creation care

I put my trust in you

What does the future hold? What is the world coming to? Where are we headed? These are Advent questions, and they are also the questions that beset me as I study climate change. Will human beings learn at last to live in a peaceful, creative way on our planetary home? These are not abstract, neutral questions, but urgent questions, the kind that wake me up in the middle of the night.

I want to tell an Advent story that took place five years ago. In the fall of 2005, Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita – strengthened by the unusually warm waters of the Gulf – plowed into Louisiana and Mississippi. Millions of Americans were evacuated. Within a matter of hours, most of an American city lay in ruins.

Soon afterwards, a small group from my parish, Grace Church in Amherst, began organizing a service trip to Mississippi. In late November we would drive down a truck full of supplies, sleep in a makeshift camp, and do whatever was needed – haul debris, dig mud, offer a shoulder to cry on, or just listen and pray. I was eager to go, but then I received an invitation to join a delegation of interfaith religious leaders who would attend the upcoming United Nations climate change conference in Montreal. It was the first international summit since the Kyoto Protocol came into force, a gathering to discuss the future of the fight against global warming — the same group that is meeting this week in Cancun, Mexico.

The two trips overlapped, and I could not take them both. How should I lend a hand in the fight against climate change – head down to Mississippi or up to Montreal? Stand in the mud with my brothers and sisters, or try in some small way to influence world leaders? Both efforts were worthy. I debated what to do. Finally a friend reminded me that if you are watching dead or wounded people floating down a river, it is important that someone rescue them and tend to them. But it is also important that someone head upstream and stop the war.

I decided to go to Montreal.

In late November, I flew to Canada as part of the U.S. Climate Action delegation, which included representatives of Interfaith Power & Light. For several days I mingled with delegates sent by the World Council of Churches, attended climate workshops, listened to speeches, and wrote editorials. Best of all, on a cold Saturday afternoon I marched through the streets of Montreal. I had never stood shoulder to shoulder with so many climate activists. Seven thousand protesters walked through the city, a throng of all sorts of people — parents pushing strollers, the sturdy middle-aged, the valiant elderly, and a large contingent of young adults fairly bouncing with glee. I, too, was buoyed by joy. Here was the most vigorous celebration of Advent that I could imagine. The placards and banners rang out the season’s urgent themes: Now is the time to wake from sleep, to clean up our act, to sort out our lives, to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armor of light.

“The time is high,” read one sign.

“People in power: wake up!” read another.

One sign declared in big black letters: La terre n’est pas une guimauve. I understood the first part: The earth is not…, but the meaning of the last word escaped me. I pushed through the crowd to view the placard’s other side: a sketch of a round earth skewered like a marshmallow on a stick, suspended over flames.

No, the earth is not a marshmallow, although we are treating it like one.

One group of protesters streamed in from the east, and another from the west, everyone cheering, waving signs, or playing drums. When the two crowds met, we marched together down the road that led to the building where the pale blue U.N. flag was whipping in the wind. There we held a rally, and we were not alone. Companion marches were being held simultaneously in 29 countries around the world.

That ebullient march was one of the gifts I received on the trip to Montreal, a glimpse of the burgeoning worldwide movement that draws upon humanity’s deepest reserves of hope, and calls upon the world’s political and corporate leaders to protect life as we know it on this planet.

The other gift came as a surprise, when I was alone one morning in the hotel. By then I had been in Montreal for several days, and I was steeped in the stark reality of climate change. I had studied the aerial photographs of Mount Kilimanjaro, newly naked, bereft of snow, and had listened to reports of “climate witnesses” from Argentina and the Arctic. I had learned about the many ways that climate change puts stress on organisms and eco-systems, and had heard survivors of Katrina speak about the particular vulnerability of the poor and dispossessed. I had listened as the delegates debated, and had read about our government’s intransigence, its complete refusal to take the issue seriously.

After a restless night, I woke up gasping with anger and sorrow, needing badly to pray. Death was prowling nearby and I was ardent for life. I sat in the hotel room and let my anguish spill out before God – grief for what we have lost and the harm that has been done, rage at the inertia and indifference that kill with such abandon. I felt utterly helpless. Dear Lord, what can I do? What can any of us do?

Then, as if to one side, I heard a quiet message.

I put my trust in you.

Startled, I opened my eyes and looked around. Who said that? I had heard the sentence as clearly as if someone were standing in the room. I had often said those very words to God, but now the message was addressed to me. How bizarre. Was there some mistake? Who was speaking? How could God trust me?

I saw that I had a choice: to accept the message or to reject it, to believe it or to blow it off. The message was as improbable as the message that the angel Gabriel delivered to Mary so many years ago: you are a virgin, you will conceive a son, and he will be the savior of the world.

Yeah, right is surely a sensible response.

Yet God’s hope for the future hung on Mary’s willingness to trust and her decision to say yes. Perhaps it hangs on our own willingness and our decisions, too. Who knows how many such messages are delivered every day to the countless faithful of every religious tradition around the world? Trust the good, wherever you find it. Trust love. Trust the truth. Trust yourself. Who knows how much energy for life would be released into the world if we dared to believe in those intimate, hidden encounters when, at a deep level of our being, we are offered a divine word of love, an assurance of forgiveness, an expression of trust?

Musing in my hotel room, I considered the words: I put my trust in you. What I heard in those words was the quiet assurance that I was exactly where I was meant to be, and that I was not alone. I was trusted. I was loved. My task was simply to keep listening to the deepest truth within me, and to follow where it led.

I decided to accept the message that I had received. Maybe I was a fool to do so — I will never know, at least not on this side of the grave. But I learned again that there is a fountain within us that is not contingent on outward circumstance, an upwelling of love that comes from nowhere. Maybe that is what gives us hope even in the midst of loss, terror, or failure.

I touch that hope in every service of Holy Communion. During this retreat we have been considering the resources that Christian theology and practice can offer us in the face of the environmental crisis now unfolding in our midst. My short list of essential Christian resources would have to include the sacrament of Holy Communion.

It is here at this table that we receive the simple elements of bread and wine, and realize that these apparently ordinary things – like Nature herself – are actually filled with God.

It is here at this table that we learn to eat mindfully, to take God’s creatures of bread and wine into our hands with reverence and a grateful heart.

It is here at this table that we share the one loaf and one cup and discover that a bit of bread can fill us and a sip of wine can quench our thirst. We don’t have to grab for more; we don’t have to be greedy “consumers” who must constantly replenish ourselves with material things in order to reassure ourselves that we matter or that we exist. At this table we discover that in sharing what we have, our hearts are satisfied at last.

It is here at this table that God gives God’s self to us, and we in turn give ourselves to God. It’s here at this table that our bonds with God in Christ, with each other, and with the whole Creation are restored and renewed. I wish that this last point was made explicit in our Eucharistic prayers, so I have taken the liberty of changing the wording of the post-Communion prayer. ¹

1. A line in the Enriching Our Worship post-Communion prayer was changed from “you have united us with Christ and one another; and you have made us one with all your people in heaven and on earth” to “you have united us with Christ and one another; and you have made us one with all your people in heaven and on earth, and with all creation.”

When a leaf needs to speak

As I prayed about this sermon, I knew that I wanted to give you something, but what kept coming to mind were not ideas, or even words, but images of a leaf. I kept imagining myself standing here and holding up a leaf. I decided to trust what was coming to me in prayer, so I wandered about, looking at trees, and came back with this [holding up a leaf].

As I imagined holding this very leaf before you, I asked, “OK, Leaf, what do you have to say to these good people?” And the leaf gave me three messages.

