creation care

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?

“As One Having Authority”

I have to tell you, I wrestled with this Gospel. How does it connect with us? How does it speak to the issues that are on our minds this morning, from our personal relationships to the economic meltdown and the struggle of Israelis and Palestinians to learn to co-exist? What does this brief scene of Jesus teaching in the synagogue and releasing a man from an unclean spirit have to say to us today? I found myself walking around, repeating the opening line of today’s Gospel as I pondered the story: “Jesus and his disciples went to Capernaum” — “Jesus went to Capernaum” — “So Jesus walks to Capernaum” — and before long I found myself saying, “So a man walks into a bar…”

I laughed. Well, I thought, laughter is a good thing. Laughter breaks open the mind. And I think that is the point of the story: when we find ourselves in Christ’s presence, our minds break open. We awaken. We see the world with new eyes. We understand afresh, as the poet says, that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

So let’s take a look at the passage. It comes immediately after the one we heard last week about Jesus calling his first disciples. We are at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, and the first thing he does is to go into a synagogue on the Sabbath and begin to teach. As far as Mark’s Gospel is concerned, teaching was vital to Jesus’ ministry, but it is interesting that Mark says nothing in this passage about what Jesus taught. ¹ In fact, throughout his Gospel, Mark has comparatively little to say about the content of Jesus’ teaching. The other Gospel writers are eager to preserve it — think, for instance, of Jesus’ long discourses, such as the Sermon on the Mount, in the Gospel of Matthew, or Jesus’ long discourses on light and darkness, life and death, good and evil, in the Gospel of John. For the other Gospel writers, knowing the content of Jesus’ teaching is essential to the Christian life.

By contrast, Mark focuses less on what Jesus taught and more on its power, its effect. The text tells us that everyone was “astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” [Mark 1:22]. Who were the scribes? In Jesus’ time they were the men who interpreted the Scriptures. They examined precedent; they quoted tradition; they repeated other people’s ideas about God. Unlike the scribes, Jesus taught “as one having authority.” One way to explain his authority is to believe that Jesus was more educated than the scribes, and some scholars argue that Jesus was trained and ordained as a rabbi. “Properly ordained rabbis with full rabbinic authority” seldom traveled into Galilee, so maybe the people of Galilee were astonished to hear someone who had that authority, or who spoke as if he had. ²

But whether or not Jesus spoke as a rabbi — and the evidence is inconclusive — Jesus’ authority obviously springs from a source more significant than that. When Jesus speaks, he speaks with the authority of God. When Jesus teaches, he conveys — through his presence and gestures and words — the very presence and power of God. Jesus is not just imparting information. He is not just passing along something that he read in a book. He is not just giving second-hand ideas, however interesting they may be. No — when he stands before us in the synagogue, he is lit up with God. He is inviting us not to think about God or talk about God, but to experience God. Jesus is a teacher who wants not just to put new ideas in our minds, but to transform our minds, not just to fill up our consciousness but to enlarge it, to break it open, so that we can meet the God who makes all things new.

Jesus does this with power. And Mark is quick to show that this power is a healing power, a power that sets us free. “Just then,” says Mark, “there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit,” and the story of Jesus healing the man with an unclean spirit is quickly followed by the story of his healing Peter’s mother-in-law [Mk 1:29-34], and of his healing a leper [Mk 1:40-45], stories that we will hear over the next two Sundays.

Healing is what happens when we come into the presence of God. The healing may take place very gently, as when a leper’s skin is quietly restored, or it may take place with a great struggle, as in today’s scene in the synagogue, when the unclean spirit cries out to Jesus, and Jesus loudly rebukes it, and the unclean spirit comes out of the man, “convulsing him and crying with a loud voice” [Mk 1:26]. I wonder if the man’s external, bodily tossing to and fro as the spirit comes out of him expresses how attached the man is to that “unclean” spirit, and how fierce his inner battle to relinquish it. Sometimes we don’t quite want to let those spirits go.

