Author Archives: mbj

The Blame Game

Today is September 11, 2005, four years to the day after September 11, 2001, and the end of a week in which once again we’ve been shocked by images of extraordinary violence and suffering on American soil.  This time it wasn’t New York but New Orleans.  This time it wasn’t crashing airplanes and falling towers but crashing waves and falling levees.  This time is wasn’t an act of terrorism but a natural disaster compounded by human failure and incompetence.  These two events – what we now call 9/11 and a hurricane named Katrina – are in some ways very different but both of them shake us to the core.  They leave us disoriented and dismayed, groping for meaning.  They are a stark reminder of human vulnerability and mortality, of how quickly an ordinary life, an ordinary day, can be up-ended.  They raise far-reaching questions about basic aspects of American society and our national priorities.  And they are tragedies whose aftermath will be felt for years.

As I thought about all this, I did some wandering on the Internet and came across a video clip that was made after 9/11.  It’s short, lasting no more than 60 seconds, and its graphics are simple, just a line tracing a circle that closes on itself.   Here’s its message:

Terrorism is bred in

FEAR
ANGER
HATRED.

The recent attacks on America have instilled

FEAR
ANGER
HATRED

in otherwise peaceful people.

Vengeful retaliation will also instill

FEAR
ANGER
HATRED

in innocent people who suffer from such attacks

Terrorism is bred in

FEAR
ANGER
HATRED.

Violence breeds violence.

Our mission now is to break the cycle. (1)

 

A Chinese proverb puts it even more succinctly: “The one who pursues revenge should dig two graves.”

Today’s Scripture readings convey the same urgent message: stop the cycle of revenge.  Break the long, bloody chain of recrimination and retaliation.  Relinquish fear, anger and hatred.  Have mercy.  Extend forgiveness.  “The vengeful will face the Lord’s vengeance,” we hear in Ecclesiasticus.  “Forgive your neighbor the wrong he has done… Does anyone harbor anger against another, and expect healing from the Lord?… Set enmity aside….Do not be angry with your neighbor” (Ecclesiasticus 28:  1, 2, 3, 6, 7).  The psalm lifts up the length and breadth of God’s mercy, and if divine forgiveness is that extravagant, shouldn’t human forgiveness seek to be as generous, too?  The passage from Paul’s Letter to the Romans exhorts us not to despise or pass judgment on our brother or sister, “for each of us will be accountable to God” (Romans 14:12).

Or take today’s Gospel reading: “How often should I forgive?” Peter asks Jesus.  “As many as seven times?”  No doubt Peter thought seven a lavish number – after all, rabbinic tradition counseled forgiving three times.  But Jesus says no – we shouldn’t forgive once, or twice, or seven times, but seventy-seven times – in other words, a number without limit, a number beyond calculation.  Some scholars interpret the forgiveness that Jesus proclaims as a reversal of Lamech’s malicious boast way back in the fourth chapter of Genesis that “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech is avenged seventy-sevenfold” (Gen. 4:24).  In other words, in Jesus we come to the end of the path of violence and blood revenge.  That path leads only to death and to the soul’s destruction.  Jesus opens up another way.

In case we missed the point, he tells a parable of an unmerciful servant who is forgiven a ridiculously large amount of money and then turns around and refuses to forgive a tiny debt that amounts to no more than a small coin.  The man’s refusal to show mercy provokes the anger of the king, who hands him over to be tortured until he pays off the original debt.  And then comes the kicker: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you don’t forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

Are you still with me?  Forgive from the heart – that is what Jesus insists on this morning.  That is what all today’s readings proclaim.  But how do we take in that message against the backdrop of the double catastrophes of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina?  I’m going to put this bluntly.  Most of us are in no mood to forgive.  Forgive the suffering we’ve witnessed in the last two weeks, the sudden revelation to this country’s astonished eyes and to the eyes of the whole world that large groups of Americans are living in abject poverty?  That in this rich country of ours, there are millions who live as if they inhabited the so-called Third World?  Are we to forgive the racism that plagues the land, the desperate neglect of our African-American brothers and sisters?  Twenty-eight percent of the residents of New Orleans lived in poverty, and 84% of them were African-American.  Surely poverty and racism killed many of the victims of Hurricane Katrina just as surely as did the wind and waves, for it was the black and the poor who had no means to escape.  Are we to forgive the government for the inadequacy of its planning for the hurricane, or for the ineptitude and delay in its response?  Are we to forgive its appalling complacency about global warming, which scientists have long predicted will increase the intensity of hurricanes and storms?   Surely we should be angry.  We should be ashamed.  What can it possibly mean that Jesus also urges us to forgive?  What might forgiveness look like in this situation?  Let me sketch a few possibilities.

