Author Archives: mbj

As a title for these remarks, I’d like to take the school motto, “Truth without fear.” When I was a student at St. Tim’s, I probably heard many chapel talks about the meaning of those words, and about who chose the motto and why, but I don’t remember. It’s been 45 years since I graduated, and a good many things have faded from memory. Still, I think those three words are a good beacon to guide us as we make decisions and as we go through each day: truth without fear.

What would it be like to face the truth without fear – the truth of what’s going on inside us, the truth of what’s going on in the world around us? As an Episcopal priest, I hear a biblical resonance in that question, for, according to John’s Gospel, the Spirit that Jesus sends will lead us into all truth (John 16:13). Truth is what we’re after, and a capacity to live into the truth without fear. “Fear not,” say God’s messengers, and Jesus himself, countless times. “Do not be afraid.” “Have no fear.” “Speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15), says one biblical writer. Says another, “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18).

Over the years I’ve thought a lot about fear and about what it takes to face the truth. In 1962, when I was ten and about to enter sixth grade, my father, who was an English professor at Harvard, took a sabbatical in England. I was sent off to boarding school in Switzerland, where I felt desperately homesick and alone. A few weeks after I arrived at the school, the Cuban missile crisis broke out, and I was terrified. For days the world held its breath as we teetered on the brink of war. Were the world’s great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, going to blow each other up? Panic-stricken, I decided to face my fear by learning everything I could about the Soviet Union, this mysterious enemy that made everyone so afraid. After I came home I began reading books about communism and I vowed to learn Russian at the earliest opportunity. Sure enough, when I came to St. Tim’s in 1966 I signed up for Russian classes and, among other things, I spent three years happily immersed in studying that wonderful mouthful of a language.

I was willing to explore one kind of truth – the truth of the world outside – but I wasn’t yet willing or able to explore the truth of what was going inside me or inside my family. I couldn’t see and couldn’t face my father’s alcoholism. I couldn’t see and couldn’t face my mother’s depression. I didn’t yet have the skills or the support to face the truth of my anger and loneliness and sorrow. I was afraid to face what was in me, and at St. Tim’s I began to eat compulsively and in secret. I raided the candy machines, gorged on cookies, and went on endless diets. Outwardly I was one of the star achievers (at least academically – I was never any good in sports!), and I kept on smiling, kept on studying, kept on making the honor roll. But inwardly I was full of self-doubt, shame, and fear. I lived a double life and hid what I was doing from other people.

Like every child who grows up in an alcoholic or dysfunctional home, I’d learned the basic household rules of “Don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel” – rules that prevent us from disclosing what’s going on, of trusting anyone with the truth, or of admitting what we feel. In some ways I lived, as every addict does, in a world of secrets and lies. To the outside world I pretended that everything was fine (“I’m happy! We are all happy in this family!”), even though my parents separated during my first year at St. Tim’s and divorced soon thereafter. Truth without fear? I was just beginning that journey and had a long way to go.

I went to college in California – getting as far from home as I could – and I majored in Russian language and literature. I wanted to make a difference; I suppose I wanted in some way to save the world. So, after college, I considered going to law school. To test that out I spent a year in Philadelphia working as a VISTA volunteer at a law firm that served the poor. But I quickly realized that my mind is too intuitive and imaginative to thrive on legal analysis, and I decided that I wanted instead to be a college teacher and to focus on how literature can contribute to creating a more just and peaceful society. I returned to Harvard and enrolled in a Ph.D. program in comparative literature.

I’m not going to walk you through the details of the story, which I tell in my memoir, Holy Hunger. Suffice it to say that during my years at Harvard, I reached a crisis point in my eating disorder in which I had to tell the truth or die. I alternated fasting and bingeing, running for endless miles and then eating everything in sight – at one point I gained 11 pounds in four days. Shame and fear were driving my life, and the food addiction had me in its grip. The split between my outwardly successful, accomplished and competent self and my secretly shame-filled and fear-filled self had become too great to endure. At the age of 30, I finally became willing to face myself, and what was going on in me. I entered a 12-Step program based on Alcoholics Anonymous, renewed my work in psychotherapy, and, for the first time in years, began to pray and returned to church. Truth without fear – that’s how I wanted to learn to live, that’s what I wanted to embody. As best I could, I wanted to live into the truth in a spirit of love, not fear.

Looking back more than 30 years later, I can see that getting into recovery was the great turning point of my life, the pivot that made possible everything that followed. Once I began telling the truth about my eating disorder and began to make peace with my body, I started to feel alive in a way that I’d never experienced before. I remember, soon after my recovery began, riding in the back of a pickup truck across a Minnesota field. It was a glorious, sunny afternoon in July, and I was entranced by the smell of the grasses. I threw back my head and inhaled. Just to breathe was erotic! What a joy it was to be alive, to live in a body, to be part of this living, buzzing, blooming earth! Right then I knew that I was part of a sacred mystery that infuses all things and that transcends them, too. Somehow that loving, nameless, sacred mystery was giving itself to me in the grasses, in the wind, in the light, and I was giving myself back to it, saying “I love you, too.”

Who was this sacred power of truth that had saved my life? As soon as I finished my Ph.D., I went straight to seminary. After being released from my eating disorder I had fallen in love with life, fallen in love with God, fallen in love with this beautiful world that God made. I married a wonderful man and we started a family. Ordained in 1988, I launched into my vocation: I wanted to help other people to experience for themselves the liberating love of God that leads us into all truth. So over the years I served as a parish priest, became a spiritual director, and led retreats; I taught seminary courses on prayer and for a while was chaplain to the bishops of the Episcopal Church.