The first one: Here is the world in all its beauty. This leaf is unlike every other leaf. If you spent just five minutes examining its stem and veins and color and shape, you would see that this leaf is a very particular leaf, one that has its own contribution to make to the world, just as each of us has our own particular part to play in the whole web of life. This particular, irreplaceable leaf emerged in connection to the rest of the tree: its stem connected to a branch, the branch to the trunk, and the trunk to the roots. From below, the roots absorbed water and nutrients that were drawn up the tree-trunk and passed along to the leaf. And from above, sunlight shone down and made the leaf grow. So this leaf is intimately connected to sunshine and water, to dirt and cloud, worms and sky. And this leaf is connected to us, and to every creature that shares what the Book of Genesis calls “the breath of life” (Genesis 1:30). When we breathe in, we take in oxygen that the leaves have released, and when we breathe out, we exhale carbon dioxide that the leaves in turn take in as food. With every breath we exchange the elements of life with plants.

What a beautiful world we live in — one that is so very particular, so full of such unique and exquisitely designed creatures as a leaf, a tree, a person. And everything is so interconnected. Here is the world in all its beauty — that is the cry of mystics from every religious tradition, and the deep perception of things that animates the Bible, when in the Creation story God takes a look at the world that God has made, and pronounces it “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Everything is particular; everything is connected. Study this leaf with a quiet eye, and you will glimpse the imperishable, shining through what perishes. You will see the invisible, illuminating what can be seen.

Here is the world in all its beauty, the leaf says. And it says a second thing, too: Here is the world in all its fragility. This leaf is soft and easily torn, and it has been separated from its tree. It speaks about the vulnerability of the world, about its mortality and pain. Week after week last summer, we were riveted to the terrible sight of oil and gas gushing up from the floor of the sea, a mile down deep in the Gulf of Mexico. The BP oil spill is one of the most violent assaults on the natural world that any of us have ever seen. And yet, as Bill McKibben points out, if everything had gone smoothly, if the oil had made its way “up through the drilling pipe, onto the platform, off the gulf into some refinery and thence into the gas tank of a car,”¹ the damage it would have created would have been even more extreme. The relentless burning of dirty energy is changing the planet in “large and fundamental ways,” and, as McKibben points out, global warming is not just a future threat. It is, he writes, “no longer a threat at all. It’s our reality? Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.”² “We’ve undermined the basic physical stability of this planet,” he says.³ Of course, different places can have a string of cool or warm days, but the average planetary temperature is going in only one direction. NASA reports that the first half of 2010 set a record for global temperature.

Fragile, afflicted, under assault — that is a truth about the world in which we live. When we acknowledge that, we pierce the illusion that human beings can treat the earth with impunity, drilling, mining, dumping at will, burning fossil fuels without care for the consequences, buying the next new thing, and the next, and the next — as if nature were at our beck and call, a supposedly endless supply of “resources” for the use of a single species, as if the natural world were a business, and we were holding a liquidation sale.

When we see the world’s fragility, we allow ourselves to grieve what human beings have done. We break through our numbness and denial, and feel the anger and sorrow that spring from love. We find the courage to acknowledge our uneasiness and fear, and the moral clarity to admit that we need to change course.

This is where a third message speaks from the leaf: Here is the world in its need and longing to be healed. The world is beckoning us, inviting us, even crying out to us: Stand with me! Protect me! Set me free! If we perceive the beauty of the world, if we perceive its fragility, then we can’t help but hear its call to each of us to become a — what shall I say? The traditional word is “steward,” but I am looking for a word that is more robust and urgent than that. How about “a healer,” “a liberator,” “a guardian,” “a protector”? We need, as McKibben says, to find ways to live more “lightly, carefully, and gracefully”⁴ in the world. We need to join the search that so many others have begun, the search to bring forth a human presence on the planet that is “environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just.”⁵ We don’t have much time to accomplish this, so it is a precarious and very precious time to be alive. We have a chance to take part ? if we choose ? in a great work of healing.

What does that look like in our own lives? We take the steps that individuals can take. Maybe we recycle, drive less, and quit using bottled water. Maybe we eat local, organic foods and support our local farms. Maybe we install insulation, put up solar panels, turn down the heat, use AC in moderation — hey, you know the drill.

Working to stabilize the climate begins at home, but it cannot end there. The scope and speed of the climate crisis require action on a much broader scale. We need to push our political leaders to get this country and other countries on track to bring down the level of CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, the uppermost level that many scientists say is safe for life as we know it to continue on this planet. What is the level today? 390 — and climbing. There is work to be done.

The good news is that we have an opportunity every day to bear witness to the God who loved us, and all Creation, into being. The face of the Risen Christ shines out in every leaf and blossom, in every chickadee and butterfly, in every worm and wren. When we take action to mend the fabric of life that seems so swiftly to be unraveling, we express our reverence for God. Although it was a struggle to stop the deathly flow of oil that erupted at the bottom of the sea, nothing can stop the love of God that is being “poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). That love will guide and sustain us in the work that lies ahead.

Here is the world in all its beauty? its fragility? and its need and longing to be healed.

If I could, I would place this leaf in your hand, and yours, and yours, and yours. We need people who live with grateful awareness of life’s beauty and fragility — people who are willing to take the risk, and bear the cost, and carry the joy of standing up for life.

This sermon is based on my Baccalaureate Sermon delivered at St. Timothy’s School, Stevenson, MD, on June 5, 2010.

1. Bill McKibben, “It’s about the carbon: What’s worse than the gulf oil leak?” The Christian Century Magazine, June 1, 2010, http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=8460

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. Bill McKibben interview, Democracy Now!, April 15, 2010 < http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/15/mckibben >

4. McKibben, Eaarth, p. 151.

5. “Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream,” a symposium sponsored by the Pachamama Alliance ? < http://www.awakeningthedreamer.org >

As you set out into the world

Blessed be the God who has brought us to this day.
Blessed be the God of all our days. Amen. ¹

I am grateful to Randy Stevens for inviting me to speak. Thank you. It is a pleasure to be back at my alma mater and to see that it is thriving, although it is startling to realize that a full forty-one years have passed since I sat where you Sixes are sitting today, preparing to set out into the world. This is a big moment in your lives, and in the lives of your family-members, as well. My son graduated from high school two years ago, and I know how proud you parents and grandparents are feeling right now, how sweet and joyful this transition is, and yet how poignant, too, for it is a tender moment when young ones grow up and head out into the world as young adults.

As I prayed about what to say, I knew that I wanted to give you Sixes something, and what kept coming to my mind was not ideas, or even words, but the image of a leaf. I kept imagining myself standing here and holding up a leaf. As it happens, I am finishing a book, a spiritual memoir about becoming a climate activist, and its working title is Love Every Leaf. I decided to trust what was coming to me in prayer, so I went outside after lunch and wandered about. I found a maple tree by the chapel, and I came away with this [holds up maple leaf] .

As I imagined holding this very leaf before you, I asked it: OK, Leaf, what do you have to say to these good people who are graduating from St. Tim’s? And the leaf gave me three messages.

The first one: Here is the world in all its beauty. This leaf is unlike every other leaf. If you spent just five minutes examining its stem and veins and color and shape, you would see that this leaf is a very particular leaf, one that has its own contribution to make to the world, just as each of us has our own particular part to play in the whole web of life. This particular, irreplaceable leaf emerged in connection to the rest of the tree: its stem connected to a branch, the branch to the trunk, and the trunk to the roots. From below, the roots absorbed water and nutrients that were drawn up the tree-trunk and passed along to the leaf. And from above, sunlight shone down and made the leaf grow. So this leaf is intimately connected to sunshine and water, to dirt and cloud, worms and sky. And this leaf is connected to us, and to every creature that shares what the Book of Genesis calls “the breath of life” (Genesis 1:30). When we breathe in, we take in oxygen that leaves have released, and when we breathe out, we exhale carbon dioxide that the leaves in turn take in as food. With every breath we exchange the elements of life with plants.

What a beautiful world we live in — one that is so very particular, so full of such unique and exquisitely designed creatures as a leaf, a tree, a person. And everything is so interconnected. Here is the world in all its beauty — that is the cry of mystics from every religious tradition, and the deep perception of things that animates the Bible, when in the Creation story God takes a look at the world that God has made, and God pronounces it “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Everything is particular; everything is connected.

