creation care

Being willing to die and bear fruit

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
–John 12:24

The last time I stood in this pulpit was eight years ago, and what a joy it is to return to this beautiful space, to look out at so many familiar faces, and to enjoy the company of those who discovered All Saints sometime after my family and I headed out to western Massachusetts. I bring greetings from Grace Church in Amherst, and I want to thank your rector, my friend and colleague David Killian, as well as Marianne Evett and the Adult Education Committee, for asking me to come this weekend.

Our Lenten season of prayer and self-examination invites us to bring before God our deepening concern about the health of God’s precious, unrepeatable, fragile Creation. We just experienced what’s being called “the winter that never was.” ¹ You noticed that, right? Winter 2012 will go down as the fourth warmest winter on record for the contiguous United States, according to the National Climatic Center. ² And now, with a mixture of pleasure and uneasiness, we’re experiencing a spring that seems ready to catapult us into a very early summer. The decade from 2000 to 2010 was the warmest on record, and 2005 and 2010 tied for the hottest years ever recorded. ³ We know that heat-trapping gases are accumulating in the atmosphere, mostly because of the burning of fossil fuels, and those gases are driving the Earth’s climate beyond the relatively stable range within which human civilization developed over the past 10,000 years. On average, the Earth has already warmed about one degree worldwide, and the Earth’s temperature is not only rising — it’s rising increasingly fast. Already we are starting to experience the extreme weather events — droughts, floods, and storms — that are associated with an unstable climate. A new study shows that since 2006, four out of five Americans have been affected by weather-related disasters. ⁴ Immediately I think of the unprecedented heat and downpours that New England endured last year, the tornadoes that took down areas in towns near my house, the hurricane that blew through with its drenching rains, and the weird and massive snowstorm in late October that leveled trees and knocked out our heat and electricity for five days.

I mean — come on! I’ve been thinking about climate change for years, but now it’s starting to get personal. I’m noticing its effects not as a distant possibility in a far off place in the far off future, but as something that is affecting me, and the people I love, right here, right now. Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben puts it like this in his recent book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet: global warming is not just a future threat. It is, he writes, “no longer a threat at all. It’s our reality. 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.” ⁵

Am I the only one who experiences a certain disquiet as we contemplate this new reality? I don’t think so. When it comes to the climate crisis, many of us feel a sense of urgency. As Christians, we long to know how to face the peril of this moment with all the wisdom, courage, and resilience that a loving God can give us. We want to find a way of life and a way of being that enable us not only to live skillfully in the present, but also to look ahead to the future with confidence and hope. Like the unnamed Greeks in today’s Gospel story from John, “we wish to see Jesus” (John 12:21). We want to move out of our inertia, denial, and fear. We want to offer the world — and our children, and our children’s children — more than a shrug of hopelessness or a sigh of resignation. We want to see with the eyes of Christ, to feel with the heart of Christ, to serve with the hands of Christ, and to share with God in the great work of restoring all people and all creation to unity with God and each other in Christ. ⁶

How do we do that? Today’s Gospel gives us a place to begin. “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). This saying of Jesus was so basic to his mission that it shows up in all four Gospels, and twice in Luke (Matthew 10:39, Mark 8:35, Luke 9:23-24, Luke 17:33). There is a death we have to die, if we want to save our life — a life we have to lose, if we want to be truly alive.

What needs to die, in order for us to be fully alive? What do we need to relinquish and let go — to drop, to renounce, to stop doing — if we want to create a sustainable human presence on the earth and to become fruitful again? Well, we might start by critiquing our economic system and what the bishops of the Episcopal Church denounce as “unparalleled corporate greed” and “rampant consumerism.” ⁷ An economy that is sustainable over time is one that honors the gift of Creation and its intricate web of life; it is one that would be sustainable well beyond the lives of our grandchildren. But depending on non-renewable energy and non-renewable resources is by definition unsustainable. Gobbling up resources faster than the planet can replenish them is by definition unsustainable. Producing a killing level of greenhouse gases is by definition unsustainable.

We hear a lot of talk these days about the value of energy independence, ⁸ but the big problem is not just our country’s reliance on foreign oil, but its reliance on oil, period. The planet’s atmosphere doesn’t care about the source of the oil that we burn. As far as the atmosphere is concerned, it doesn’t matter if the oil we extract comes from the deserts of Saudi Arabia, the tar sands of Canada, or from the bottom of the deep blue sea. What matters is whether or not it gets extracted and burned, for once burned, it releases greenhouse gases that heat up the atmosphere and destabilize the climate. Surely dependence on fossil fuels is one thing that needs to die if we want to create a life-giving society. Like Jesus’ grain of wheat that needs to fall into the earth in order to give life, fossil fuels need very literally to stay in the ground. As Christians we should be advocating for clean, safe, renewable energy, and for economic systems that are sustainable and just, and that don’t tear apart the very fabric of life upon which human beings and all other creatures depend.

So we can hear Jesus’ words as a challenge to social and economic structures that need to be transformed. “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

We can hear these words on a personal level, too. Are we anything like that isolated grain of wheat that refuses to let itself fall into the earth and die? Maybe we’ve developed a hard shell that keeps us isolated and apart, so that we stand in our own little kingdom and are estranged from the people around us. Maybe our lives are closed in on our small ego-self and its insistent ambitions and needs. Maybe we race through the day clenched by anxiety or stress, fearful and holding tight, too busy to see what we’re doing and to let go in love. Maybe we simply feel small — that our lives can’t possibly make a difference, and that essentially we’re on our own. All kinds of things can close us in on ourselves – pride or fear, arrogance or shame. Many of us suffer from the illusion that we are completely separate from each other and that our identity stops with our own skin.

Well, here comes Jesus, telling us not to live like that isolated grain of wheat but to go ahead and die – die to yourself, die to your worries, die to your fear, your judgments, and your shame, and give yourself away in love. Even die to who you think you are. You’re not who you think. God has a larger identity in store for you. And it is waiting for you, right here, right now! Let God break open that hard shell of yours! Step out of your smaller self and into your true, free self in God! We might have to cry when that happens, for it can hurt when we open ourselves in love; and we might have to laugh when that happens, for it brings joy when we give ourselves fully to each moment, with nothing held back. We might have to dance when that happens, and we might have to co-create new ways of living with other people and with nature and with all other creatures.

When our hardened hearts break open – when we die to the habit of self-absorption and self-promotion, and live no longer for ourselves – we begin to perceive and to care about the needs of the world around us. It can start with small things – starting a compost pile or a community garden, buying from local stores, getting an energy audit, or renewing a commitment to recycling more and driving less. This church has led the way in modeling how parish buildings can be made energy-efficient, and maybe there are similar changes we can make in the buildings where we live and work. But there is larger battle on our hands as we struggle to turn back the forces that are driving climate change. Now is the time to throw ourselves into building a diverse, grassroots, bold, visionary, hope-filled, hands-on, feet-on-the-ground, shoulder-to-the-wheel political and social movement that can transform the society in which we live. I am happy to say that Bill McKibben will come to Cambridge one month from now for a “Healing Earth” vigil, dinner, and talk sponsored by Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries, ⁹ an event linked with Earth Day. and I hope you’ll be there.

There are so many ways that our lives can bear fruit! As we move through this last week of Lent and head with Jesus toward the cross, we look for what needs to die in the social systems around us and what in our own lives needs to die, so that new life can spring up among us and within us.

It is you for whom Christ came into the world, you for whom he died, you whom he now would fill with his presence and his Spirit. Soon 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 not only our own belovedness, our own blessedness in God, but also the fact that everyone is beloved, everyone is blessed. Everyone and everything is part of a sacred whole, and everyone is 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 will become at last who we were made to be, a blessing on the earth.

1. David A. Gabel, “Reflecting on the Winter that Never Was,” www.enn.com

2. Heidi Cullen, “Spring Gets Ahead of Itself,” www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/opinion/spring-gets-ahead-of-itself.html

3. 4. http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/02/25/431891/americans-affected-by-weather-related-disasters

5. 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. Italics in original.

6. Bishop Ian T. Douglas gave me this re-statement of the Church’s mission, which improves on the one found in The Book of Common Prayer (p. 855, online at http://www.bcponline.org/Misc/catechism.htm#AutoNumber20).

7. “A Pastoral Letter from the Bishops of the Episcopal Church” meeting in Hendersonville, North Carolina, March 13-18, 2009 to the Church and our partners in mission throughout the world. [http://www.episcopalchurch.org/79901_106036_ENG_HTM.htm]

8. Clifford Kraus and Eric Lipton, “U.S. Inches Toward Goal of Energy Independence,” New York Times, March 22, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/business/energy-environment/inching-toward-energy-independence-in-america.html

9. For information, visit www.coopmet.org. To learn about Bill McKibben’s climate advocacy and to participate in the next global event, visit www.350.org.