Forgiveness is a process that includes accountability. Forgiveness doesn’t mean permitting abuse or violence to continue.  It’s worth remembering that the passage we heard in today’s Gospel about forgiving seventy-seven times is placed after the passage we heard in last week’s Gospel, which invites us first to confront what must be changed. If, after a disaster, political leaders quickly urge critics not to play “the blame game,” we have to wonder whether the process of forgiveness has been co-opted.  If the causes of suffering are not confronted, the suffering is all too likely to be repeated. (2)

At the same time, genuine forgiveness means relinquishing a habit of blame.  It means refusing to find fault endlessly and to point fingers at everyone but ourselves.  Forgiving seventy-seven times means renouncing the delicious itch to judge and criticize, the insidious thrill of playing “Gotcha!”  When we maintain the discipline of a forgiving heart, we refuse to demonize our antagonists or to triumph in their mistakes.  We recognize with humility that they are as human as we are, and that, as St. Paul puts it, “we will all stand before the judgment seat of God” (Romans 14:10b). 

Genuine forgiveness takes our anger and channels it to creative use.  Feeling outrage over poverty, racism, and war, over shortsighted or selfish policies, over all the forces that diminish life, is a splendid thing when it gives us the energy to notice injustice and to change what should be changed.

So I see forgiveness in the campaign launched by Sojourners this week inviting Americans to sign the “Katrina Pledge,” a declaration that the poverty we’ve witnessed because of the hurricane is morally unacceptable, along with a pledge to renew our personal commitment to overcoming poverty in the United States.

I see forgiveness in the campaign sponsored by Sojourners, Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation, and other groups, to fast and pray for bold U.S. leadership to overcome global poverty during this week’s World Summit gathering at the United Nations.

I see forgiveness closer to home, in the efforts of this parish to help mobilize and coordinate hurricane relief in the Pioneer Valley.

I see forgiveness in the piles of donated supplies now rising up in the Connector, the growing stacks of diapers and toothbrushes, garbage bags and soap. 

I see forgiveness in this parish’s interest in exploring a possible work trip to the Diocese of Mississippi to volunteer some help, and in the checks that so many of you have sent to Episcopal Relief and Development, to the Red Cross, and to other agencies. 

Through the grace of God, forgiveness can be born at the very center of our outrage and sorrow, our repentance and compassion.  We don’t “forgive and forget” as if nothing wrong happened.  We “forgive and go forward,” building on what we’ve learned from mistakes made in the past and using the energy generated by reconciliation to create a new future. (3)

Forgiveness takes guts.  It takes work.  It takes commitment.  And it has the power to change lives.  I will close with a true story about forgiveness that is told by Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield (4):

Once on a train from Washington to Philadelphia, [he writes,] I found myself seated next to an African-American man who… [was running] a rehabilitation program for juvenile offenders in the District of Columbia.  Most of the youths he worked with were gang members who had committed homicide.

One fourteen-year-old boy in his program had shot and killed an innocent teenager to prove himself to his gang.  At the trial, the victim’s mother sat impassively silent until the end, when the youth was convicted of the killing.  After the verdict was announced, she stood up slowly and stared directly at him and stated, “I am going to kill you.”  Then the youth was taken away to serve several years in the juvenile facility.

After the first half year the mother of the slain child went to visit his killer.  He had been living on the streets before the killing, and she was the only visitor he’d had.  For a time they talked, and when she left she gave him some money for cigarettes.  Then she started step by step to visit him more regularly, bringing food and small gifts.  Near the end of his three-year sentence she asked him what he would be doing when he got out.  He was confused and very uncertain, so she offered to set him up with a job at a friend’s company.  Then she inquired about where he would live, and since he had no family to return to, she offered him temporary use of the spare room in her home.

For eight months he lived there, ate her food, and worked at the job.  Then one evening she called him into the living room to talk.  She sat down opposite him and waited.  Then she started.

“Do you remember in the courtroom when I said I was going to kill you?”

“I sure do,” he replied.

“Well, I did,” she went on.  “I did not want the boy who could kill my son for no reason to remain alive on this earth.  I wanted him to die.  That’s why I started to visit you and bring you things.  That’s why I got you the job and let you live here in my house.  That’s how I set about changing you.  And that old boy, he’s gone.  So now I want to ask you, since my son is gone, and that killer is gone, if you’ll stay here.  I’ve got room, and I’d like to adopt you if you let me.”  And she became the mother of her son’s killer, the mother he never had.

Now that’s a story of what it means, and what it costs, to forgive seventy-seven times.  Where in your life is Jesus inviting you today to take a bold step and to forgive from the heart?

 ——————–

(1) http://www.freerangegraphics.com/flash/fl_cycle.html

(2) Robert J. Schreiter, Reconciliation: Mission and Ministry in a Changing Social Order, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003, p. 19.

(3) Carolyn Osiek, Beyond Anger: On Being a Feminist in the Church, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1986.

(4) Jack Kornfield, The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace, New York: Bantam Books, 2002, pp. 44-46.

