creation care

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

Sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter (Proper 4C), June 2, 2013. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Grace Church, Amherst, Massachusetts.

1 Kings 8:22-23, 41-43Psalm 96:1-9
Galatians 1:1-12Luke 7:1-10

On being set free

Starting today, for six weeks our lectionary includes passages from Paul’s letter to the churches of Galatia.  Over these six weeks, we’ll have a chance to immerse ourselves in Galatians, to ponder the epistle almost in its entirety.  I am delighted, because this letter includes one of my all-time favorite lines in the whole Bible: “For freedom Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1). We won’t hear those particular lines for several weeks, but already in this morning’s reading Paul is sounding the great theme of his letter to the Galatians: freedom.  He makes an opening salutation, one that Randy often uses when he begins his sermons – “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” – and then Paul jumps right in to describing what Christ has done for us: he “gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age” (Galatians 1:3-4).  He gave himself… to set us free. 

Galatians has been called “the Magna Charta of Christian liberty,”1 for in this letter Paul makes a spirited defense – in the words of one scholar, a “bitterly polemical”2 defense – against those who would try to limit the freedom that is ours in Christ. Scholars don’t seem to agree on the location of the churches to which Paul was writing, nor on when this letter was composed, but, as one scholar puts it, it is clear that this letter “reflects a critical moment in the early Christian movement’s struggle to define its mission and identity.”3

What was at stake? The issue in Paul’s time was whether or not a Gentile had to become a Jew before becoming a Christian – whether or not a man had to get circumcised and to follow other elements of Jewish law and ritual in order to become right with God.  The struggle, in other words, was whether we are made right with God by doing certain things, by performing certain rituals, by carrying out certain good works that earn us our salvation, or whether Christ’s dying and rising is the decisive event that sets us free. Paul was convinced that the Christ event had set us free and that we shouldn’t go crawling back into the various traps that keep us restricted and small. The trap that he identified in his own day was the trap of believing that we must purify ourselves in certain ways, must follow certain rules, and must carry out certain obligations, before God in Christ will love us and save us and accept us. Of course there’s nothing wrong with doing good works or performing rituals, but they are not what saves us. Paul couldn’t be more vehement in defending our freedom in Christ, and twice he pronounces “accursed” anyone who proclaims “a different gospel” (Galatians 1:8-9; 1:6).

So what does it mean to know freedom in Christ?  Surely being free in Christ does not mean acting like the proverbial college freshman who arrives on campus and feels delightfully entitled to express every impulse, indulge every whim, and try every illegal substance because somehow the rules no longer apply. As any addict will tell you, in the end there is nothing more confining or death-dealing than to give free rein to our cravings and impulses – we end up trapped. 

Freedom in Christ is not self-indulgence or anarchy, but the deep ordering of our desires. When we know what we love most, we are set free. When we know what we long for more than anything else, when we find something big enough to die for, something big enough to live for, then we are set free. When we become aware of something so beautiful and so true that we want to give ourselves to it totally, with nothing held back, then we are set free. We know what to hold on to, and what to ignore or let go.  We have found our compass, found our North Star.  Whatever the circumstances of our lives may be, we know what we want to bear witness to, what we want to embody. We are free.

People who have discovered their freedom in Christ know that we don’t have to earn our salvation. We don’t have to impress anybody or prove ourselves to anybody. We can finally quit the ego’s desperate, insatiable quest for other people’s approval, for other people’s sympathy and admiration, because people who are free in Christ are people who know that we are loved.  Nothing and nobody can take that love away, and we don’t have to do a thing to earn it. We are loved for no reason – not because of anything that we have done or for anything that we will do, but simply because we are.  God loves us not because we’re lovable, but because God’s nature is to love. That is what we see when we gaze at the cross: a God who loves us completely.

So it’s worth paying attention to the many ways in which we limit our freedom and trap ourselves in a small place. For instance, we can take at look at our inner self-talk. Do we have a habit of thinking harsh things about ourselves?  Do we belittle ourselves and put ourselves down?  It’s also worth paying attention to the ways in which we do or do not encourage other people to step into their freedom.  Do we give other people our full attention, without expecting or demanding that they be a certain way?  Do we approach other people without preconceived expectations of who they are and what they need and what we intend to (quote-unquote) ‘get out’ of the conversation?  Are we basically trying to promote and prove ourselves, or are we giving ourselves in love?  Alan Jones contends that “‘We either contemplate or we exploit.’ We either see things and persons with reverence and awe, and therefore treat them as genuinely other than ourselves; or we appropriate them, and manipulate them for our own purposes.”4 

It’s all about growing in freedom, and about setting others free.  Every time we receive the Eucharist, it’s as if Christ were saying to us: “I love you, and I want to set you free.”  As Paul says, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).