But a new call was emerging alongside everything else I was doing. It didn’t come abruptly, like the Cuban missile crisis, but gradually, in articles I spotted here and there in the New York Times that mentioned something called “global warming.” When I began ordained ministry in the late 1980’s, climate scientists were just beginning to voice concern that burning fossil fuels such as coal, gas, and oil was heating up the global atmosphere and disrupting its delicate balance of gases. For some reason I took the news of climate change very personally. It was not an abstract or distant issue for someone else to deal with, but something that affected me viscerally and close to home.

I absorbed the increasingly alarming reports of glaciers receding, tundra thawing, and icecaps melting; of sea levels rising and of oceans heating and growing more acidic; of severe droughts and fires erupting in some parts of the world, and torrential deluges and floods in others. It turns out that in just 200 years, hardly a blink in geologic time, human beings have pumped so much heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) into the air that atmospheric levels of CO2 are higher today than they’ve been for many millions of years. A climate scientist recently remarked at a conference I attended, “We are breathing from an atmosphere that none of our ancestors would recognize.” To put it in the words of environmentalist Bill McKibben: “We’ve changed the planet, changed it in large and fundamental ways… Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.”

So as the years went by, climate activism became an increasingly important part of my ministry. It seemed to me that the same Spirit of love and truth that had helped me heal my relationship with my body was now sending me out on a quest to help human beings to heal our collective relationship with the body of the earth. Twenty-five years after my ordination, I finally left parish ministry completely and I’ve just started a new job in the Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts as its first Missioner for Creation Care. My new Website is called Reviving Creation.

What I’ve discovered is that when you step out to bear witness as best you can to the deepest truth you know, you get through your fears, whatever they are. Speaking for myself, you get through your fear of rocking the boat and of making people angry or uncomfortable. You get through your fear of picking up a bullhorn and speaking to a crowd. You get through your fear of conflict, your fear of addressing a hostile audience, and your fear of not mastering every last fact. You get through your fear of being dismissed as radical, sentimental, or naïve. You get through your fear of being arrested and hauled off to jail.

Of course when you do these things you may still be afraid – in fact, you may be shaking in your boots. But you get through those fears because life is too important –- your children and their children are too important – the truth is too important – for you to be stopped by your fears. You realize that Love sent you into this world for a purpose, and that when it comes to protecting life as it has evolved on this planet, we need all hands on deck. We want to leave a habitable world for our children and our children’s children. We want life in all its beauty and diversity to continue to thrive. We don’t want to propel the world’s sixth major extinction event and to allow half the world’s species to vanish before the century is out. We don’t want to create the conditions that lead to famine, pestilence, and war. We refuse to allow business as usual to continue, if business as usual means unraveling the planet’s web of life.

That is where truth without fear is leading me. I hope that many of you will join me over the weekend of September 20 and 21, when the largest rally in the history of the climate movement will be held in New York.

I take to heart the words of Helen Keller, who said, “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something I can do.”

The last word goes to poet Michael Leunig, who writes:

There are only two feelings. Love and fear.
There are only two languages. Love and fear.
There are only two activities. Love and fear.
There are only two motives, two procedures,
two frameworks, two results. Love and fear.
Love and fear.

— Presented at “St. Timothy’s Talks: Spotlighting Six Graduates Who Have Devoted Their Lives to Cultivating Meaningful and Sustainable Change,” June 7, 2014, St. Timothy’s School, Stevenson, MD

© 2014 Margaret Bullitt-Jonas

Take a moment to feel the earth beneath your feet. As you inhale your next breath, take a moment to give thanks for the air that is flowing through your lungs. Notice the living world around you. In awakening to the gift of God’s creation, you are not alone! Today (June 5) is World Environment Day, and people around the world are turning with grateful hearts to oceans, rivers, and trees, to birds, marine animals, and mountains, as we honor our corner of creation and remember how interdependent everything is.

The United Nations invites us to celebrate World Environment Day, or WED, a pretty fine acronym evoking the possibility that one day human beings and the rest of creation will be “wed” together in love. That may sound impossibly quaint or far-fetched, given humanity’s collective assault on the natural world, from deforestation and the spread of toxic chemicals to species extinction and climate change. But it’s a vision that speaks to my heart. To play with the marriage imagery, I’d say that humanity and the rest of creation could definitely use some marital counseling.

So today is a good day to refresh our personal relationship with the natural world. We can ask ourselves: What kind of relationship am I creating with the living world around me? Do I hurtle through the day with my head down, absorbed in my own thoughts, wired for worry and ignoring my non-human kin? Or do I make myself available for encounter? Do I notice the hawk overhead, the shining leaf and passing cloud? Do I give myself permission to slow down and pay attention, to relish each breath and to bless the ground with every step? Is there something I can do this week to express my affection for the web of life of which I am a part, and my concern for its well-being?

Love every leaf. So says Father Zossima, the Russian Orthodox abbot in The Brothers Karamazov, a novel that I read in high school, studied in college, and studied yet again while completing my doctorate in Russian and comparative literature. From his deathbed, the abbot describes the ecstatic perception of reality that inspired his life.

Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.[1]

Compassion Mandala, Robert Lentz
Compassion Mandala, Robert Lentz

A version of that passage is taped to the back of every “Compassion Mandala” icon made by Robert Lentz, a wonderful image for meditation and prayer. The image shows a Christ-figure surrounded by golden light, bending over to embrace the Earth. Without a word, the image portrays the all-embracing compassion of Christ, whose love extends not just to each of us as individuals, and not just to human beings, but also to the whole creation.