The “Oh, sh*t” moment we all must have

“A leper came to him, begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’”
 (Mark 1:40)

Today Grace Church is taking part in the National Preach-In on Global Warming. We’re joining more than one thousand congregations of varying faith traditions across the country who are focusing their attention this morning on the urgent reality of climate disruption. I’ve preached on this topic many times, and I’m not going to say much about the facts on the ground. You already know the science. Rapidly increasing greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of coal, gas, and oil are destabilizing “the only climate under which human civilization has flourished.” ¹ Sea levels are rising; oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic; weather events are becoming more severe; species are going extinct; ecosystems are shifting; refugees are already on the move. According to NASA scientists, last year was the ninth-warmest year on record, and nine of the ten warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000. ²

Now I want to ask — what happens inside you when you hear facts like these? How does your body respond? If you’re like me, you feel something constrict or tighten up. When I think about global warming, I sometimes feel my belly squeeze and my breathing get shallow. I want to push the news away. I don’t want to think about it. Why? Because it can make me feel anxious and helpless, maybe full of despair. I’d much rather turn my attention to something pleasant, or at least something that seems more immediate and closer to home — like: time to make supper.

However, as Australian ethicist Clive Hamilton writes, “At some point — finally — the full truth of what the climate scientists are saying breaks through all of our defences. We can no longer pretend the impacts of warming are too far off to worry about, or that the scientists must be exaggerating. We realise that our apathy is rooted in fear…” He goes on to say, “For some, the realisation creeps up as the true meaning of warming leaks into consciousness. For others, the breakthrough is sudden and overwhelming.” ³ In other words, there comes a point when we finally get it, we finally grasp the enormity of the climate challenge. One journalist calls it the “Oh shoot” moment, though actually he uses a more basic expletive than that. ⁴ The “Oh shoot” moment is the instant when our denial breaks open and we realize that the people we’d like to ridicule as “alarmists” are bringing us news that is essential for us to hear.

I remember exactly where I was when I hit my “Oh shoot” moment. In the summer of 2001 I was on Thompson Island in Boston Harbor for an intensive weekend conference about the science and politics of climate change. After a long day of taking copious notes and trying valiantly not to go numb under the barrage of bad news, I went outside before bed and stood alone — reeling — under the stars, trying to assimilate what I’d heard, trying to find my balance again, trying to pray, trying to find my way back to God.

When we reach the “Oh shoot” moment that we all must have, we may feel as lost as the leper in today’s Gospel story, as desperate as he was, as distressed and alone, as needy for help. Anxiety is even more contagious than leprosy, and out of anxiety we may isolate ourselves and chew on our worries alone, or we may deliberately or unwittingly spread our anxiety around like an infection, making other people catch it or making them keep a safe distance when they see us coming.

What do we do with our feelings of helplessness and despair? How do we face the unraveling of life as we know it without panicking or giving up? Where do we find energy and hope to keep working toward solutions, and what spiritual practices can sustain for the long struggle ahead?

I’ve been pondering these questions for the past ten years in my efforts as a climate activist, and I’d like to offer three words, three spiritual practices, that can guide us when the world as we know it is falling apart. The words are “creation,” “crucifixion,” and “resurrection.”

“Creation” is when we root ourselves again in the love of God. If we’re reeling with anxiety, fear, anger or sorrow, we need to ground ourselves again in the basic fact of our belovedness in God. In today’s story, the leper comes to Jesus and kneels before him, begging to be healed. “If you choose,” he says, “you can make me clean” (Mark 1:40 ). And how does Jesus respond? In one of the rare moments when the Gospel writer tells us what Jesus is feeling, the text says, “moved with pity” — or, as some translations put it, “moved with compassion” — Jesus stretches out his hand to heal the suffering man. The God we know in Christ is a compassionate God, a God moved with pity who reaches out to all who suffer, to all who feel lost, afflicted, helpless, or estranged. When the news of climate change — or of any other trauma — threatens to undo us, we can remember what I call the “creation” practice: we recall our belovedness in God. God created us in love and for love, and God will never let us go, even if we die.

What helps us to stay grounded in love? Maybe we bring awareness to our breathing for a while, and consciously breathe in the love of God. Maybe we turn our attention to something beautiful that’s right beside us, maybe notice the stillness of the trees or the way the sun is shining just now against that cloud. Bringing awareness to the present moment is one way to reconnect with the love of God, for God is always and only found right now, right here. Or maybe we dip into Scripture and turn to the God who says, “I have called you by name; you are mine. You are my beloved; on you my favor rests. You abide in me, as I abide in you. I am the vine, and you are the branches. Nothing can separate you from my love.” There are many ways to come home to God’s love, and that is the first practice we need to cultivate when times are tough and everything in us wants to close down or flee.

A second spiritual practice is “crucifixion,” the willingness to stand or kneel at the cross and to let our hearts break. In today’s story, we see Jesus’ vulnerability: he stretches out his hand to touch the leper, whom society considered untouchable and ritually unclean. From this little scene at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel, it’s already evident that for the sake of giving us healing and wholeness, Jesus will move toward us and share in our pain. Jesus’ solidarity with human vulnerability reaches its fullest expression on the cross. When we pray at the foot of the cross, we discover how close God is to us in our terror and vulnerability and loss. When we look at Jesus dying an agonizing death, we gaze squarely at everything that frightens us and does us harm. We face our fear and anxiety, our sadness, anger, and guilt. And we see that all of it — all of it — has been taken up by Jesus, that all of it has been embraced by God. Even our sin, even our willfulness and greed, our apathy and despair – all of that, and more, is met on the cross by the outpouring love of God. There is nowhere we can go, nothing that we can experience, that God in Christ does not share in and redeem.

So when the latest bad news about climate change — or anything else — grips my heart, I go to the cross in prayer and let myself grieve. I let myself howl, if I need to, for we must let our hearts be broken by the things that break God’s heart. That is how we share consciously in Christ’s suffering, and how we know that he shares in ours. That is how we discover how intimately he loves us, and where we receive the resilience and zest to renew our efforts in the world with fresh energy and zeal.

And so God draws us into the third spiritual practice, “resurrection.” Through conscious sharing in Christ’s crucifixion, we are drawn by God’s grace into resurrected living. Filled with the Spirit, we share in God’s mission to restore all people and all creation to unity with God and each other in Christ. Resurrection as a spiritual practice is doing our part to heal what is broken, to resist evil with love, to be agents of justice and compassion. Like the healed leper in today’s story who can’t contain his joy, we want to proclaim the reality of hope and healing through the power of God.

Of course, what we feel sent out to do in our newly resurrected lives may take many forms. The world needs healing at every level, so wherever we feel led to begin is a good place to start. Commitment to care for the Earth will affect what we buy and what we refuse to buy, what we drive and what we refuse to drive, how we heat our homes, how much we re-use and re-cycle.

The season of Lent begins in ten days, and I hope you will participate in this year’s Ecumenical Lenten Climate Fast ⁵ — look for details in the written announcements. I hope you will join me during coffee hour to send Senator Scott Brown a Valentine’s Day postcard that invites him to love the Earth by opposing efforts to weaken or delay enforcement of the Clean Air Act. I hope you will read and sign The Clean Air Promise, which I will then return to Interfaith Power & Light. ⁶ Finally, I hope that some of you will consider joining me at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Earth Day, April 22, when tens of thousands of people from all walks of life and from all across the country will gather for a rally to galvanize this country’s environmental movement.

God has so much love to give us, so much vulnerability to share with us, so much energy to give us in the mission to heal and restore life. Creation — when we ground ourselves in the love of God; crucifixion — when we open our hearts and minds to the dangers we face; and resurrection — when we pass beyond anxiety and fear to take action that makes a difference: these three practices can give us the wisdom and courage to move through that “Oh shoot” moment and to relish many moments of creativity, generosity, and joy.

1. Byron Smith, “Doom, Gloom and Empty Tombs: Climate Change and Fear,” Studies in Christian Ethics, 2011, 24:77 DOI: 10.1177/0953946810389120, p. 78 (online version: http://sce.sagepub.com/content/24/1/77).

2. “NASA Finds 2011 Ninth-Warmest Year on Record,” January 19, 2012 (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2011-temps.html)

3. Clive Hamilton, “The ‘Oh shit’ moment we all must have,” April 27, 2010, http://www.earthscan.co.uk/blog/post/The-e2809cOh-shite2809d-moment-we-all-must-have.aspx, cited by Byron Smith, op. cit., p. 78.

4. Clive Hamilton, op. cit, p. 79, citing journalist Mark Hertsgaard.

5. Sign up on Facebook, or visit this site: http://www.macucc.org/pages/detail/2410, to receive a daily email with suggestions for reducing your carbon footprint.

6. The mission of Interfaith Power & Light, the organizer of the National Preach-In on Global Warming, is “to be faithful stewards of Creation by responding to global warming through the promotion of energy conservation, energy efficiency, and renewable energy.” (http://interfaithpowerandlight.org/)

Grumbling in the vineyard

The LORD is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and of great kindness. (Psalm 145:8)

Here’s a question. How do we bear witness to God in a society that is increasingly secular and pluralistic? That’s the question we’re invited to discuss with Rob Hirschfeld after today’s service, in our first Sunday Forum of the season. It’s a great question, and in some ways a perennial one, too. How do we bear witness to the sacred in a society that is so driven by other values, and in which speaking about quote-unquote “God” can seem like so much empty chatter? Jesus faced this question, too, and it’s interesting to notice that he often spoke about God, and the kingdom of God, not in direct terms, as if he were giving a linear, logical lecture, but sideways — in parables and stories that are full of paradox and surprise, in periods of silence, in embodied acts and gestures — as if the reality and mystery of the divine can never be captured directly in ordinary speech, but only conveyed indirectly, maybe in a story that catches us off-guard or in a question or an action that suddenly pierces our heart.