I’d like to close with a story about how I glimpsed my freedom in Christ in the most unlikely of places.5 It’s a story about the first (and, so far, the only) time that I was arrested.  Back in 2001, when the administration was pushing an energy policy that involved new drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I headed down to Washington, D.C. and joined a small group of interfaith activists.  After holding a worship service in front of the Department of Energy, twenty-two of us knelt down in front of the doors to protest our country’s relentless use of fossil fuels. We sang, we prayed for God’s Creation, and, when the police told us to move or be subject to arrest, we refused to move.  Before long I was in handcuffs and locked in a police wagon.  Over the course of a very long afternoon and into the night, we were transferred from one jail to another, each one more apparently God-forsaken than the last, as if we were making our own small descent through Dante’s circles of hell.  By nightfall our group was locked into a row of cells that ran along a corridor, and I found myself confined with fellow priest and environmental activist Sally Bingham in a small, dark space supplied with a dirty toilet and two bare, metal bunks painted olive green and etched with graffiti.  We were anxious, tired, and unsure how much longer we would be detained.  Our nerves were frayed.

We had had nothing to eat or drink all day, so when a guard appeared with a pile of bologna sandwiches, stacks of donuts wrapped in cellophane, and cups of Kool-Aid, I took notice.  I was hungry, but I don’t eat meat and I can’t eat sugar, so I wasn’t sure what to do. Finally I accepted a couple of bologna sandwiches and asked for a glass of water. I peeled off the bologna and gloomily studied the meal in my hands: bread and water.  Basic jail food. 

Just then someone called from an adjoining cell, “Watch out.  The bread’s moldy.”

With growing despair I examined my slice of bread.  I couldn’t see anything green, but it was too dark to get a good look.  All in all the bread looked fairly loathsome.  I took a quick bite, figuring that if I gulped it fast, maybe I wouldn’t notice my disgust.  But as the bread touched my tongue, I remembered the Eucharist.  I remembered how Jesus gives himself to us in the bread and the wine. My disgust vanished, along with my sense of deprivation.  I took a second, slow bite of the bread and ate it with reverence.  I took a sip of water.  To my surprise, I suddenly saw that I had everything I needed.  My anxiety slipped away.  I was filled with gratitude and completely at peace.  I knew that I was free.  It didn’t matter that I was still in jail.  It didn’t matter that I had no idea when I would get out.  None of that mattered.  I was being fed from within, as if a river of joy were secretly flowing through me.

I looked around my cell in disbelief.  No, I wasn’t hallucinating.  I could see that everything was exactly as it had been: the same bleak walls, the same metal bunk, the same rows of bars.  Nothing had budged.  But everything had changed.  It was as if my outward circumstances had suddenly fallen away, or as if they were filled with a hidden radiance.  Everything material seemed to open beyond itself, to be secretly as spacious as the wild Arctic wilderness.  The powers-that-be thought they had imprisoned me, but actually I was free.  I almost burst out laughing.

May freedom be ours today, and every day, as we welcome and ponder the mystery of Christ within us and among us. How is Christ inviting you to be set free?

1. Introduction to “The Letter of Paul to the Galatians,” The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, RSV, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 1410.

2. Richard B. Hays, Introduction to “The Letter of Paul to the Galatians,” The HarperCollins Study Bible (Fully Revised and Updated), NRSV, HarperCollins Publishers, 2006, p. 1972.

3. Ibid.

4. Alan Jones, Soul-Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality, p. 29, quoted by Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 202.

5. For a longer essay that includes this story: Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, “When Heaven Happens,” in Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo, NY: Seabury, 2007.

Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent, February 24, 2013. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Grace St. Paul’s Church, Tucson, Arizona. Listen to an audio recording.