Seeds of God

Today’s parable of the sower brings me back to a crystal-clear summer morning many years ago.  I am standing in the hallway by the front door, trying to get everything organized so that my son will arrive on time for his first day of summer camp.  The lunch-box is ready with the foods that this particular seven-year-old will be likely to eat, there is a change of clothes in his bag, I have found the bottle of sunscreen, I am about to go looking for a towel, and surely Sam’s bathing-suit is around here somewhere.  Just then, Sam gets it into his head that he absolutely must change the shoelaces on his sneakers.  The white ones simply won’t do anymore: they’re too long.  What he needs, he tells me, are the brown shoelaces from his hiking shoes: they are just the right length for his sneakers.  So here I am, standing with Sam in the hallway, the two of us peering down at one of his hiking shoes as I try to untie the knot and pull out the shoelace so that we can thread it into a sneaker.  And suddenly I am overtaken by happiness.  I have suddenly discovered that this is the most wonderful moment in the world.  Here is this son of mine whom I love so much, all freckles and innocence; here are my hands, involved in a useful and simple task; here is a brand-new morning, full of infinite possibilities. 

If someone were to come up to me and ask, “How big is God?” I suppose I could start waving my arms around, make big, sweeping gestures.  I could answer, “Oh, God is huge, God fills the heavens and the earth, God is in everything, and everywhere, there is no way our minds can encompass the enormity of God!”  And I suppose I would be right.  But sometimes God is very small.  I hear that scientists have discovered a particle so small that it can pass right through the earth without bumping into anything, so small that it can pass right through our bodies without touching any part of us.  Sometimes God can be that small, so small that we miss the presence of the Holy One unless we’re paying close attention.  As Jesus suggests in the parable of the sower, God can seem as tiny as a seed, as tiny as a brief moment in a hallway when you look at your son and are suddenly pierced by joy.

Do you want to see God?  Well then, says Jesus, don’t go looking for God only in the high dramas, the big deals.  Look for God in what is small – maybe in the slant of evening light, as the setting sun casts a glow across the grass; in the eyes of a friend, as you pause in a conversation simply to gaze at the face of this person you love; in the last, lingering note of an aria from Bach as it trails off into silence.  Look for God in that quick-silver impulse to pick up the phone and call someone who is lonely.  Look for God in that hint of a desire to give someone a hand or to say a kind word.  Look for God in those moments when an invisible Someone practically tugs at our sleeve, urging, “Wake up now and pay attention!  I’m up to something here!”  God is in the details, Jesus says to us today–in the small stuff, in the seeds.

What are the seeds that God is sowing in you?  What are the little stirrings that signal the presence within you of this exuberant farmer-God who flings seeds so recklessly through the cosmos, hoping that they will somewhere find an answering heart?  Maybe you notice a restless stirring within yourself, some kind of insistent call to new life.  Maybe you feel a gentle coaxing to open up just a crack and to risk trusting, if just for a moment, that really and truly, you are loved just as you are.  Maybe you feel the tiniest of invitations to take a chance, take a leap: there is something that needs to be done, and you are just the person to do it.  Maybe you feel a tug to forgive someone whom you’ve refused for years to let back into your heart, or maybe you feel nudged to admit that the time has come to make someone an apology, and to ask for forgiveness.  Maybe you are suddenly touched by gratitude, overtaken on an ordinary day by the sheer gift of being alive.  These are just some of the many seeds of God, clues of the Holy One who gives the divine Self to us at every moment.

Here’s another story about a seed.  There was once a lawyer who was a good lawyer–indeed a very good lawyer.  But he kept feeling a persistent restlessness, an uncomfortable sense that his life didn’t quite fit, that he was called to do something else.  What began as a slight inner tug slowly began to grow.  One day this man was offered a partnership in a prestigious law-firm in downtown Boston.  That afternoon he walked all the way home to Cambridge, deep in thought–deep, as I imagine it, in prayer–and on that day he decided that No, he would not be a lawyer any longer. He would leave the law, go to Paris, and begin doing what he’d always longed to do: to write.  So that’s what he did.

The man was Archibald MacLeish, an old family friend who became one of the most popular American poets of the late 20th century.  I grew up listening to this story, and I have always loved it, because it speaks to me of a person who was entrusted with the seeds of God–though MacLeish himself might not have named it that way.  To me, it is a story of someone who listened with care to a deep inner call to follow wherever the Holy One might be leading, however disruptive and unsettling that call might be.

And we have to be honest about this: if the God who comes among us is often very small, the divine life that grows up in us will be no tidy little thing that we can tend quietly in our garden like a tulip.  The seeds of God do not grow into nice little posies, fit for a bouquet.  They are more like the magic beans in “Jack and the Beanstalk” that spring up through the floorboards and begin toppling the house.  When we open ourselves to a little rivulet of love, in the end we open ourselves to the whole river – as today’s psalm says, “the river of God is full of water” [bbllink]Psalm 65:9[/bbllink].  And so the divine life begins to travel through us, de-centering the ego and de-throning our claim to belong to no one but ourselves.  Our whole lives can begin to change, so that we become a new person, with new eyes, a new heart, a new way of living in the world.

