Student Chaplain Nicole Vickey.
Good morning! As I said before, my name is also Nicole.
I am in my third year of a graduate degree at Duke Divinity School and am delighted to serve as your student chaplain for this academic year as part of my chaplaincy coursework.
My work here at CUCC will be focused on providing contemplative pastoral care and pastoral care out in nature. So, if you find yourself in a difficult season and would like the support of a chaplain, my literal job is to meet you over cup of tea or a walk among the trees and listen to and pray with you. Feel free to touch base and exchange contact info with me before or after services, or let Rev. Nicole know you’d like to connect. I am really looking forward to walking alongside you all.
Let’s open today’s message with a prayer. Will you pray with me?
Creator of all things,
Christ, in whom all things hold together,
We gather this morning to dwell with Your Word,
And with the wordless voice of Your Creation.
Please let the words of our mouths
and the meditations of our hearts reflect Your truth,
our rock and our redeemer.
Amen.
I just love the metaphor of God as a rock. I love imagining God as something so strong that all of the pressures of this world only make it more solid and more precious to us. There are so many beautiful metaphors for God to be found in nature: God as a rock, God as a river, God as the wind. Theologians refer to this as natural revelation, or what God shares about God-self through Creation.
Next week, we will have a chance after the 10:30 service to let a piece of nature right here share a new metaphor for God with you. And for us to share those bits of natural revelation with each other. All of the details for next week’s “Wild Worship” program are in your bulletin.
Now, I’ve only been with you for a couple of weeks, but I can already sense how much attention and love is poured into this place. I see it in little and big ways. I see it in the small and gentle way that Phillip escorted a spider back outside after it wandered inside to join in Rev. Nicole’s welcome back party last week, and in the big ways this congregation intentionally walked a parallel sabbatical journey this summer.
You love this place. You love it enough to protect it and to work to restore it, even after a stretch of years that held some really difficult and errosive things like a pandemic, a mass shooting, and a devastating wildfire. In order to have the commitment that I see among you to help this place heal and flourish, I know you must already have a rhythm of attention and conversation out of which grows this sustaining love. Part of next week’s wild worship experience will be taking a little intentional time to pay attention to and to recognize the Holy within this place down at the level of its rocks and its spiders.
Our Psalmist today tells us this about those rocks, those spiders and other bits of Creation that make up this place. It says:
1 The heavens are telling the glory of God,
and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.
2 Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
3 There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
4 yet their voice goes out through all the earth
and their words to the end of the world.
This Psalm is a poem about the ongoing conversation that is happening between our Creator and Creation, between The Word and the Wordless. My invitation is for us to practice joining that conversation. A practice of contemplative attention that cultivates the sort of love that is needed to protect, restore, and sustain a place. But first, let’s preview this practice of Wild Worship so you know what you are getting yourself into next week.
Let’s take what Rev. Nicole likes to call the way-back-time-machine all the way back to early summer by a lake in the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge. Come with me to this lake. Imagine it is you and me and two dozen teenage campers from around the country who gathered in Denver through an organization called Be The Neighbor to learn about leading creation care efforts through their congregations back at home.
As an aside, if you have middle or high school students and are looking for a progressive and inclusive mission trip type experience, give Be The Neighbor a look. It’s the brainchild of UCC and Disciples pastors, and they are doing great things.
In the middle of these camper’s week, they joined me in our lovely Wildlife Refuge for a time of nature-based wild worship. For most of them, it was their first contemplative practice.
When they arrived, they were definitely skeptics, itching to ditch their camp counselors and use their phones. But it was my hope that they would walk away from our time together in the Refuge with the knowledge that they don’t just carry phones in their pockets. That they also carry refuges of God within them.
I used the Psalm that we heard today to introduce the idea that there is this ongoing, wordless conversation happening between the created world and its Creator. I invited them to lay down their devices, their distractions, and their skepticism and intentionally join that conversation for just fifteen minutes. From my own experience, I knew those fifteen minutes would expand to feel like an eternity in both challenging and spirit-filled ways.
I asked them to let their hearts and the Holy Spirit guide them into an encounter with one, single non-human thing around that lake. I asked them to give this creature their full and singular attention. I asked them to notice what was unique about it. What I asked of them is exactly what I will ask of you if you stay next Sunday for wild worship: to open themselves to the possibility that Christ, whom the apostle Paul tells us created all things and holds all things together, would actually be present between them and this thing that they chose to pay attention to. I encouraged them to see what they could discern about the God who created that thing, just by spending some intentional time paying attention to it. And, to wonder what God might be trying to tell them through this creature, which has no words like we do to convey a message. As I watched them begin their 15 minutes of holy wandering, I sat in silent prayer. The hot sun and the dry wind brought to mind the hand of God coming upon Ezekiel to guide him into the valley of dry bones. I prayed for that same holy hand to come upon them and bring them to some small point of natural revelation from that place in that sliver of time. When their time of contemplative wandering was finished, the campers came back, and the air between us was changed. I asked them to share what they heard.
