creation care

Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 21A), September 28, 2014 Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at Christ Episcopal Church, Rochdale, MA Exodus 17:1-7 Psalm 78-1-4, 12-16 Philippians 2:1-13 Matthew 21:23-32

Speaking and living our “Yes”

It is a pleasure to be with you this morning, and I’d like to thank Molly, your rector, for inviting me. I serve the churches in this diocese as your Missioner for Creation Care, and I am just back from last Sunday’s exhilarating experience of walking through New York City in the People’s Climate March alongside literally 10,000 people of faith. As you probably heard, the march drew a record 400,000 people from all over the country to express their concern about climate change.

I’d like to speak about why Christians care so much about protecting the world that God entrusted to our care, and we have a wonderful parable to guide our thoughts, the parable of the two sons, which is found only in the Gospel of Matthew. We just heard the story: a father with two sons asks the first son to go work in the vineyard, and the boy replies, “Nope, no thanks. Not interested.” But sometime later he changes his mind, heads to the vineyard and gets to work. The father asks the second son to work in the vineyard, and the boy says, “I go” (Matthew 21:30). But he doesn’t go; he stays put. The question is: which of the two sons did the will of his father? The answer, of course, is the first son, the one who, despite his initial no, actually carried out his father’s request, not the son who said yes, but did nothing. What counts in the end is what we do, not what we say we will do. I confess that I smiled when I realized that this was one of today’s readings, for this parable means something to me personally. My son is now 24, but when he was a kid, I remember asking him one day to turn off the TV and go clean his room. “Sure, Mom,” he said, “I’m on it.” But he kept sitting on the couch, absorbed in the TV, and didn’t move. I gave him a couple more minutes and asked him again. Again he said yes, just a sec, sure, he’d go, but he kept on staring at the screen. I waited a while longer until finally – exasperated – I decided to tell him the parable of the two sons. Which is better, I asked: to say no but then do what is right, or to say yes and do nothing? With a hangdog look my son went off to clean his room. I was pleased about that, though I can’t say that my irritated lecture deepened his appreciation of either the Bible or Christianity. Still, I think there is something here for all of us to consider: this story invites us to notice the places in our lives where we know what the right thing to do is, but we’re not doing it, the places in our lives where our lips say, “Yes, Lord, I love you, I’ll do what you ask,” but our actions express something else entirely. We all have places in our lives where what we believe and what we do don’t quite line up, places where what we intend to do and plan to do and know is right to do somehow never gets done. We say yes with our lips, but our actions say no. It is a powerful moment, a moment of healing and integration, when our actions finally line up with our values, when we start doing the things that we know are right, when we say yes to God’s will and desire for our lives and then actually follow through. That is one reason why last Sunday I found the People’s Climate March so exhilarating. Here we had people of all the world’s faith traditions – everything from A to Z, Agnostic to Zorastrian, and people of every religion in between – Episcopalians, for sure, but also pagans, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Greek Orthodox, indigenous people, Evangelicals, Buddhists – you name it, the world’s religions were represented – and all of us, with our different rituals and different doctrines and different ways of talking about the Holy, all of us were saying yes: yes, we recognize that the living world of which we are a part is sacred and precious, and we take action today to heal and protect it. As I imagine it, it was as if members of all the world’s religions had in their own way heard God the Father say, “I need you to work in my vineyard; I need you to play your part in the urgent work of healing the Earth that I entrusted to your care,” and last Sunday members of all the religions said yes, and went out to the vineyard and got to work. Values and actions lined up. It was a day for rejoicing. I’ve talked a bit with Molly, and I’ve heard many good things about how here at Christ Church you are already taking action to make care for Creation an important part of your mission and ministry. I’ve heard about your replacing throwaway, disposable cups at coffee hour with cups that can be washed and reused. I’ve heard about your community garden, which is a terrific way to build local resilience and food security. I’ve heard how several years ago you raised thousands of dollars to build a well in Liberia. I want to salute you for efforts like these, because doing our utmost to protect the ongoing web of life on this planet, and caring for the water and soil and air upon which our good health, and all life, depends is central to what it means to be a faithful Christian. In our Creation story at the beginning of Genesis, we meet a God who loves the Creation into being and who takes a look around at what he just made and is filled with delight. “God saw everything that [God] had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). The created world, the web of life that scientists call the biosphere, is created by God and reveals God’s glory. As the psalmist puts it, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows [God’s] handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). Land and rivers, animals, air and sea ultimately belong to God, not to human beings, for, as we also hear in the psalms, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it” (Psalm 24:1). As humans we are part of the created order, not above it or separated from it, and the Book of Genesis tells us that the very first task that God gave to human beings was to take good care of the earth (Genesis 2:4b-8, 15).  