Pentecost A
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Acts 2:1-21
Psalm 104
Planting Rocks
You make darkness and it is night . .
. . the young lions roar for their prey,
seeking their food from God.
When the sun rises, they withdraw
and lie down in their dens.
People go out to their work,
and to their labor until the evening.
- Psalm 104:20-25 (NRSV)
Pentecost was and is a harvest festival. We live in a garden somewhere between the soupy gas of Venus and frozen dust of Mars.
Here in middle Tennessee we are moving. New call. Today I load my pickup with pieces of Pennsylvania shale and Entrada standstone we have plucked up along the way - Cannon County limestone fallen from roadcuts - old life we have lifted out of ditches. We are rock huggers. Like the dump truck bumper sticker: “You fossilize it, we move it.” I lay them gently into the rented storage. They go with us – not the house we are selling. Summer twines through the chain link guarding this place – into my heart, ready for planting.
The scoffers say they are only rocks. That Peter was only drunk. But in all this field, nothing is only anything.
© 2011 Andy Gay