One more things about seeds: it’s not only God who is a sower of seeds.  Like God, we, too, sow seeds for the future.  A kind word sends out a little more kindness into the world.  A harsh word sends out a little more bitterness, a little more fear.  What are the seeds that we are sowing?  Are we sowing seeds of contempt, selfishness, or anxiety?  Are we sowing seeds of respect, kindness, truthfulness, and courage?  I wonder how my life would change if I remembered that every single moment contains the seeds of the future.  Would I speak more kindly and listen with greater care?  Would I take more risks to love fully and freely, holding nothing back?  Would I learn to trust more deeply that every act of love, however small, has an effect and can bear fruit in ways I might never have imagined?

That’s the great promise in today’s passages from Scripture.  Today Jesus tells us that when we take in the seeds of God and let them root, our lives will bear fruit.  Whether it be a hundredfold, or sixty, or thirty times over, our lives will become a blessing to others, as if God has the power to take our small efforts to do good and to multiply them, grace upon grace.  God makes the same promise through the prophet Isaiah, proclaiming that “as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it” [bbllink]Isaiah 55: 10-11[/bbllink].  Hold on to this promise when your efforts seem futile and everything you’ve tried seems to have come to naught.  The word that God has sown in you will yet bear fruit, even if you know nothing about it.  If you consent, if you say Yes, God will accomplish in you and through you exactly what God has purposed.

This week I traveled to Washington, D.C., to spend a day fasting near the White House with about 30 other activists as part of a three-day event to protest the failure of the United States to act more decisively to slow global warming.  We were an unusual coalition of environmental, youth, and religious groups, conducting what was apparently the first-ever fast in this country to protest global warming.  Some of you took part in a companion fast here at home and some of you prayed with us, and I am grateful for that.

But did this small action make any difference?  Will this seed of an effort have any lasting effect?  In a world of violence and fear, of massive poverty in Africa, genocide in Darfur, war in Iraq, bombings in London, and an environmental crisis almost too large to face, do any of our individual actions make any difference?  Today’s Scripture readings tell us: Yes.  Trust the seeds of God.  Our exuberant farmer-God is casting seeds among us every day.  Notice them.  Give them room to take root and grow.  Cast the seeds that God gives you to cast.  Let God work freely in your life and don’t worry about the results: God will make use of you, and you will bear fruit, and the day will come, as Isaiah says, when “you shall go forth in joy, and be led back in peace; [and] the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands” [bbllink]Isaiah 55: 12[/bbllink].

So today we say Yes: Yes to the love whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, Yes to the mighty love that brought forth the whole creation, Yes to the love that is soft as a whisper, as persistent as a growing plant, as gentle as child’s hand that holds a hiking shoe and a brown shoelace.

Ascending into Heaven

Clap your hands, all you peoples;
shout to God with a cry of joy.
Amen.

I can’t remember a spring in New England that I’ve savored with more delight than this one.  After a long, hard winter, how sweet it’s been to watch colors rise to the surface, to see forsythia and then magnolia, crabapple and now dogwood trees bursting into bloom, to look up at the hills of the Holyoke Range and see a haze of pink, followed by so many astonishing shades of green that I found myself wishing that I knew as many words for “green” as the Eskimos apparently have for snow. 

Energy seems to rise in the spring.  Not long ago I took a walk in a nearby town.  It was one of our first warm days, the sun was shining, and I saw a young man walking down the sidewalk on his hands.  He’d taken off his shirt and his feet were waving in the air like two flags.  I saw a child holding hands with a woman with multi-colored dreadlocks, or maybe it was ribbons that she’d woven into her hair, for the braids dangling over her ears were pink and orange and green.  And I saw a sentence painted on an old brick wall and the sentence said, “Change the future.”  Let me tell you, joy rose up in me.  I thought to myself, Christ has risen.  The world’s gone topsy-turvy.  People walk on their hands, they wear ribbons in their hair, and they know the truth: anything is possible.  With God’s help we can change the future. 

My spirits soared.

Here on the Sunday after Ascension Day, it feels right to muse a bit about images of rising, of being lifted up.  A few moments ago we listened to that familiar passage from the book of Acts, the story of Jesus’ ascension into heaven [Acts 1:1-14].  It is the Bible’s only detailed account of how Jesus departed from his disciples and returned to God.  As we heard, for forty days after his crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus appeared on different occasions to his disciples.  At last, on the fortieth day, Jesus gathered his disciples together, promised them the gift of the Holy Spirit, and was then “taken up” or “lifted up” in a cloud.  Jesus disappeared from their sight, and the disciples returned to Jerusalem to gather in prayer with the men and women who had known and loved him.  Little did they know that ten days later, on the feast of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit would suddenly come upon them with great power.