What would it be like to look at the world with eyes that see its beauty, its hidden radiance? It is easy to turn away from the actual world and to focus instead on the virtual world of screens and electronic devices, or on our own worried or self-absorbed thoughts. Many of us are alienated from the living body of the earth, and have forgotten its beauty. For many years I lived with a food addiction, and during that time I felt completely out of touch with the first bit of nature with which I have been entrusted — my body. For me, re-connecting with the earth began with learning to inhabit my own flesh, to listen to it, and treat it kindly and with respect.

So what a discovery it was for me, as it is for many of us, to fall in love with the beauty of God’s Creation, to look at the world around us with gratefulness, wonder, and awe, and to begin to experience how deeply God loves us not only in ourselves, but also as an integral part of this blooming, buzzing, bellowing, flapping, whirling life that surrounds us on every side. Our great Protestant forebear, Martin Luther, once said, “God writes the Gospel, not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and the flowers and the clouds and stars.” And our great Roman Catholic forebear, Thomas Aquinas, once said, “Revelation comes in two volumes – the Bible and nature.” Study this leaf with a quiet eye, and you will glimpse the imperishable shining through what perishes. You will see the invisible illuminating what is visible.

As you set out into the world, I hope that you will keep your eyes open to its beauty, and let your spirit be renewed. I hope that you will walk with gratefulness, for a grateful heart is sensitive to God. I hope that you will breathe with awareness, for every breath connects you to the living world around, and to the Holy Spirit — the divine Breath of God — that, moment to moment, is giving us life.

Here is the world in all its beauty, the leaf says. And it says a second thing, too: Here is the world in all its fragility. This leaf is soft and easily torn, and it has been separated from its tree. It speaks to me about the vulnerability of the world, about its mortality and pain. For weeks, many of us have been riveted to the terrible sight of oil and gas gushing up from the floor of the sea, a mile down deep in the Gulf of Mexico. The BP oil spill is one of the most violent assaults on the natural world that any of us have ever seen. And yet, as environmentalist Bill McKibben points out, if everything had gone smoothly, if the oil had made its way “up through the drilling pipe, onto the platform, off the gulf into some refinery and thence into the gas tank of a car,” ² the damage it would have created would have been even more severe. The relentless burning of dirty energy is changing the planet in “large and fundamental ways,” and, as McKibben points out, global warming is not just a future threat. It is, he writes, “no longer a threat at all. It’s our reality… Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.” ³ “We’ve undermined the basic physical stability of this planet,” he says. Of course, different places might have a string of cool or warm days, but the average planetary temperature is going in only one direction. “NASA [recently reported] that we’ve come through the warmest January, February, March on record, [and] that 2010 is going to be the warmest year that we’ve ever seen.” ⁴ The global climate with its delicate balance of gases turns out to be more fragile then we ever imagined.

Fragile, afflicted, under assault — that is a truth about the world in which we live. The life systems of the earth are in decline. Since I was a student at St. Tim’s, the human population has doubled worldwide, a heavy burden on the planet. Species are going extinct at a rate unprecedented since the death of the dinosaurs. “The whole creation [is] groaning,” wrote St. Paul (Romans 8:22), and we sense that, too, more acutely than ever.

When we see the world’s fragility, we pierce the illusion that human beings can treat the earth with impunity, drilling, mining, dumping at will, burning fossil fuels without care for the consequences, buying the next new thing, and the next, and the next — as if nature were at our beck and call, a supposedly endless supply of “resources” for the use of a single species, as if the natural world were a business, and we were holding a liquidation sale.

When we see the world’s fragility, we allow ourselves to grieve what human beings have done. We break through our numbness and denial, and feel the anger and sorrow that spring from love. We find the courage to acknowledge our uneasiness and fear, and the moral clarity to admit that we need to change course.

This is where a third message speaks from the leaf: Here is the world in its need and longing to be healed. The world is beckoning us, inviting us, even crying out to us: Stand with me! Protect me! Set me free! If we perceive the beauty of the world, if we perceive its fragility, then we can’t help but hear its call to each of us to become a — what shall I say? The traditional word is “steward,” but I am looking for a word that is more robust and urgent than that. How about “a healer,” “a liberator,” “a guardian,” “a protector”? We need, as McKibben says, to find ways to live more “lightly, carefully, and gracefully” ⁵ in the world. We need to join the search that so many others have begun, the search to bring forth a human presence on the planet that is “environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just.” ⁶ We don’t have much time to accomplish this, so it is a precarious and very precious time to be alive. We have a chance to take part – if we choose – in a great work of healing.

What does that look like in our own lives? We take the steps that individuals can take. Maybe we recycle, drive less, and quit using bottled water. Maybe we choose a hybrid over a Hummer, a bicycle over a hybrid, a pair of walking shoes over a bicycle. Maybe we eat local, organic foods, start a community garden, and support our local farmers. Maybe we install insulation, put up solar panels, switch to energy-efficient light bulbs, turn down the heat, use AC in moderation — hey, you know the drill.

Working to stabilize the climate begins at home, but it cannot end there. The scope and speed of the climate crisis require action on a much broader scale. As I see it, we need to push the Senate to pass the strongest possible energy and climate bill. We need to get this country and other countries on track to bring down the level of CO2 in the atmosphere to no more than 350 parts per million, the uppermost level that many scientists say is safe for life as we know it to continue on this planet. I am happy to mention that our beloved brother in Christ, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is supporting the international campaign to reduce atmospheric levels of CO2 to 350 parts per million. What is the level today? 389 — and climbing. There is work to be done.

The good news is that we have an opportunity every day to bear witness to the God who loved us, and all Creation, into being. If God created us to love God, our neighbors and ourselves — if deep in our guts, our bones, our genes, is a God-given affection for the rest of the created world — then our rising up to protect that world is an act of love, an act of faithfulness to God. To use images from my own religious tradition, the face of the Good Shepherd, the face of the Risen Christ, shines out in every leaf and blossom, in every chickadee and butterfly, in every worm and wren. Taking action to protect God’s Creation and to mend the fabric of life that seems so swiftly to be unraveling is an act of reverence to our Creator. We may be struggling to stop the deathly flow of oil that is erupting at the bottom of the sea, but nothing can stop the love of God that is being “poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). That love will guide and sustain us in the struggle ahead.

Here is the world in all its beauty… its fragility… and its need and longing to be healed.

If I could, I would place this leaf in your hands, and yours, and yours, and yours. We need people who live with grateful awareness of life’s beauty and fragility, people willing to take the risk, and bear the cost, and carry the joy of standing up for life.

“You are the light of the world,” Jesus says to you (Matthew 5:14). Let your light shine.

Blessed be the God who has brought us to this day.
Blessed be the God of all our days. Amen.

1. Prayer from Changes: Prayers and Services Honoring Rites of Passage, New York, NY: Church Publishing, 2007, p. 31.

2. Bill McKibben, “It’s about the carbon: What’s worse than the gulf oil leak?” The Christian Century Magazine, June 1, 2010, http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=8460

3. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Times Book, 2010, p. xiii and book jacket. Italics in original.

4. Bill McKibben interview, Democracy Now!, April 15, 2010 http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/15/mckibben

5. McKibben, Eaarth, p. 151.

6. “Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream,” a symposium sponsored by the Pachamama Alliance – http://www.awakeningthedreamer.org

Good shepherd, good earth

What a spectacular week this has been in New England! The oaks are in bloom, the maples have leafed out, the first warblers have returned, and the lilacs have begun to flower, which means that soon the first hummingbirds will arrive. Whether we’ve had the privilege of spending hours with our hands in the garden, or have only had a chance to look up once or twice to feel the breeze on our face or to glimpse the soft green colors of the Holyoke Range, all of us have been blessed this week by the gentleness of spring. On days like these we feel what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the “allure” of the natural world, and what biologist E.O. Wilson calls “biophilia” — that instinctive love that human beings feel for the creatures and living systems that surround us and of which we are a part.