If you want to safeguard our world, which is so loved by God (John 2:16), please join me in New York City on the weekend of September 20th and 21st for the largest rally in the history of the climate movement. As environmentalist Bill McKibben puts it, “If you’re wondering how to react to the devastating news that the Antarctic is melting out of control: New York. If you’re scared like I am by the pictures of the fire and drought across the West: New York. If you’re feeling like it’s time to change the trajectory of this planet: we’ll see you in New York.” Here is a link for more information about the march, and to register, and here is Bill McKibben’s article, “A Call to Arms: An Invitation to Demand Action on Climate Change.”

I imagine a crowd of Christians from across New England, the Atlantic seaboard, and beyond, gathered on that September weekend in New York, along with thousands upon thousands of other people. I imagine us walking, singing and carrying banners from our respective churches. I imagine us witnessing to a creative and redeeming God who loves the world with an all-embracing love and whose Spirit empowers us to tackle the biggest challenge that human beings have ever faced. Find a way to come! I’ll see you there.

 

1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Constance Garnett, revised and edited by Ralph E. Matlaw, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976, p. 298.

Margaret was interviewed by Victoria Ix, Communications Director of the Diocese of Western Massachusetts, for Abundant Times (May 2014). Read or download it here.

 

Margaret was recently interviewed by Victoria Ix, Communications Director of the Diocese of Western Massachusetts.  An excerpt of the interview is included in Abundant Times (May 2014), pp. 12-13, and can be read or downloaded here.

 

 

Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter (Rogation Sunday), May 25, 2014. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, St. Paul’s Church, Stockbridge, MA. Acts 17:22-31      1 Peter 3:13-22 Psalm 66:7-18     John 14:15-21

In God we live and move and have our being

It is a pleasure to be with you on this Memorial Day weekend, and I’d like to thank your rector for inviting me to preach. As your Missioner for Creation Care, I am especially glad that today is Rogation Sunday. Celebrating rogation days is a custom that goes all the way back to the 5th century. The word “rogation” comes from the Latin verb rogare, which means “to ask” and also gives us the root of our English word, “interrogate.” Rogation Sunday, the Sixth Sunday of Easter, is all about asking: we ask God to bless the land and to give us a fruitful harvest.