This is God’s Creation, not ours. We are here to shepherd and protect what is ultimately God’s possession, not ours. Well, we’ve got some hard work ahead of us in that department. Even a quick look at the news reveals how far humanity has fallen away from God’s vision of our species living in a loving relationship with each other, our non-human neighbors, and the rest of the natural world. Because of our burgeoning population, powerful technologies, and ever-expanding appetite for “more,” we’ve reached a point where human activities are unraveling the web of life. My particular concern is how humans have affected the global climate. As no doubt you’ve heard, climate change caused by human activity is already having far-reaching effects on the world’s continents and oceans, and the creatures that inhabit them. In only two centuries, we have pumped so much heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air that atmospheric levels of CO2 are higher today than they’ve been for millions of years. A while back I heard a climate scientist remark, “We are breathing from an atmosphere that none of our ancestors would recognize.” Burning fossil fuels, such as coal, gas, and oil, at present rates could raise worldwide average temperatures between 5 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit in this century, which would make the world extremely difficult for humans and other creatures to inhabit. Already our planet is changing before our eyes: oceans are heating up and becoming more acidic as they absorb some of the carbon dioxide released by cars and power plants; tundra is thawing, ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, coral reefs are dying, massive droughts are spreading in some places and heavy rains are intensifying in others. This past spring we learned that the huge West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to collapse and slide into the sea in a way that scientists call “unstoppable.” As the environmentalist Bill McKibben has written, “Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.” 1 Given the many pressures on the planet’s web of life, we are now in the midst of Earth’s sixth major extinction event. Maybe half the world’s species could vanish before the century is out. Our planet is 4.5 billion years old and has endured other extinction events, but this is the very first time that an extinction event is being caused by one species: us. We live at an unprecedented moment in human history, a moment when our choices really matter and what we do, or don’t do, makes all the difference to what kind of world we leave our children and our children’s children. What can we do? Well, we can recycle more, drive less, and be sparing in our use of water. We can turn off lights when we leave a room. Maybe we can eat local, organic foods and support our local farms and land trusts. We can install insulation, turn down the heat, and cut back on AC. 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, 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 make a swift transition to clean, safe sources of energy like sun and wind. We need to quit our addiction to fossil fuels and bring down the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, which is 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? Nearly 400 parts per million – and climbing. So we have work to do. Hope springs up when we take hold of that work and move into action. So I hope you’ll form a “green team” or a Creation Care committee (whatever you want to call it) here at Christ Church, 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 you’ll read the blog posts on my new Website, Reviving Creation. I hope you’ll take full advantage of our diocese’s first-ever Season of Creation, which begins next Saturday and lasts through the end of November. We are fortunate to have a bishop who recognizes what we Christians must do. I hope you’ll be thoughtful and creative and have some fun as you find ways to line up actions that express your values. The news from scientists is grim. But the good news, as we saw last Sunday, is that people the world over are finally beginning to organize, strategize, and mobilize. And the Gospel good news is that God is with us. God is with us. “God so loved the world” – literally, in Greek, the “cosmos” – “God so loved that cosmos that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16). The melting ice in West Antarctica may be unstoppable, but so is the divine love that made us, that sustains us, and that calls us to stand up for life. Jesus is among us now, offering us here at this table the nourishing gift of his presence and power. There is so much left to save, so much good that we can do, so many ways that we can help to build a better world. Like the two sons in the parable, we have a chance not only to say yes, but also to embody that yes: to go to work in the vineyard and to learn to live more lightly on the earth.  As the poet Wallace Stephens once wrote: After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends.   1. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Times Book, 2010, p. xiii.
 
Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 13A), August 3, 2014. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Williamstown, MA Genesis 32:22-31 Psalm 17:1-7, 16 Romans 9:1-5 Matthew 14:13-21

Feasting on hope

It is a pleasure to be with you on this green, summer morning, and I’d like to thank your rector Peter Elvin for inviting me. I serve the diocese as your Missioner for Creation Care, and today’s Gospel passage provides a wonderful story for us to consider as we reflect on our call to protect the Earth.

Most of us have heard the story before – in fact, many times before – and evidently it was a significant story for the early Church: it’s told more often than any other story in the Gospels. A story of Jesus feeding a crowd of thousands shows up in every one of the four Gospels, and the Gospels of Mark and Matthew even tell the story twice (Mark 6:30-44, Mark 8:1-9; Matthew 14:13-21, Matthew 15:32-39; Luke 9:10-17; John 6:1-13)! That’s how important this story was to the first Christian communities. The stories vary in their details, but the basic plot-line is the same: a crowd gathers around Jesus in a deserted place. Jesus teaches them and heals them. Hours pass, evening approaches, and by now everyone is very hungry, but there are only a few scraps of food to be found and no grocery store in sight. The disciples are baffled – maybe even desperate. What can they do? All they have rustled up are five loaves and two fish. Yet when these small offerings are placed in Jesus’ hands, he takes them, blesses and shares them, and behold – everyone eats and is satisfied, with baskets of leftovers to spare. This is a story of hopelessness shifting to hope, of scarcity transformed into abundance, of empty places filled to overflowing. Generations of Christians facing hard times – times of poverty or war, of personal loss or societal breakdown – Christians in times like these have clung to this story, for it assured them, as it assures us still, that even if we feel depleted, tired, or afraid, even if our stomachs are growling or our hearts are yearning, even if we’re sitting in a great crowd of people and feeling anxious, helpless, and alone, there is Someone – capital S, a holy Someone – within us and beside us who will meet us where we are and in whose presence we will be filled with hope and new life, even in the midst of suffering and grief. Now is a very good time to find our selves in this story, for the crisis of climate change is leading many of us to feel as if we’re sitting among those hungry, late-afternoon crowds in the Gospel story, out in the middle of nowhere with night coming on; and the hour is late. Just to say the words “climate change” and most of us tighten up; we duck and draw back; we feel a weight on our chest. The reports from scientists are increasingly urgent and grim, and it’s no wonder, when we allow ourselves to pay attention, that we react with a mix of disbelief, sorrow, and fear. Strictly speaking, most of us are probably not climate skeptics: we believe what the scientists are saying. It’s just that the situation is too much to take in – we can’t deal with it, we don’t know how to respond to it or what we can possibly do about it. How do you respond when you hear from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group, that climate change is already having far-reaching effects on the world’s continents and oceans? In only two centuries, human beings have pumped so much heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air that atmospheric levels of CO2 are higher today than they’ve been for millions of years. Recently I heard a climate scientist remark, “We are breathing from an atmosphere that none of our ancestors would recognize.” Burning fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and gas, at present rates could raise worldwide average temperatures between 5 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit in this century, which would make the world extremely difficult to inhabit. Already our planet is changing before our eyes: oceans are heating up and becoming more acidic as they absorb some of the carbon dioxide released by cars and power plants; tundra is thawing, ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, coral reefs are dying, massive droughts are spreading in some places and heavy rains are intensifying in others. You know about that – you’ve been through Hurricane Irene. This spring we learned that the huge West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to collapse and slide into the sea in a way that scientists call “unstoppable.” As the environmentalist Bill McKibben has written, “Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.”1 Given the many pressures on the planet’s web of life, we are now in the midst of Earth’s sixth major extinction event. Maybe half the world’s species could vanish before the century is out. When we hear things like this, most of us freeze. We shut down. We stop listening. We go into shock, into denial, or into despair. We get paralyzed. Either we tell ourselves that it can’t be that bad, surely this is not going to affect me or my children, surely climate scientists are exaggerating and this is just some awful mistake. Or we slide into hopelessness: it’s too late, we tell ourselves; we’re not experts; we don’t have the skills or knowledge or leverage to turn this around; we can’t make a difference; we’re goners; we’re cooked. Either way, like the crowds in the Gospel story, we sit on the grassy hillside as the hours tick by, unable to move, feeling increasingly anxious and empty. And unlike the crowds in the story, we don’t have any nearby villages to which we can go look for food. We’re out here by ourselves, facing an unprecedented historical situation, in which the whole human enterprise on this planet is at stake. Where will we find the inner food, the inner nourishment to meet this crisis with courage and hope? Today’s Gospel story suggests three ways that Jesus’ presence nourishes and empowers the crowds. First, he loves them. He has, as the Gospel says, “compassion” (Matthew 14:14) for them. Jesus knew in his very bones that he was deeply loved by God. He knew that he was cherished to the core, and he came among us to us to show us what we, too, are cherished. We, too, are the children of God. We, too, are beloved. Whenever we know ourselves as precious – whenever we take in the divine love that is streaming through us in every moment, in the gift of this breath and this heartbeat – whenever a person we care about turns and looks at us with eyes of love – whenever we gather together as a community and tell the sacred stories and share the sacred meal that remind us that God is with us – we touch the divine love that will never let us go. Hope comes back to us when we know that we are loved, for whether or not our efforts are successful, we know they are worthwhile – because we are worthwhile, and because God’s Creation is worthwhile. Jesus’ first gift to the crowds is the gift of love. His second gift is empathy. He shares in our suffering, in our brokenness and fear. At the end of the day in our Gospel story, Jesus was just as hungry as the crowds were – just as tired, just as thirsty. Jesus was fully human and he shared fully in the human condition. When it was hot, he sweated. When he was hungry, he needed to eat. Not only that – in this version of the story, Jesus was also feeling an immediate and very personal sorrow. Right before Jesus fed the five thousand, Matthew’s Gospel tells us that Jesus heard the news that his dear friend John the Baptist had been brutally executed. Out of that well of shock and grief, Jesus withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself, presumably to grieve and pray. Only then could he come out of prayer to share the Good News. The God we meet in Jesus is a God who shares our grief. I know that many of us can’t even begin to feel the cascade of losses that has already been initiated by climate change. We may be afraid that sorrow will overwhelm us, and that we will drown in the grief. But unfelt emotions can keep us immobilized, so it is good to know that Jesus is with us in our grief, that Jesus shares it and understands it and can give us a heart to hold it without being overcome by pain. It is good to feel our sorrow about climate change, because tears can water the soul. It is good to feel our anger and protest, because anger can be an energy for life. It is good to invite Jesus into our hopelessness, because in that place of emptiness, impasse, and waiting, God’s hope, not ours, can be born. So Jesus offers us, just as he offered the crowds, the gift of his love and the gift of his empathy. He offers a third gift, too: the capacity to act, the power to make a difference. What we have to contribute may seem very small. I mean, come on – all I’ve got here are five loaves and two fish! I’m not a climate scientist or a politician! I’m just an ordinary citizen with a pile of other responsibilities on my plate! What can one person possibly do? But of course there is plenty that we can do. We can recycle more, drive less, and be sparing in our use of water. Maybe we can eat local, organic foods and support our local farms and land trusts. We can install insulation and cut back on AC. 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, 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 parts per million, and climbing. So we have work to do. Hope arises when we move into action. I like to say that hope is love in action. So if you don’t already have a “green team” or a Creation Care committee (whatever you want to call it) here at St. John’s, I hope you’ll form one and will 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 you’ll read the blog posts on my new Website, Reviving Creation. And I hope that some of you will join me on Sunday, September 21st, when the largest rally in the history of the climate movement will be held in New York City, the People’s Climate March. As 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.” 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. Jesus is among us now, just as he was among those hungry crowds, offering us here at this table the nourishing gift of his presence and power. There is so much left to save, so much good that we can do, so many ways that we can help to build a better world. I’ll close with the words of Edward Everett Hale: “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.” What is Jesus inviting you to do?
  1. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Times Book, 2010, p. xiii.

