Ezekiel 17:22-24
Psalm 92:2-16
2 Corinthians 5:6-10
Mark 4:26-34

"'Let There Be ...
Swarms of Living Creatures'"

A man scatters seed upon the ground. He goes to bed. In the morning, behold, the ground has broken open with new, green life forcing its way upward. In our own day, sidewalks are uplifted and concrete is broken apart by the force packed within that tiny seed. How does it happen?! No one really knows. This was the spirit of Jesus' teaching: a potent magic, everywhere to be found on our planet, is taken for granted then ... and now. We continue to ask in our own time, "Why? How does this happen?" And it continues to be the case that no one knows.

Yes, today we have technologies that enable us to see things in microscopic, even sub-atomic, detail. Yes, we can even see the plant's genes, for all life has DNA, and we are able sequence and map a genome. But however far we journey into these details, however wonderful our maps of the stuff of life, we will always come to a dead-end that cannot be surpassed. For no human two thousand years ago, now, or ever will understand that mysterious stirring, that force and movement, we call life. All that remains in the face of this most holy and most wondrous miracle is silence. Being of a certain age and background, I think of that old Bukka White blues song, "Panama Limited": "The hobos don't mess with that train. They just stand by the track with their hat in their hand."

Many years ago as a young lecturer in the Center for Advanced Engineering Study at MIT, I sat in the crowded Faculty Dining Room with my Center's director, Ziggy Ezekiel. Surrounded not by hobos this time but by people whose research is reviewed by Nobel Prize committees. Ziggy reached into his salad and held aloft a Sunflower seed and asked loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear, "Who invented this?! Eh?! Who could have invented this?!" The only reply was silence .... even reverence in this room overflowing with genius. Yes, these scientists might marvel that compact within each tiny seed is the color, shape, and composition of each leaf, the number of leaves, the height of the plant, the complex plumbing and circulation of water and nutrients moving up and down the leaves and stems, the diameter of the enormous Sunflower blossom, and then the countless other seeds within the blossom pointing to countless future generations ad infinitum. Well might they marvel at even knowing all this. But inventing it themselves? Unthinkable! Packing all this superhuman machinery into a tiny seed .... which would create an infinite number of others like it? Beyond contemplating! But infinitely far beyond these formidable challenges lies another, which is taking lifeless stuff into our hands and then endowing it with that magic, that power, that force that we call a living, breathing organism. Who could ever cross that boundary?

It is at this point that we approach an irony nearly as vast as the dark and silent spaces beyond us: this commitment to find life is carried out at great cost to the only life we shall ever discover, which is on Earth. Both the desire to explore space and the perverse impulse to ignore Earth are rooted in the self-same soil, which is the human tendency to "take life for granted." Precious life on Earth is taken for granted, and astrophysicists and engineers take it for granted that there is intelligent life beyond our unique lifeworld, which only God could have created. "But, wait!" I hear a voice saying. "We did discover life on Mars!" In the words of the distinguished scientist Stephen Jay Gould, as he inspected the microscopic fossilized bacteria in question, "You call this life?!" And today scientists argue over what that small fragmant really is.

Whence comes this irreverence for life (even as it spends stupendous sums in the name of reverence)? Whatever the cause, it must have something to do with our false sense of mastery over life. As children we could catch life in the form of fishes and frogs. As teenagers We could tame life as dogs and horses came into our sphere. Certainly, any of us can extinguish life at will. But who, except St. Francis and others like him, will sit on a rock with a little ant perched on his outstretched palm, watching it as it turns its head this way and that, observing it as it preens its antennae, and marvel that it possesses the spark of life? It is here that I take pleasure even to read another sentence from our Gospel lesson:

Why is Earth's oxygen always kept in precise balance that we may breathe? What regulates the pH and salinity of Earth's oceans that life might continue and thrive? And Earth's narrow band of temperatures and soils ... what keeps its organisms-beyond-numbering in check-and-balance? How do all these myriad "thermostats" work, so that our planet home is always comfortable and hospitable to life?

Scientists tell us that before life was created on Earth, our atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide, and the oceans were much more salty, both prohibiting life as we know it. But with the creation of life, introduced into this mix, created life, which transformed a toxic vacancy into a life-nurturing paradise. To say it differently, God, Who alone is the source of life, set life into place: — "Let there be .... swarms of living creatures," we read in Genesis 1. — and these living things brought about the balance, and countless balances of balances, that is unique to the Earth. This understanding of Earth is known as the Gaia Hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock (1965). (Gaia is a Greek word referring to Earth in its aspect of divinity.) Despite its lack of acceptance a half-century ago, new evidence bearing out Lovelock's hypothesis has begun to turn the situation around with more and more scientists supporting it.

Here at the Hermitage situated on our island in Polynesia, God has brought us very close to this fountain of life and its great multitude of species. Life springs up out of the ground with breathtaking rapidity and power. A citrus trunk sawn on both ends and left in our orchard for dead some years ago, threw down new roots and quickly sent up shoots that have become trees. Last year, we harvested hundreds of pounds of oranges from those new trees. In our Turmeric fields we labor in vain attempt to weed out competitor plants. Yes, the Turmeric grows rapidly, too, with its enormous leaves and gaudy blooms, but the competitors are always bursting with new vigor and life. Last week I cut back a Megathyrsis maximus to ground level, and thirty hours later new shoots had grown six inches high. Mechanically removing all, root and branch, does not work, for even a fragment of a root or a root hair left in the soil will produce a new plant. Working each day in these ultra-fertile jungles of flora and fauna, it is easy to understand why humans might take life for granted. After all, whole lifetimes are spent here trying to suppress life. But so great is its power, that it seems nigh unstoppable, even immortal. You can't kill it.

As St. Paul teaches us in this morning's Epistle lesson, we have both a material home and a spiritual home. In both we aim to please Him Who is the author of both. For life on Earth belongs to God as surely as the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near to us. All is God's domain. From our Hebrew Scripures reading, we hear Ezekiel, my MIT mentor's namesake:

The Gospel today has reminded us that life is a beating heart set within our one-of-a-kind world. We may sleep and rise and do .... nothing, yet it will "produce of itself." Life springs from its womb of its own accord and power. You see, it doesn't need us ... so the Lord Jesus taught. And He should know. For He was the One Who set it there and breathed life into it and endowed each living thing with that divine spark which we shall never understand. This holy life. This holy Earth. As every Franciscan knows, we must reverence it and care for it and protect it. For it is God's, and He has appointed us to be its faithful stewards.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.