In olden times, people would celebrate rogation days by a “beating of the bounds”: priests and parishioners would gather outside the church building and walk in procession along the boundaries of the parish, asking God to protect it during the coming year. They would rededicate themselves to good stewardship of the particular piece of earth that God entrusted to their care. As far as I know we’re not going to do an outdoor processional today, and the entire service will be held inside (right?), but today we acknowledge with joy the fact that we worship the God who loves all creation into existence – seas and sky, warblers and whales, penguins and peonies. Here at the height of Easter season we celebrate the risen Christ who restores, redeems and heals not only human beings, but also the whole natural world (Colossians 1:20). Like generations of Christians before us, on this Rogation Sunday, we, too, want to rededicate ourselves to the care of God’s creation. In this morning’s first reading, we heard Paul proclaim, in his famous speech in front of the Areopagus, a hill beside the Acropolis in Athens, that God “made the world and everything in it.” The God “who is Lord of heaven and earth” does not live in buildings, “in shrines made by human hands” (Acts 17:24), but everywhere – in the vastness of the great outdoors and in the intimacy of this breath, this heartbeat. God “is not far from each one of us,” says Paul. “For ‘In [God] we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:27). In God we live and move and have our being. That is what Jesus is saying in today’s Gospel passage, which starts where last Sunday’s left off, in the middle of the section of John’s Gospel that scholars call Jesus’ farewell discourse. Jesus is saying goodbye to his friends, and as he prepares to go to the Cross and to return to the loving Father who sent him into the world, he shows his friends the path to the same union with God that he experienced throughout his life. What is that path? To love God and one another, just as Jesus has loved us. To abide in his love (John 13:34-35; 15:9-12). To share in his mission of justice, mercy, and compassion (Matthew 28:19-20). Soon the disciples will no longer see the human Jesus, so in order to empower his disciples to abide in that never-failing flow of love between God the Father and God the Son, Jesus will ask the Father to give them what he calls “another Advocate, to be with you forever” (John 14:16). That advocate – that counselor and sustainer, that comforter, helper and guide who leads us into all truth and who abides with us always – is the Holy Spirit. At its most basic level, that’s what it means to be a Christian: someone who, through the power of the Spirit, connects with and trusts in the ever-flowing love of God that is always circulating among us. Someone who bears witness in very tangible ways – even in the face of suffering and death – to the ongoing love, power and presence of God that fills the whole creation. Given the frightening news about human-caused climate change that we’ve been hearing in recent days, it’s clear to me that we need people like that – in fact, lots of people like that: people who are willing to face squarely the most challenging, even devastating facts, people who can reach into their reserves of courage, faith, and hope, people who can step out to bear witness to the God who entrusted the world to our care and in whom we live and move and have our being. A quick scan of the headlines will show you what I mean. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group, shows, in the words of one reporter, that “climate change is already having sweeping effects on every continent and throughout the world’s oceans… and [that] the problem [is] likely to grow substantially worse unless greenhouse emissions are brought under control…[I]ce caps are melting, sea ice in the Arctic is collapsing, water supplies are coming under stress, heat waves and heavy rains are intensifying, coral reefs are dying, and fish and many other creatures are migrating toward the poles or in some cases going extinct. The oceans are rising at a pace that threatens coastal communities and are becoming more acidic as they absorb some of the carbon dioxide given off by cars and power plants….[Ocean acidification] is killing some creatures or stunting their growth.” On top of this grim news, two landmark studies disclosed a couple of weeks ago that the huge West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to collapse and slide into the sea in a way that scientists call “unstoppable.” Researchers had expected that, despite human-caused climate change, the ice sheet would last for thousands of years, but the new studies found that the loss is happening much more quickly than scientists expected. The slow-motion collapse will eventually lead to a rise in global sea levels of 12-15 feet, “overrunning many of the world’s islands, low-lying areas, and coastal cities.”1 When it comes to climate disruption, the scientific controversy is over. The science is settled. 97% of climate scientists worldwide are telling us with increasing alarm that climate change is not a future threat. It is our reality. Burning fossil fuels such as coal, gas, and oil emits gases into the atmosphere that make the climate hotter and more unstable. Of course there has always been some natural variability in the planet’s average temperature, but ever since the Industrial Revolution we’ve been forcing the climate to change in a way that human beings have never experienced before. Around the world we’re seeing the result in extreme fluctuations of weather. People in the American Southwest are experiencing a massive, record-breaking drought and a prolonged fire season, while people in the Balkans just endured an unprecedented deluge of rain that triggered thousands of landslides and forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes. Boats plucked countless people to safety from their roofs. When weather erupts in such extremes, no wonder global warming is sometimes called “global weirding.” The environmentalist Bill McKibben puts it succinctly: “We’ve changed the planet, changed it in large and fundamental ways… Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.”2 What must we do to turn this around? I wonder if we need a conversion of heart and a change of behavior as radical and transforming as Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, when he turned his life around and put his faith in Jesus Christ (Acts 9:1-19). A first step in that new behavior might be for us to recycle more, drive less, and quit using bottled water. Maybe we can eat local, organic foods and support our local farms and land trusts. We can install insulation and turn down the heat. As individuals we can and should do everything we can to reduce our use of fossil fuels, but the scope and speed of the climate crisis require action on a much broader scale, as well. We need to join with other people and make it politically possible to do what is scientifically necessary. We need to push our political leaders to get this country and other countries on track to bring down the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, the uppermost level that many scientists say is safe for life as we know it to continue on this planet. What is the level today? 400 parts per million, and climbing. So we have work to do. I invite you to imagine a church, imagine a diocese, in which every aspect of its life, from its preaching and worship services to its adult education and Sunday School, from its prayers to its public advocacy, grasps the urgency of protecting life as it has evolved on this planet. That is the kind of Church that we need today. We are facing the greatest challenge that human beings have ever faced, and as Christians we must take our stand in creating a world for our children and our children’s children that is habitable, peaceful, and just. I hope that you will form a “green team” or Creation Care committee – whatever you want to call it – here at St. Paul’s, and start to explore what you can accomplish together. I hope that those of you interested in building a network of people in the diocese committed to Creation care will give me your names, so that we can work together and support each other. I hope that all of you will consider joining me in New York City on the weekend of September 20th and 21st. Bill McKibben just wrote a new article calling for the largest rally in the history of the climate movement to be held that weekend in New York. As Bill McKibben put it, “If you’re wondering how to react to the devastating news that the Antarctic is melting out of control: New York. If you’re scared like I am by the pictures of the fire and drought across the West: New York. If you’re feeling like it’s time to change the trajectory of this planet: we’ll see you in New York.” On this Rogation Sunday, we ask God not only to bless the harvest and the land, the seas and the sky – we ask God to bless us with the Spirit as we take hold of our vocation to be healers of the earth. The melting ice in West Antarctica may be unstoppable, but so is the love that made us, that sustains us, and that calls us to stand up for life. There is so much left to save, so much good that we can do – if we act right now – to prevent the worst effects of climate change, so many ways that we can build a better world.Today, as we prepare to receive the bread and wine of the Eucharist, we open to the love that will never let us go, to the love that is stronger than death. We share in what Dante called “the love that moves the sun and other stars,” and we remember who we are – a people created by God to love and be loved, and sent out by God to make that love real in the world in every way we can. For in God we live and move and have our being. © 2014 Margaret Bullitt-Jonas
1. See also: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=131369&org=NSF&from=news; http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/center/articles/2014/los-angeles-times-05-12-2014.html 2. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Times Book, 2010, p. xiii and book jacket (http://www.billmckibben.com/)

I have never been to Nebraska and I don’t know anyone who lives there. The more than 7,000 entries in my address book include no one from Nebraska. Yet, Nebraska, dear Nebraska – you are in my prayers.

Nebraska sits squarely in the path of the proposed 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline, and for months the state has been divided over the project. There is still no pipeline route through Nebraska, which is one reason that building the Keystone XL pipeline has repeatedly stalled.

A friend of mine here in western Massachusetts shares ownership of a Nebraska farm. One recent weekend she leaves me a long voice message. TransCanada has approached her family and wants to run the Keystone XL pipeline across a corner of her land. Every member of the family has to sign the contract in order for the deal to go through, but she doesn’t want to sign. Her husband is standing with her, but her brother and two cousins disagree.  They have decided to sign it.

Of course, they tell her, they would prefer not to. They know that the excavation of the tar sands is leaving an environmental catastrophe in Alberta. They’ve heard the reports that extracting the tar sands in Canada and transporting the dirty fuel by pipeline down to the Gulf of Mexico risks causing leaks that would contaminate the region’s soil and water. They know that burning the tar sands could aggravate climate change, including severe weather and drought. None of them wants the pipeline to go through their land. But what can you do? The oil industry looks unstoppable. The pipeline seems inevitable. Besides, TransCanada is sweetening the deal by offering to pay premium prices upfront before it receives state and federal approvals, promising landowners that they can keep the money even if the pipeline is not approved. One cousin does the math and figures that if they refuse to sign the contract, they could end up with only a quarter the price that TransCanada is now offering, plus they would sacrifice pocketing $55,000 now. You might as well bow to the inevitable: sign the paper and get the best possible deal.