Take today’s Gospel, for example. “The kingdom of heaven is like…” Jesus begins, and off he goes into a story that looks perfectly ordinary. A landowner goes out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard, agrees with the laborers to pay them the usual daily wage, and sends them out into his vineyard to work. The day goes by, and at different intervals — at around 9 o’clock and noon, at about 3 o’clock and 5, the owner goes back to the marketplace and hires more workers, promising to pay what is fair. So far, so good — and I must say that we who listen to this story, we who have been experiencing in this country a soaring rate of unemployment and underemployment, and a growing disparity between the wealthy and the poor — we probably find it satisfying to hear a story about an employer who can hire so many workers, and who can relieve so much anxiety and give so many people and their families the promise at the end of the day of a nourishing meal and a good night’s sleep.

But then the story takes an unexpected twist: the landowner pays the fellows who were hired at the eleventh hour a full day’s pay. He gives a full day’s pay to the folks who worked for one hour and for three hours, for six hours and for nine. Everyone gets a full day’s pay. No exceptions. And the laborers who worked the longest hours start to grumble. “Hey,” they object. “That’s not fair! We’re entitled to more! If you give those who worked only a short time a full day’s pay, then you should give us — I don’t know — two day’s pay!” Actually, if you look closely at the text, you’ll notice that it’s not only, or maybe even mainly, the equality in pay that most irks the laborers who complain — it’s the equality in value that the landowner seems to be assigning to the workers themselves. “You have made them equal to us” (Matthew 20:12), object the angry workers, as if to say, “We’re better than they are, can’t you understand that?”

I don’t know about you, but I can identify with that voice of envy and entitlement. Any child who has vied with a sibling for their mother’s love and attention can understand the anxious and sometimes petulant concern that everything be divvied up fairly. If Tommy got to have two cookies, then I should get two cookies, too. If I raked the lawn for three hours, and Tommy raked for one — plus half the time he was horsing around — well, I should get paid a whole lot more than he does!

That is how our usual transactions work: we invest such-and-such an amount of time and effort, and we expect to be paid accordingly. The resources of love and money are limited, and we’ve got to hustle to get what we want. We’ve got to earn it and compete for it, and if necessary to push our neighbor out of the way, so that — bring it on! — we can finally receive our just desserts.

But along comes this generous landowner, and our notions of merit and entitlement are thrown out the window. In God’s economy, everyone receives the full love of God. God’s love isn’t parceled out in dribs and drabs, so that a person over here receives this much, and a person over there receives that much. No, God’s love and grace are given entirely and fully to each and every person without regard for merit or achievement. God doesn’t care about merit — God loves you completely. God doesn’t care about achievement — God loves you completely. God doesn’t even care about time. You may have spent a lifetime in the earnest search for God and to do God’s will. Or until this moment you may have spent your whole life running away from God, frittering away your days on trivia and distractions, wasting yourself on selfish or malicious pursuits. In a way, it doesn’t matter. God’s love is always available now, in each present moment. Right here, on this very spot, right now, in this very breath, here is God’s love, reaching out to embrace us and to call us home, welling up within us to fill every aching, empty, and desolate place.

That is the love we want to experience and to which we want to bear witness in the world: a divine love that cannot be earned or achieved, but only received, a love that from moment to moment is always circulating within us, and to which we can always return whenever we get lost or forget who we are. Tap into that stream of love, and we can relinquish our compulsive drive to prove ourselves and promote ourselves. We don’t have to any more: we are complete. We have everything we need. We breathe in God’s love, taking it into our depths, and we breathe it out, so that it can be fully expressed in the world.

Knowing that we are completely loved by God can give us a deep serenity, but it’s not going to make us lie down and eat grapes. No, it’s going to send us out to do the work that God has given us to do: to love and serve God with gladness and singleness of heart.

As I look at next weekend, I see that we have plenty of opportunities for expressing that love, for bringing it more fully into the world. Some of you will be coming to Grace Church on Saturday morning to offer several hours of much-needed clean-up work. On Saturday afternoon some of you will gather at 4 o’clock for a fundraiser and book event to benefit the little school in Haiti, St. Mathieu de Bayonnais, whose students and families and faculty we’ve taken under our wing, and who in turn are giving us the gift of their hope and faith. Some of you will have personal things to attend to that I know nothing about.

And next Saturday some of you — I hope many of you — will carpool with me to join a climate rally at a park on the Boston waterfront. It turns out that September has been a rousing month for the climate movement. September began with the so-called Tar Sands Action in Washington, D.C., in which more than 1200 people, including our own Lucy Robinson, were arrested for an act of peaceful civil disobedience at the White House to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry dirty tar sand oil from Canada down to Texas at a potentially disastrous environmental cost.

Next Saturday, the last weekend of the month, thousands of climate rallies will be held around the world as part of what’s being called Moving Planet day (), a day to get us moving beyond fossil fuels. For people living in New England the most important rally to attend is the one in Boston, one of five cities nationwide that climate organizers have targeted as the best site for a massive demonstration (

I have been asked to give an interfaith prayer both at the rally in Boston on Saturday and at the rally in Northampton on Sunday. And I’ve been wondering what to say. When I look out at the crowds, how can I convey the love of God? How can I let them know that within them and among them is a source of energy that is always clean and always renewed? How can I let them know that their struggle to create a sustainable world will be strengthened and renewed if it is guided by the divine love that sustains all things? As far as I know, I could be the only person in the line-up of speakers who communicates a religious perspective, and I know that I will be addressing a crowd of folks from a range of faiths, and no faith at all — “spiritual but not religious”; “post-Christian.” I can’t use the language of our tradition, for traditional Christian words only shut some people down and drive them away. I can’t mention Jesus, or the power of the cross and the resurrection, or the gift of the Eucharist. I can’t say much about the power of meditation and prayer, much less refer to the story of the laborers in the vineyard. But, God willing, the love of God in Christ will still inform what I do, and will still give me words to speak. Whether we acknowledge it or not, and whether we perceive it or not, God’s love is always being poured out to us, right here, right now, in full abundance, with nothing held back.

Maybe it will be enough to ask everyone to feel their feet on the ground, and to make conscious contact with the earth. Maybe it will be enough to ask everyone to stretch out their hands, and to sense the hands of everyone the world over who is fighting with us for a better world. Maybe it will be enough to ask everyone to take a deep breath, and to remember that with every breath we are exchanging the elements of life with all green-growing things. How good it is to wake up to the present moment, and to sense our connection with the earth and all its creatures! How good it is to marvel for a moment at the sheer gift of being alive!

I won’t be saying this out loud at the rally, but secretly I’ll be giving thanks for the kingdom of God. Secretly I’ll be giving thanks for God’s absurd generosity, for being like an extravagant employer who gives everyone a full day’s wages, no matter how much or how little each person has worked. Secretly I’ll be praising the LORD who “is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and of great kindness” (Psalm 145:8).

The Way, the Truth, and the Life

I would like to thank my long-time friend and colleague Martin Smith for inviting me to preach here this morning, and to thank your Environmental Committee, which, as far as I can tell — given what it has been up to in just the last few months: planting trees, hosting a film festival, organizing a nature walk — is an unusually dedicated and talented group.

I want to speak about reclaiming the sacredness of God’s creation, but right off the bat I have to admit that at first glance the phrase may sound absurdly naïve or sentimental. The sacredness of creation? As soon as I say these words, I imagine someone wincing and I hear the wry, even cynical voices of people who say dismissive things like — tree hugger, whacko New Age devotee, pagan. I think of Oscar Wilde, who observed: “Nature is a damp place over which large numbers of ducks fly, uncooked.” Or of someone else’s remark that “Animals may be our friends, but they won’t pick you up at the airport.”

Fair enough. I’m not going to go all gushy on you.

But actually, when it comes to the natural world, many of us don’t feel sentimental or cynical. We feel uneasy, even anxious. There are times when I wake up at night thinking about what the future will hold. We have already burned enough coal and gas and oil to raise the planet’s average temperature by more than one degree, and if we keep 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. 2010 tied 2005 as the hottest year in 131 years of recordkeeping. Do you know how many countries endured unprecedented heat last year? Nineteen. Temperatures in Burma reached 117 degrees Fahrenheit, setting a record for Southeast Asia, while the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan hit 128.3 degrees Fahrenheit — a record not only for the country but for all of Asia. ¹

How serious is the threat to God’s creation? Here is what one mainstream environmental lawyer, Gus Speth, has to say: “…all we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and [organisms] and leave a ruined world to our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy. Just continue to release greenhouse gases at current rates, just continue to impoverish ecosystems and release toxic chemicals at current rates, and the world in the latter part of this century won’t be fit to live in. But, of course, human activities are not holding at current levels — they are accelerating, dramatically.” ²

In a situation that speaks so much of death, of fear and hopelessness, it is astonishing — maybe even shocking — to hear Jesus say, “Do not let your hearts be troubled” (John 14:1). For of course they are troubled! We fear for our children and our children’s children. We know only too well that if we just keep doing what we’re doing, keep carrying out our usual daily activities in our usual way, then within two, three, four generations we will bring an end to creation as we know it.