One heard that God is like the comfort of a velvety leaf they could rub between their fingers. Soft and nourishing.
One gave their undivided attention to the pollinators and wondered if God, like the bees, isn’t the very thing that connects us across time and space to allow for our collective flourishing.
One spent the whole fifteen minutes being led by the wind at his back, amazed at how the Holy Spirit led him from a flower to a deer to the flight of a great blue heron. He shared that he had been struggling with so much anxiety about his future and how the wind told him to trust the path he was on, because he and God were on it together. Sounds a little like that hand of God that led Ezekiel, doesn’t it?
One chose to spend her fifteen minutes with a dying honeybee. She reflected on what it is like to have been born in a time of ecological crisis. She said she was never taught to just love nature without also being told to grieve its impending and impossible loss. That day, she set aside what she called a routine dissociation from the natural world and allowed herself to fully love that bee even as it was dying.
I don’t have time to share all fifty or so mini-sermons on natural revelation that they gave me, but I can’t wait to learn what you hear in your 15 minutes next Sunday.
When I did my own listening to Creation while they wandered, what poured out into my ears was natural revelation, yes, but it was also a natural confession. That Wildlife Refuge is a place that bears powerful witness to both God, and to the shape of systemic human sin. Those high prairie plains used to be the home of large wild bison herds and the indigenous people who followed their movements. It is a place that has been ravaged from the time of the earliest colonizers, who included my great-great-grandparents. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, this land was turned into a massive Army chemical weapons manufacturing facility. In our earnestness to fight a distant war, we waged chemical warfare on this land, too. In 1987, the land became an EPA National Priority List Superfund hazardous waste site. That’s a lot of words that simply means it was one of our country's worst places of hazardous waste pollution only 37 years ago. It was the discovery of a roost of endangered bald eagles during hazardous waste remediation planning that led to its eventual designation as a National Wildlife Refuge. That Refuge is now 16,000 acres of protected mixed-grass prairie. It has become again, through great human effort to protect it and restore it, home to a vast multitude of bison, bald eagles, migratory songbirds, prairie dogs, and endangered black-footed ferrets. The fact that those teen campers and I were able to gather there for wild worship, surrounded by bird calls and a lake full of fish, is a miracle of restoration that recalls Ezekiel and God breathing life back into those dry bones. I can’t help but wonder what dry bones, what polluted places God is calling upon those young people to help breathe life back into in the places they call home. Of course, the Refuge is not unique in that mix of beautiful creation and hard human history. We’ve all heard the tales of radioactive contamination at Rocky Flats, just south of here.
Last year, the very land where I was knit together in my mother’s womb was also named a Superfund National Priority List hazardous waste site. My birthplace is now recognized as one of the most highly contaminated hazardous waste sites in our country. Many who lived there have experienced strange and early cancers and other illnesses that didn’t make any sense until someone took the time to notice that place and what we had let happen there.
Yet, I can’t regret being born there. My love of the natural world was born there too, in the parks that Delaware’s industrialists built to separate their fancy estates from their factories and their dump sites. These parks were my first sites of wild worship. They continue to be the land that raised me and taught me so much about the shape of God. I love that place enough that it inspired my whole first career working for The Nature Conservancy, and my whole current career helping others discern the shape of God and God’s love for them.
Loving places back to life begins by noticing, both what they can reveal to us about God and what they can share with us about human fallenness. The intentional act of noticing is required, because, like the Psalmist says, the natural world has no speech. It has no words to ask for help to heal and be made whole again. Maybe that ask for help comes to us in the wordless shape of hotter summers, drier winters, and bigger wildfires. And this is why I love to invite people into the practice of nature-based contemplative practices. The practice of intentional attention to the natural world leads us into loving it. And loving it is the first step toward being a voice for it, toward protecting it and toward sustaining it.
Every single place that you find yourself has something to tell you about God if you slow down and give it your full attention. That’s how natural revelation works: it meets us right where we are, free to all of us, but for the cost of taking the time and attention.
The Psalmist leaves us today with the metaphor of God as our rock. I wonder what the rocks of our labyrinth, or the rocks of Bear Creek, have to teach us about the shape of God. I invite you to join me next week and find out. For now, I invite you to turn to your neighbors in groups of two or three and share about:
Either the land that raised you,
another natural place that taught you something about the shape of God,
or something that you love about this land, right here, where we worship today.
Benediction:
May the God who reveals magical things
through rocks, wind, and all of Creation
guide your steps in the week ahead.
May your attention
nourish a sustaining love,
for this place and beyond.
Amen
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