Today is Good Shepherd Sunday. On the Fourth Sunday of Easter our Gospel reading is always taken from chapter ten of John’s Gospel, where Jesus speaks of himself as the Good Shepherd. Today is also Creation Sunday, the Sunday closest to Earth Day, whose fortieth anniversary we celebrated last Thursday. So it is a good morning to reflect on our call to care for Creation, a good morning to see if we can listen more deeply to the Good Shepherd’s voice.

Back on that first Earth Day in 1970, some twenty million Americans 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 afterwards, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, strengthened the Clean Air Act, and created the Environmental Protection Agency.

Forty years later, a new passion for the earth is sweeping — and needs to sweep — this country as Americans begin to understand the reality of climate change. I have just started reading Bill McKibben’s new book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, and McKibben makes it clear that 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.”¹ “We’ve undermined the basic physical stability of this planet,” he says. “The atmosphere holds about five percent more water vapor than it did forty years ago…[which] explains all those deluges and downpours. The ocean is 30 percent more acidic, as it absorbs all that carbon from the atmosphere. NASA [reported last week] that we’ve come through the warmest January, February, March on record, [and] that 2010 is going to be the warmest year that we’ve ever seen.”²

And there is no going back. Human beings have irrevocably altered the earth into which you and I were born. As Bill 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.

Last weekend a small group from Grace Church — Lucy Robinson, DeAnne Riddle, Chris Riddle, and I — took a train down to Washington, D.C., and I want to thank you for your prayers last Sunday. On Monday we met with staff-members of Senator Brown and Senator Kerry, and with staff-members of Representatives John Olver and Richard Neal. We urged them to pass the strongest possible climate legislation. We fervently hope that in the weeks ahead, the Senate will decide to get this country’s emissions down, and to do it fast — and to help the rest of the world to do the same thing.

Our little group wanted to underscore the science of climate change, for, as McKibben explains, global warming is basically not a debate between China and the U.S., or between Democrats and Republicans. Basically “it’s a debate between human beings and physics and chemistry.”⁶ Physics and chemistry are not going to back down.

But climate change is not just a scientific issue — it is a spiritual and ethical issue, as well. Hence our group gave each legislator a sheaf of statements from the leaders of a range of religious groups — Episcopal and Evangelical, Roman Catholic and Jewish, Greek Orthodox and Southern Baptist — that agree on the moral imperative to stabilize the climate and to protect the poor, who are the people least responsible for global warming and yet most vulnerable to its effects. Science and religion are united, we told our legislators. They speak to this issue with a single voice.

I took the train home on Tuesday and I found myself unaccountably happy. Partly it was sheer relief — we had finished a stretch of hard work. But it was more than: it was the joy of having done what love called us to do. If God created us for biophilia — if deep in our guts, our bones, our genes, is a God-given affection for the rest of the created world, then rising up to protect that world is an act of love, an act of faithfulness to God. The face of the Good Shepherd, the face of the Risen Christ, shines out in every leaf and blossom, in every chickadee and butterfly, in every worm and wren. The actions we take to protect God’s Creation and to bind up in some small way the fabric of life that seems so swiftly to be unraveling — these actions are an act of reverence to the Creator.

The love of the Good Shepherd is also a balm to my anxious and guilty heart. It seems to me that when it comes to the very first task that God gave human beings — the responsibility to care for the earth, to be good stewards of its bio-diversity and bounty — right now we are doing a pretty poor job of it. The fossil fuels that we have burned cannot be unburned. The carbon emissions that we have poured into the sky cannot be un-poured. What we have done, we have done; we have changed the earth forever. And my response, and perhaps yours, too, is one of deep sorrow, guilt, anger, and regret.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner who has witnessed at close hand what he calls “the cruelties, hurts, and hatreds”⁷ of the world, and who spoke this week in Springfield, writes about guilt and failure in his latest book, Made for Goodness:

“The pain cannot be unmade,” he writes,
“The life cannot be un-lived,
The time will not run backward,
You cannot un-choose your choice.”
And yet, Bishop Tutu goes on, “…the pain can be healed,
Your choices can be redeemed,
Your life can be blessed,
And love can bring you home.”⁸

We come home whenever we listen again to the Good Shepherd, whose voice is always speaking in our heart. We come home whenever we face the fact, as Isaiah says, that: “all we like sheep have gone astray” Isaiah 53:6. We come home when we turn again to the divine love that always dwells within us and in whose image we are made, the divine love that longs to guide us “to springs of the water of life, and … [to] wipe away every tear from [our] eyes” Revelation 7: 17.

In an unsettled and unsettling time, prayer is the staff on which we lean when we need the guidance and loving care of the Good Shepherd. Bishop Tutu calls prayer “the staff that supported me during the darkest periods of our history,”⁹ and his words echo the 23rd Psalm, “Your rod and your staff, they comfort me” Psalm 23:4. Jesus assures us in today’s Gospel, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me” John 10: 27. So we trust that in prayer we can listen deeply to the inner voice of divine love, and attune ourselves again to its call.

We also trust that God’s love can move through us — through our words and hands, our thoughts and decisions. We trust that the Good Shepherd will guide us to take actions that can heal and set free. In every moment, we can make a choice for love. In every moment, we can make a choice to reach beyond narrow self-interest, and to encounter and embrace those most in need of care. We may not perceive ourselves as having the miraculous power of St. Peter, who apparently raised the disciple Tabitha from the dead Acts 9:36-43. But we dare to claim that the power of God can flow through us, and accomplish infinitely more than we can ask or imagine Ephesians 3:20 — although we may know nothing about it.

I invite you, after the service, to sign postcards to our Senators, asking them to pass a strong climate bill during this session. I invite you also to think of one way you can listen more deeply to the land and to learn from it. Maybe you want to start up a compost pile or to check out a farmer’s market; maybe you want to send a little money to a local land trust, or to 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.

There is joy that comes in living like this, a joy that has nothing to do with proving anything or deserving anything, but which springs up simply from being true to the basic goodness that God has planted in us. The Good Shepherd is calling us by name. Will we listen to his voice?

1. 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.

2. Bill McKibben interview, Democracy Now!, April 15, 2010 www.democracynow.org

3. McKibben, Eaarth, p. 2.

4. McKibben interview, op. cit.

5. McKibben, Eaarth, p. 151.

6. McKibben, interview, op. cit.

7. Ibid, p. 4.

8. Ibid., p. 137.

9. Ibid., p. 77.

Love at the core

Tonight’s service brought to mind a movie that came out a good many years ago. I have only seen the trailer for the movie, not the movie itself, which received some almost comically awful reviews. The movie was named “The Core,” and according to that ever-ready source of information, Wikipedia, in a poll of hundreds of scientists about bad science fiction films, “The Core” was voted the worst. ¹ It may have been an impressively bad movie, but in the context of Holy Week I find the premise of the movie quite interesting. The idea behind the film is that the hot liquid center of the earth has stopped spinning, and the only way to save the planet from total destruction is for someone to go down there and jumpstart the core by exploding some nuclear bombs. The science may be out to lunch, but isn’t that premise interesting? Here’s what it’s saying: there is a problem at the center of things and the only way to solve it is to bring in massive weapons and blow something up. It’s a pretty satisfying fantasy. If something deep down is wrong, we will grab some weapons, unleash a few bombs, and wham-o! Problem solved. We will have saved the day, saved the world.

Generally I like action movies, but this Hollywood flick is delivering more than entertainment. It is delivering a basic worldview, one that is familiar to everyone in this room. According to this paradigm, our deepest problems can be solved by force. Whatever is ailing us, or the world, can only be fixed by violence. Domination, intimidation, fear – these are the weapons we must use on a daily basis if we want any kind of lasting security or peace. And when push comes to shove, we’re gonna haul out our arsenal of weapons and let ’em fly.

