Wicker Park Lutheran Church
Rev. Tom Gehring
October 4, 2026
Wicker Park Lutheran Church
Rev. Tom Gehring
October 4, 2026
May these words of my mouth and this meditation of all our hearts be acceptable to you O Lord, our Creator and our Sustainer. Amen.
In the spring of 2016, I was living on the land of the Sicangu Lakota Oyate, more commonly known as the Rosebud Indian Reservation, in South Dakota. I had been living there as a member of a young adult intentional community, and serving as a vicar to the eight Episcopalian congregations on the reservation, before heading to Seminary that coming fall.
One of my good friends that I made while living there was a young Lakota man by the name Rich Kills-in-Water. He was three years older than me, and we ended up doing a lot of projects together as he and his mom were also very involved the church’s ministries. We helped paint churches that were in need of attention, did landscaping work where church grounds had become overgrown, and we constantly split firewood and delivered it to elders and families who needed it in the colder months. One such project that we worked on together was redoing the garden in the front lawn of Trinity Episcopalian Church in Mission, SD. As we worked, we naturally slipped into the kind of small talk that often accompanies a manual labor project.
Eventually, the conversation took a turn to the more spiritual and existential, as I found conversations often did among my native friends on the rez. Rich started telling me a story about how his young cousin was asking him about just how God created the world. See Rich had provided an answer, but wasn’t sure if it was good theology or not, so asked if he could recount the conversation with me to get my opinion.
As he told it, his young cousin was curious about what exactly God made when God created the world, and was having a hard time grasping the general concept. So, Rich took his cousin out to their front porch. Granted, this is the most rural of rural South Dakota, so Rich’s front porch overlooked a vast expanse of gorgeous prairie grassland. Rich then told his cousin to close his eyes. When he did, Rich asked him “what do you see?” His cousin responded, I can’t see anything. Rich then told his cousin to open his eyes, and asked him again “what do you see?” His cousin replied “I see everything.” Then Rich said: “That’s what God made.”
As we continued to work on our garden project, Rich asked me if what he had told his cousin was a good answer, apparently putting a lot of stock in my knowledge and understanding as someone who was soon to be bound for Seminary. I told him, I can’t think of a single answer that would have been better than the one he gave.
I share this story as we celebrate the Feast Day of Saint Francis simply because I could not get it out of my head as I reflected on today’s readings and themes for worship. I love this feast day every year because it’s one of the few times that we as Christians living in a city, get to see, hear, touch, and maybe even smell, the fullness of God’s creation within our church walls. See, I think that in modern times, followers of the Christian faith are very siloed or cut off from the natural world and our understanding of how we relate to it, and how through nature we might relate to God.
If I’m being honest, I find myself almost daily caught in a tension between loving my people and my community here in the city, and yearning to return to the prairies, grasslands, lakes, rivers, and woodlands that I grew up in. But even then, my understanding of nature as a child was not one that I would consider very relational. We went camping almost every summer but nature was always more entertainment to be consumed than a being to meet and relate to. And, though I am grateful for and thrilled by all of the lovely animals here with us today, I can’t help but feel a tinge of jealousy. Because, despite my and my sister’s extremely earnest attempts at convincing our dad that we needed a dog in the house, the most we ever got was a very territorial Japanese beta fish named Jaws.
But, beyond the personal experience, I found that my spiritual upbringing was almost even more detached from the natural world. My days in Sunday School and Confirmation were largely about very cerebral, very heady topics. We talked about salvation, grace, community, faithfulness and the like. We memorized prayers and creeds. We shared thoughts, ideas, laughter, tears, and all these experiences were meaningful to be sure. However, looking back I can’t help but notice just how overwhelmingly cognitive and cerebral my upbringing in a life of faith was. I was taught to respect God’s creation, I was taught to enjoy it, yet I don’t think I was ever taught to experience God through creation. Or to form a relationship with God’s creation.
It seems as though the prevailing thought within our current capitalist context is that creation, the natural world, the planet that has sustained all known life for all of existence, has no intrinsic worth unless it is somehow producing profit for somebody. A vibrant and lush grassland is useless unless it is producing crops, and the crops that get planted are only of a single variety that sap the soil of its nutrients. A mountain range that supports more rugged life forms is worthless unless it is being mined for its more precious metals, damaging fragile ecosystems in the process. I could continue to list examples from deep ocean mining to drag net fishing to deforestation but I think the point is fairly clear. Yet today, we heard directly from our savior that we need not view the world the way the systems of the world currently do.
In Matthew’s gospel, we hear a lesson from Jesus that I think has only increased in relevance as we trudge ever further into the modern industrial age. Jesus tells his audience that there is both nourishment, and wisdom to be found in observing the natural world. While instructing those listening to him not to worry, he appeals to birds of the air, and how they live their lives. They find sustenance and food not for their worrying, but because The Creator provides for them. And we, as created beings made by the same Creator, can trust that God and creation can and will sustain us as well, so long as we are good stewards of creation.
Not only that, Jesus also makes an appeal to the beauty of creation as a way of reassuring his audience. Consider the lilies of the field, he says. They do not worry, they do not toil, they do not spin. Yet still, they are more glorious even than Solomon, the most extravagant of the past kings. The lilies simply exist as God created them to exist, and they are all the more glorious for it.
It would seem that the lesson, then, is to spend less time and energy overthinking about all that we could, or should do. And instead, make every effort to dwell in the present moment more. For when we focus on the present moment, we exist as we were created. To be in community with one another, and with our neighbors. And, our neighbors are not just the people around us, but the birds, the bugs, the squirrels, the plants, the spiders, dare I even say, the rats? There are lessons to be learned by observing our neighbors, and it’s lovely having some wise-looking teachers here among us today.
I’ve lost count of how many times our dog has taught me the importance and even the necessity of taking a moment of stillness. Of finding joy in simply dwelling in your favorite blanket, and how even the familiar things in life like your loved ones coming home need not be mundane just because they’re familiar.
As I think on what it means to be of this creation and situated in community with all the life around us, my mind cannot help but reflect upon another lesson I learned during my time on the Rosebud Reservation that has become an instrumental aspect of my life and my faith. And, that is the Lakota phrase: Mitakuye Oyasin. Perhaps you’ve heard it before, but it most closely translates to “we are all related.”
However, the relation we all share is not shallow or surface level, but that of a sibling or family member. And we all, is truly we all. The birds are my family, the plants are my family, the sky is my family, the microbes and bacteria in the soil are my family, the centipedes in my basement, the pigeons on the sidewalk, the trees in the park, the aloe vera plant in my kitchen, the rocks and the dirt, these are all my relations. Not one more important or lesser than the other. Each a necessary and essential thread woven into the grand mysterious tapestry of this life that we share alongside one another. All of us able to learn from, and give back to one another.
As we prepare to bless our beloved animal relatives here today, I give thanks for the ways they remind us to expand our ideas of what is sacred and good. May we reorient our minds to situate ourselves within the entirety of creation. May we advocate for all our relatives to be treated with dignity and respect. May we always remember that everything we see, is what God created. Everything we see is divine and beautiful. Mitakuye Oyasin. Amen.