“I want to sink back into a certain innocence.”

My friend Ruth is describing what leads her to visit a place of natural beauty and to walk among trees. For the first time in her life she has been doing the kinds of things that social activists do: gather information about an issue, make phone calls, organize meetings, distribute leaflets, hire a lawyer, talk to reporters, voice opposition, articulate a vision. Never before has she been so acutely aware of the need for ordinary citizens to band together and to work for a better future, and never before has she participated in that effort with so much vigor.

Yet she also notices that the more active she becomes, the more she needs the solace of prayer. The more she moves forward to engage with other people in the effort to heal the world, the more she needs to draw back into periods of silence and solitude, of gazing and reflection. What Ruth so wonderfully calls “sinking back into a certain innocence” means being willing to relinquish for a while the impulse to figure out, plan, and analyze, to assess, define, and control. When we sink back into a certain innocence, we invite our hearts to be unguarded. We let go our agenda, drop our defenses, and open in childlike trust to the present moment. We allow ourselves to gaze, to rest, to be encountered, and to be changed.

I know that spending time alone doing nothing is anathema to most Americans. In unstructured moments, many of us whip out our cell phones, snag a cigarette, grab a snack, or get busy with the next task. A remarkable article published last month in the journal Science reports that, in one study, when participants were left alone in a room for a while, most of them chose to administer painful electric shocks to themselves rather than to sit silently, in solitude. Clearly it goes against the cultural grain if we recognize and honor our deep need for solitude, stillness, and contemplation.