Now the coming of the Holy Spirit was all well and good, but I have to confess that for a long time I didn’t know what to make of the ascension bit.  Every Sunday we repeat the line in the Nicene Creed, “he… ascended into heaven,” but secretly I suspected that one shouldn’t look at this part of the story too closely.  The thought of Jesus ascending into heaven evoked the irreverent and definitely unhelpful image of Mary Poppins slowly rising into the sky, umbrella in hand.  Surely, I thought to myself, surely the disciples’ last sight of Jesus was not of the soles of his feet. 

My difficulty came from assuming that I was supposed to take the image quite literally and to believe that heaven — and God — were literally “up,” a geographical place “above” the earth, and that after his death Jesus had to be re-united with God by going “up” — up and away.  On this point I was no better informed than the first Russian cosmonaut, Yurij Gagarin, who returned from the first manned orbit of the earth to announce triumphantly that he hadn’t seen God when he was up in space, proof positive (in his view) that God does not exist.  For years I avoided using the traditional imagery of heaven as “up” and the earth as “down,” precisely because taking those images literally invites such a simplistic response.

But this spring has reminded me that even if heaven and God are not literally “up,” and the earth and the rest of things not literally “down,” there is still something in our language, in our psyche, that links transcendence and joy with moving upward, with elevation.  “I was feeling down,” we say sometimes, “but now things are looking up.”  Happiness makes our spirits “rise”; we feel “uplifted.”  Joy, hope, inspiration — all these feelings of exaltation lift us up, they enlarge us, they carry us beyond ourselves, they may even move us to ecstasy, which literally means “ex-stasis,” out of a static place.

Is it possible that our moments of joy, our own experiences of feeling inspired or lifted up, are hints of Christ’s ascension, moments when we are aware that we are part of a great circulation of love that is always going on between heaven and earth?  For that is the great love story that we find in the Bible: God so overflows with love for God’s creation that — to use the familiar imagery — God in Christ descends among us, descends into our depths and finally into death itself, and then God in Christ gathers up all that he is and all that we are, and carries everything back to the Father, the Creator of all. 

That, to me, is one message of the ascension: we can trust our moments of joy, we can notice and value those moments of being uplifted by what is beautiful or noble or pure, or by the sheer exuberant creativity of life, because in those moments our hearts are rising with Christ to give thanks to the One who loved us into being.  And when we feel no joy at all, when we are in a time of sorrow or confusion or pain, we can trust that because of the ascension, all that is in us — our cares and concerns, our needs and our loves — have been taken up with Jesus to be drawn into the heart of God.  Through Christ’s incarnation, God came down among us and became one of us, and through Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension, Christ bore everything back up to God.

The ascension also means that we can have a living relationship with Jesus.  After the ascension, the life of Jesus Christ can never again be limited to one spot or identified with only one moment in history.  Because of the resurrection and ascension, Jesus Christ is not far off, a man who lived — as fairy-tales say — long ago and far away.  Instead he is radically present to us, intimately close.  As St. Augustine once put it, “Jesus ascended into heaven so that we might return to our hearts and there find him.”

Thanks to the ascension, we can also speak not only of an inner Christ, the Christ that lives within us, but also of a cosmic Christ.  The ascension means that Christ is everywhere, beyond us, around us, within everything that exists.  As the letter to the Ephesians puts it, Jesus “ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things” [Eph 4:10].  Because of the ascension we encounter a Christ whose living presence infuses all of creation, permeating everything with his life.

It can be tempting to think that we’ll run into Christ only in predictable places – only in church, maybe, or only in passages of Scripture, or only in the sacraments.  Yes, we do meet Christ here, but not only here, not only in the places we expect.  As Luke makes clear in his Gospel and in the Book of Acts, the risen and ascended Christ can also meet us where we least expect it.  This week I did something I’ve never done before: I put Luke’s story of the resurrection side by side with his story of the ascension and compared the two accounts.  I was surprised by their similarities.  In Luke’s account of the resurrection, the women can’t find Jesus when they go looking for him in the tomb.  “Suddenly,” says Luke, along come “two men in dazzling clothes” who stand beside the women and ask, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” [Luke 24:5].  In Luke’s account of the ascension, the disciples can’t find Jesus when they go looking for him in the sky.  “Suddenly,” says Luke, along come “two men in white robes” who stand by the men and ask, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” [Acts 1:11].

It seems that men and women alike need a couple of heavenly messengers to prod them with a question that helps them see that from now on, they’re not going to find Christ in some limited, predictable place.  The living Christ simply can’t be confined, whether in a tomb below or in the heavens above.  The living Christ now fills all things.  We look around and find him in the secret places of our own hearts, in the faces of the poor, in the trees bursting into bloom and leaf, and the ferns unfolding their tiny green fists.  We look around and find him in laughter and multi-colored ribbons on a city street, in the embrace of friends, in every truthful and loving word, in every act of kindness.  We look around and find him in each other’s faces, in the bread and wine that we share at the altar, in the hope that inspires us to restore our building stone by stone and to create a space that praises God. 

