Author Archives: mbj

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.

“I arise today
Through the strength of heaven:
Light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.”

I cherish these words from the ancient prayer that we know as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate.” What would it be like to arise every morning experiencing that sort of kinship with the natural world?

Waking up with a visceral and grateful awareness of the living world may sound strange to us, even quaint. Most of the world’s citizens now live in cities, and many of us spend hardly any time outdoors – in fact, I read somewhere that the average North American spends 4% of a typical day outside, including time spent in a car. Many of us are more captivated by virtual reality and by staring at a screen than we are by contemplating light of sun or radiance of moon, stability of earth or firmness of rock. Besides, isn’t paying too much attention to the natural world a rather suspect practice for Christians? Aren’t Christians supposed to be focused on “otherworldly” things like heaven and the salvation of our disembodied souls? Some Christians scoff at people who emphasize the value of nature, charging that this is some kind of foolish New Age fantasy.  Christians who care about the Earth must be naïve and sentimental “tree-huggers” or “pagans.”

Yet as Christians we belong to a tradition that proclaims the basic goodness of the natural world: “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Jesus certainly lived in kinship with the natural world. He spent a lot of time outdoors, walking from place to place. In the Bible we meet him on hillsides and mountaintops, beside lakes and in deserted places. He speaks of seeds and harvest, of fig trees, vines, and weeds, of clouds and storms, sheep and hens. He teaches about God in elemental terms, using images of fire, wind, water, and stones. Jesus knew that the birds of the air and the lilies of the field could teach us about our relationship with God (Matthew 6:25-33).  And he gave us bread and wine as an ongoing sign of his living presence with us.

Christian Scripture even dares to claim that Christ’s crucified and risen presence fills all things and redeems all things.  In Christ, “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:19-20).

Experiencing the sacredness of the natural world is neither an outworn heresy nor a newfangled fantasy. It is essential to Christian faith.  Our great Roman Catholic forebear, Thomas Aquinas, declared: “Revelation comes in two volumes – the Bible and nature.”  And our great Protestant forebear, Martin Luther, proclaimed: “God writes the Gospel, not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and the flowers and the clouds and stars.”

What this means is that the living Word of God is speaking to us not only in the pages of Scripture, but right outside the window and under our feet! The divine Mystery is addressing us in wind and rock, sparrows and grass. Indeed, the Book of Nature is where human beings have always encountered the sacred mystery of God. As St. Paul puts it, “Ever since the creation of the world [God’s] eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things [God] has made” (Romans 1:20).

That is why instinctively we go outside when we need to connect with something greater than ourselves. When we’re stressed or anxious, saddened or afraid, many of us head for a place in nature – maybe a hilltop with a good long view, or a particular bend in the Connecticut River, or a certain oak tree in a city park. We want to feel the wind on our face again and to feel the good earth under our feet. We want to hear birdsong again and to notice how the sun is casting light across a field. Renewing our connection with the natural world restores us to our senses and to a felt sense of God. To adapt a line from Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Peace of Wild Things”: “for a time [we] rest in the grace of the world, and [are] free.”

In leading retreats, I often invite people to spend some time bringing to mind a place in nature that they love. It might be a place that they knew as a child or a place that is dear to them now; it might be a place that they’ve visited only once or a place to which they return again and again. I invite everyone to dwell imaginatively for a time in that special place – to notice what season it is and what time of day, to savor again the smells, sights, and sounds. “How does it feel to be there?” I ask everyone. “Let yourself rest in this place. Let your affection for this place become very clear to you.”

A hush falls over the room, and when the meditation is over, people speak with glowing eyes. One man recalls the beloved bush under which he often hid when he was a child; a woman remembers a curving stream, filled with sparkling light; someone else recalls how a forest smells, or the sound of waves beside the sea at night.