My friend is a gentle person, an Episcopalian so soft-spoken that people often have to lean forward to catch what she is saying. By nature she is a peace-lover and she has no desire to create dissension in her family. But when it comes to justice and to doing what she believes is right, she has a spine of steel. The lawyer for her farm checks the fine print and finds loopholes that leave little protection in the case of a leak. She researches groups in Nebraska that are fighting the pipeline, among them Bold Nebraska, Nebraskans for Peace, the Sierra Club, and Natural Resources Defence Council. She learns that she is not alone: 115 Nebraska landowners are holding out and have not signed contracts. She offers to pay each of her family members the money they would have received from TransCanada if they’d signed, for she doesn’t want them to suffer financial loss for doing the right thing.

And she contacts each of them to say that she is not signing and that she hopes they understand.

Three days after phoning me, she tells me the outcome. Her husband continues to stand with her, and her other relatives have now accepted her decision not to sign.

“My brother said that he was willing to sell his soul, but that he didn’t mind too much if I didn’t sell mine: by not selling my soul, I prevented him from selling his. My cousin who manages the farm confessed last night how relieved she was that I’d said ‘No.’ She didn’t really want to take ‘blood money,’ and she knew from past dealings with the pipeline company how sleazy it was.. My other cousin, the one I was afraid of talking to, refused my offer to pay her the amount of money she would have gotten from the pipeline company. She said, ‘No way. I don’t feel good about this.’”

My friend added, “So I haven’t ruined all my family relationships and no one has accepted my offer to pay them the equivalent of pipeline money, though for now I’m leaving it on the table.  I guess we’re all in there with the other pipeline resisters.”

My friend’s story gives me hope. You never know how many people will be changed when you refuse to submit to apathy and resignation. You never know what will happen when the Spirit impels you to speak out, even when doing so causes conflict with family members. You never know – until you do it – how much energy for life will be released if you stand up and resist the forces that are destroying life. You never know if taking care of your own small corner of the world may end up changing the course of history.

Curious about our fellow Episcopalians in Nebraska, I checked out what that Diocese had to say about the Keystone XL pipeline. I was delighted to find an Easter reflection by Archdeacon Betsy Blake Bennett. Her message connects our Easter hope with the landowners, activists, and people of faith who are resisting the pipeline. It concludes:

When Bill McKibben’s Do the Math tour visited Omaha, he said that he became discouraged at first when people pointed out that he was involved in a David and Goliath situation, but then he remembered how that story ends. Easter tells us the end of the story, and it calls for an alleluia response.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

I have just added a new entry to my address book: the Episcopal Diocese of Nebraska. Let’s keep the prayers coming.

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter, April 27, 2014 (Earth Day/Creation Sunday). Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, St. Francis Episcopal Church, Holden, MA Acts 2:14a, 22-32        1 Peter 1:3-9 Psalm 16                     John 20:19-31

Do not doubt but believe

Every year on the Sunday after Easter we listen to the marvelous and mysterious story from John’s Gospel that we just heard. Jesus shows himself to the disciples on the evening of Easter Day and then returns a week later to convince the disciple we call Doubting Thomas that yes, the Risen Christ is real.