This week I spent a couple of days on retreat with my husband Robert Jonas at our old farmhouse in Ashfield, in the hills of western Massachusetts. For two days it rained heavily. Clouds rolled and churned across the sky. Wind tossed the branches of the trees and blew wild patterns across the pond. Torrents of rain kept falling. For a long time my husband and I stood on the back porch, taking it all in. We weren’t alone, but we were quiet together, absorbed in watching and listening as rain pounded on the roof overhead and as it poured in sheets over the field and pond and woods beyond.

Standing on the porch, I noticed two ways of paying attention to the rain. One was to think about it. For instance, I could reflect on the fact that intense deluges seem to have become more frequent in my corner of the world. I could think about climate change, and how some places are flooding while other places are going dry. I could think about the fact that because of carbon dioxide emissions, the atmosphere now holds 5% more moisture than it used to, and that extreme downpours are another sign of a warming world. Thoughts typically generate more thoughts: I could then start thinking about the condition of the gutters or the roof; I could look to the past and reflect on my memories of rain; I could look to the future and start making plans for the next climate rally.

Thank God for thoughts and for the capacity to think. It is good, even essential, to know such things and to think such thoughts. Having a basic grasp of facts is a prerequisite to knowing what actions we need to take. But on that rainy day in Ashfield I didn’t want to think about the rain, to analyze or strategize – I wanted to perceive it with imagination and intuition and with all five senses, to encounter it in the present with the innocence of a child. What are you saying? Speak, Rain – I am listening.

Standing on the porch with my husband, I remembered the words of Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and social activist, who wrote:

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.

In the midst of the storm, Jonas and I listened to the rain’s “wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech,” and watched as rain splashed all over the deck. The rain’s song was wild and wordless, an insistent oratorio. Patiently we listened. Eventually I grinned at my husband and pointed out how the water was dropping on the horizontal wooden boards, landing quickly like notes upon a staff. “It’s like reading a piece of music.”

Jonas took up the idea and before long he’d created a short video. I don’t know what he plans to name it, but I’m calling it Sonata for Deluge and Porch.

When it comes to addressing climate change, I want to speak up for the need for concerted, smart, and effective action. But I also want to speak up for the need for prayer and contemplation. Creativity, playfulness, and a fresh perspective arise in the space beyond thought. Wisdom emerges as we learn to sit quietly with ourselves and with the world around us, open to reality, just as it is.

I grew up dividing the world into two camps: “spiritual” people and “activists,” people who pray, and people who actively pursue social and environmental justice. Of course that is a bogus split. Contemplation and action are both necessary if humans are to flourish on this planet. Moving gracefully between them is as essential for life as breathing in and breathing out.

Back in the 14th century, the Christian mystic John Ruysbroeck described God as “absolute repose and fecundity reconciled.” Rusbroeck goes on to say: “The Spirit of God breathes us out that we may love, and do good works; and draws us into [God’s] self, that we may rest in fruition, and this is Eternal Life… Action and fruition never hinder, but strengthen one another… They are the double wings… that take us home.”

Sermon for Trinity Sunday, June 15, 2014. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Grace-St. Paul’s Church, Tucson, AZ. Genesis 1:1 – 2:4a Canticle 13 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 Matthew 28:16-20

Holy Trinity: Joining the dance

It’s a pleasure to be with you this morning at Grace-St. Paul’s, and I want to thank your rector for welcoming me back. Some things have changed since the last time I was here. An array of solar panels has shown up on every roof! It’s fantastic! Some things in my own life have changed, too. Last fall I resigned from my job at Grace Church in Amherst, Massachusetts. I went to my bishop and told him that I didn’t want climate activism to be only a part of what I do – I told him that I felt called to focus all my energy on awakening people of faith to the urgency of tackling climate change, and that my dream is to help build a movement to protect life as it has evolved on this planet. Through the grace of God, funding was found, a position was created, and since January I’ve been serving the Diocese of Western Massachusetts as its first Missioner for Creation Care. Now I travel around the diocese like an itinerant 19th century Methodist minister on horseback, or maybe like Paul Revere, spreading the word from church to church that climate change is not only coming, it is upon us, it is here, and that as people blessed and sustained and empowered by God we have the great privilege and holy responsibility to rise up and to do something about it.