This paradigm is a temptation for everyone holding power and everyone seeking power, whether they are Iraqi or American, Russian or Chinese. What can be played out on a large scale by nation-states and terrorist groups, by militias and tribal armies, can also be played out by individuals. I know for myself what it is like to jockey for position and to look out for number one. There are so many ways to explode our own little bombs – by name-dropping, bullying, or boasting, by spreading gossip or by speaking harsh words of judgment and contempt. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, right? That’s the worldview we learn to call “realistic,” and it is reinforced every day. In a competitive marketplace, we are taught that the bottom line is money, power, fame, and individual success. We learn to look at each other with wary eyes. What can I get from you? How can you be useful to me? In the words of Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel, we learn to suspect our neighbors as ourselves. ²

Into this anxious and belligerent world comes the one who says, “I am among you as one who serves. My only weapon is love and my only desire is to set you free.” In Jesus, God comes among us as one who renounces worldly power and rejects the grasp for domination and control. Jesus offers a new paradigm and a new worldview: the only way to peace and security is to serve one another, to listen to each other, to make room for the stranger, and to reach out to the lost. The core of the world cannot be mended by violence. Force and fear will never save the world, much less save our souls. Only love can do that. Only love.

Now, more than ever, we must consider this second worldview and explore its possibilities, for none of the big problems we face today – from global warming to racism and poverty – none of them can be stopped by B-52s. Not even terrorism can be stopped by war, for terrorism is itself a method of warfare used by those with no other recourse. Some analysts even say that terrorists want to evoke a violent response. And the more violent we become, the more frightened we feel. As the Sufi poet Hafiz puts it, “Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I’d like to see you in better living conditions.”

Jesus comes to show us the way out of fear, to give us a path to fullness of life. What does he do? “During supper, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him” John 13:2b-5. It is a gesture of profound humility, the gesture of someone who seeks not to dominate but to serve, not to hoard power but to offer everything he has for the sake of others. Jesus refuses to react to our fearful situation with fear and force. Instead he offers a paradigm of cooperation and mutual service, and releases among us the unconditional love of God.

In a moment we will re-enact his gesture, as we come forward, take off our shoes, and bend over to wash each other’s feet. It will be for many of us a vulnerable moment, a moment, perhaps, of feeling uncomfortably exposed. Perhaps Peter speaks for us all when he flinches and draws back. “Lord, are you going to wash my feet? You will never wash my feet.” It is hard to be vulnerable, even with people who love us. It is especially hard to be vulnerable in a power-hungry world where people elbow each other out of the way in their rush for domination and control. We long for unconditional love, but so often we draw back in shock, embarrassment, or suspicion when it is freely offered to us. How much safer to keep other people at a polite distance, to do our best not to need anyone and to go it alone! But that is what love is about: the willingness to lay aside our weapons and our shields, the willingness to disclose who we really are and to encounter each other with kindness and respect, the willingness to find a way to serve.

In a world so bewitched by the drug of force, so addicted to the thrill of domination, we stand tonight, as we do in every Eucharist, inside a different paradigm. Tonight we lift up the power of community, the power of service, the power of belonging to one another. Tonight we dare to say: this is what God is like. This is the power at the center of reality and at the center of our being: the power of love. Fear is not the only force at work in the world today, ³ nor will fear have the last word.

Jesus gives himself to us tonight as we wash each other’s feet, and as we share in the bread and wine. Tomorrow he will give himself to us in his outpouring of love on the cross. “Take me,” says Jesus. “I am holding nothing back.” Will we accept his love? Will we follow where he leads? Which path, which paradigm, will we choose?

Here is another poem, this one by Michael Leunig: ⁴

There are only two feelings. Love and fear.
There are only two languages. Love and fear.
There are only two activities. Love and fear.
There are only two motives, two procedures,
two frameworks, two results.
Love and fear.
Love and fear.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Core

2. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, quoted by Rabbi Michael Lerner, “Spiritual Politics and the Post-Iraq Realities of Global Discourse,” from a talk given on 3/31/03 and excerpted in an email from the Tikkun Community.

3. Slogan spotted several years ago on a United Methodist Church poster at the Amtrak train station in Stamford, Conn.

4. Michael Leunig, A Common Prayer

A voice in the wilderness

A voice cries out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low” (Luke 3:4). One morning this week I woke up wondering — What is the voice that cries out in the wilderness? What did Isaiah hear, what did John the Baptist hear, as they wandered in wild places, listening to wind and scrambling over rocks? Is the voice that they heard in the wilderness still speaking, and can we hear it, too? I decided that I needed to go find myself a few mountains and valleys, and a good place in which to listen.

Around here we don’t have to search hard for such places. I grabbed a cup of coffee and drove straight to Skinner State Park. I left my car in the lot near the base of the mountain and began walking up the road. It was a warm day, and a gusty wind was roaring about, tossing the branches of the oak and hickory trees in the woods around me. A flock of geese passed overhead, beating their wings hard in the roiling air and almost tumbling against each other as they fought to keep their balance. I heard them make their fierce cries, until at last their calls vanished in the wind. I turned to take the short, steep trail that leads straight to the summit, and listened to the sound of my labored breathing and the squelch of my sneakers as they slipped on rocks and patches of mud. As I climbed, the far-off hum of traffic grew more faint, and by the time I reached the top of the mountain, all I could hear was my panting and the steady howl of the wind.

I stood on the balcony of Summit House, that former hotel that is still a magnet for people in search of open spaces and distant views, and I looked out at the landscape far below. It was hardly the desert wilderness that Isaiah and John the Baptist knew. I could see plenty of civilization — the 18-wheeler crossing Coolidge Bridge, the clusters of rooftops and spires jutting up through the trees, the airport runway. Yet I could also see the river curling peacefully in the distance, the great stretches of fields and forest, the shadows of clouds as they moved silently over the rises and hollows of the land.

I’m told that the Holyoke Range was formed 200 million years ago “as lava welled up into the valleys, and sediments were washed in from nearby mountains.” ¹ For thousands of years before European settlers arrived, Native Americans considered the larger peaks of these mountains to be sacred sites. Thanks to the vision and generosity of local citizens some years ago here in the Pioneer Valley, most areas of these mountains are now protected from development. I am grateful that some of you here in this congregation are active in similar efforts today.

We all know what can happen to our souls when we spend time in a natural setting. Something in us relaxes, enlarges, and lets go. The immediate, urgent concerns that keep such a tight grip on us — an escalating war, financial uncertainty, health issues, relationship issues, all the worries, regrets, and fears that plague us and pursue us and hem us in — somehow they drop away for a time out of time when we walk in the wilderness, listening.

This week I was interested to learn that a recent issue of Scientific American reports on a new study from the University of Rochester that shows that spending time in nature can change our values, making us less focused on ourselves and more focused on others, less concerned with personal gain and more concerned with generosity to the larger community. ² The study distinguished between what it called “extrinsic life aspirations,” such as being financially successful or being admired by a lot of people, and “intrinsic life aspirations,” such as creating meaningful and enduring relationships or working to build a better society. The results showed that people who watched images of nature, or who spent time in nature, “scored significantly lower on extrinsic life aspirations, and significantly higher on intrinsic life aspirations.” Experiencing only built environments led to life aspirations that were more focused on the self. It’s enough to make one wonder whether our country’s growing absorption in the world of screens and virtual reality, of the Internet, social networking, computer games, and everything else that keeps us firmly indoors is somehow related to the apparent increase in our aspirations for celebrity, wealth, power, achievement, and all those other values that enhance the self. ³

Yet something in our souls calls us back into nature. Something lures us out to find again a space of open sky or a stretch of wild water, a spot deeply hidden among trees or a bluff from which we can look out to the furthest horizon. Something in us wants to be immersed in wildness, to find ourselves related to something large and living and free. Our soul expands to fit this large and wild space, because our soul — it turns out — is just that large, and just that wild. Deep within us a voice cries out, and we can hear it cry. It is a cry of recognition and rejoicing. I am home now! I have found my place! And it is a cry of repentance, too. My life has been too small!