How much affection has been released in the room! What power these natural places have – even in memory – to heal the heart! My hope is that after meditating on nature like this, all of us will be drawn outdoors, for in a stressed-out, fast-paced, wired world, we need more than ever to reclaim our God-given relationship with the natural world. Study after study shows that exposure to nature contributes to physical and emotional wellbeing, and it certainly heals the soul. The more we contemplate the beauty and intricacy of nature, the more we see what the psalmist saw and want to join the universal cry of praise: “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1).

Here is a suggestion. Step outside today for a contemplative walk. Walk slowly and in silence, letting each step draw you into the present moment. Notice smells, sounds, textures, and colors. Bless the ground with each step. Feel the wind. Breathe. If you like, invite Jesus to walk beside you. What do you experience together?

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.  For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

–Wendell Berry, Openings (1968)

Copyright © 2014 Margaret Bullitt-Jonas

Margaret contributed fifteen meditations to a new anthology, Seeking God Day By Day, published by Forward Movement. For info and an excerpt, visit the books page.

 

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 22, 2013. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, St. John’s Church, Ashfield, Massachusetts.

 
Job 19:23-27a 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Psalm 17:1-9 Luke 20:27-38
 

Another look at Joseph

 

“Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.”  So begins Matthew’s version of the Christmas story, a story that in his telling gives Joseph quite a significant role to play.  Maybe it’s because I’m a woman and a mother, but it’s Mary – not Joseph – whom I usually think about at Christmas, Mary who gets the spotlight as the mother of Jesus, the mother of God.  Of course no crèche would be complete without Joseph, but usually I don’t pay much attention to him.  He wasn’t Jesus’ “real” father, and in the story of Jesus’ birth and infancy, Joseph never says a word, he doesn’t even speak, whereas Mary (in Luke’s Gospel) gets to sing the “Magnificat.”  I usually think of Joseph as a minor character in the drama of salvation, and soon enough he slips off the stage upon which Jesus’ life plays out, a guy with a bit part who disappears quickly into the wings. My Bible commentary points out that Joseph is mentioned only a few times in the whole New Testament, and that he drops out entirely by the time that Jesus begins his public ministry.

 

Yet here is Matthew in this morning’s Gospel, speaking of Joseph’s place in the story of Jesus’ birth, and I thought: maybe it’s time to take a fresh look at Joseph. Who was this man, and what did he do that enabled Jesus to be born?  Here we are, on the brink of Christmas, longing for Christ to be born afresh in our hearts, in our lives, in our homes, and in this world, and what can we learn from Joseph?  How does he help this birth to take place?

 

The first thing to say is that Joseph was a “righteous” man.  That’s not a word we often hear these days, unless we place in front of it that troublesome little word, “self.”  Self-righteous – now that’s a word we recognize.  “Self-righteous” conjures up images of a holier-than-thou kind of person who looks with contempt on lesser mortals.  When we feel a surge of self-righteousness, we pull back from other people, and look down on them with pity or scorn.  Self-righteousness makes us feel superior and gives us permission to blame and shame and to point an accusing finger at another person.

 

But that’s not how Joseph was.  He was not a “self-righteous” man but a “righteous” man.  To be righteous is to live in right-relationship with God, to be straight with God, to seek to do God’s will.  A righteous person is someone who in every situation keeps asking: What is the most loving thing I can do right now for this person or for this community or for the Earth on which all life depends?

 

Joseph didn’t indulge in self-righteousness, even though the culture around him would quickly judge and condemn a young woman who got pregnant out of wedlock.  When Joseph heard that his betrothed had conceived a child, I can imagine his confusion and anger and sorrow.  I can imagine him wrestling with shock and disappointment.  But it seems that Joseph’s deepest commitment was to do what was right in the loving eyes of God.  He asked himself: What is the most loving thing to do?  Rather than rush to judge or condemn, rather than take revenge by exposing Mary to public humiliation, Joseph treated Mary with respect and tried to protect her from the jeers of the crowd.  And so, the Gospel tells us, “[he] planned to dismiss her quietly” (Matthew 1:19).  That decision must have been a costly one, one that required a strong dose of self-discipline and self-restraint.