And yet Jesus tells us, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” It’s a message that runs through Scripture — do not fear; be not afraid. What I like so much about this way of putting it — “do not let your hearts be troubled” — is that it reminds me that to some degree I have power over whether or not I am beset with fear. You and I have the power to guard our hearts, the power to exercise what we might call “spiritual warriorship,” so that rather than be mesmerized by the forces of death and swallowed up by the latest terrifying statistics, we can tune our awareness again and again to the love of God that is always being poured into our hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5). As spiritual warriors, we don’t turn away from the problems we face; we turn toward them and we engage with them, while consciously breathing in God’s love.

Jesus was hardly in denial about the fact of evil, suffering, and death. In today’s Gospel passage, he knew full well that he was on the brink of being arrested, tortured, and killed. And yet he could say to his friends, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” How was he able to say this? Because he knew that he was rooted in the love of God. Because he knew that nothing could separate him — or us — from the love of God. Because he knew that we, too, have been drawn, as he was drawn, into the divine life that circulates at the center of everything and that can never be destroyed.

That is the great promise of today’s Gospel passage: at the deepest level of our being we belong to God; we abide in God and God abides in us. As we read in the First Letter of John, “…All who abide in love, abide in God, and God in them” (1 John 4:16). And the love of God extends not only to us, not only to human beings — it extends to the whole created world and to its diversity of buzzing, blooming, finned, and feathered creatures. In Jesus, God took on flesh, and the incarnation tells us that God comes to us in and through our bodies and through the “body” of the earth. So maybe it’s no wonder that the risen Jesus came back for a time in a body. After he died and rose again, he didn’t just vanish into thin air, into some ethereal, disembodied realm of light. He came back first in the flesh, as if to say: look for me here, in the body of this world. Look for me in the sights, sounds, and smells, the tastes and touch of the world. Here is where you will find me, for I am everywhere present. The created world is good — so says Scripture all the way back to Genesis. What is holy and what is natural, what is divine and what is physical — these apparent opposites are embraced and interwoven in the incarnation of Christ, and all of it shines with God’s glory.

That is the vision that animates us as we rise up to protect God’s creation. We have touched the deep truth that we are God’s beloved; we have breathed in again the love and presence of the divine Mystery that dwells within us and around us, who shines out in the waves of the Potomac, in the breeze on our faces, in the touch of a child’s hand. Fired by that love, we are set free to love as generously and boldly as Jesus did, and to live through a time of turmoil with creativity and even joy.

“I am the way,” Jesus said to his friends. “I am the truth and the life.” And from his words and actions, from his passion, death, and resurrection, a movement sprang up – a movement of passionate men and women who were convinced of the way of generosity and kindness, committed to the truth of love, and dedicated to a life of praising and serving God, whatever the cost might be.

In a time when the planet’s living systems are in peril, now is the time to reclaim our God-given connection with the earth. Now is the time to renew our union with God and all God’s creation — which includes not just our human fellows but all living creatures and the larger eco-systems on which all of us depend. As a society we have to change course, for our present way of life is unsustainable. Depending on non-renewable energy and resources is by definition unsustainable. Consuming more resources than the planet can provide is by definition unsustainable. Wiping out wilderness habitat and the innumerable species upon which our species depends is by definition unsustainable. Producing a killing level of greenhouse gases is by definition unsustainable. We are living beyond our ecological means.

If ever there were a time to bear witness to our faith, now would be the time. If ever there were a moment to hold fast to our vision of a world in which human beings live in right relationship with each other and with our fellow creatures, now would be the time. Now is the time, as theologian Sallie McFague would say, to recognize that the world is not a hotel, but our home. ³ When we visit a hotel, we may feel entitled to use copious amount of hot water, to throw towels on the floor, to use and discard everything in sight and then to head to the next hotel – in short, to exercise what she calls the “Kleenex perspective” of the world. But when we realize that in fact the earth is our home – that God created it and loves every inch of it and entrusts it to our care – then everything changes. We realize that we live here; we belong here; we can no longer tolerate a life-style that exhausts the planet’s resources and that treats land, sea, and sky alike as receptacles for waste.

What can we do to simplify our lives? I invite you to think of one way you can listen more deeply to the land and to learn from it. Maybe you want to start a compost pile, to plant a garden, or to check out a farmer’s market. If you have some money to invest, you might invest in socially responsible funds or in local, green businesses. You might invest in your local land trust, seeking ways to protect some of the few remaining wild areas and local farms that we still have. You might get an energy audit, or invite the neighbor you’ve never met to come over for a cup of tea. We need to build up our local communities, to live in ways that are closer to the earth, more about sharing than about consuming, more about self-restraint than about self-aggrandizement, more about generosity than about fearful survivalism, so that we can take care of each other when the hard times come. There is joy that comes in living like this — a joy that springs up simply from being true to the basic goodness that God has planted in us. And because individual actions are necessary but not sufficient to the challenge that confronts us, together we need to create the boldest, most visionary, wide-ranging, powerful, hope-filled, hands-on, feet-on-the-ground, shoulder-to-the-wheel political and social movement that humanity has ever seen.

It is you for whom Christ came into the world, you for whom he died, you whom he now would fill with his presence and his Spirit. 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 will become at last who we were made to be, a blessing on the earth.

The risen Christ is among us and beside us and within us.

Do not let your hearts be troubled.

1. Facts in this paragraph are from research posted by Lester R. Brown’s Earth Policy Institute, www.earth-policy.org.

2. James Gustave Speth, The Bridge on the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008, p. x (Preface).

3. Sallie McFague, A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008, p. 53.

Hands-on faith

“[Jesus] said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’”
— John 20:27.

“Glory,” I kept murmuring the other day as I jogged down the hill behind Smith College. Trees were bursting into leaf; magnolia and forsythia were in full bloom; birdsong filled my ears; and I was inhaling the season’s first scent of cut grass. The sky was blue, the winter was over, and all I could say was “Glory, glory, glory.”

Earth Day fell on Good Friday this year, and rather than celebrate Creation Sunday on Easter morning, we decided to honor it today, on the Second Sunday of Easter. Now is our chance to give thanks for God’s Creation and to rejoice in the holy radiance that shines in every wild and quirky creature, in every branch and blossom, in every chipmunk and bumblebee. Sometimes, when I stand in a field somewhere and gaze at the Holyoke Range, or when I watch sunlight and shadow play across the Connecticut River, I feel what I imagine the disciples felt when they announced to Thomas with such joy and surprise, “We have seen the Lord” [John 20:24].

Maybe it is sheer sentimentality that makes us respond so deeply to the beauty of the world, but I don’t think so. Years ago, former Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple pointed out that we live in a sacramental universe, for the created world is like the sacrament of Baptism or Communion — it discloses the presence of God. William Temple’s insight is entirely orthodox, for Christians as far back as Irenaeus and on to Augustine, Aquinas, and Teilhard de Chardin perceived the whole universe as being the image of God. ¹ That experience is what invites us in every Eucharist to turn to our Creator and proclaim, “Heaven and earth are full of your glory.”

So isn’t it interesting that the risen Jesus came back for a time in a body? He didn’t just vanish into thin air, into some ethereal, disembodied realm of light, but instead came back first in the flesh, as if to say: look for me right here, in the body of this world. Look for me here in your ordinary lives, here in the sights, sounds, and smells, the tastes and touch of the world. Here is where you will find me, for I am everywhere present. The created world is good — so says Scripture all the way back to Genesis. What is holy and what is natural, what is divine and what is physical — these apparent opposites have been embraced and interwoven in the incarnation of Christ, and all of it shines with God’s glory. As Jesus says to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe” [John 20:27]. Sometimes the best way to make contact with the divine is not to worry about abstractions and mental constructs, about what we believe or do not believe, but rather to reach out, as Thomas was invited to do — to make conscious contact, to discover the living God in the here and now, in the gift of this moment, in the flesh of the world, in the flesh of our daily lives.

Yet if the whole creation is radiant with the risen Christ, how much suffering the part of the universe that was entrusted to us, planet earth, is now enduring! The earth itself is being nailed to the cross. We learn about its wounds every day, from the BP oil rig explosion a year ago, that led to the largest accidental oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, to the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan, where radioactive particles have been released into the sea and air, and where workers are apparently still locked in a desperate struggle to prevent total meltdown. This week the South and Mid-West experienced an extraordinary series of tornadoes, the worst tornado season in decades, and our hearts go out to all those who in the course of a few terrifying days lost their loved ones, their livelihood, their homes, or their lives.

Were those record tornados related to global warming? Meteorologists seem to be split on the question, with most saying no, and some saying that the unusually warm waters of the Gulf contributed to the tornados’ power. Of course, no particular tornado, flood, drought, hurricane, or any other extreme weather event can be directly attributed to human-caused climate change. But it is clear that the earth’s temperature is not only rising, but rising increasingly fast. Nine of the ten warmest years occurred in the last decade. 2010 tied 2005 as the hottest year in 131 years of recordkeeping. Last year 19 countries endured unprecedented heat. Temperatures in Burma reached 117 degrees Fahrenheit, setting a record for Southeast Asia, while the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan hit 128.3 degrees Fahrenheit — a record not only for the country but for all of Asia, and the fourth hottest temperature ever recorded anywhere. ²

How serious is the threat to God’s creation? Here is what one mainstream environmental lawyer, Gus Speth, has to say: “…all we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and [organisms] and leave a ruined world to our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy. Just continue to release greenhouse gases at current rates, just continue to impoverish ecosystems and release toxic chemicals at current rates, and the world in the latter part of this century won’t be fit to live in. But, of course, human activities are not holding at current levels — they are accelerating, dramatically.” ³

Jesus says to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe” (John 20:27). Are we willing to reach out our hands and to touch the wounds of creation? Are we willing to make contact with the pain of the earth? It is so tempting to turn away — maybe to catch up on email or pour a drink or clean the basement, anything that keeps us from looking directly and carefully at the destruction going on around us. We do need to take breaks; we do need to take care of business; but we also need to embark on a personal and social transformation that will enable human beings to live more lightly on the earth.