“The word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness” (Luke 3:2), and the word of God comes to us in the wilderness, too. It is a voice that greets us tenderly, as if putting a sheltering hand over our sad, sorry selves, welcoming us in and carrying us home. And it is a voice that challenges and confronts us, that uproots and unsettles and shatters and breaks and burns. Our small, tight, ego-centered self, the self that is so focused on its own appearance and survival, on looking good, and winning, and being liked, and being right — that self is crucified when the God of love comes near. The mountains of that ego-self are laid low. Its self-serving stubbornness is toppled. Its pride crumbles. Its hard-hearted insistence on triumphing at all costs collapses and falls away. Down it all goes! And our valleys are raised up. We are lifted up out of shame and fear, pulled up from despair. Our hollows — those aching places of loss and grief and self-doubt — those hollows are filled.

Advent is full of the imagery of transformation, of preparing a way for God, of leveling mountains and filling up valleys. Of course we don’t take this literally — we know that this is not a call to fire up the bulldozers, blow off mountaintops for coal, or fill up valleys with sludge. But often we think that leveling those mountains and raising those valleys is a job that is up to us to do. After all, Advent is a busy time — for example, a good many of you just finished organizing a flat-out, hats-off, hands-down, over-the-top fantastic St. Nicholas bazaar. (Thank you, everybody!) Many of us are on the go in these weeks before Christmas. Some push hard to finish exams; others clean house before the return of far-flung family members for the holidays; many buy gifts, send cards, host parties. There is a lot to do, and if we’re lucky, we love every minute of it.

But of course, Advent has another dimension, too. You might say that Advent has a contemplative heart. It’s not about us, but God — not about our own activity, but God’s. In this darkest month of the year, when the days grow short and the wind now blows cold, our forbears in faith invite us to seek an open space in which to listen carefully for the inner voice of love. We are invited to do what Isaiah and John the Baptist did — to go out to a place in nature, or to set aside time at home to pray in silence as we await the Sacred Mystery that is larger than our own small selves. Preparing the way of the Lord is not another project of the ego, not another busy, bustling effort to assert our will. It’s about allowing our selves to be seized and silenced by the living God, and to let God do the work within us and among us that only God can do.

In a few minutes, as we sing the offertory hymn, we will have a chance to come forward with our pledge cards and to make a financial commitment to the work of God as it is expressed in this particular community of faith. We offer our pledges because we are confident — as Paul says in his Letter to the Philippians — that “the one who began a good work among [us] will bring it to completion” (Philippians 1:6). We offer our pledges as a sign of God’s self-giving to us, in the gift of Christ’s birth. We pledge money, time, support, creativity — whatever we have — to each other as a way to share in God’s self-giving. The more we participate with each other in God’s self-giving love, the more we embody the life of the Trinity in whose image we are created. Our true selves are ignited in these precious moments of opening our hearts — and, yes, our pocketbooks — and we give thanks for “the tender compassion of our God… [whose] dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1: 68-79, Luke 1:78-79).

1. From a sign posted at the entrance to Summit State Park.

2. P. Wesley Schultz, “The Moral Call of the Wild: New study suggests that spending time in nature changes our values,” http://www.scientificamerican.com.

3. A similar point is made in the article cited above.

Seeing with new eyes

Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” Mark 10:51

My mind is full of images of yesterday’s wonderful climate rally on the Town Common, in which many of you participated. The core group that organized the event was a mix of Episcopalians, Quakers, Unitarians, and Congregationalists. Friends and strangers in this town came together around a shared concern: the desire to protect life as we know it on this planet. And this little group was a microcosm of what is happening around the world. The event here in Amherst was one of more than five thousand similar actions that were carried out yesterday in 181 countries, in dozens of languages, in every time zone and on every continent, in heat and in cold, under sun and clouds and snow, and yes — as we discovered yesterday — in the pouring rain. According to the event organizer, Bill McKibben, as far as anyone can tell, this was “the single most widespread day of political action that the earth has ever seen.” ¹

In just six weeks, world leaders will meet in Copenhagen to negotiate a new treaty to cut global warming pollution, and the message that millions of people around the world were lifting up yesterday, and will keep lifting up in the weeks ahead, is the urgent need to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to no more than 350 parts per million. 350 is the number that represents safety, and that’s why a 350 banner has been hanging from our steeple for a while, and why we are pressing our political leaders — both internationally and here at home — to set us quickly on a path to energy efficiency and to clean, safe, renewable energy before the load of carbon in our atmosphere triggers irreversible and catastrophic effects.

If you take a look at the pictures now being posted on the Website 350.org, you will see photographs from every corner of the Earth — Ethiopia and India, Australia and Afghanistan, Botswana and Peru, the Maldives and Mongolia, Syracuse and Spain. Every picture includes the number 350, and one of the most striking series of photographs is from the Middle East, where the waters of the Dead Sea are rapidly dwindling. In one picture you can see people forming the number 3 on the Jordanian shore. In a second picture taken further down the beach, in Palestine, another group of people forms the number 5. In a third picture, the zero is formed by people who stand on the Israeli coast. As the caption says, “If there’s any image that illustrates the ability of people to come together across political boundaries, this should be it.”

In the context of yesterday’s global events, I can think of no better passage to consider this morning than the joyful, hope-filled words that we heard from the prophet Jeremiah. Today’s passage is part of the so-called “book of consolation” that Jeremiah wrote during the long dark years of his people’s exile, which began in 587 BCE. It was a bitter time, a time of fear and loss, a time of dislocation and death. The Babylonian empire had destroyed Jerusalem and taken the people captive. People had died or had been scattered, ripped from their homeland. No hope was in sight. Yet Jeremiah was fired with a holy vision. He burned with a vision of restoration and homecoming. Our God, he says, is a saving God, a God whose deepest desire is to gather God’s people “from the farthest parts of the earth,” to bring them back, all of them, even and especially the very weakest of them, “the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor, together; a great company, they shall return here” [Jeremiah 31:8].

Jeremiah anticipated and foresaw and prayed his people into the great homecoming that did in fact take place some fifty years after he wrote these words, when his beloved people were at last set free to reclaim their home. Long before that day, Jeremiah could see it up ahead in his mind’s eye. He could feel it in his bones, for he was filled with confidence in the saving purposes of God, a God who “with consolations” would lead God’s people home along a road that was smooth and where there would be plenty of water to drink. “I will let them walk,” God says through Jeremiah, “by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble; for I have become a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my first-born” [Jeremiah 31:9].

If you know what it is like to be in a hopeless place, in a desperate place, whether you are worrying about global climate change or any of the other troubles that beset us, you might want to sit for a while with this passage in prayer, and to let yourself know what it feels like to have God seek out all the scattered parts of yourself, to gather up all those far-flung bits, and to lead you home with consolation beside a stream of clear water. In the last line of the text, you might want to replace the words “Israel” and “Ephraim” with your own name, so that you can hear in your depths that God has become a father to you, a mother to you. You are the first-born; you are the one whom God cherishes to the utmost. When we can pray our way into these words, we may sense again within us the divine Source who is always luring us to life, always blessing us with love, always reaching out to whatever within us is most lost or lonesome or cast away, and coaxing us back to wholeness, urging us to come home. Like those, as the psalm says, who “go out weeping carrying the seed,” we, too, may find that we “will come again with joy, shouldering [our] sheaves” [Psalm 126:7]. These two readings — from Jeremiah and Psalm 126 — speak to us words of hope in a desperate time.