 
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18 Philippians 3:17-4:1
Psalm 27 Luke 13:31-35
 

“Look toward the heaven and count the stars”

 

“The word of Yahweh came to Abram in a vision, ‘Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield…’…God brought him outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them… So shall your descendants be.’ And [Abram] believed Yahweh.” (Genesis 15:1, 5-6a)

 

It is wonderful to be back at Grace St. Paul’s and to worship with you again.  I am delighted that today’s readings bring us the story of our brother Abram, this man who longed so much for life to flow through him.  You know the story – Abram and his wife Sarai were old, and they had no children.  Although the couple yearned to bear a child, Sarai was unable to conceive, and to all intents and purposes it seemed impossible that they would ever have biological descendants.  Yet the word of God came to Abram in a vision, and Abram received that mysterious assurance that only comes when our minds grow quiet and we listen attentively in the silence.  “Do not be afraid,” God whispered in Abram’s heart. “I am your shield.” And then, on that memorable night, “God brought [Abram] outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them’” (Gen 15:5).

 

You live right here in the Tucson desert, so you know what that’s like: you go out into the desert on a quiet night, you stand in the company of ancient mountains, you look up, and you see a sky brimful of stars.  Even if you’ve seen it many times before, you can’t help but be seized by amazement.  Wherever you look, there they are: stars and more stars – more constellations than you could possibly name.  Abram couldn’t count them any more than we can, and in that moment of silent wonder, he heard God’s promise: “So shall your descendants be.”  Now comes the story’s pivotal sentence, the sentence on which everything depends: “Abram believed Yahweh.”  He believed Yahweh.  He trusted that somehow his longing to give life would be fulfilled.  In the silence of his heart, he heard the divine promise, and he believed what he heard.  He accepted it.  He put his trust in it.  No, let’s put it in stronger terms – he committed himself to that promise, even though there was no tangible evidence to back it up.

 

I relish this story of Abram because he is the archetype of every person of faith.  Abram is a spiritual companion to everyone who feels a deep longing to be fruitful and who dares to trust that somehow that longing will be fulfilled.  Of course the desire to give life can be expressed in all kinds of ways.  Sometimes it takes a literal form, as it did with Abram and Sarai, in our desire to conceive and bear children, and to raise a family.  But the desire to give life is expressed in many other ways, too – by the desire to heal or to reconcile, by the desire to speak truthfully and kindly, to be patient and to listen more carefully, by the desire to create something beautiful, to tend a garden, feed the hungry, work for justice, or in some other way to make the world a better place.  Whoever we are, whatever our age or circumstances, God has planted deep within us a desire to bear fruit, a longing for our lives to be a blessing to those who come after us.  We want to bless the future by the choices that we make today.  We want life to flow through us – through our hands and words and thoughts and actions.

 

That’s no surprise, really, for that is what Jesus came to do: to give us a path to life.  “I have come that you may have life,” he tells us, “and have it to the full” – or, as another translation puts it, “I have come that you may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).  “I am the bread of life,” he says (John 6:35).  “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6).  And whatever Jesus has, he wants to share with us (c.f. John 14:20, 15:4, 14:27, 15:9, and 17:21-26).

 

Lent is a season that calls us to reclaim our God-given longing to be fully alive and to be bearers of life.  During these forty days we are invited to pause and take stock of our personal lives and of our life together on this planet.  In Lent we have an opportunity to confess where we have gone off-track, and to repent and ask God for strength to amend our ways.  It turns out that Lent is a season that we dearly need, for it is crystal clear that the present path on which our species is headed is a path that leads to death, not life.  Whether we are keenly aware of it, or are 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 this planet is unraveling.  We humans are destroying wildlife habitat on land, sea, and air at an alarming pace, and we have already burned enough coal, gas, and oil to raise the planet’s average temperature by more than one degree.  If we stick to our present course, business as usual, the earth will be an average of four or five degrees hotter before the century is out.  Nine of the ten warmest years occurred in the last decade, and scientists recently confirmed that 2012 was the hottest year in U.S. history.  At the end of last summer, scientists reported that Arctic sea ice had melted to a record low – as one headline crisply put it: “Half of Polar Ice Cap Missing.”

 

Meanwhile we are seeing around the world a chaotic array of weather extremes – intense flooding, droughts, and storms – maybe including this week’s snowfall in the desert.  Although any given day may be cold, the long-term trend is going in one direction: toward heat.  The drought here in Arizona and other Western states, one of the worst in American history, was front-page news in yesterday’s New York Times.1

 

We’ve never had a Lent in which the choice before us has been so clear: will we stay true to our heart’s deep call to be bearers of life?  Will we cast our lot with Abram and trust that even if the task before us seems impossible, even if preventing runaway climate change seems beyond our reach, nevertheless we will “stand firm in the Lord” (Philippians 4:1) whose love sustains us, who tells us again and again, “Do not be afraid,” and who urges us to believe that our acts of love and justice will bear fruit in ways we cannot even begin to imagine?  “Look toward the heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.  So shall your descendants be.”