The good news is that the risen Christ is with us as we face and touch the wounds. As a contemporary theologian, Richard Rohr, has put it, “The fact that [Jesus] returns to embodiment tells us that salvation is first of all in this world, and embodiment is good. [Jesus] meets the disciples back at their jobs, the women in their very human grief, with friends for breakfast, with two [people] walking along a road, and first of all to a very human friend, Mary of Magdala. He does not leave this world. He re-enters this world as it is and reveals its radiance.” ⁴

It is clear to me that once we perceive the radiance of the world, we receive the motivation and the courage to protect it. Just as Jesus breathed his Spirit into the disciples on the day of Resurrection, so he breathes his Spirit into us, and with each conscious breath we draw in more deeply the presence and the power of God. Who knows what will be possible when we Christians awaken to the power that sleeps within us, and when we realize that our breath and words and hands can convey the reconciling, healing, and liberating love of God?

Traditionally during Lent and Holy Week we pray with the Stations of the Cross. Now that it is Easter, I have set up a small display for coffee hour that I’m calling “Stations of Creation.” On the table in the Connector you will find several ways to express your care for God’s good earth. I hope that you will start by signing a letter to Senator Scott Brown that will be hand-delivered to him on Wednesday by our friends at Massachusetts Interfaith Power & Light. Last year the Senate failed to pass a comprehensive climate and energy bill, so we are counting on the EPA to carry out its responsibility under the Clean Air Act to reduce the emissions that cause climate change. Let’s encourage Senator Brown to protect the EPA, and let’s applaud his commitment to create jobs in Massachusetts, for by shifting from fossil to renewable energy, we will not only tackle climate change but also generate new jobs.

You might want to sign a postcard asking State Senator Stan Rosenberg to support the updated bottle bill, which would expand the bottle bill — the 5-cent deposit that we pay on some beverages to encourage recycling — to include non-carbonated drinks such as water, juices, and sports drinks.

Or maybe you’ll want to pick up material about the Hitchcock Center for the Environment, our local center for environmental education, or to sign a postcard to the Governor urging him to close the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. Or maybe you’ll pick up an application for a low-cost share of fresh vegetables from a new local farm in Northampton.

If you are a resident of Amherst, I hope you will make a plan to contact your Town Meeting members and ask them to vote for the “stretch code” at the May Town Meeting, which begins tomorrow night. Once Amherst passes the “stretch energy code,” we will become a so-called “Green Community” and therefore eligible to apply for state grants to fund energy-efficiency improvements.

After that, step outside and learn a few things from Mary Hocken about a skill that still eludes me: how to create a robust compost pile. It is a great time of year to get our hands back in the dirt!

“Reach out your hand,” Jesus says to Thomas and to all of us. 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. The risen Christ is among us and beside us and within us. Do not doubt, but believe.

1. Sallie McFague, A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008, p. 53.

2. Facts in this paragraph are from research posted by Lester R. Brown’s Earth Policy Institute.

3. James Gustave Speth, The Bridge on the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008, p. x (Preface).

4. Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 150, day 159, sent by email.

Sacred mourning

We are keeping company today with Jesus as he moves through his betrayal, arrest, and trial, and as he gives his life on the cross. I want to thank the Cathedral Scholars for chanting the Gospel for us with such clarity and fervor. The passion story may be deeply familiar to us, but this afternoon we can’t help but hear it with fresh ears. No doubt you know that today Good Friday coincides with Earth Day. This is the first, last, and only time that these days will overlap in our lifetimes — unless, of course, we plan to be around 84 years from now, in 2095, which is the next time it will happen. Of course we can dismiss today’s overlap of dates as nothing more than coincidence. But if it is just a coincidence, then I rejoice in the God who provides such coincidences. For when we place Earth Day and Good Friday side by side, or, to put it another way, when we take Earth Day and our concern for the ongoing integrity and vitality of life on earth, and bring it to the cross of Christ, we receive power not only to face the precarious state of our ailing planet, but also “to comprehend … the breadth and length and height and depth” [bbllink]Ephesians 3:18[/bbllink] of the redeeming love of God.

It is often in nature that I perceive the divine and come face to face with the glory of God, so in recent years the destruction of our life-giving and God-given eco-systems has struck me more and more as a crucial dimension of Jesus’ crucifixion. The meaning of Good Friday has opened up for me: I see the earth itself being nailed to the cross.

Back on that first Earth Day in 1970, some twenty million Americans — that’s one out of every ten of us — rose up to proclaim their love for the natural world. They took part in rallies, protests, and teach-ins, and demanded that our government take action to restore the environment. And it worked. Soon afterward, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, strengthened the Clean Air Act, and created the Environmental Protection Agency.

But forty years later, the troubled relationship between human beings and the rest of creation is starker than ever. A quick scan of the past year makes it clear how much we need a national and international movement to protect God’s good earth. A year ago this week we watched, aghast, as the BP oilrig exploded, killing eleven rig workers and spilling five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the largest accidental oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. This week we watch, aghast, the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan, where radioactive particles have been released into the sea and air, and where workers are locked in a desperate struggle to prevent total meltdown.

Meanwhile, “since the Industrial Revolution, emissions from human activities of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide have driven the earth’s climate system dangerously outside of its normal range.” ¹ Of course there have always been natural cycles of warming and cooling, but for the first time in our planet’s history the cycle is now being driven by human activity. Heat-trapping gases released in the burning of fossil fuels are forcing the earth’s temperature to rise, and the earth’s temperature is not only rising, it is rising increasingly fast. Nine of the ten warmest years occurred in the last decade. 2010 tied 2005 as the hottest year in 131 years of recordkeeping. Last year 19 countries endured unprecedented heat. Temperatures in Burma reached 117 degrees Fahrenheit, setting a record for Southeast Asia, while the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan hit 128.3 degrees Fahrenheit — a record not only for the country but for all of Asia, and the fourth hottest temperature ever recorded anywhere. 2010 brought us a heat wave in Russia, fires in Israel, flooding in Pakistan and Australia, landslides in China, record snowfall across the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, and 12 Atlantic Ocean hurricanes — the kind of extreme weather events that climate scientists consider characteristic of a hotter climate. “Unless global temperatures are stabilized, higher sea levels from melting ice sheets and mountain glaciers,” combined with the expansion of warmer ocean water, will displace “millions of people as low-lying coastlands and islands are inundated.” ² Heat waves and droughts will decimate harvests, and shrinking mountain glaciers will imperil the water supply of hundreds of millions of people.

Climate change epitomizes our assault on the natural world. Scientists tell us that modern industrial society, with its sudden expansion of our capacity to extract and consume the planet’s abundance for the sake of short-term profit, is simply not sustainable. For the past 250 or 300 years, human beings have been extracting goods faster than they can be replenished, and dumping waste faster than the earth can absorb it. Those who are rich live in a luxury once reserved for kings, while the billions who are impoverished struggle for clean water and a mouthful of food. Species are going extinct at a rate unprecedented since the death of the dinosaurs. ³ And the global climate with its delicate balance of gases turns out to be more fragile then we ever imagined.

How serious is the threat to God’s creation? Here is what one mainstream environmental lawyer, Gus Speth, has to say: “…all we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and [organisms] and leave a ruined world to our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy. Just continue to release greenhouse gases at current rates, just continue to impoverish ecosystems and release toxic chemicals at current rates, and the world in the latter part of this century won’t be fit to live in. But, of course, human activities are not holding at current levels — they are accelerating, dramatically.” ⁴ Back in 1951, when I was born, there were 3 billion people on the planet; today there are close to seven billion.

Are you still with me? Have you tuned out yet? It is no easier to listen to even a quick sketch of the damage going on around us than to it is to face the agony of Jesus on the cross. It is painful and scary to acknowledge this devastation, this crucifixion, and if I were speaking at a climate rally, I would probably leap right now to saying what we can do about it and what actions we must take. God knows that there is a lot that we must do, and do fast. But holy wisdom tells us that first we must stop on Good Friday and reflect deeply on how we respond. What do we feel in the face of the crucifixion of this beautiful world that God entrusted to our care? Where do we feel the ache of what has already been lost, and what we are likely to lose? We cannot rush ahead to Easter if we want truly to understand where we now find ourselves, if we want to change course, and if we want to draw upon the self-giving love of God who pours out his life for us on the cross. If we don’t take time to pray through our emotional response, we may do one of two unhelpful things: either become paralyzed with anxiety and do nothing, or go rushing off to do something, anything, not because the action is particularly effective, but simply because we want to stay one step ahead of our feelings. When we don’t stop to feel our love and grief, then our actions are likely to be motivated only by anxiety, worry, and fear.