Today’s Gospel story also gives us a powerful passage to ponder. The blind beggar Bartimaeus is sitting at the side of the road. He is washed up, at the end of his rope, at the end of the line, without recourse, with no backup plan. He is a beggar and he is blind, the very image of someone who has nothing to offer and nothing to claim as his own. Like the people in exile in our first reading, this man is helpless and he is desperate. If you know what that’s like, then I invite you to sit with Bartimaeus for a while. So many us try so hard to be self-sufficient, to hold it together, to look good and get the job done, that it may come as a surprise and a relief to remember that Jesus is particularly attuned not to the powerful but to the weak, to those who know their need. And who among us does not feel weak and in need sometimes when we look squarely at the daunting issues that face humanity today, from climate change to species extinction, to say nothing of our own personal challenges? Often enough we can’t see a way forward. We can’t see our way clear.

So let us sit for a moment with Bartimaeus at the side of the road. He hears that Jesus is approaching, and he begins to cry out, in an appeal that nothing and nobody can stop, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” This is a man who knows his need, and can name it. He even shouts it. He is yearning for mercy, hungry for healing, totally convinced of his need to be made whole and that Jesus can heal him.

The disciples and members of the crowd try to stop him. We can imagine what they say. “Oh, be quiet. We’re in a hurry. We’ve got places to go. Jesus is much too important to be concerned with the likes of you. You’re not worth his time. Don’t make such a fool of yourself. Buck up. Settle down. Quit complaining.” But Bartimaeus will have none of that. He knows what he needs and he knows where help can come, so he cries out even more loudly, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

And here comes something amazing. Jesus stops. Jesus stands still. In the Gospel stories, Jesus is often on the move, traveling from one place to another, and now he is heading to Jerusalem to accomplish and complete the work that he was sent on earth to do. He has every reason to keep going. Yet he stops. Out of the welter of voices in the crowd, he can hear the beggar’s cry. He hears the man’s deep longing for healing. He hears the ring of sincerity in the man’s voice, the note of urgency, the desperate plea. And he stops. I dare say that Jesus always stops when we are that honest with him. He always listens when we name our need with all the simplicity and candor that is in our hearts.

Jesus says to the disciples, “Call him here.” So they call the blind man, saying, “Take heart; get up; he is calling you,” and the man springs up, throwing off his cloak. That cloak was apparently the man’s only possession, and he may have needed it not only for warmth but also to drape over his legs as he sat begging, to let it catch the coins. ² But in his eagerness to meet Jesus, Bartimaeus throws the cloak aside. Unlike the rich man whom we met earlier in the chapter [Mk 10:17-22] who could not relinquish his riches to follow Jesus, the blind man clings to nothing. He lets go what he has and gives it all away, in order to come to the Lord.

Then Jesus asks him the same question that he had just asked James and John, in almost exactly the same words, “What do you want me to do for you?” [Mk 10:51; cf. Mk 10:36]. It is a piercing question, a probing question that reaches deep into the man’s heart. What is his deepest desire? Unlike James and John, it is not power that the man wants, not self-seeking glory. He wants simply to see, to have his sight restored. As one commentator points out, this fellow may be blind, but it seems that already he has better sight than the members of Jesus’ inner circle! ³ He names his need: “My teacher, let me see again.” And Jesus says to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.”

So may it be for us, for all of us who feel caught in the dark sometimes, who can’t see our way forward, who feel overcome sometimes by forces and situations that leave us feeling helpless by the side of the road. Jesus is willing to stop for us, to listen to us, and he is eager to learn how we would name our deepest need. Are we willing to do that? Are we willing to acknowledge our helplessness to him, and our longing for to be healed? For then we can regain our sight, and maybe we will be given eyes to see as Jesus sees, so that, when we look into one another’s faces, we see our brothers and sisters, and when we look at the glorious Creation that surrounds us, we see the face of God.

1. From Bill McKibben’s “Final Organizer Update” email, sent out the day before the International Day of Climate Action

2. Synthesis; A Weekly Resource for Preaching and Worship following the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, October 25, 2009.

3. Ibid.

Finding Communion with Creation

An Episcopal bishop named Mark Macdonald tells a wonderful story about leading worship in a congregation in the middle of Navajo Nation. It was Easter morning, and when the time came to read the Gospel account of Jesus’ resurrection, Bishop Macdonald stood up and began reading in Navajo: “It was early in the morning…” Almost before the words were out of his mouth, “the oldest person there, an elder who understood no English, said loudly (in Navajo), ‘Yes!’”

Macdonald thought “it seemed a little early in the narrative for this much enthusiasm,” so he assumed he had made a mistake — maybe he had mispronounced the words in Navajo. So he tried again: “It was early in the morning…’” This time he heard an even louder and more enthusiastic Yes. After Communion, the bishop went up to one of the lay leaders and asked if he had pronounced the words correctly. Oh, she said, looking surprised, of course. Well, asked the bishop, then why was the older woman so excited? Oh, he was told, “The early dawn is the most important part of the day to her. Father Sky and Mother Earth meet at that time and produce all that is necessary for life. It is the holiest time of the day. Jesus would pick that good time of day to be raised.” ¹

Bishop Macdonald comments that while the early dawn is certainly the best time for new life, he had never thought about the possibility that this “observation about the physical word could be theologically and spiritually revealing, that it suggested a communion between God, humanity, and creation that is fundamental to our… existence.” It took him a while to absorb this. He writes: “An elder with no formal schooling had repositioned the central narrative of my life firmly within the physical world and all its forces and interactions. It was,” he says, “an ecological reading of a story that, for me, had been trapped inside a flat virtual world misnamed ‘spiritual’.”

Today on Creation Sunday, the finale of Earth Day and Earth Week, we celebrate the sacred power of the natural world. Like Bishop Macdonald, today we remember and re-claim what he calls “a primal, long-ignored layer of spiritual consciousness that [is] also an ecological consciousness.” ²

I don’t know about you, but I grew up thinking of “spirituality” as completely 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. Since the time of the Reformation, Christianity — at least in the West — has had 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 people of the land — to know that the Earth is holy. Its creatures are holy. The whole created world is lit up with the power and presence of God.

Our Gospel story this morning is full of meanings, but surely one of them is that the Risen Christ is alive in the body, in our bodies, in the body of the Earth. “When the disciples were telling how they had seen Jesus risen from the dead, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost” [Luke 24:]. But Jesus comes not as a ghost. He comes not as a memory, nor as an idea, nor as something from “a flat, virtual world misnamed ‘spiritual’.” He comes as a living body, a body made of flesh and bones that can touch and be touched, a body that can feel hunger and thirst and that wants to know, “Hey, isn’t there anything to eat around here?” The Messiah suffers, dies, and rises as a body, and that must tell us something about how much God loves the body and wants to meet us in and through the body – through our bodily senses of sight and sound, through taste and touch and smell. Scripture tells us that for forty days the disciples met the living Christ through his risen body. And then, when he ascended into heaven, Jesus’ body withdrew from the disciples’ sight, so that his living presence could fill all things and so that all of us can touch and see him, if our eyes are opened.

What this means is that when you and I go out into nature, when we let our minds grow quiet and we simply gaze at the river or the blooming magnolia or the slopes of the Holyoke Range coming back to life as the first soft leaves of Spring unfold, when we gaze with a quiet eye, not grasping for anything and not pushing anything away, we begin to perceive that a holy, living presence fills everything we see. Wherever we gaze, the Risen Christ is gazing back at us and his presence is flowing toward us. “Peace be with you,” he is saying to us through hawk and wind, through tree and cloud and stars. “Peace be with you. I am here in the needles of the pine tree beside you that flutter in the breeze, and in the bark overlaid with clumps of lichen, each one a tiny galaxy. I am here in the ocean waves that form and dissolve on the shore, in the sand under your bare feet, in the sea gull that is crying overhead. Peace be with you. I am here, and you are part of this with me, and you are witnesses of these things.”

When our inward sight is restored, and our eyes are opened, as today’s Collect says, to behold Christ in all his redeeming work, the Earth comes alive and we perceive Christ revealing himself in every sound we hear, in every handful of dirt that we hold and in every bird we see.

