Reformed Spirituality: An Ecological Spirituality.
John 2: 1-11
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ And Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.’ His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ Now standing there were six stone water-jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, ‘Fill the jars with water.’ And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, ‘Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.’ So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, ‘Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.’ Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.
Reflection
Water into wine – the best vintage! This is a story of wonderful, glorious abundance. Jewish weddings could go on for seven days. Jesus is a guest, and he averts a social disaster by turning the water in six stone water jars into wine – 120 gallons of good red. The ordinary made extraordinary by the presence of Jesus.
That is, if you like, a paradigm of the way the world is. Calvin wrote that God ‘…has so wonderfully adorned heaven and earth with as unlimited abundance, variety and beauty of all things as could possibly be, quite like a spacious and splendid house, provided and filled with the most exquisite and at the same time most abundant furnishings.’ (Institutes I.xiv.20)
The glory of God is everywhere, and that means that the whole of creation is precious, because it bears witness to God by its beauty, its rationality, and perhaps, as a distinguished mathematician mused, by its ultimate unknowability. Reformed Christians have always taken the world seriously. They have valued secular vocations as much as sacred, and as they did so discovered that the banking hall was as much holy ground as the sanctuary. Equally too, they have prized the Earth for its beauty, and some now find in Calvin the first stirrings of an ‘eco-theology’ as he explores creation as the ‘theatre of God’s glory’.
In 2004 the World Alliance (now Communion) of Reformed Churches adopted the Accra Confession which rejected political and economic systems that ‘…defy God’s covenant by excluding the poor, the vulnerable and the whole of creation from the fulness of life.’ It went on to claim that ‘…God has made a covenant with the whole of creation…[and] brought into being an earth community based on the vision of justice and peace…It is an economy of grace for the household of all of creation.’
Prayer
Creating God,
the Earth bleeds and burns.
The times are out of joint.
Exploitation and in justice run rampant.
Your tears touch our souls.
Grant us courage, endurance and skill
that the world may be truly
the theatre of your glory.
Amen.