If we feel the love we will also feel the grief. But, oh, there are so many reasons to avoid our grief! For starters, who wants to feel pain? Not I. What’s more, we may not want to look morbid, or we may fear bringing other people down. Maybe we’re afraid of being considered weak or emotional or sentimental. Maybe we’re afraid that once we start feeling the grief, we will succumb to despair.

I remember going to a weekend climate conference on Thomson Island in the Boston Harbor about ten years ago, and listening to a cascade of facts about thinning polar ice caps, melting glaciers, and the projected rise of the average worldwide temperature in one hundred years. I took copious notes, trying valiantly to absorb the information and not to go numb. But by Saturday afternoon, as I listened to a presentation by a doctor from Harvard Medical School, I was feeling overwhelmed. Before bed I went outside and stood alone under the stars, trying to assimilate what I had heard. At breakfast the next morning I looked for the doctor, and carried my tray to his table. I told him how stunned I was by what he had told us.

“How do you bear it?” I asked him. “What do you do with your feelings?”

“I don’t get into my feelings,” he told me. “I focus on what I can do.”

I considered that comment as I ate my cereal. On one level, it made sense. In the midst of battle, we need to act. We need levelheaded leaders who can say, This is what we must do. Let’s go. When labor organizer Joe Hill was dying, he reportedly said to his followers, “Don’t mourn. Organize.” Maybe it’s a guy thing, too — who knows?

Yet for the long haul we also need to sort out what we feel. Is not grief a way of expressing our love? Is not anger a natural response to injustice? Is not allowing ourselves to express our guilt and regret, our sadness and rage, a way of drawing close to the God whom we meet at the cross? It is in kneeling at the cross that we discover how close God is to us in our terror and vulnerability and sense of loss. When we look at Jesus dying an agonizing death, we look squarely at everything that frightens us, and does us harm. We face our fear, our sadness, and our guilt. And we see that all of it — all of it — has been taken up by Jesus, that all of it has been embraced by God. There is nowhere we can go, nothing that we can experience, that God in Christ does not share with us. Even our sin, even our willfulness and greed, our impatience and envy, our laziness and despair – all of that, and more, is met on the cross by the outpouring love of God.

So I invite you to let yourself kneel in your mind’s eye at the foot of the cross and to notice the love you feel for the earth, and where you most feel its pain. Is it the mountains of Appalachia, whose tops are being blown off so that coal companies can extract the coal that generates most of the electricity in this country, perhaps in this very cathedral? Is it the millions of acres of pine trees that have been killed from New Mexico to British Columbia by the mountain pine beetles that no longer die off in winter because the winters are no longer sufficiently cold? Is it the diminishing songbird population, the dying coral reef or alpine meadow, the polar bear on the iceberg or the elephant in the forest? Is it the refugees on the move in sub-Saharan Africa because Lake Chad has dried up, or the islanders forced to leave their homes in the Pacific Ocean because the sea is rising? Is it the poor in this country who struggle to pay high heating bills and who need help to weatherize their houses, if they have one at all? Is it something more modest and closer to home, maybe a particular field once full of meadowlarks and clover in which you wandered as a child but which has since been “developed” into a mall? Or a sweet little city park you once knew that has fallen prey to drug dealers and neglect? Where do you most feel the pain of the earth? Where do you hear the groaning of God’s creation? What do you need to bring to the cross of Christ, where Christ takes up what we cannot bear ourselves, and whose every word to us is love?

1. Facts in this paragraph are from research posted by Lester R. Brown’s Earth Policy Institute.

2. Ibid.

3. For two recent articles on mass extinction, visit “Multitude of Species Face Climate Threat” and “Saving Endangered Species as the Climate Changes”

4. James Gustave Speth, The Bridge on the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008, p. x (Preface).

Claiming kin

“…Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home” (John 19:25b-27).

I want to tell you right up front that I find this gesture deeply moving. Jesus is suffering unimaginable pain; he is dying; and yet his dying words are completely consonant with the life that he lived: he wants to build relationship. Even as he dies, he reaches out to these two people that he loves so much, his mother and the beloved disciple, and he offers them to each other, inviting them into a fuller, more intimate, and more conscious connection. Jesus spent his whole life generating lively connections among everyone he met, challenging relationships that were built on domination, exclusion, and rejection, and creating ever-widening circles of love in which no one was left out.

We might interpret this scene at the cross simply within the context of personal relationships: here is Jesus showing us how much we need each other, how much we matter to each other. To quote the King James Bible: “Woman, behold thy son… Behold thy mother.” Behold, there is so much love that human beings can give each other! Give it, Jesus says to us. You belong to each other! Let your care for each other be expressed and cherished and known!

Yet I hear in these words much more than Jesus’ longing to connect one human being with another. I also hear his longing to connect human beings with the rest of the created world, his longing to heal the deep split between humanity and our brother and sister beings. The one we call Christ is the one through whom all things were made, in whom everything is knit together, and toward whom all things on heaven and earth converge. As we read in Colossians, “…In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross” (Colossians 1:19-20). As he hangs on the cross, Jesus not only reconciles human beings with each other; he reconciles everything in heaven and on earth, including humanity with the rest of the creation.

This is may be a deeply biblical insight, but it is a very different spirituality than the one with which many of us grew up. I grew up believing that “spirituality” was completely disembodied and ethereal. The God I grew up with had no body. Being a good Christian was all about distancing oneself from the body and transcending the body — both one’s own body and the “body” of the natural world. The natural world and its diversity of buzzing, blooming, finned, and feathered creatures was essentially irrelevant and dispensable, only the backdrop to what was really important: human beings. As a matter of fact, since the time of the Reformation, Western Christianity has had very little to say about the salvation of the natural world and the cosmos, as if only one species, Homo sapiens, is of any real interest to God.

So what a healing it is, what a restoration of the ancient biblical understanding — an understanding that has never been forgotten by the indigenous peoples of the land — to know that Christ on the cross is reconciling all things, restoring all things, and revealing again the deep truth that the earth is holy. Its creatures are holy. The whole created world is lit up with the power and presence of God. The created world is “very good,” as God proclaims in Genesis [bbllink]Genesis 1:31[/bbllink], and the first task of human beings is to tend and protect it.

We human beings are on a long journey back to understanding our God-given connection with the earth. That’s our greatest task and calling at this point in human history: to find our way to union with God and all God’s creation, to learn to reclaim our partnership not just with our human fellows but also with all living creatures. Heaven knows that we humans do not live in right relationship with our brother and sister beings who are four-legged, feathered, or finned, nor with the larger eco-systems of trees and soil and waters on which both they and we depend.

Our estrangement from the natural world is clear in the ecological crisis that is upon us, and when we set this crisis in the light of the cross, we understand it as a moment of judgment, a moment of reckoning. Our society’s way of living – what the bishops of the Episcopal Church decry in a recent pastoral letter as “unparalleled corporate greed and irresponsibility, predatory lending practices, and rampant consumerism” ¹– is a direct contradiction to the way of Jesus. We all know that we’re living in an unsustainable way. Depending on non-renewable energy and resources is by definition unsustainable. Consuming more resources than the planet can provide is by definition unsustainable. Producing a killing level of greenhouse gases is by definition unsustainable. Wiping out wilderness habitat and the myriad species upon which our species depends is by definition unsustainable. We are living beyond our ecological means.

Like it or not, we are the generation of the cusp, the generation that bridges the familiar and lovely old world of a stable climate, clean air, and temperate weather, of animals and birds that know when to migrate, where to nest, and what to eat, of farmers that know when and where to plant, of fishermen that find a catch — and this raw new world of sudden spikes in heat and cold, of wild winds and punishing droughts, of torrential rains and brutal heat.

As Bill McKibben writes in his latest book, global warming is “…our reality. 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 And there is no going back. Human beings have irrevocably altered the earth into which you and I were born. As McKibben puts it, “The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has….” ³ Our task now is not to stop global warming, because that is impossible. Our task is to “keep it from getting any worse than it has to get,” ⁴ and to find ways to live more “lightly, carefully, and gracefully” ⁵ in this new world.

What is the way forward? To kneel at the cross in a spirit of profound repentance. To express not only our love and grief, but also our guilt. To confess the ways that we ourselves benefit from the destruction of the earth, and to admit our own patterns of consumption and waste. And to listen afresh to these words of love: “Woman, behold thy son… Behold thy mother.” Jesus is showing us how to move forward: connect with each other. Choose each other. Claim each other as kin. Turn with love not only to your fellow human beings, but also to the other creatures of the natural world.