You know as well as I do how much suffering there is in life, how much loneliness and sorrow.  You know how daunting the problems that we human beings face, from war to global warming, and how hard it can be just to live a single day wisely and well, much less to “change the future.”  Will we have faith and strength to face life’s challenges in a creative way?  Will we rise to the occasion?   If we do, it will be through the One whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.  It will be through the One who lived, died, and rose for us.  When the celebrant calls out, “Lift up your hearts” we have the joy – and great privilege – of calling back in reply, “We lift them to the Lord.”

Conversion to Eco-Justice

“Be joyful in God, all you lands. Dear God, the earth bows down before you, sings to you, sings out your Name.” Amen.  

 Along with – literally – something like half a billion people around the world, this weekend we’re celebrating Earth Day.  Today is Creation Sunday – a day for giving thanks to God for the extraordinary mystery and miracle of God’s Creation.  And it’s a day for sober reflection and recommitment, as we consider the environmental perils that face us today. 

For several years I’ve been asking myself what inspires Christians to place care for the earth at the center of our moral and spiritual concern.  What needs to happen inside us – what deep change in perspective, what significant shift in values must we experience – before we become willing to offer ourselves to the great work of healing the earth?  One reason I’ve been asking this is that I’m trying to make sense of my own spiritual journey.  Some of you know that three years ago I was arrested in front of the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., during an interfaith prayer vigil organized by a group called Religious Witness for the Earth to protest our national energy policy and the intention to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  The decision to participate in non-violent civil disobedience came as a surprise to me.  I’m not “the type.”  I mean – hey, I’m an Episcopal priest.  I lead retreats.  I teach courses on prayer.  By temperament I’m a peacemaker, not a rabble-rouser.  When a photograph of me being led away in handcuffs showed up in the Boston Globe, more than one startled person told me, “You’re the last person I would have thought would get arrested!”

Of course, civil disobedience is not the only, or even the most important, sign of someone’s conversion to eco-justice, since God calls us out in many different ways.  But what inspires conversion to eco-justice in the first place?  Based on my own experience, here’s what I propose: for Christians it involves three steps or stages.  I call them “creation,” “crucifixion,” and “resurrection.”  I have no idea whether this model of conversion applies to every Christian who is committed to earth-care, for our journeys in faith take many different routes.  But I invite you to check this against your own experience as a Christian: to what extent does your conversion to earth-keeping include these three elements?

The first stage, “creation,” is when we fall in love with the beauty of God’s creation.  We experience amazement, gratefulness, wonder, and awe.  In this first stage of the mystical journey, we discover how loved we are as creatures made in the image of God and connected by breath, blood, bone, and flesh to the whole of God’s creation.

I don’t take this first step for granted.  It’s a huge discovery to experience creation as sacred.  Some of us grew up in a city, and to some degree city-dwellers are cut off from the natural world.  For the first time in history, more than half the planet’s human population now lives in cities, which means that they don’t see stars at night, don’t hear spring peepers, don’t smell hay.  Even living here, in the beauty of the Pioneer Valley, we may experience a certain alienation from the natural world. We are embedded in a culture that tells us daily in a thousand different ways that we are the most important thing on earth and that our deepest identity as human beings is to be a consumer: to buy, discard, and buy again.  We are conditioned to think of nature as a “resource” for us to exploit and use up, and in the midst of our busy, distracted, and often car-centered lives, I sometimes find it easy to think of nature as nothing more than the weather that does or doesn’t get in my way as I drive from one appointment to the next.

To add to our alienation from the earth, many of us grow up in families riddled with addiction, or we develop an addiction of our own.  If you’ve ever been close to an addict, you know that addictions function to disconnect us from the needs and rhythms of the body.  In my own years of addiction, I paid no attention to my body’s signals.  Addicts don’t much notice – or care – if they are tired or sad, if they are anxious or lonely – whatever they’re feeling, they just do their compulsive thing – grab the food, swig the drink, hunker down with the Internet, find something to buy.  Addiction of any kind dulls our awareness and cuts us off from our bodies and the natural world.

I began my recovery in 1982, and in the years that followed I gradually learned to honor the first bit of nature with which I’d been entrusted: my own body.  As I learned to listen to my body and to live within its limits, I began to connect more deeply with nature.  I began to see that God loved not only my body – God also loved the whole “body” of creation.  God began showing up all around me – in the pond, the hills, the willow tree – and I began to understand the words of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”  I began to understand the words of Genesis: “God saw everything that [God] had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).  

“Creation” is the stage when we discover the great love affair that is going on between God and God’s creation.  We enter that stage when we experience God’s love for us, and not only for us, not only for our own kind.  Because God’s love is infinite, this stage is one that we can never “outgrow,” never finish exploring.