 

I was thrilled to learn ten days ago that on Ash Wednesday more than forty activists from all over the country were arrested outside the White House in a peaceful act of civil disobedience.  Why did they decide to break the law?  Because they were challenging the President to confront the climate crisis and to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, a pipeline that would carry what some people are calling the dirtiest oil on the planet from Canada’s tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico.  Many of those arrested carried on their foreheads the smudge of ashes.  As a friend of mine, Jim Antal,2 wrote in an eloquent statement to explain his arrest, “Repentance is essential if we are to find a way forward.  Ash Wednesday is a good day to be arrested because civil disobedience is a form of repentance…  Our generation must now repent of the sin of wrecking God’s creation.”

 

Then, a few days later, on the first Sunday in Lent – last Sunday! – somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000 people gathered on the Mall in Washington, DC, in the largest climate rally in history, to voice their opposition to the Keystone pipeline and to urge a swift transition to clean, safe, renewable sources of energy.  Can it be that the climate movement in this country has finally sprung to life?  Can it be that the God who lures and coaxes us to become agents of life is speaking now in the hearts of men and women all over the country – and indeed, all over world – inviting us to stand up and speak out and change course?

 

The battle for life to flourish on this planet is just that – a battle.  Energy companies already own a pool of fossil fuels that is five times larger than the amount of fossil fuels that – if burned – would catapult the global climate into catastrophic, runaway change.  So we are fighting to keep that carbon in the ground, where it belongs.  We are fighting for our future.  We are fighting for a habitable planet, and for the survival and flourishing of life – not just human life, but life as it has evolved around the world.

 

Standing up for life can be risky, as Jesus well knew.  In today’s Gospel passage, some friendly Pharisees warn him to turn back, because Herod Antipas wants to kill him.  But Jesus refuses to step away from the life-giving path along which God is leading him, whatever the cost may be.  “Today, tomorrow, and the next day,” he replies, “I must be on my way” (Luke 13:33).  In short, he won’t be stopped.  Like Abram, Jesus chooses to live by faith.  He puts his trust in the unseen God and keeps going.  No wonder it’s so inadequate to think that we who follow Jesus are a fixed institution or cling to a rigid set of beliefs!  The Church is not a building – we’re a movement!  We’re a community of people joined with Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, and we are on the move – like Abram, like Jesus – to stand up for life in an often death-dealing world.

 

How is God inviting Grace St. Paul’s to take a leadership role in this city and in this diocese in addressing climate change?  I know that you already have a strong Creation Spirituality Ministry here, and I salute you for that!  Maybe there is more you would like to do.  Maybe you will want to join the Annual Ecumenical Lenten Carbon Fast, which delivers free daily emails during Lent, with suggestions for reducing your carbon footprint.  Maybe you’ll want to discuss divesting from fossil fuel companies as a symbol of your commitment to heal the earth. Maybe you’ll want to convene conversations among lay people and clergy in the diocese about how to create a political economy that does not depend on ravaging the earth, or how to build emotional resilience in the face of almost inconceivable loss, or how to help each other move past our fear and despair and to keep listening for the voice of a loving God.

 

Now is the perfect moment to stand up for life, for we’re living at a pivotal moment in human history when our choices really matter.  As philosopher Joanna Macy points out, we live between two competing possibilities: the possibility of life unraveling on this planet and the possibility of creating a life-sustaining society.  We don’t know how the story will end, so it matters what we do.  It matters whether or not we are growing in love for ourselves, for our neighbors, and for the earth on which all life depends.  It matters whether or not we are finding a way to become healers and transformers in a troubled world.

 

After making the covenant with Abram, God says to him, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates” (Genesis 15:18).  Moved by the love of God in Christ, we, too, want to be able to say to our descendants: I give you a flourishing world.  To quote another climate activist (Eban Goodstein), we want to be able to say to our children and to our children’s children:

 
I give you – polar bears. I give you – glaciers. I give you – coral reefs. I give you – ice shelves as big as a continent. I give you – moderate weather. I give you – a stable climate.
 