On Tuesday The New York Times reported the story of a man who was snorkeling in the blue waters of the South Pacific, photographing a humpback whale and her calf swimming less than 50 yards away. “As [the man] waited for the right moment, the playful calf swam right up to him, so close that he had to lower his camera. That’s when he felt a gentle tap on his shoulder. Turning around, [Bryant Austin] found himself looking straight into the eye of the mother whale, her body bigger than a school bus. The tap had come from her pectoral fin, weighing more than a ton. To Mr. Austin, her gesture was an unmistakable warning that he had gotten too close to the calf. And yet, the mother whale had extended her fin with such precision and grace — to touch the photographer without hurting him –that Mr. Austin was in awe of her ‘delicate restraint.’ Looking into the whale’s eye, lit by sunlight through the water, Austin felt he was getting a glimpse of calmness and intelligence, of the animal’s consciousness. The moment changed Mr. Austin’s life.” He went on to devote himself to making life-size portraits of whales, so that other people might perceive the grandeur of these enormous creatures, and might sense what he saw when he looked into that mother whale’s eye. ⁶

What a marvel it is to break out of our usual state of alienation from the earth and its creatures, and to begin to perceive how connected we are with the other beings all around us. In our fear and despair, it is so easy to feel that we are alone, and that if human beings have irrevocably damaged the creation, then we might as well give up the struggle to create a more just and sustainable future. But then our consciousness breaks open. We meet the gaze of a robin, or a fox, or a frog, we gaze at a tree, we feel the wind on our cheek, and we hear Jesus speak within us, “Behold thy son… Behold thy mother.”

When our inward sight is restored, and our eyes are opened to behold Christ in all his redeeming work, the earth comes alive again and Christ shows up in every sound we hear, in every handful of dirt that we hold, in every bird that we see. The God who created all things also redeems all things and fills all things. Through the crucified and risen Christ, divine love has woven together the human and natural worlds into one inter-related whole. We participate in that mystery, whether we know it or not. Awaken to it, take our place within it, and maybe we will find the strength we need to live more lightly on the earth and to exercise the same delicate restraint regarding our fellow creatures that the mother whale showed to that awe-struck photographer. The only way forward is together.

What would change if we began each day in the way that St. Patrick began his, consciously arising “through the strength of heaven: light of sun, radiance of moon, splendor of fire, speed of lightning, swiftness of wind, depth of sea, stability of earth, firmness of rock”? What would become possible if we asked our brother-sister beings for support? Most of us have never tried it, and I wonder if this might be how the Holy Spirit is now calling us to pray.

So I invite us to take some time in silence and to let the breath bring us images of the living beings that surround us — maybe a red-tailed hawk or a magnolia tree, maybe a frog or prairie dog, a wolverine or walrus, bumblebee or bat. Let images of our brother-sister beings come to you, especially those that are threatened or in danger. Can you sense their support? How different these creatures are from us, how particular and strange, and yet how much they can help us as we take our place in the family of things.

If you prefer, I invite you simply to bring awareness to your body, which in itself is already linked to everything else. Breathe in, and oxygen released by plants and trees flows into our body. Breathe out, and we exhale carbon dioxide that plants in turn absorb. Most of our body’s weight comes from water, just as the surface of the planet is mostly made of water. The salinity of our blood matches the salinity of the sea, as if we carry an ocean inside. Not only that — the carbon and other elements that make up our bodies are the same elements that composed the dinosaurs who roamed the earth sixty-five million years ago, and that will compose whatever beings inhabit the earth sixty-five million years from now. Our body connects us to green-growing plants, to the earth and its creatures, to the oceans, and to every being that preceded us and every being that will follow. Our body even links us to the stars, for everything that makes up our body ultimately comes from stars. Our bodies can become radiant with Christ’s presence.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Rejoice. We are not alone.

Behold thy son. Behold thy mother.

1. “A Pastoral Letter from the Bishops of the Episcopal Church” meeting in Hendersonville, North Carolina, March 13-18, 2009 to the Church and our partners in mission throughout the world.

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. Italics in original.

3. McKibben, Eaarth, p. 2.

4. McKibben interview, op. cit.

5. McKibben, Eaarth, p. 151.

6. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, “Whales’ Grandeur and Grace, Up Close,” The New York Times, April 18, 2011. For a fine article on whales, visit “Watching Whales Watching Us” (The New York Times, July 8, 2009).

Down to earth: The way of the cross

“Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid. And so, because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there” (John 19:41-42).

The passion narrative starts in a garden, where Judas betrays Jesus, and it ends in a garden, where our Lord is laid to rest: sin in the first garden, and death in the second; betrayal in the one, and burial in the other. John’s Gospel clearly wants to remind us of the garden that begins the story of human sin and death, the Garden of Eden. Of course, on Good Friday we haven’t yet reached the end of the story. On Easter morning, from out of that garden-turned-wasteland where sin and sorrow dwell and death reigns supreme, the risen Christ will burst from the tomb. The garden will be transformed: from a place of death it will become a place where new life rises again. According to John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene will be the first person to meet the risen Christ, and she will mistake him for a gardener (John 20:15) — a wonderful insight, for the crucified and risen Christ is indeed a gardener who brings new life.

Living as we do in this time of the earth’s crucifixion, how do we follow Jesus on the way of the cross and the path that gives life? How do we stay true to the mind of Christ, keeping our hearts open and responding with boldness and generosity to his call to give ourselves to this great work of healing? If ever there were a time to bear witness to our faith, now would be the time. If ever there were a moment to hold fast to our vision of a world in which human beings live in right relationship with each other and with our fellow creatures, now would be the time. Now is the time, as theologian Sallie McFague would say, to recognize that the world is not a hotel, but our home. ¹ When we visit a hotel, we may feel entitled to use copious amounts of hot water, to throw towels on the floor, to use and discard everything in sight and then to head to the next hotel – in short, to exercise what she calls the “Kleenex perspective” of the world. But when we realize that in fact the earth is our home – that God created it and loves every inch of it and entrusts it to our care – then everything changes. We realize that we live here; we belong here; we can no longer tolerate a life-style that exhausts the planet’s resources and that treats land, sea, and sky alike as receptacles for waste.

Creating a life-giving society will not be easy. Global market capitalism, the economic system that most of us take for granted, is based on gobbling up the natural resources of the world. As Sallie McFague points out, Christians have an obligation to advocate instead for economic systems that are just and sustainable. We need “to become informed about the global injustices of market economies” and to work “to change the policies and practices of so-called free trade that result in impoverishment and unsustainability.” We have a battle on our hands, for the powers-that-be make hefty profits from the status quo. Oil companies continue to make record profits and to push lawmakers to drill even more widely in our waters and lands. The Clean Air Act is under assault, as is the regulatory power of the EPA. And the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which boasts that it is the biggest lobby in Washington, is pumping tens of millions of dollars into the effort to deny the science of climate change and to block our country from making a transition to clean, safe, renewable energy anytime soon. ²

There is a political battle going on in which we must engage, so that what is scientifically necessary can become politically possible. We have our own personal battles to carry out, too, as we struggle to simplify our lives, to use less of the earth’s resources, and to acknowledge the tight connection between global warming and consumerism, since unlimited consumption is a major contributor to greenhouse gases. ³ Can we learn to live more lightly on the earth? Can we learn to share rather than to hoard? Can we hear the cries of the poor and the cries of the groaning earth rather than just our own insatiable appetite for more, more, more?

The personal and social transformation that this period in history requires is so profound, it can only be described in the language of religion. As one economist puts it: “Sustainable development will require a change of heart, a renewal of the mind, and a healthy dose of repentance. These are all,” he says, “religious terms, and that is no coincidence, because a change in the fundamental principles we live by is a change so deep that it is essentially religious whether we call it that or not.” ⁴

The transformation that we seek is symbolized by the cross. The old has died. Behold, the new has come. That is the language that speaks to me now, the biblical language of transformation. There is so much that needs to die, beginning with the small ego-self, that sinful, separated self that lives over and against all other beings and that claims no one but itself (and maybe its immediate tribe) as kin. A whole way of life needs to die, as well, if that way of life is driven by selfishness and greed, if it results in an ever-widening gap between the wealthy few and the impoverished multitude, and if it tears apart the very fabric of life upon which human beings and all other creatures depend.

Endings are real, disruptive, and scary, whether they are the end of oil, the end of empire, the end of a stable climate, or the end of our lives. But Christians, like people of other religious traditions, always live in sight of endings. And we dare to believe that by following the way of the cross, we can do what Jesus did: we can make way for new life to be born within us and among us. We can help turn the wastelands of the earth into gardens, into places where love and life can flourish.

Jesus provoked the powerful, and he endured suffering and death. Yet his consistent message was one of hope, not fear. Why? Because he was rooted in the love of God. Because he knew that nothing could separate him from the love of God. Because he had a vision of how human beings could live well on the earth in obedience to God, a vision of a beloved community of brothers and sisters living together in justice and peace. “I am the way,” Jesus said to his friends. “I am the truth and the life.” And from his words and actions, from his passion, death, and resurrection, a movement sprang up – a movement of passionate men and women who were convinced of the way of self-giving generosity and kindness, committed to the truth of love, and dedicated to a life of praising and serving God, whatever the cost might be.

At the cross of Christ we refuse to settle for a status quo in which the poor go hungry, landfills overflow, lakes die, entire species disappear, gas-guzzlers foul the air, and the global climate is scorched. For here is our brother and savior Jesus, living for us, dying for us, rising for us, standing with us and calling us out to a life that is devoted to God’s shalom and to the healing and wellbeing of all, even when living such a life disrupts the powers-that-be.