The second stage is “crucifixion.”  Nobody likes this part of the journey, but it’s becoming harder and harder to avoid.  The more fully we experience the ways in which the creation reveals the love of God, the more we recognize the relentless assault on the natural world.  Clear-cut forests.  Vanishing topsoil.  Disappearing wetlands.  Acid rain.  Worst of all, perhaps: global warming.  The ice in the Arctic is melting so rapidly that there is now no ice in the sea during the summer; by the year 2050 there may be no ice in the sea at any time of year.  One news outlet [Reuters] reports that “Inuit hunters are falling through ice, permafrost is thawing…[and] the habitat of creatures from polar bears to seals is literally melting away.”  In recent months we’ve learned that up to 30 percent of the world’s species face extinction in the next 50 years, that more than 40 percent of birds in Europe face an uncertain future, and that North American wildlife species ranging from butterflies to red fox are “scrambling to adapt to Earth’s rising temperatures and may not survive” [AP report, 11/8/04].

We try not to notice these things.  We try to shrug them off or look away.  But crucifixion is the place where God finally breaks through our denial.  When we reach this stage we finally dare to feel the pain, to mourn what we’ve lost and what our children will never see.  It’s important to feel our protest and grief because it’s an expression of our love.  We can’t sidestep this stage if we are to become truly human.  I wonder what the church would be like if it became a genuine sanctuary, a place where we felt free to mourn, free to express our anger and sorrow.

At the foot of the cross we express not only our grief, but also our guilt, because if we’re honest with ourselves, we must confess the ways that we ourselves benefit from the destruction of the earth.  We must admit our own patterns of consumption and waste.  When it comes to eco-justice none of us – at least, not most North Americans – can stand in a place of self-righteousness, because we, too, are implicated.  In penitence and sorrow we approach the cross of Christ, where God gives us grace to face and to confess our malice and ignorance, our grief and guilt.  We can take heart at the cross of Christ, because it is here that all evil and suffering are continually met by the love of God.  In a time of ecological crisis, we need to take hold of the power of the cross as never before. 

If in the first stage of conversion we fall in love with the beauty of God’s creation, and in the second stage we share in Christ’s crucifixion, mourning creation’s wounds and acknowledging our own deep grief and guilt, then, as we enter the third stage, we find ourselves sharing in Christ’s resurrection.  Filled with the love that radiates through all creation and empowered by the cross that like a lightning rod “grounds” our suffering and sin in the love of God, we come at last to bear witness to the Christ “who bursts out of the tomb, who proclaims that life, not death, has the last word, and who gives us power to roll away the stone.”*  When we’re led to resurrection we move out into the world to participate in works of compassion and justice.  We enter the stage when the mystic also becomes a prophet, standing up to the powers-that-be.  As we heard in today’s reading from Acts, the early Christians were known for being people who were “turning the world upside down” [Acts 17:6].

What we feel ourselves sent out to do can take many forms.  God’s creation needs healing at every level, so wherever you feel led to begin is a good place to start.  Commitment to care the for earth will affect what we buy and what we refuse to buy, what we drive and what we refuse to drive, how we heat our homes, how much we re-use and re-cycle, whether we’re willing to do something as simple as switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs, and whether we’re willing to go even further and engage in public protest and civil disobedience. 

Living out the resurrection begins right here.  I invite you to take a look at the green insert in today’s service leaflet for some local environmental events. I invite you to throw some extra money in the offertory plate, for it will go to Clean Water Action to support their efforts not only to protect clean water but to fight global warming and to get rid of toxic chemicals like mercury that threaten the health of our children. I invite you to consider signing the petition about climate change that the Episcopal Peace Fellowship has put on a table in the parish hall, along with some handouts on ecology and faith. I invite you to take a walk through the town common and learn how you can participate in protecting the earth while you enjoy the music and the fun.

I’m inspired by the commitment of those leading our parish’s Restoration Project to make the renovations as energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable as possible.  You may know that the Church School’s Sixth and Seventh Graders spent some time thinking about today’s biblical readings, including the passage from First Peter that calls us “living stones . . . being built into a spiritual house.”  The students commented that our church building is made of stone, and one child reported having heard that we’re named Grace Church because the stones are gray.  (Don’t you love it?) Well, the stones may be gray, but I’m happy to say that Grace is going green. 

Some people want to ignore the environmental crisis, to deny its urgency, to deal with it some other time.   As comedian George Carlin once remarked, “I don’t believe there’s any problem in this country, no matter how tough it is, that Americans, when they roll up their sleeves, can’t completely ignore.” 