As I wrote today’s sermon, I had to do some wrestling. How in the world does Trinity Sunday, which we celebrate today, connect with climate change? How does understanding God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit help to inform and inspire our struggle to stabilize the climate and to pass on to our children and our children’s children a sustainable, just, and habitable world? That is not an idle question, for the news from climate scientists in the last few months has been increasingly grim. Maybe you heard about the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group, which 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…” On top of this bleak news, last month two landmark studies showed 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 The environmentalist Bill McKibben has commented that it’s as if we were running Genesis backwards. Given the perilous situation in which human beings and all other living creatures now find ourselves, what can we learn from the doctrine of the Trinity? What gift of hope can we receive as we consider the God we meet as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? A quick word about history: probably no doctrine of the Church developed with more contentiousness and controversy than the doctrine of the Trinity. After the life and death of Jesus Christ, generation by generation Christians searched the Scriptures and found hints and clues that suggested how to think about the nature of God. They pondered passages such as the ones we heard this morning. At the end of Second Corinthians, Paul blesses his community by invoking “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit” (2 Cor. 13:13), and at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus commissions his disciples to baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:18). From these biblical hints and clues, from their ongoing lives of prayer, and from their forays into Greek philosophy, in the 4th century the teachers and scholars of the Church began to hammer out the doctrine of the Trinity. It took many acrimonious arguments to work out the phrasing of the Nicene Creed, and it took decades for that Creed to be accepted across the Church. In fact, one of the causes of the Great Schism between East and West was whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father or whether it proceeds from the Father and the Son – the so-called “filioque” debate, to use the Latin word, as you’ll see in your service leaflet in the note at the end of the Nicene Creed. That is how much it mattered to the Church that we get it right when we think about the Trinity – a thousand-year-old Church split over who proceeds from whom! I am grateful that our Christian forebears thought so rigorously about the nature of God, and that they gave us an intellectual framework for speaking about the divine. It matters how we think about God. But no matter how subtle, even brilliant, our analysis, there are limits to what the intellect can do. God is not an object – even a very big object – that we can separate from other objects and then analyze, dissect, and probe, as we might study a star in the sky or a specimen in a lab. God is not an object at all, but a mysterious Presence that abides within and beyond all things; not another being among many beings, but the very Ground of all being; not a monolithic, omnipotent Man in the Sky but a dynamic communion of self-giving love. We can’t know the Trinity from the outside, by thinking about it, but only from the inside, by experiencing it. As St. Augustine put it long ago, “We come to God by love, not by navigation.” And he describes the Trinity very simply as the Lover, the Beloved, and the love that flows between. Step into that flow of love, and we are caught up in a love affair that has been going on since before time began. The divine Mystery that we call “God” is an ongoing exchange of love between God the Father – the Lover, the Creator – and God the Son, the Beloved. Flowing between them is the never-ending, tender love of the Holy Spirit. God is one, and yet God is also three, a dynamic relationship, a giving and receiving of love. When the early Councils of the Church debated the nature of God, they came up with a wonderful image of the Trinity as a dance. The word in Greek is perichoresis and it means a “dance-around” of love. Imagine that! At the center of reality, a dance of love is in full swing! Jesus came to invite us to join the dance. He was completely caught up in a love affair with God, his beloved abba, which is the Aramaic word for Father, and through the Holy Spirit, our counselor and comforter and the guide who leads us into all truth, we, too, are drawn into the flow of love between God the Father/Mother and God the Son. Our baptism in the name of the Triune God signals the fact that God is not just “out there,” but also “in here,” and that from the very beginning, God has made a home in us. 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 circulating everywhere. 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. Someone who knows, as we heard in the creation story from Genesis, that we are made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26), who is a dance-around of love – which is why, when we give and receive love, we feel most joyful and alive, and most truly and fully ourselves. The so-called “dominion” that God gives to human beings in the Genesis story is permission not to dominate or exploit the other creatures of the earth, but rather to love as God loves, to exercise a dominion of love that protects the wellbeing and integrity of God’s creation. So in the face of the climate crisis, we Christians have a chance to show who we really are: people whose very nature and truest identity is to love as God loves; people who are willing to face squarely the most challenging, even devastating facts; people who can reach into our reserves of courage, faith, and hope and can step out to bear witness to the God who entrusted the world to our care. There is so much that we can do. We can recycle more, drive less, and be sparing in our use of water. Maybe we can eat local, organic foods and support our local farms and land trusts. We can install insulation and cut back on AC. 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, 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 parts per million, and climbing. So we have work to do. And the dance of love that is circulating within us will empower us to do this work. The Diocese of Massachusetts recently decided to divest from fossil fuels, reasoning that if it’s unethical to ruin the world by burning fossil fuels, then it’s unethical to profit from that ruin. The Diocese of Western Massachusetts, where I serve, is in the midst of debating whether or not to divest its portfolio, and perhaps that it is a conversation that some of you can initiate or join here in the Diocese of Arizona. Divestment is one of the best strategies around for mobilizing a movement that will eventually accomplish what we really need: a stiff price on carbon and strong, binding international treaties. Meanwhile Bill McKibben has written an article calling for the largest rally in the history of the climate movement. It will be held in New York City on the weekend of September 20. As 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.” I’m not going to ask you to expand your carbon footprint by joining me in September at what’s being called the People’s Climate March, but maybe you can invite your New York friends to come, and your friends in New England, and anyone who lives, let’s say, a half-day’s train ride from Manhattan. The melting ice in West Antarctica may be unstoppable, but so is the love that made us and sustains us and 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, so many ways to help build a better world. On this Trinity Sunday we celebrate the living God who is beyond us, and among us, and within us, the God in whose image we are made, the God who meets us in every Eucharist and who sends us out to make love tangible and visible in the world. “Go,” the Risen Christ says to his disciples in today’s Gospel reading from Matthew. Don’t hang around and worship me. Go. Take part in my mission of mercy, justice, and compassion. Step into the dance and invite everyone else to join in, too. And, whatever comes, “remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).   c) 2014 Margaret Bullitt-Jonas
1. http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/may/nasa-uci-study-indicates-loss-of-west-antarctic-glaciers-appears-unstoppable/#.U3FiNflLWRO 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    