May God sustain and bless our efforts in the years ahead.

 

1. “Thin Snowpack in West Signals Summer of Fire and Drought,” by Jack Healy, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/in-drought-stricken-heartland-snow-is-no-savior.html.

 

2. “Ash Wednesday 2013: A Good Day To Be Arrested as an Advocate for God’s Creation and for Future Generations,” by the Rev. Dr. Jim Antal, Minister and President of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ.

 
 
 
 

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Epiphany, January 20, 2013. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Grace Church, Amherst, Massachusetts.

Isaiah 62:1-51 Corinthians 12:1-11
Psalm 36:5-10John 2:1-11

You have kept the good wine until now

“When the steward tasted the water that had become wine… the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, “…You have kept the good wine until now.” (John 2:9-10)

A few weeks ago I came across an essay on the editorial pages of the New York Times in which – as I remember it – the author described the personal and professional hardships of turning 40.  He listed all the reasons why the decade of your 40’s is particularly difficult, but it turns out that he wasn’t looking back nostalgically at a happier time in his youth – he had found every decade of his life unsatisfying.  His essay laid out the reasons why being in your 30’s was pretty awful, too; why it was a burden to be in your 20’s; and why it was so tough to be a teenager.  The essay did not go unanswered.  Before long a letter showed up, in which a reader was keen to carry on the line of reasoning and to inventory all the difficulties we face in our 50’s and 60’s.  I am waiting for a letter that comments on the decades after that. 

Now I don’t have a problem with being clear about the challenges of life, but isn’t it true that something in us hungers for more than a life filled with complaints and regret?  Isn’t it true that we want more out of life – and to give more to life – than to find ourselves perpetually hemmed in by frustration and disappointment?  It is so easy to settle for being only half here, to be caught up in anxiety about the future or weighed down by bitterness about the past.  We can look as if we’re alive – we can go through the motions: we can walk, talk, drive to work, deal with the kids and the grandkids, run the errands – but inside we can be irritable, depressed, worried, and only barely present.  Deep down, isn’t it true that we long for so much more?  The truth is that we’d like our days to be brimming with wonder, not with worry.  We want to be able to rise to the challenge of whatever life brings, to find a way to live with zest and creativity, with curiosity and compassion, no matter what the circumstances of our lives may be.  We don’t want to succumb to cynicism or despair.  We want to be fully alive, not partially alive. 

I can’t help but turn to a poem by Mary Oliver that expresses the determination not to settle for anything less than fullness of life.  It’s called “When Death Comes,”1 and the poet writes, at the end:

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement. 
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. 

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real. 
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument. 

I don’t want to end up simply having visited the world.

Jesus would understand a declaration like that.  Jesus came to show us a path to fullness of life.  “I have come that you may have life,” he tells us in what sounds to me like a mission statement, “and have it to the full” – or, as another translation puts it, “I have come that you may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).  “I am the bread of life,” he says (John 6:35).  “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6).
And so his first miracle – the first of the seven so-called “signs” in the Gospel of John that disclose Jesus’ true nature and reveal his glory – is to turn water into wine.  You know the story: during a wedding at Cana, while the festivities are in full swing, the wine runs out.  Jesus points out six large stone jars, all of them empty, and has them filled with water; then he turns their contents into the finest, most delicious wine that anyone has ever tasted.  Jesus is an agent of change, a transformer.  By his words, at his touch, in his presence, what is ordinary and lackluster, “same old same old,” becomes vital and sparkling, as delicious and joy-inducing as the very best – well, choose whatever most pleases you – cabernet sauvignon, merlot, champagne… 

What the story suggests is that there is a river of divine creativity at the very center of things, ready to pour into the most ordinary moments of our lives so that we are filled again with reverence and wonder, with a sense of courage and fresh possibility.  Jesus turns water into wine, not only once, at a long ago wedding in a far away place, but whenever we find ourselves caught up in that mysterious transformation of despair into hope, of fear into gratefulness, of sorrow into joy.  I know what it’s like – you know what it’s like – we all know what it’s like – to find ourselves standing motionless like those empty stone jars, stuck in our old habits and fixed ways of thinking, hopelessly repeating our endless stories of worry, argument, and lament – and then along comes Jesus to wake us up and to fill us with his wine.  Carl Jung once suggested that an alcoholic’s addiction to spirits might be a misplaced search for the Holy Spirit, that intoxicating presence that gladdens our hearts and draws us out of ourselves and gathers us up in love. 

