Consider the Lilies

‍ Consider the Lilies

Psalm 24:1, Matthew 6:25-29

May 3, 2026   Earth Care Sunday

Rev. Cynthia Cochran-Carney, First Presbyterian Church, San Rafael, CA

The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.  Psalm 24:1

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?

Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet God feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?

And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.

“Consider the lilies,” Jesus said one day, and I have been doing that recently.

Recently I am noticing lilies, day lilies, calla-lilies.  They startle me every time I see them, and I do, in fact, think about Jesus one day saying to his disciples “Consider the lilies—they neither toil nor spin . . . yet Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.”

The "lilies of the field" are not the flower we call a "lily" in this country, for they are not found in Palestine. The "lilies of the field" are the scarlet poppies which bloom from a bulb after the spring rains.

The point he was making was that God’s providence and loving care was a reality in all of life—witness the birds of the air and the beauty of the lilies—so they, his friends, had nothing ultimately to fear.  There will be hard days, but they could trust God’s creative love was with them, and so they could live freely, giving their lives away.

Consider the lilies of the field. Here today, gone tomorrow. They are beautiful in their time, not because they worked at it or worried about it. We read about the high levels of anxiety these days – for people of all ages, for young people. Jesus is inviting all of us to live in ways that are more open to the beauty of the world and less worrying.  The lilies were beautiful because that's how they were created. From the time they were seeds in the ground, all the lilies had great potential in their genetic formation. With a proper amount of nurture, sunshine, and rain, their beauty breaks forth. They don't need to prove anything. They are beautiful because God made them that way.

Look at the birds. Consider the lilies. In the Greek language, these are strong, energetic verbs. Look, really look! Pay very close attention. We spend so much energy striving, working, hovering, as if that's going to improve anything. But the birds and the lilies live in a different world, "a world where God provides freely and lavishly, a world where anxiety plays no part, where worry is not a reality. Jesus invites us to allow our imaginations to enter such a world, to compare this world with the world in which we must live out our lives."

When we celebrate Earth Day and today Earth Care Sunday as people seeking to following biblical stories and invitations, we are expressing what has been called Creation Theology.  Its premise is that you can see and know the creator by looking at the creation. Christian theology would say that while that is true, there is more to God than creation shows; there is even more goodness and grace and love, which we see in Jesus. But seeing God in creation is an early and important part of our religious tradition.  And seeing the earth as part of the Divine, not separate, can inspire us and motivate us to protect the earth for future generations. 

We acknowledge how we have not done that and there are more and more threats to the environment.  We look for people with whom we can share this work of environmental action. In worship today, we pause to give thanks to the Creator for creation and commit to notice, to savor beauty, to indeed consider the lilies and the birds. And we commit to doing what we can to protect and care for the earth.

Who can help us hold the joy and beaty of the natural world?  Artists, musicians, poets, writers.

Mary Oliver  - She writes poems about the world of nature and the God who created it and is present and accessible to us in it:

             
Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety—
best preacher that ever was,
dear star . . .                          (from “Why I Wake Early”)

“Best preacher that ever was”: the sun, a conveyer of the reality of God—now there’s a concept for the preacher to ponder.

Francis of Assisi, born in 1182, whose “Canticle of Creation” is one of the most memorable proponents of creation theology.  He traveled throughout Europe for many years.  When he returned to Assisi, Francis was sick, frail, and blind, and his body was covered with sores—maybe a form of leprosy. Francis was dying, but one of the last things he did was write a remarkable poem, “Canticle of Creation.”

                     
Most high, omnipotent, great Lord . . .
Praise be to you, my Lord,
with all your creatures,
especially Brother Sun,
who illuminates the day for us.
Praise be to you, my Lord,
for Sister Moon . . .  for Brother Wind . . .
Sister Water . . .  Brother Fire . . .
Praise be to you, my Lord,
for our sister, Mother Earth,
who nourishes and sustains us all
and brings forth diverse fruits with many-colored flowers and herbs.

 How do we pause and ponder and consider the lilies and natural world each day in a way that reminds us of Divine Holy presence in all things?  Close with a reading from Barbara Brown Taylor in her book An Altar in the World. She considers how God shows up in all things:

 The Bible I set out to learn and love rewarded me with another way of approaching God, a way that trusts the union of spirit and flesh as much as it trusts the world to be a place of encounter with God…. People encounter God under shady oak trees, on riverbanks, at the tops of mountains, and in long stretches of barren wilderness. God shows up in whirlwinds, starry skies, burning bushes, and perfect strangers. When people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay. 

 Taylor admits how easy it is to miss these ever-available encounters with God: 

 According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, “Grow, grow.”

 How does one learn to see and hear such angels?

 If there is a switch to flip, I have never found it. As with Jacob, most of my visions of the divine have happened while I was busy doing something else. I did nothing to make them happen…. I play no apparent part in their genesis. My only part is to decide how I will respond, since there is plenty I can do to make them go away, namely: 1) I can figure that I have had too much caffeine again; 2) I can remind myself that visions are not true in the same way that taxes and the evening news are true; or 3) I can return my attention to everything I need to get done today. These are only a few of the things I can do to talk myself out of living in the House of God. 

 Or I can set a little altar, in the world or in my heart. I can stop what I am doing long enough to see where I am, who I am there with, and how awesome the place is. I can flag one more gate to heaven—one more patch of ordinary earth with ladder marks on it—where the divine traffic is heavy when I notice it and even when I do not. I can see it for once, instead of walking right past it, maybe even setting a stone or saying a blessing before I move on to wherever I am due next. 

 Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish—separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars. 

 Amen.

 Resources

Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2009), pp. 12–13, 14, 15.

Featured in Center for Action and Contemplation blog - March 21, 2024

“Waking Up to God”  https://cac.org/daily-meditations/waking-up-to-god/

Rev. Bill Carter, “Enough for Today,” Feb. 26, 2011   https://billcartersermons.blogspot.com/2011/02/enough-for-today.html

Rev. John Buchanan, “God’s Grand Improvisation,” July 12, 2009 https://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2009/071209.html