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.

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/)

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.

Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9C), July 7, 2013. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Grace Church, Amherst, Massachusetts.

Isaiah 66:10-14Psalm 66:1-8
Galatians 6:7-16Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Let us not grow weary

For the past few weeks Hilary’s sermons have focused on Galatians, and today, in the sixth and final text from Galatians that we’ll hear this summer, we reach a wonderful line: “Let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9).  What a strong and timely word of encouragement when we may feel tempted to quit!  The same encouragement shows up in other places, too.  In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes, “Since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart” (2 Corinthians 4:1).  For emphasis, he repeats the phrase just a few lines later: “We do not lose heart” (2 Corinthians 4:16).  In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples the same thing, giving them a parable “about their need to pray always and not to lose heart” (Luke 18:1).

You and I need that encouragement, don’t we?  It is so easy to lose heart, so tempting to think that our efforts to serve God, our efforts to heal and protect and bring forth life on this planet are for naught.  We can feel that hopelessness not only in our personal lives, but in our collective life, too.  It can be discouraging to read the newspapers, depressing to follow the news, from this country’s deployment of drones and its ever-increasing use of surveillance to the ongoing violence in the Middle East.  Or take the issue that you know is most urgent to me, and that I’ve spoken about many times from this pulpit: climate change. We’re having another scorcher of a summer, with triple digit and often record-breaking temperatures in California, Arizona, and Nevada. The U.S. is experiencing deep drought in some places and wild deluges in others, such as the 13 inches of rain that fell this week on Florida’s panhandle in 24 hours.  Last summer the Arctic sea ice essentially melted, and this spring we learned that the atmosphere’s concentration of CO2 has reached 400 parts per million, a level not seen on Earth for some three million years. We’ve got only a short time in which to drastically reduce emissions and to wean the world off fossil fuels lest we catapult into catastrophe. But given the political and corporate forces arrayed against us to prevent substantive action on climate change, it’s no wonder that we can grow weary, no wonder that we can lose heart.

Yet here is Jesus, filled with the Spirit of God, sending out seventy disciples two by two to proclaim that the kingdom of God is near.  Evidently he sends them out with a sense of urgency, for they are to travel lightly, without purse or bag or sandals.  How precious their mission is, and how precious few these missioners are, for, as Jesus observes, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few” (Luke 10:2).  Off they go ahead of him into an often dangerous world, proclaiming a new way of living that is organized not around domination and power-over but around interdependence and mutual care, not around selfishness and greed but around sharing and self-giving, not around privilege for the few and poverty for the many but around justice and kindness for all.  These missioners are fired up by a vision of possibility that animates and inspires them. 

Meet two or three people like that, and you can’t help but have hope.