In the light of the cross, what can we do to simplify our lives? I invite you to think of one way you can listen more deeply to the land and to learn from it. Maybe you want to start a compost pile, to check out a farmer’s market, or to start a small garden at your home or church. If you have some money to invest, you might invest in socially responsible funds or in local, green businesses. You might get an energy audit, or invite the neighbor you’ve never met before to come over for a cup of tea. We need to build up our local communities, to live in ways that are closer to the earth, more life enhancing, more about sharing than about consuming, more about self-restraint than about self-aggrandizement, more about generosity than about fearful survivalism, so that we can take care of each other when the hard times come. And together we will need to create the most diverse, bold, visionary, wide-ranging, powerful, hope-filled, hands-on, feet-on-the-ground, shoulder-to-the-wheel political and social movement that humanity has ever seen.

It is you for whom Christ came into the world, you for whom he died, you whom he now would fill with his presence and his Spirit. In a little while we will venerate the cross on which he gave his life, and then 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, everyone is blessed. Everyone and everything is part of a sacred whole, and everyone is 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 will become at last who we were made to be, a blessing on the earth.

I invite us to take some time in silence as we consider the way of the cross. What in your life needs to die? What needs to be transformed? What small action step do you feel led to take that expresses your desire to follow Jesus and to live in a way that helps God’s creation flourish?

1. Sallie McFague, A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008, p. 53.

2. Bill McKibben: Money Pollution — The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Darkens the Skies

3. McFague, op cit., p. 96.

4. Herman E. Daly, Beyond Growth: Economics of Sustainable Development, Boston: Beacon Press, 1996, p. 201.

The journey of the wise men

Happy are the people whose strength is in you! whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way. – Psalm 84:4

When I think about the three kings, what leaps first to mind are the crèches that I unpack every year a couple of weeks before Christmas. On the piano in the living room I put the tall, earthenware figures of Mary, Joseph, and the baby, of shepherds and sheep, and — yes — of the three kings and their camels. On the mantelpiece goes a miniature nativity set in which each teeny-tiny figure is made of clay, delicately painted, and no more than one inch high. On the coffee table I put the plastic figures and the cheap wooden stable that children can play with to their heart’s content without making their grandmother worry that something is going to break. No crèche is complete without its three kings, and when the Twelve Days of Christmas are over, back go the various kings and camels into their boxes, where they spend the rest of the year stored in the basement.

As I pondered today’s Gospel, I got to thinking: what would happen if the wise men walked out of those crèches and into our lives? What would happen if these figures — so easy to trivialize as nothing more than decorative props for a mid-winter festival that we pack away when the festival is done — what if the wise men actually came to life for us? What if their journey informed and deepened our own spiritual search, and propelled it forward? What if their experience of seeking and finding the Christ child was an archetypal journey, one that could lead us into a move vivid and lively relationship with Christ? So I began to read the story for its spiritual significance, as a sacred story about how to grow in intimacy with God.

Four parts of the story stood out for me.

The first, of course, is the star, that mysterious, shining presence that startles the wise men and sends them out on a search. Ancient tradition held that an unusual star could appear in the skies to mark the birth of someone special, such as a king. That is how the wise men interpret what they see: something out of the ordinary is taking place, something truly significant is afoot, and out the door they go, leaving their ordinary lives behind as they follow the light wherever it leads.

I think it is worth pointing out that although every painting, movie, and Christmas card that depicts the journey of the wise men shows a dazzling star above their heads, we don’t actually know from the biblical story whether anyone but the wise men can see that star. King Herod, the chief priests and scribes, don’t seem to know anything about the star until the wise men arrive in Jerusalem and tell them about its rising. So the star may be visible to the eye or it may be perceptible only to one’s inward sight; it may be seen or it may be unseen. Either way, it is significant, for it signals the birth of something new in the world. It heralds a presence and power that is just now being born. The wise men are wise, indeed, for they spot that star and they set everything aside to follow where it leads.

Probably every spiritual journey begins with a star. At some point we get a sense — perhaps a very vague one — that there is something more to life than the ordinary round of tasks and responsibilities, something above and beyond, or perhaps within, material reality that can give a larger meaning and purpose to our days, something that is beautiful and shining and that lights up the world. So we set out on a quest to follow that star and to see where it leads. We may name the quest in different ways — maybe we call it a search for meaning or wholeness, a search for happiness or peace. Maybe we seek to know that we are loved, or to draw closer to the divine Source of love. Maybe, as some Greeks say to Philip in the Gospel of John, we express our desire in a simple, straightforward way: “We wish to see Jesus” John 12:21.

However we name that desire, deep down we want to know God. And so, like the wise men, we set out, and what beckons us forward is a star, a subtle, shining presence that keeps company with us, and that we follow as best we can. For most of us, most of the time, following the leadings of God is not like having a GPS fastened to the dashboard of our car, delivering clear-cut instructions: “Turn left in .2 miles; take the freeway; turn right in 4.3 miles.” Like it or not, the star of Bethlehem is more elusive than that, so we have to develop an attitude of careful listening, a stance of open inquiry, and a practice of prayer that develops our sensitivity to the glimmers of the holy. It takes practice to stay attentive to the star, for, as Boris Pasternak once wrote, “When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.”

The star is the first thing that catches my attention in this story, and the second is Jerusalem. Where does the star lead the wise men? Straight to Jerusalem, straight into the center of political and economic power, where King Herod the Great, a client king appointed by Rome, rules with the same ferocity that Stalin wielded over his own country in the 1930’s. We might wish that following a spiritual path were purely an individual and internal enterprise — that following the star meant nothing more than developing a personal practice of prayer or going away on periodic retreats. There are plenty of contemporary books and speakers out there that define spirituality in a very individualistic way as being mindful of your own mind and cultivating your own soul — and of course that is part of the journey. But right from the beginning, from the very moment that Christ is born, it is clear that following his star also means coming to grips with the social and political realities of one’s time. Being “spiritual,” for Christians, is not just an interior, individual project of “saving ones soul” — it also has a civic dimension, a political dimension, and as the wise men faithfully follow the star, they are drawn straight into the darkness and turmoil of the world, where systemic power can be used to dominate and terrify. Without intending it or knowing it, the wise men even contribute to Herod’s program of terror, for Herod takes the information that they give him and uses it to order the slaughter of all the children under the age of two who live in Bethlehem.

Following the star evidently means being willing to become conscious of the darkness of the world, and even to perceive how we ourselves are implicated in that darkness. With my taxes, I am paying for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; with every turn of the ignition key, I burn fossil fuels that add to global warming. Until I recognize how I am caught up in and how I contribute to the contradictions and injustices of our political and economic system, I am not following the star and accompanying the wise men into Jerusalem.

We notice, too, that King Herod trembles at the news of the star — in fact, its rising frightens him. The powers that be are terrified whenever God in Christ draws near, for God’s love is always a threat to those powers; it opposes everything in us and around us that is selfish, greedy, and motivated by the urge to dominate, control, and possess. As I read it, the wise men needed to come to know those powers, both within themselves and in the world around them, if they were going to find and follow Christ.

So they entered Jerusalem, and they saw what they saw; they learned what they learned. Then, keeping their eyes on the star, they kept going, “until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy” Matthew 2:9b-10. This is the third part of the story: the encounter with Christ. What a beautiful line that is — “when they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy.” The long, long journey with all its uncertainties and privations, its cold nights and its restless, ardent searching, has reached its fulfillment. The star has stopped, and the wise men can be at peace at last, they have arrived at last, they have found what they were looking for, at last! They enter the house, they see Mary and the child, and they fall to their knees in a gesture of deep reverence and humility.

Do we know what that’s like? Of course we do. We glimpse such moments whenever time seems to stop, when, for instance, our minds grow very quiet in prayer, we surrender our thoughts, and we seem to be filling with light. Or maybe it happens when we gaze at something that captures our complete attention — maybe a stretch of mountains or the sea, or when we take a long, loving look into a child’s sleeping face, or when we are completely absorbed in a piece of music. In moments like these, it can feel as if we are gazing through the object on which we gaze, and seeing into the heart of life itself. Love is pouring through us and into us, and all we can do is throw up our hands, fall inwardly to our knees, and offer as a gift everything that is in us, just as the wise men open their treasure chests and offer everything that is in them. Worship is what happens when we come into the presence of what is really real. When we come to the altar rail at the Eucharist, whether we choose to stand or whether we kneel as the wise men did, like them we stretch out our hands to offer everything that is in us, and like them we receive — we take in — the living presence of Christ.

Finally, the fourth element of the story is its last line: “… having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road” Matthew 2:12. In other words, the wise men refused to cooperate with Herod. They deceived him. They resisted him. The wise men have been called the first conscientious objectors in the name of Christ. They are the first in a long line of witnesses to Christ who from generation to generation have carried out acts of non-violent civil disobedience in Jesus’ name. The journey of the wise men is our journey, too, for, as Gregory the Great reportedly remarked in a homily back in the 7th century: “Having come to know Jesus, we are forbidden to return by the way we came.”

So, as we set out together into a new year, I hope that you will join me in keeping the wise men at our side, rather than packing them away in a box somewhere.

Like them, we can attune ourselves to the guiding of the star, and renew our commitment to prayer and inward listening.

Like them, we can enter Jerusalem and all the dark places of our world and soul, following wherever God leads, and trusting that God’s light will shine in the darkness.

Like them, we can make our way to Christ, and kneel in gratitude.

And like them, we, too, can rise to our feet with a new-fired passion to be agents of justice and healing, and a renewed desire to give ourselves to God, for “happy are the people whose strength is in [God, and] whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way.”