“Put your finger here and see my hands,” Jesus says to Thomas, showing him the wounds. “Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” And then Thomas finds his faith, saying, “My Lord and my God.” As I’m sure some of you noticed, two days after Easter Sunday we celebrated Earth Day, which means that this year Easter Week and Earth Week almost completely overlapped. As your new Missioner for Creation Care in this diocese, I’d like to reflect on Earth Day in light of our Easter joy. And what great timing for me, because I get to do this in a community named after St. Francis, a Christian who discerned God’s Presence in non-human creatures and in nature herself, and who experienced that connection so deeply that he called the sun his brother, and the moon his sister in Christ. Our Easter proclamation and our Easter hymns and prayers make it abundantly clear that Christ’s death and resurrection are good news not just to human beings but also to the whole and every part of Creation – to river and mountain, whale and sparrow, forest and field. At the Great Vigil of Easter, when we mark Jesus’ passing from death to life, one of the first things we do is listen to someone chant these ancient words:
Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth, bright with a glorious splendor, for darkness has been vanquished by our eternal King.
Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth! Christ is risen! Today’s Gospel story invites us to explore the good news of Christ’s resurrection by taking stock of our doubts and then letting them go. Doubting Thomas stands for all of us who wrestle with doubt – doubt about what Jesus accomplished on the cross and doubt about the reality of the resurrection. Doubt is a perfect theme for Earth Day, too, for when it comes to climate change, which is at the top of everybody’s list of concerns on Earth Day, we hear a lot about the doubters, don’t we? A Gallup poll released on Earth Day shows that one in four Americans is “solidly skeptical” of global warming and refuses to believe that human-caused climate change is real. Other members of the public are on the fence and don’t know what to believe, assuming that the jury is still out and that scientists have yet to reach a consensus on the reality and causes of climate change. I’m sure there are many reasons that some people still doubt that human-caused climate change is happening. If you’re a gardener or a farmer, you know how much you love the piece of ground that is in your care, and how precious and beautiful the natural world is. If you’ve gardened in one place for a while, you may have started to notice the subtle changes taking place as the years go by: how a particular flower now blooms two weeks earlier than it used to, or how migratory birds now arrive at a different time. In some respects climate change is very local, but many busy, rootless, urban folks don’t have that kind of intimate relationship with a specific ecosystem.1 Today, most people worldwide live in cities, and many of us who live in modern, post-industrial countries work indoors and travel to work inside a vehicle. Many of us spend a lot our work time and leisure time relating to a computer screen or a TV screen. The natural world can seem very far away, and we may be completely unaware of what’s taking place right in our own backyards. What’s more, a good many special interest groups are working hard and spending millions of dollars in a deliberate campaign of disinformation to make the American public stay confused. The same folks who spread doubt some years ago about the risk of smoking tobacco are throwing their weight behind some of the current efforts to mislead the public about the reality of climate change.2 But the truth is that the scientific controversy is over. The science is settled. 97% of climate scientists worldwide are telling us with increasing alarm that climate change is not a future threat – in fact, it is not a threat at all. It is our reality. Burning fossil fuels such as coal, gas, and oil is releasing gases into the atmosphere that are forming a blanket around the Earth and making the climate hotter and more unstable. Of course there has always been some natural variability in the planet’s average temperature, but ever since the Industrial Revolution we’ve been forcing the climate to change in a way that human beings have never experienced before. Around the world we’re seeing the result in extreme fluctuations of weather: droughts and floods, record heat waves and unusual bouts of cold weather. No wonder global warming is sometimes dubbed “global weirding.” The environmentalist Bill McKibben puts it succinctly: “We’ve changed the planet, changed it in large and fundamental ways… Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.”3 So when I hear Jesus say to Doubting Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe,” I hear Jesus inviting Thomas – and us – to face the truth of crucifixion. We might wish away the reality of the violence and the wounds. We might wish very ardently that none of this wounding of our dear planet were happening, that we weren’t seeing dying coral and melting ice-caps, rising seas and rising numbers of refugees. But it is happening, and just as on Good Friday the disciples couldn’t pretend that Christ’s wounds on the cross weren’t real, so we, too, can’t pretend that the wounds to God’s Creation aren’t real. Yet because of Jesus’ crucifixion, we know that God is with us in our suffering and in the planet’s suffering. We know, and God knows, that all Creation is groaning (Romans 8:22). And because of Easter we also know that death does not have to be the end of the story. “When it was evening of Easter day, the first day of the week,” Jesus comes and stands among his disciples and says, “‘Peace be with you’” (John 20:19). Can you feel the impact of that moment? The Risen Christ comes to his guilty, worried, frightened friends and says “Peace be with you.” It is peace that he gives them. Forgiveness. Acceptance. However much they’ve abandoned and denied him, he loves them still. In fact, in this one short passage Jesus says “Peace be with you” three times, as if the disciples need to hear that message again and again – partly in order to undo Peter’s three-fold denial, but also so that all of them and all of us will experience that forgiveness deep in our bones. Maybe that moment marks the beginning of our own resurrected life: when we hear and take in how much God loves us and how completely we are forgiven, no matter what we have done. We humans are hurting this Creation, which God has given us as a free gift to love and to steward – and yet, we are forgiven. And from this place of being forgiven, we can now act to right the wrong and can live in a different way. So it is not only peace that Jesus gives to his disciples. He also sends them on a mission. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you,” he says, breathing into them the Holy Spirit, the same creative wind and energy that moved across the face of deep at the very beginning of creation. Jesus not only shares in our suffering, he not only loves and forgives us – he also sends us out to bear witness to the resurrection, to the wild, holy, and completely unexpected fact that through the grace and power of God, life – not death – will have the last word. Through the power of the Risen Christ, we are sent out to be healers of the Earth, sent out to take our place in the great work of healing the wounds of Creation, sent out to restore the web of life upon which we, and all creatures, depend. What can we do? We can recycle more, drive less, and quit using bottled water. Maybe we can eat local, organic foods and support our local farms and land trusts. We can install insulation and turn down the heat. As individuals we can and should do everything we can, but the scope and speed of the climate crisis require action on a much broader scale, too. We need to join with other people and make it politically possible to do what is scientifically necessary. We need to push our political leaders to get this country and other countries on track to bring down the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, the uppermost level that many scientists say is safe for life as we know it to continue on this planet. What is the level today? 400 — and climbing. So we have work to do. I invite you to imagine a church, imagine a diocese, in which every aspect of its life, from its preaching and worship services to its adult education and Sunday School, from its prayers to its public advocacy, grasps the urgency of protecting life as it has evolved on this planet. We are facing the greatest challenge that human beings have ever faced, and we refuse to get bogged down by doubt, denial, or despair. I am delighted to hear that you are forming a green team or a Creation Care task force – or whatever you want to call it – in this parish, and that you will start exploring what you can accomplish together. I hope that anyone interested in building a network of people in the diocese committed to Creation care will give me their name, so that we can work together and support each other. I am grateful for Doubting Thomas, for he gives voice to our doubt – doubt that we can prevent catastrophic climate change, doubt that we can make a difference, doubt that resurrection is even possible. But just as Jesus invited Thomas to move past his doubts, so, too, Jesus invites us to receive the gift of his forgiveness and the power of his energizing Spirit. Today at the Eucharist we will stretch out our hands to receive the body and blood of Christ, just as Thomas stretched out his hands to touch Christ’s wounded hands and side. There is so much healing that we can do, so much power-to-reconcile that God has given to us, so much life that we can help to bring forth. Do not doubt but believe.
1. Naomi Klein has written an excellent essay about why so many Americans are not responding to the climate crisis: “The Change Within: The Obstacles We Face Are Not Just External,” posted online on April 21, 2014; appeared in May 12, 2014 edition of The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/article/179460/change-within-obstacles-we-face-are-not-just-external 2. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/); see also Ross Gelbspan, The Heat is On (http://www.heatisonline.org/); and Union of Concerned Scientists’ 2007 report on ExxonMobil http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/solutions/fight-misinformation/exxonmobil-report-smoke.html 3. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Times Book, 2010, p. xiii and book jacket (http://www.billmckibben.com/)