This morning I brought in an icon of the Risen Christ that usually hangs in my office. ³ The icon imagines Christ as a Native American figure whose body shines out from every habitat and every creature – from the sky above to the water below, from mountains, field and buffalo. 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.

I know that some of you have gone to great lengths to make today a carpool or car-free Sunday. Some of you have already told me about the efforts you made to reduce your carbon footprint this morning. I am delighted, and I look forward to hearing more stories, especially during the Forum today after the 10:30 service, when a local eco-activist, Tina Clarke, will speak to us about Transition Towns, a new movement taking hold in the United Kingdom and now reaching the U.S., to re-imagine and re-design our urban communities so that they are less dependent on oil and more environmentally sustainable. ⁴

Why do we go to this kind of trouble to cut back our use of fossil fuels? Maybe it is partly social pressure, but obviously it is a lot more than that. If you are like me, sometimes we take action out of fear. And with good reason — the news from climate scientists is increasingly scary. Sometimes we take action out of anger, anger because the poor — as always — are the people most threatened by climate change and will suffer most from its effects, anger because greed and carelessness and inertia are stealing a habitable Earth from our children and our children’s children. Or maybe it is sorrow that pushes us to act — a piercing grief at how much has been lost, at the species that are likely to go extinct, the massive glaciers and healthy coral reefs that our children will never see. Fear, anger, sorrow — all these can galvanize us to act.

But stirring beneath them all is love, love for each other, love for the Earth entrusted to our care, love for the God whose mercies cannot be numbered. We were made for communion with God and each other and God’s Creation, and it is communion that we feel when we gaze in silent awe at the sparkling river or the distant stars, and Communion that we celebrate every Sunday. When the celebrant lifts up the bread and the wine at the Eucharist, the whole Creation is lifted up. When the celebrant blesses the bread and wine, the whole Creation is blessed. Christ comes to us in the consecrated bread and wine, and in the grain that was formed into bread and the grapes that were pressed into wine. Christ comes to us in the sunshine that warmed the grapes and the grain, in the rainfall that watered their roots, in the hands that tended them, and pruned and harvested them. Christ comes to us in the very ground in which the seeds of grain and grape were planted, for the risen Christ is alive in every part of Creation, offering us healing, offering us blessing. In the strength of this blessed and broken bread, and of this blessed and poured-out wine, we dare to hope that human beings will find a way to respond with grateful hearts, and to become who were made to be, a blessing on the Earth.

1. Mark Macdonald, “Finding Communion with Creation,” in Holy Ground; A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation, edited by Lyndsay Moseley and the staff of Sierra Club Books, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2008, pp. 150-151. Macdonald is the former bishop of Alaska and now the pastoral bishop of the Episcopal Church of Navajoland.

2. Ibid, p. 151.

3. “Mystic Christ,” by Fr. John Giuliani, Bridge Building Images, Inc. (www.BridgeBuilding.com)

4. See www.transitiontowns.org The Forum never did take place today, but we hope to reschedule.

Anointing at Bethany

“See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them. Amen.”

Here we are on Monday in Holy Week, launched like a boat into the deep currents of sacred history. As we set out on this journey, we bring with us our particular hopes and dreams, our concerns and fears, and we ask God to help us set them in the context of what is ultimately true and ultimately real. We ask God to help us understand more fully who Jesus is and what he has done for us. We ask God to help us follow Jesus in walking the way of the cross, and, as today’s Collect says, to “find it none other than the way of life and peace.”

You and I hear the events of Holy Week in relation to what is on our hearts and minds just now, and for me, the words and actions of Holy Week take place this year in relation to the distress of the natural world. Sometimes it seems that I can almost hear the relentless melting of glaciers as our climate heats up. The Arctic was predicted to melt at the end of the century; a week or two ago we learned that it will probably melt in just 30 years. This morning I learned that a vast ice bridge in the Antarctic collapsed last Saturday, a sudden and unusually dramatic result of global warming. Last Friday that enormous ice bridge, apparently in place for the past 10,000 years, was intact. Last Saturday it splintered.

I come to tonight’s Gospel story and I wonder: what word is God giving us tonight? How is God calling us tonight to come alive? What message of hope and truth does the Spirit want to convey to us just now, at this critical moment in history, when we have such a short span of time in which to act quickly and effectively to heal our beautiful and ailing planet?

Tonight’s Gospel invites us to enter a home in the village of Bethany, where a small circle of friends has gathered for the evening meal. Lazarus is the host, and his sister Martha is serving the meal. At some point during dinner, Lazarus’ other sister, Mary, takes a large quantity of expensive perfume, anoints Jesus’ feet, and then wipes his feet with her hair. Judas objects, and Jesus defends her.

It is Mary who catches my eye tonight, Mary who perhaps can be a friend in Christ and give us a word from God. What do I see in Mary? Three things.

First, I see a woman who has spent time with Jesus and has come to know and love him. Mary has watched Jesus console and challenge, beckon and invite, admonish and teach, weep and laugh. She has found in him a man so transparent to God, so filled with God’s Spirit, that if God could take human form, you would say — This is what God is like! If God could speak in a human voice or look at us with human eyes, this is how God’s voice would sound and what God’s voice would say! This is how lovingly God’s eyes would look into yours! And Mary has seen Jesus’ power up close. At one point she knelt, weeping, at Jesus’ feet, when her brother Lazarus died, and then watched in amazement as Jesus called him back to life. Now she kneels again at Jesus’ feet, this time to anoint his feet with fragrant perfume, as if preparing his body for burial.

That is the first thing I want to say about Mary: from this loving gesture we can see that she has cast her lot with Jesus. She has come to know and trust the God who is manifest in him. In Jesus she has experienced the healing and liberating power of God, and she will follow Jesus, and the divine Spirit that is working through him, to the end.

And here’s the second thing. Mary is acutely aware of the darkness and danger of the moment. She is not living in some kind of bubble of happy piety. Ever since Jesus raised her brother Lazarus from the dead, the civil and religious authorities have been actively looking for Jesus, planning to arrest him and put him to death. The tension around Jesus is reaching the breaking point, and the forces of darkness and death are closing in. In fact, they are already inside that apparently safe haven in Bethany, for Judas the betrayer is speaking up with his lies, pretending to care for the poor when in fact he is stealing from the box of money that Jesus and the disciples share.

Yes, Mary is highly aware of the darkness. But what does she do? Does she cower in fear? Is she paralyzed by anxiety? Does she lash out in anger? No. She acts boldly, even extravagantly, in love. And that is my third point: Mary acts in love. And with such lavishness, too, in that sensual, even erotic gesture of pouring perfume over Jesus’ feet and wiping it away with her hair! It is a scandalous act, for respectable Jewish women would never appear in public with their hair unbound. But in that moment of self-abandon and self-giving, Mary does not seem to care. She allows herself to express all the love that is in her, to give herself fully to the one who has loved her so fully and who will soon pour out his life for her — and for all — on the cross.

As I listen to this story tonight, as I tremble for our children and grandchildren, and wonder what sort of world we will leave them, I hear God addressing us through the person of Mary of Bethany. Stay with Jesus, she would tell us. Listen to him. Watch him. Follow him.

And — she would say — face the darkness. Don’t pretend it is not here. For it is, around us and within us.

And — I think she would also say — don’t be afraid. Keep on loving, even in the darkness. Be bold in your love. Don’t hold back, for the love you have to give — the acts of kindness that you can offer, your own bold gestures of justice and creativity and compassion — are like a balm to a hurting world, like a fine perfume whose fragrance fills the house.

What I want you to hear is that Jesus’ story is our story, and that Mary of Bethany’s story is our story, too. Easter morning has not yet come for Mary in the story that we hear tonight, and yet she is fearless in her love. Like Jesus, like Mary, we are on a path straight through the darkness, and, like them, too, we need not recoil in fear. Tonight, in the midst of darkness, we open our hearts, and give and receive extravagant love.

How does that love speak in your heart tonight?