Well, when we Americans do get past our denial and actually take a look at the challenges we face, what may come next is despair – the awful sense that it’s too late, it’s gone too far, we won’t be able to turn this around.  I know only two antidotes to despair: prayer and action.  Prayer roots us in the first stage of that 3-part journey: in the love of God that extends through all creation.  Prayer also gives us courage to enter the second stage, as we share Christ’s crucifixion, mourn the losses and feel the grief.  And through the Spirit of the risen Christ, we embark on the third stage: we are sent out to act, to do what we can to transform the world.  Conversion invites us to become people of prayer, people who take time to steep ourselves in the love of God.  And it invites us to become people of action, too, people who try in every aspect of our lives – from what we eat to what we drive and how we vote – to move toward ecological sustainability and to honor our first and most basic God-given call: to become care-takers of the earth.

  

*First written for “To Serve Christ in All Creation – A Pastoral Letter from the Episcopal Bishops of New England” (sent to the Episcopal Churches of Province One on the Feast of the Presentation of Christ, 2003)

 

Altar of resistance

The showdown has begun. On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered the holy city of Jerusalem.  The next day, as we heard in tonight’s reading, he entered its holy place – and caused a commotion.  He walks into the temple and drives out those who are buying and selling.  He overturns the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those selling doves.  Quoting Scripture, he cries, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.  But you have made it a den of robbers” [bbllink]Mark 11:17[/bbllink].

The temple is sacred space.  It is made for prayer.  It is no place for dishonesty, no place for greed, no place for the profit of a few.  Some scholars emphasize that the cleansing of the temple takes place in the Court of the Gentiles, the only area where non-Jewish people are admitted for worship.  If buying and selling is permitted in the Court of the Gentiles, then the Gentiles will have no place to join in worshipping with the people of God.  When Jesus cleanses the temple – when he drives out all commercial transactions, expels buyers and sellers, and declares the space so holy that no one can even carry a vessel through it – he is carrying out the first act of a Messianic king.  He is clearing out and protecting the sacred space so that all people, Jew and Gentile alike, may worship together.  He is proclaiming the kingdom of God.

Tonight we contemplate Jesus protecting sacred space that has been invaded by commercial interests.  I hold that scene side by side with another invasion by commercial interests of another sacred space.  Last week’s vote by the U.S. Senate to open the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil and gas drilling was not unexpected, but still it came to many of us as a shock.  It’s not just that so little oil is expected to flow from those pipelines, nor that the same amount of fossil fuel that is expected to come from the refuge could be saved by investing in clean, renewable energy and by improving the average fuel efficiency of our cars and trucks.  It’s not just that drilling for more oil in Alaska seems a particularly tragic and ironic project, given the fact that Alaska and the whole region of the Arctic is already bearing vivid witness to the perils of global warming, from thawing tundra to melting ice and changing patterns of migration.  Maybe you read in last week’s newspapers that it’s become so warm up there, Grizzly bears were spotted 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

But what especially appalls so many of us is that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is sacred space.  It is the last great, untouched, wilderness area in this country.  As Jimmy Carter writes, “There are few places on earth as wild and free as the Arctic Refuge.  It is a symbol of our natural heritage, a remnant of frontier America that our first settlers once called wilderness” [quoted from his foreword to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land]. Do we really want to hand it over to multinational corporations and to the politicians who champion their cause?  Are there no limits that we are willing to set on our greed?  Do we bear no responsibility to other forms of life on this planet and no responsibility for the quality of life that our children and grandchildren will inherit after we are gone?

Some of you may know that four years ago I went to Washington, D.C. with an activist, interfaith group called Religious Witness for the Earth.  We marched to the Department of Energy and held a worship service to protest the Administration’s energy plan and its intention to drill for oil in the Arctic refuge.  We didn’t turn over any tables, but we did kneel in front of the doors to the building and pray that the sanctity of the Arctic refuge be protected.  I was among the 22 of us who were arrested.

You may know that the indigenous peoples who live in the refuge, the Gwich’in people, are sustained by herds of caribou.  They are called the Caribou people, and 90% of them are Episcopalian.  In Washington D.C., we met a Gwich’in elder who told us that the land is so sacred to his people, there are areas that they do not even enter. 

This is not just a Republican issue.  It’s not just a Democrat issue.  It’s not just a political and economic issue.  It’s a human issue, a moral and spiritual issue. 

Tonight, as at every Eucharist, we come to a table like this one.  Tonight Jesus reminds us that this table is not only the altar of repentance, the place where our sins are met by the forgiveness and mercy of God.  Nor it is only the Altar of Repose, where the Blessed Sacrament is taken after the service on Maundy Thursday, the place where Jesus rests and where we receive his peace.  It is also the altar of resistance, the place where we receive strength to stand up to the powers and principalities of this world.  It is the table that gives us power to turn the tables on the forces of greed, oppression, and injustice.  It is the table that gives us strength to resist the forces of death and to proclaim the power of life. 

In the silence that follows I invite you to let Jesus draw close.  Are there tables inside you that he wants to overturn, places where you are stuck or colluding with the powers that be?  Is he perhaps inviting you to join with other people and to play a part in turning over the tables of injustice so that together we can proclaim the kingdom of God?