HELLO!

Many thanks to the 35 members of the UKES4PEACE ukulele ensemble who offered their ministry of music today. Given the warm weather, sailing competition attracting thousands in HRM, and various illnesses, there were not 35 musicians today but those who did come were all in their blue “uniforms”. If you would like to hear them, please click on this today’s service link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYJvG_l60Vc

Our service today focused on a holy or Divine presence. Indigenous Peoples remind us, the Creator’s imprint can be found, felt, in Creation. For reasons I find bewildering, many more conservative Christians feel threatened by the notion God would be found in nature, they condemn such talk as “other”, yet if God is incarnate in our world, why would God be absent in those very forms God names in Genesis 1 and 2? Evangelical Christians delight in a “personal God” and this is a clear and affective means of reminding ourselves of God’s care and love for us. But surely, if God loves us, God loves others too. And if God loves others, why wouldn’t our God love and be present in sky, trees, sun, oceans, vistas, soil?

The specific times, the context, of our scriptures are a rural, land-based economy. Participants in Biblical stories are shepherds, farmers, fishers. The land was never far from their imaginations. Contrast this with my own childhood, in the west end of Halifax. Food came from grocery stores, nature was concrete and pavement. The soil was thin, shale rock was everywhere. The only natural, organic, presence in my daily walks were lilac bushes and “dog berry” trees. Those small orange berries flooded our streets for months. I remember reading Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, where he writes about his childhood in South Africa, a spiritual upbringing that combined the colonial Methodist teachings of Europe and a more indigenous African experience, where the land carried a deep spiritual presence. As a young man, he and other youth, were to walk and feel the presence of a Creator who was pulsing through the land. These long walks were part of his formation, and he returns to it when speaking of his 27 years in prison for opposing Apartheid. Using a more United Church phraseology, he was never “alone”, for he walked in the presence of his ancestors, in the presence of his God, in the presence of freedom, justice and redemption. I now feel a presence when I walk in Creation, and I am grateful for the teaching and witness of indigenous peoples who have shown me the way. “We are not alone”…Peace, Kevin