then watched the snow and the rain and the wind wear them down to nothing, flake by drop by gust, and then watched them rise again? What if that were the patient life of God? What if we said that was the body of God? What if, after a week like this one, what if we called that the presence of the Holy Spirit? Then I think we have a God who is present not just present, but really present. Then we have a God we know here. Not anywhere else, and not in the abstract, but a God we know here, who is native to this place. In those Rockies. In this air. In our bones. Then we have a God whose presence makes the hair on the backs of our necks stand up, who is always at the edges of our perception, sometimes known, sometimes just out of sight, always before us, always around us. I want to close with one more image, one more metaphor, that I hope will make clear what I mean. I ve been reading a lot lately about Mars and the Moon, as the new Curiosity rover has begun to send back information and as NASA has turned its thoughts to a Mars mission or a

7 7 return to the moon. And something strikes me about those places: a crater on Mars or on the Moon still looks almost exactly like it did 300 million years ago. In fact, scientists estimate that some of the craters visible on the moon today were formed two billion years ago, and haven t changed much since. Young craters on the moon are about a hundred million years old. The edges might get softened by dustfall over the aeons, and the surface might get pockmarked by smaller impacts, but the crater doesn t really go away. There s nothing there to cause any change. There aren t plate tectonics, or rain or snow or an atmosphere, or animals or humans, or plants whose roots can pry apart the rocks. Mountain ranges on the moon don t rise and fall and rise again; it s frozen the way it once was, and it more or less won t ever change, save for a stray new crater dotting the surface. Alan Shepherd s golf balls are still there where he left them, and the lunar rovers are still right there where they parked them, and they and will be there long after we are all gone. And then there s the earth. The earth, scientists agree, has not stopped changing as long as it has existed. Rivers wash mountains to the sea, continents push mountains up again, jungles advance and recede,

8 8 deserts swirl, ice caps shrink and grow, wildfires reshape landscapes, and human beings leave their marks every day with farms, cities, roads, power plants, landfills, houses, airport runways, and all the things that make us who we are. This place is alive in a way that is unlike any other place we know. This place is always changing, always on to what s next. That s why I love the ocean so much; you can t stand on the shore and see the same wave break twice. Each one happens once, and then it s on to the next one. See, I am making all things new. If the earth is the body of God, the place we know God best, the physical presence of God in our lives, then all this makes sense. Mars is not the body of God. The Moon is not the body of God for us. They are part of our universe, contained within God to be sure, but we do not know a living God there. Here God is alive. In the bustling striving tragic changing life of this planet earth we have full evidence of the nature of the God of the universe. Here, different from all other places we know, we can see God at work in the life and the death of every thing that abides here, and even in the stones and the sea themselves. Here, it is all alive with a spirit we know as God.

9 9 Revelation, the last book of our bible, does not end in destruction. A lot of people think it does, but those people haven t read it. After a week like this, a week so filled with apocalyptic images and fears, and that pervasive feeling that something has gone so wrong with this world, after a week like this it might be tempting to buy into the idea that this world ends in destruction, that ruin is the path we are on, that we are headed for demise. But that s not what happens in the bible. That s not the vision and promise of Revelation. Revelation ends with healing. Revelation ends with all things made new again. There is a new heaven, and there is a new earth, and it s not some abstract heaven and earth on a cloud somewhere either. There s a new Jerusalem, a city, one just like the one there was before, but this one made new, and there are people there just like there are people here, and their tears are wiped away, and death and pain will be no more. Their tears are wiped away, even the tears of a week like this one, and death and pain will be no more. See, I am making all things new. The vision, here at the end of our bible, is of the earth, made new but still the earth. We don t escape to some other place. This is our home. And this is God s home too, the place where we are bound up with God and with each other, this is God s body, the place God inhabits, the place the Spirit haunts. This is where

10 10 God lives and works, and it is here, on this earth and in this God that we live and move and have our being. So it has been, and so it is, and so it shall be until the Rockies are worn down and raised up again. See, I am making all things new. See. I am making all things new. Amen.

Unit 2. Spelling Most Common Words Root Words. Student Page. Most Common Words

Unit 2. Spelling Most Common Words Root Words. Student Page. Most Common Words 1. the 2. of 3. and 4. a 5. to 6. in 7. is 8. you 9. that 10. it 11. he 12. for 13. was 14. on 15. are 16. as 17. with 18. his 19. they 20. at 21. be 22. this 23. from 24. I 25. have 26. or 27. by 28.