In my younger days, I attended a meeting lead by my Bishop who had just shared his vision for the future of our Conference. After the meeting I had the nerve to ask the Bishop why “Evangelism” wasn’t one of his priorities for the Annual Conference. His response was, “It is because it has such a negative connotation to so many people. So I stress goals like church growth and mission.” Sadly, he was and still is correct. Studies have shown when people are asked to share their impressions of an evangelist they often say they think of a person who is rigid, intolerant, dogmatic, and is the only one who is right or possesses the truth. More interesting is the fact that most of the people who were interviewed had never met an evangelist. How did a word that simply describes a person who brings “good news,” and not just any good news but God’s good news evolve to such a negative meaning? The core of the word evangelist is angel, who is a messenger of God. I want to reclaim the word and have it reflect who we are as Christian people, and be the basis for our ministry to the world. A ministry that calls us all to share the message of God’s love and care, compassion and concern for all of God’s children. It is a word that describes how I see myself and my role as a follower of Jesus Christ.

I want to use a couple of other words today that complement the word evangelist, that describe how I perceive myself as a Christian. I call myself a “Prophetic Evangelistic Fundamentalist.” Now there’s a name for everyone. There is either enough in the name to make everyone happy, or to raise a level of concern for everyone. In fact I am the only self-proclaimed Prophetic Evangelistic Fundamentalist I know. And maybe that’s a good thing. What’s in a name? When I told Nancy my moniker so to speak, she broke out in a sweat. She suggested strongly I may want to reconsider sharing that with all of you. Yet, it’s a good name, so let me tell you how I define this name.

I’ve already shared with you my thoughts about evangelism as someone who shares God’s good news, so let me continue with the name “Fundamentalist,” as it is probably the next most loaded of the names. Fundamentalist in its most literal sense means “getting back to the basics.” My goal as a Christian, as a person who seeks God’s call and direction for life, especially through scripture, is to get back to the basics. To dig through and scrape away all the layers of teachings and theologies that have been overlaid upon scripture throughout the centuries and try to discover, as best I can, what the original context and intent of the scripture was. Again, I lift the word evangelism as an example. You heard one of those fundamentals or basics in our sermon series on the Unfolding Drama. Starting at the very beginning of the scriptural witness we find in Genesis the whole idea of Original Blessing. That God created and then said, “It is very good!.”

The Psalm we read today reinforces this thought and maybe even takes us further in the understanding of who we are as people of faith, as the children of God.  You can imagine the Psalmist looking up at the night sky and being in awe of what he sees. We have all done it ourselves. And in some ways it may even be more awe inspiring as we know the infinite grandeur we see. But we can hear that sense of wonder as he looks up and says, “Who are mortals that you are mindful of us? Yet, you have made us a little less than God and crowned us with glory and honor.” What an important fundamental of our faith. People, all people are so precious to God that we are crowned in glory and honor. How can we ever look at ourselves in the same way when we understand this? When we look upon any person, we see someone created in the image of God and who God seeks to also crown with honor and glory. The scripture actually shows that God has given us a royal status in creation. I find this an awesome piece of good news.

The passage then goes on to say, “And you have given them (or us,) dominion over the works of your hands. God has given us dominion over all God has created. But might that mean today to someone who reads this? When I looked up the word dominion in Webster’s Dictionary, I found this definition. Dominion means to have power over, to rule. So if we read this passage from our perspective or definition of the word today, it implies that God has given us the power to rule over creation, to subdue it, posses it, to control it for our own gain and purpose. Here is where getting back to the fundamentals or the basics is important. In the time and culture of the Psalmist to have dominion over meant to have the responsibility to keep it well and whole. And so in this passage what we are hearing is that God has called us to be co-caretakers of all that God has created and given to us as original blessing and to keep it a blessing for ourselves and for those who follow us generation after generation.

We are celebrating Earth Day a few weeks late. The reason being is we did not want to interrupt the flow of the Unfolding Drama, the overarching story of scripture. But today, I am going back to the beginning of the drama, seeking the fundamentals of the story again. And it is important, for as one First Testament theologian states, “Today, we misunderstand dominion as domination, which means subduing and using creation for our own gains and wants. The original blessing story certainly tells us that God gave us this beautiful creation and all that is in it to provide life and sustain life. Yet, God also asks us to be good stewards as co-caretakers of creation protecting it and keeping it whole as the paradise God created it to be.

So it seems to me, on this Earth Day Celebration, we need to ask ourselves the question, “Are we being good caretakers of creation?” Are we fulfilling our royal status as those “created in the image of God, crowned with glory and honor?” Are we living our lives in a way that sustains the blessings of the earth not only for ourselves, but for our children and grandchildren, and the generations to come who seek to experience God’s original blessings in their lives? Are we promoting the wholeness and wellbeing of this incredible gift of creation? Or are we allowing it to be dominated and diminished by those around us.

Now, this is where being prophetic comes in. If you remember, a prophet was called the “Word of God” in scripture. Whenever God’s people would stray from God’s direction and blessing, God would send a prophet trying to help the people see where they were straying and put them back on course. Remember we gat back to the basics when we looked at Torah. Torah has been translated as the law, a sense of legalisms and rules, but it actually and literally means, “go in this direction” for this is the way to wholeness and wellbeing. To be prophetic literally means calling people back to the fundamentals of the faith. That is the purpose of Earth Day and any other celebration that asks us to stop and look at what we are doing and if it is indeed in line with being the people of God. A prophet is someone who seeks to direct people back to the original blessings of life as they try to remind us that God is the one who is in charge, God is the one who is sovereign in creation, and God is the one who seeks to bless us and all of creation..

To be prophetic may mean being counter-cultural, for it asks us to bring into question those places and practices in our world, in our nation, in our community, that are contrary to the fundamentals, the basics of our faith. It is an important responsibility. There is a wonderful adage that I believe reminds us why we need to live this calling. It says, “When the people lead, the leaders will follow.”  Our leaders, those who can make the difference in insuring the wellbeing of creation, need to hear our concerns as people of faith, as those who have been given the responsibility to have dominion over God’s original blessings. But, we need to hear Jim Wallis’ warning to us in his book, God’s Politics. He says, “Our concerns need to be more than a politics of complaint. . . .The concerns we raise need to be more than counter-cultural, they need to be transformational. We need to give our society a better vision for its future. That is the way of the prophets. They began in judgment but ended in hope for change.”

When Jesus taught us to pray he taught us to ask God that God’s “kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” The kingdom of God has been defined as what life would be like if we fully lived it under the sovereignty of God, by living in the direction God has pointed us. So Jesus reminds us that we are not yet fully who we can be, but at the same time in teaching us to pray those words, Jesus shows us that we can indeed grow more fully into God’s kingdom. That is the vision we have to share of our future, and that to me is hopeful. It is a message of hope and hope is always a message of good news. So, I guess I’m back where I started, being a Prophetic Evangelistic Fundamentalist.

Sermon delived by Rev. George Cushman on May 7, 2006.