We are in the midst of Easter Week and Earth Week, a wonderful coincidence of celebrations. What better day than today, what better week than this, what better time than now, to reach out in wonder and gratitude to the living world around us! Jesus Christ’s resurrection is good news not only for human beings, but also for the whole creation – for ocean and mountain, beetle and bumblebee, granite and grasses. If we imagine that Christ’s resurrection affects only people, or that it concerns only a “spiritual” realm unrelated to ordinary reality, then our understanding of resurrection is far too small. As Br. Mark, Brown, SSJE, explains in a powerful sermon:

Something that pertains to the whole cosmos is happening in the death and resurrection of Christ: animal, vegetable and mineral; earth, air, fire and water. From the depths of inner worlds to the furthest reaches of outer space. “Behold, I am making all things new” — not just all people, but all things, he says. Whether we quite comprehend this or not, the scope is breathtaking.

So it is no wonder that during the Great Vigil of Easter, when we mark Jesus’ passing from death to life, we listen to the ancient words of the Exsultet (from the Latin root that gives us the word “exultant”) and we proclaim a joy that is being expressed on every level of existence, from “all the round earth” to the “heavenly hosts”:

Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth,
bright with a glorious splendor,
for darkness has been vanquished by our eternal King.

Once we understand that Christ’s risen, living presence is everywhere, how much more curious we can be about the other creatures with whom we share this planet! Like our human brothers and sisters, they, too, speak to us of God. They, too, invite us into relationship. I know of no contemporary author who communicates this more beautifully than David Abram, who writes in Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology:

How monotonous our speaking becomes when we speak only to ourselves! And how insulting to the other beings – to foraging black bears and twisted old cypresses – that no longer sense us talking to them, but only about them, as though they were not present in our world…Small wonder that rivers and forests no longer compel our focus or our fierce devotion. For we walk about such entities only behind their backs, as though they were not participant in our lives. Yet if we no longer call out to the moon slipping between the clouds, or whisper to the spider setting the silken struts of her web, well, then the numerous powers of this world will no longer address us – and if they still try, we will not likely hear them.

Spirituality is sometimes defined as our capacity for relationship, and Easter season invites us to explore and renew our relationship with the living community that surrounds us.

This week a friend of mine pointed out that there is a difference between going for a walk or a run, and actually being in nature. When I go for a walk or a run, I follow my own agenda. I stay in my head, enclosed in my self-centered world. By contrast, when I am in nature I never know what will happen next. I am available for encounter and am open to surprise, willing to being affected and changed. I may greet the wind or hear the laughter of the birds. I may talk to the trees. I may grasp a pine cone or touch a forsythia blossom. I may lie down on the grass and let the good earth hold me up. Sure, when I go for a run, I get some exercise and burn some calories, but unless I take time in nature simply to observe in silence, to listen through the pores of my skin, and maybe to move or even dance in response to the moving, dancing world around me, I am not likely to experience the Risen Christ who connects all things and in whom all things hold together (Colossians 1:17).

As my friend remarked, ignoring the natural world is like being invited to a party and paying no attention to the festivities: we walk into our friend’s house and we interact with none of the other guests; we talk to no one and we accept no food or drink. What’s the fun in that? And just think how we have impoverished our relationship with our fellow creatures, and how much we have disappointed our Host!

Earth Week and Easter Week invite us to consider the many ways that we can take part in healing the Earth, from conserving water and cleaning up a local park to advocating for strong public policies that put a price on carbon and that keep fossil fuel reserves in the ground where they belong. As people who bear witness to the resurrection, we need to join the struggle to protect life as it has evolved on this planet. We need to show in very tangible ways what good news it is to the rest of creation that Christ is risen. In this suffering, death-obsessed and frightened world, where climate catastrophe may soon be upon us and we have little time left in which to turn things around, we put our trust in a creative, redeeming, and empowering Presence that holds all things together and whose love will never let us go. We have urgent work to do in the days ahead, and we plan to do it singing.

Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth!

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The Rev. Dr. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas preaches on 3-23-2014 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in East Longmeadow, MA.

Sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent, March 23, 2014. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, St. Mark’s Church, East Longmeadow, MA.

Exodus 17:1-7       Romans 5:1-11 Psalm 95               John 4:5-42

Give us water to drink

It is a pleasure to be here this morning and to join you in worship and prayer. As you probably know, I am the diocese’s new Missioner for Creation Care, and I’ve been asked to reflect on how Christian faith connects with caring for the world that God made. I couldn’t have picked better readings than the ones our lectionary gives us today, for they are all about water, literal and spiritual. What could be more basic than water?

Water is what the Israelites in the desert were thirsting for, in a story that is told in Exodus, in today’s psalm, and in the Book of Numbers. Moses successfully led his people out of slavery in Egypt – which was all well and good – but here they were now, wandering in remote wilderness, with the sun beating down, everything dry as a bone, and not a drop to drink. As we heard in this morning’s first reading, the people complained to Moses, and they quarreled and pleaded with him, saying, “Give us water to drink.” If any of you have hiked a long distance and found yourself short of water, you can imagine what that was like – the dry mouth and parched lips, the flagging energy and rising anxiety, the perhaps desperate concern for your children and for anyone who is elderly, sick, or weak. Water is what drew the Samaritan woman to the well, where she encountered Jesus and where they launched into the long and many-faceted conversation that we heard in today’s Gospel passage from John.