We are honored to welcome a similar group of missioners who have joined us this morning.  They come to us courtesy of Climate Summer, a leadership program for young adults who travel by bicycle to call for action on climate change.  Four Climate Summer teams have fanned out across New England, and the six members of this particular team are pedaling across Massachusetts, from Greenfield to Barnstable.  These folks are not necessarily Christian, but in some ways their experience resembles that of the 70 disciples that Jesus sent out.  They sleep where they can, and last night they used the Parker Room.  Like the 70 disciples, they gratefully receive whatever food is set before them, otherwise living on six dollars per person a day.  They travel lightly, with hardly a purse, bag, or sandals to their name – just a backpack and a couple of trailers, which they take turns hauling behind their bikes.  And wherever they go, they speak to whoever will listen – to students and parents, to journalists and radio announcers, to fellow activists and ordinary citizens – urging us to work together to create a more life-giving society and to build a better future beyond fossil fuels.1 

The Climate Summer team is about the same age as many of the elite firefighters who perished fighting a massive wildfire in Arizona earlier this week.  Like those heroes, these young people are fighting to protect a community – the human community, the community of life on Earth.  On this Fourth of July weekend, I want to say: this is what patriotism looks like. 

Now I’m going to do something we never do in sermons – to invite you Climate Summer folks to stand up.  Would you please give us your name and tell us where you’re from? . . . . 

I hope that many of you will take a few moments at coffee hour to speak with these young people about what they’re learning and about the campaigns they’re working on.  It is good news that we have among us such witnesses to life, and not only here, but also in many places around the country and the world.  Now that signs of a climate crisis are becoming unmistakably clear, a worldwide movement is rising up to proclaim that it is possible to protect life on this planet – we don’t have to settle for letting ocean levels rise, entire species disappear, carbon emissions foul the air, and our children inherit a scorched and chaotic world.  Last week the United Church of Christ became the first national church group to divest from fossil fuels,2 making it crystal clear that this is a moral battle.  It would be unthinkable for us to profit from slavery, and it should become just as unthinkable for us to profit from the production and burning of coal, gas, and oil. Even the chief economist for the International Energy Agency says that two-thirds of the world’s carbon reserves must stay in the ground if we’re going to prevent runaway global warming.3  So the divestment movement is beginning to take off.

The summer may be heating up, but so, too, is resistance to fossil fuels.  During the last two weeks of July, statistically the hottest stretch of the year, local groups across the country “will be fighting against bad energy projects: coal ports and coal-fired power plants, tar sands pipelines….tar sands refineries,”4 and the banks that invest in them.  As Bill McKibben says, “It’s time to stand up – peacefully but firmly — to the industry that is wrecking our future.”  I hope you’ll check out the handouts at coffee hour that give a list of local actions, and I hope you’ll consider taking part in one. You don’t have to ride a bicycle across Massachusetts in 90-degree heat to stand up for life – there are many ways to serve God, many ways to bear witness to love – but whatever you can offer will be welcome, for, as Jesus says, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.”

I want to close by commenting on two other things that Jesus says in this Gospel passage. After the seventy return with joy from their mission and report on their success, Jesus says, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning” (Luke 10:18).  What does this mean?  Well, do you remember that familiar injunction to “Think Global, Act Local”?  Jesus suggests that we do more than that – he invites us to think cosmic.  When we act in love, our efforts have an eternal significance.  The results of our efforts may or may not be as obviously successful as were the efforts of the seventy disciples, but whenever we act in love, Satan falls from heaven like a flash of lightning. This poetic image portrays the hidden, cosmic power of every act of love to overthrow the power of evil.  So when I feel weary or lose heart, I sometimes remind myself of what Jesus saw – “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning” – and I find fresh energy to do the good that I can.

A second thing that Jesus says to the 70 disciples after they return is that their deepest joy should spring not from the success of their efforts, nor even from knowing that acting in love has a cosmic effect, but rather from knowing that whatever they do, their “names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20).  Their names, your name, all our names – are held close in God’s heart. We don’t have to earn God’s love.  In fact, there is nothing you can do that will make God love you any more, and nothing you can do that will make God love you any less. Your name is written in heaven, and that is cause for joy, indeed. 

So, whatever battles you may be fighting today, whatever works of love you may be engaged in, I hope you and I will take to heart the words of St. Paul: “Let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9). 

1. “Cyclists Launch Anti-Fracking Drive In Greenfield,” www.recorder.com.

2. “United Church Of Christ Is First National Church Group To Divest From Fossil Fuel Investments,” www.washingtonpost.com

3. “Two-Thirds Of Energy Sector Will Have To Be Left Undeveloped, Bonn Conference Told,” www.irishtimes.com

4. Bill McKibben, “United We Sweat,” Orion, July-August, 2013, p. 13; online at www.orionmagazine.org