Speaking of love, it’s no accident that the story of Jesus turning water into wine takes place in the context of a wedding.  One commentary2 I read on this Gospel passage argues that it’s strictly incidental that the setting of this miracle story is a wedding, but personally I think that the wedding imagery is crucial.  The wedding is an image of erotic love, of passionate commitment and fidelity.  The poet’s words echo again in my ears:

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement. 
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. 

What transforms the water of our lives into wine?  Discovering that we are deeply loved, discovering that there is an unshakable, eternal Something at the heart of reality that is always giving itself to us in love and always inviting our passionate response.  God is looking for us and longing for us with the ardor and tenderness of a bridegroom looking for his bride.  How else are we transformed except by love?  We can’t turn the water of our life into wine by ourselves.  We can’t force ourselves to change.  Brute willpower can never accomplish deep and lasting transformation of our hearts and minds.  What changes us – what transforms the water of our lives into wine – is the experience of being deeply loved.  So if we want our lives to be transformed, and if we, too, like Jesus, want to be healers and transformers, people who are themselves fully alive and who bring life to others, then we can do what Jesus did: we can listen patiently and faithfully to the inner voice of love.  We can make ourselves vulnerable to the divine touch of God.
You could do worse than to sit down this week and to read through today’s first reading very slowly, receiving the words as if they were personally directed to you – not only to Zion, not only to Jerusalem, but also to you.  “You shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD will give.  You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.  You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land” – that is, the living, natural world around you – “shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the LORD delights in you, and your land shall be married.”  Now here’s the finish: “For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder” – that is, God – “marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you” (Isaiah 62:2b-5).
Can you take this in?  It doesn’t matter how old you are or how young you are.  It doesn’t matter if you’re in your teens, your 30’s, 40’s, or 90’s.  It doesn’t matter if you’re single or divorced, partnered, married, dating or widowed.  None of that matters.  God is longing to take you, and us, and all God’s creation, into God’s heart.  God wants to give you, and us, and all Creation, a new name, a new identity.  We are no longer to be called Forsaken, but rather My Delight Is In You; we are no longer to be called Desolate, but rather Married.  Whenever we glimpse that union between the soul and God, whenever we taste that marriage between heaven and earth, whenever we discover again how precious we are, and how precious the whole of God’s Creation is, what can we do but come to life?  

Now is the perfect moment to come to life, for we’re living at a pivotal moment in human history when our choices really matter.  As philosopher Joanna Macy points out, we live between two competing possibilities: the possibility of life unraveling on this planet and the possibility of creating a life-sustaining society.  We don’t know how the story will end, so it matters whether or not we are awake.  It matters whether or not we are growing in love for ourselves, for our neighbors, and for the earth on which all life depends.  It matters whether or not we are finding some way to become healers and transformers in a troubled world.  Howard Thurman, the spiritual mentor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., used to say, “Don’t ask what the world needs.  Ask what makes you come alive and go out and do it.  Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

We may say to ourselves, “Oh, it’s too late for me and for the world; I’m too set in my ways, and the world is too far gone.  After all, the Arctic is melting, there is a mega-drought in the Amazon, and some scientists say that we’re past the point where the world’s warming can be limited to 2 degrees.”  Yet here comes the steward, reaching out to take a sip of Jesus’ wine, and saying with astonishment, “You have kept the good wine until now!” (John 2:10b).  What if we are on the brink of – and are in fact already caught up in – a process of radical transformation, in which hate is already being turned to love, despair to hope, and water into wine?  Are we willing to become a bride married to amazement, a bridegroom who takes the world into his arms?

I’ll end with some lines by Adrienne Rich from the last section of her poem, “Dreams Before Waking” (1983):

What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other’s despair into hope? —
You yourself must change it. —
what would it feel like to know
your country was changing? —
You yourself must change it. —
Though your life felt arduous
new and unmapped and strange
what would it mean to stand on the first
page of the end of despair?

1. Mary Oliver, “When Death Comes,” New and Selected Poems, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

2. Reginald H. Fuller, Preaching the Lectionary, revised edition, Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1984, p. 450.

Rev. Dr. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, preaching at Grace St. Paul’s Episcopal Church,
Tucson, Arizona, on June 10, 2012: “Collision, Confrontation, and Climate Change”