Everyone needs water – what Nature Conservancy calls “that strange drinkable liquid that is not coffee or alcohol.” Water is what runs in our veins, what fills our lakes and rivers and seas, what covers 70% of the surface of the planet. Everything runs on water – our bodies, our farms, our power plants and cities and economies. Water is essential for life, yet because clean, fresh water is so rare, almost 2 billion people worldwide have no access to it. Yesterday we observed World Water Day, an annual event dedicated to the global effort to conserve water and to protect water supplies.

Today’s readings lift up the preciousness of literal water, but they also lift up another kind of water – what we might call the water of the Spirit, that unending flow of divine love that is symbolized in the image of Moses striking the rock with his staff and releasing a flow of water, and that Jesus in today’s Gospel describes as “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14). God’s love is like water. Sometimes divine love pours down like a gentle rain that comes from above, softening our hardened hearts and refreshing our desert places. And sometimes divine love springs up from within like a fountain, or flows through us like a river, so that we discover, as St. Paul puts it in today’s reading from Romans, that “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:5).

Finding that flow of living water, both literal and spiritual – that’s the theme of our readings today, and that’s the theme that confronts anyone who looks closely at the state of the world today. Whether we are keenly aware of it, or able only to glimpse it out of the corner of our eye, to some degree all of us are conscious that the web of life on our blue planet is unraveling. We live in an unprecedented moment in human history. In just 200 years, human beings have burned so much coal, gas, and oil, and pumped so much heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are higher today than they have been for at least 800,000 years. As I heard a climate scientist remark last year, “We are breathing from an atmosphere that none of our ancestors would recognize.”

By now we know that climate change is not a future threat – in fact, it is not a threat at all. It is our reality. As environmentalist Bill McKibben has written, “We’ve changed the planet, changed it in large and fundamental ways… Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.”

That process is accelerating, and climate scientists are increasingly alarmed that many people don’t yet understand the urgency of the situation. On Monday the American Association for the Advancement of Science released a report for the American public that summarizes the science. The report – which is readily available online – says: “We are at risk of pushing our climate system toward abrupt, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible changes with highly damaging impacts. Earth’s climate is on a path to warm beyond the range of what has been experienced over the past millions of years… The sooner we act, the lower the risk and cost… By making informed choices now, we can reduce risks for future generations and ourselves, and help communities adapt to climate change.”

Some people tell me that climate change is a partisan political issue and that polite people shouldn’t talk about it in church. But I have to say: as I see it, the Church was made for a time like this. Now is the time for us to proclaim our faith that God created our beautiful and precious world, that God delights in it, and rejoices in it, and declares it “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Now is the time for us to bear witness to our faith that the Earth is the Lord’s, for, as we heard in today’s psalm, “in [God’s] hands are the caverns of the earth, and the heights of the hills are [God’s] also. The sea is [God’s], for [God] made it, and [God’s] hands have molded the dry land” (Psalm 95:4-5). God loved the world into being and entrusted it to our care (Genesis 1:26, 2:15), and to ruin that world – to scorch it, pollute it, and push it toward catastrophic climate disruption – grieves God’s heart and dishonors our Creator. Now is the time for us to tap into those springs of living water that well up within us through the power of the crucified and risen Christ, for that is how you and I will find the courage to face the challenges ahead and to take wise and effective action.

What can we do as individuals? Maybe we recycle more, drive less, and quit using bottled water. Maybe we eat local, organic foods and support our local farms and land trusts. Maybe we install insulation, turn down the heat, use AC in moderation – hey, you know the drill.

What might we do as a church? How is St. Mark’s called to be a leader in this town and in this diocese? From speaking with your rector, I know that you’ve worked to install energy-efficient LED lights, to carry out energy audits of the heating and lighting, and to invite parishioners to sign up with Viridian for electricity that comes from the clean, safe, renewable power of wind and sun, and that gives the church a steady income stream. I know you’re exploring the possibility of installing solar panels on the roof, and I’d be thrilled to come back sometime and to see those panels blessed. What else could you do? We’ll talk about that at the forum after the second service, but for now I’ll simply say: imagine a church in which every aspect of its life, from its preaching and worship services to its adult education and Sunday School, from its prayers to its public advocacy, grasps the urgency of protecting life as it has evolved on this planet.

Working to stabilize the climate begins at home, in our congregations and places of work, but it can’t end there. The scope and speed of the climate crisis require action on a much broader scale. We need to make it politically possible to do what is scientifically necessary. We need to push our political leaders to get this country and other countries on track to bring down the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, the uppermost level that many scientists say is safe for life as we know it to continue on this planet. What is the level today? 400 — and climbing. There is work to be done.

The good news is that we have an opportunity every day to bear witness to the God who loved us, and all creation, into being, and whose love is always being poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. It is you for whom Christ came into the world, you for whom he died, you whom he now would fill with the living water of his presence. In a few moments we will share the bread and wine of the Eucharist, given to us by God in Christ with such tenderness and at such great cost. We will gather at that holy table, as we always do, so that everything in us and around us can be lifted up and blessed – not only the bread and the wine, but also we ourselves, and the whole creation, every leaf of it, and every speck of sand. Sharing the Eucharist helps us to perceive, at last, not only our own belovedness, our own blessedness in God, but also the fact that everyone is beloved, all beings are blessed. Everyone and everything is part of a sacred whole, and all living things are kin. In the strength of the blessed and broken bread, and of the blessed and poured-out wine, we dare to hope that human beings will respond with grateful hearts and come to treat the world not as an object to exploit, but as a gift to receive, as something perishable and precious. We dare to hope that we human beings will become at last who we were made to be, a blessing on the earth.