It turns out we owe a lot to the bees. One third of all of the food that we eat depends on bees pollinating fruit and vegetable blossoms. Some day this might mean, no more pears, no more strawberries, and, no more broccoli, (there may be some good new out of all of this) …But it seems like it’s bigger than the bees. To me, it seems like a symbol of the whole way we, as a human community, are out of right relationship with the Earth.

Conservative Christians clap their hands together and gleefully await the time when they will be whisked up into heaven to sit with God and I guess sort of watch from the big flat screen in the sky as Earth goes to Hell in a hand basket. Or, to be more precise, Hell comes to Earth in a hand basket. Christians of a more progressive persuasion guiltily talk about how the seven deadly sins have been rewritten to include too much wealth, buying an SUV and over- consumption of one’s share of the Earth’s resources. It’s not that I don’t agree with this baby step approach to conservation, but what about the bees?

The Apostle, Paul, as he struggles to understand what happened in Jesus as something that was working on a Universal level, rather than a Jewish guy who died in Jerusalem and then somehow was raised from the dead, talks about Jesus bringing to birth a new Creation. In Romans Eight he writes:

“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as children, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And The One who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will.

If God is for us, who can be against us? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?

   As it is written: For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.

   No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Are these just pretty words that we read at funerals to make us feel better? Or.do they have some actual connection to our present situation? Do they give us some clues about some ways we can live our lives as people of faith? The first thing I think about is hearing Kathy Tenderholt talking about helping 100’s of women give birth as she worked as a labor a delivery nurse. She would say to them, “Well, you’ve gotten this far, you can’t turn back now, God will get you through this.” We can’t turn back now. Even in our own times of cyclones, war, famine, we can’t turn back now. Where would we go. Out of this trouble, really all we can do is change and we can learn and we can begin trust in God at a very deep level and trust ourselves to stop being to spoiled children of the planet. We can choose conservation over convenience. We can, as we eat our pears and our strawberries and our broccoli, give thanks for the earth in which it was grown, the labor that tended each tender shoot, the bees that pollinated the blossoms…we can live our lives with a sense of gratitude rather than a sense of entitlement.

We can return to the ancient belief that the Earth is our home, our Mother, God’s first gift to us and not just a place to build another parking lot or another shopping mall. The Earth is not just a place for development and profit. Out of Creation can come creativity? Where at your house can you learn to keep a hive of bees? How can you restore a sense that water is a sacred resource, rather than something to be managed by timers and sprinklers to maintain our green lawns. Perhaps it’s time to restore the concept of the victory garden.

It’s taken the bees to wake me up; it’s taken the bees to make me see how the New Creation has become worn and weary and in need of our love and care and attention. Last week an older parishioner was unhappy about a younger parishioner bouncing a basketball in the new and beautiful youth room. She asked him, “Is that how you treat our home.” As people of faith, as we make choices about how we live on our earth we need to ask ourselves, “Is this how we treat God’s sacred gift to us?”