 

So that’s the first thing I see in Joseph: a man who wanted to do what was right, even when it came at a personal cost. I see Joseph in every person who is quietly trying to do the right thing, the loving thing, even when there are no reporters or cameras around to make it public, no witnesses but the eyes of God.  Some of you may have come across the rules for a good life that were laid out in the 18th century by John Wesley, the Anglican priest and early leader of the Methodist movement.  Here is what John Wesley wrote:

 
Do all the good you can, By all the means you can, In all the ways you can, In all the places you can, At all the times you can, To all the people you can, As long as ever you can.
 

I was so taken by that quote that for years I kept it on our refrigerator, and then finally went and got it framed.  I think those words fit Joseph.  He was a righteous man; he wanted to do what was right with God.  That’s our own first step, too, in preparing for Christ’s birth.  We clean up our life.  We re-commit ourselves as best we can to doing what is right.

 

Here’s a second thing I see in Joseph: he was open to God’s ongoing revelation.  He was open to surprise, available for fresh encounter.  When an angel of the Lord spoke to him in a dream, Joseph paid attention.  Joseph knew, as we know, too, that the holy Mystery we call God can speak to us in our dreams, in our intuitive hunches and flashes of insight.  I don’t imagine that Joseph went dutifully through the day following a rigid set of rules, as if being a faithful person is like having a paint-by-number kit and all you do is color inside the lines.  I imagine that Joseph lived with a prayerful awareness that the universe is much more magical and mysterious than that – that reality is not a closed system that contains a linear, logical, and predictable series of events.  No – reality is wide open.  An angel can speak to us in a dream; a voice can sound from a burning bush; we can quiet our minds in prayer and suddenly see something we’ve never seen before. As Hamlet says to Horatio, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”

 

And so, “when Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took Mary as his wife” and he named the child Jesus, which means Savior, just as the angel had told him to (Matthew 1:24-25).

 

So that’s the third thing to say about Joseph.  Not only is he a righteous man, committed to living in right-relationship with God and to doing all the good that he can; not only is he a prayerful man, listening to his inner wisdom, ready to let God speak to him in a dream; he is also a man of action.  He hears God speak in his depths and he brings it forth into the world.  He makes manifest the word from heaven that came to him in secret; he listens to it and decides to change course.  “Yes,” he says to God, and to Mary, “I will be a father to the child.  I will claim him as kin.  I will guard him and stand by him and keep him safe from harm.”

 

Because of Joseph’s willingness to respond to God and to accept the task that was given to him to do, Jesus Christ was born.  Joseph may not get all the glory at Christmas, but without him – without his commitment to doing what was right, without his prayerful, willing spirit, without his decision to take the action that God was calling him to do – who knows whether Jesus would have been safely born into the world.  It was Joseph who ensured Jesus’ safe delivery, and it was Joseph who protected his wife and newborn son by fleeing into Egypt and returning only when it was safe.

 

I’ll tell you why I am drawn to Joseph this year: because he was an ordinary man trying his best to listen to God.  And his willingness to serve God turned out to be enough: he had a role to play in the larger drama of salvation.  Some might say that Joseph’s role was only a small one, but who can measure such things?  What he did was necessary.  In fact, it was essential.  And that goes for us, too.  For all we know – and we may never know – the small good thing that you do, and that I do, today will make an immeasurable difference to someone else, and an immeasurable difference to God.

 

I think of Helen Keller, and her willingness to do whatever next good thing came across her path.  She knew her limits.  She knew that she was only one person, and that she herself couldn’t save the world.  But as she wrote somewhere, “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.”

 

Joseph did not refuse to do ‘the something’ that he could do, and so Jesus the Messiah was born and life was changed forever.  What helps you to listen deeply to the voice of love that is speaking within you?  What is love calling you to do or say?  With Joseph beside us to encourage us and give us strength, perhaps we too will respond and will follow where love leads.  Perhaps we too will stand with Joseph in that Bethlehem stable, gazing at the newborn Jesus and marveling at the ways of God.