What is an unclean spirit? A spirit that stands in opposition to what is holy. We are never told what kind of unclean spirit possesses the man in today’s story, but we don’t have to assume that the man is crazy or that he is possessed by a demon in some kind of unusual or spectacular way. ³ He may be just an ordinary fellow who is profoundly alienated from himself and from God. His “unclean spirit” may simply be the force of habit in his mind, the fact that he shows up in the synagogue and clings to the routine, the verbal formulas, the soothing liturgies, and thinks of them as something to worship in themselves. Maybe he likes conventional religion because it is predictable and safe, the “opiate of the people,” as Karl Marx would say, and maybe his spirit is “unclean” only because he has never experienced for himself the wild Mystery of God that is beyond our mental constructs, our images and ideas. When Jesus enters the synagogue and begins to speak with authority — not as the scribes do, but full on, with the very power of God — the man shouts at Jesus. He recognizes who Jesus is, the “holy One of God,” but he wants that guy out of here. “Go back to the wilderness where you came from and be a holy man out there! Don’t go bringing your living God right here into this sacred place where I’ve got everything all figured out!”

Or maybe the man has another kind of unclean spirit, the kind that whispers in our ears: “You’re not good enough. Try as hard as you like, but you’re never going to amount to much. You are lazy, you are fat, you are too thin, you are old, you are too young, you are stupid, you are a loser.” Oh, the mean things those toxic, contemptuous voices like to say! They alienate us from ourselves and they alienate us from God. They are the killing voices of shame and self-doubt.

Is that the kind of unclean spirit that is troubling you? Or is it something else? Maybe it is a spirit of fear, a spirit of worry and anxiety. There is a lot of that going around these days. Maybe it is a spirit of bitterness and resentment, a spirit that refuses to seek forgiveness or to make amends, a spirit that closes you down. How insidious and tenacious those spirits can be!

Christ wants to open us to a larger, divine reality that is always available but that we don’t always see. He wants us to let go those unclean spirits, those habitual and sometimes toxic ways of perceiving and making sense of things, and to fall silent so that we can listen and look, and discover at last his presence within us and around us. He wants to set us free.

One morning last month it started to snow — no surprise — and by sunset we had a good twelve inches. At 9 o’clock that night I went outside in the dark with a shovel, and my husband and I began digging out the driveway. After a while, Jonas went inside, but I felt like being outdoors, so I stayed in the cold dark air, and I reached and lifted and hurled, again and again, as I slowly cleared the snow away.

Finally I stopped, breathing hard, to lean on my shovel and to look around: deep gray sky, white rooftops, street lamps shining, the muffled sound of a plow scraping in the distance. With one set of eyes, it was another boring night on Bancroft Road, the weary world repeating itself endlessly. Seeing through those eyes, I felt impatient and irritable. What was the point of anything? Everything was useless, empty, and unsatisfying.

But then — I don’t know why — suddenly I was seeing through another set of eyes, and everything I saw was dear to me: the stark grey sky, the shining snow, the house across the street. All of it was just the same as it always is and all of it was lovely, however imperfect or haphazard it might be. I loved everything I saw. I don’t know whether the love in my eyes made everything lovable, or whether my loving eyes saw through the surface of things and glimpsed the Love that was already within them and that would be visible every day, if only I had eyes to see.

I felt peaceful and full of joy, as if an angel’s wing had brushed my cheek, as if the Holy Spirit had overshadowed me, as if Jesus himself had just walked into the synagogue and begun teaching with authority, and my unclean spirit had melted away like snow.

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that the main thing is not just to save the world, not just to rescue the economy, and to stop global warming, and to stop the war in Iraq, and to help the Israelis and Palestinians make peace, and to do all the other good and necessary things that we urgently need to do. What matters even more, I think, is that we save a way of seeing the world, that we continue to see the world with loving eyes — because if we do that, then what we see becomes worth saving. It becomes worth loving, worth treating kindly and with respect. I think that’s what it looks like when we stand in our authority in Christ, the place where we see ourselves and each other and all creation with loving eyes, and Christ makes all things new.

1. D.E. Nineham, The Gospel of Saint Mark, Penguin Books: Middlesex, England, 1963, 1969.

2. Ibid., pp. 74-75.

3. John P. Keenan, The Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana Reading, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995, pp. 67-72. This is a fascinating, provocative, and, as far as I can tell, quite original exploration of Mark’s Gospel from a Buddhist perspective.

Ringing 350, Restoring All Things

Today is a big-picture day — a day we lift our eyes from the immediate concerns of our daily lives in order to see the big picture and take the long view. Where do we go when we want the big view? One good place to get the big picture is the Bible, and I will say something about that in a moment. Another good place is New York’s American Museum of Natural History, which I visited two weeks ago. There you can wander through the Hall of the Universe, the Center for Earth and Space, and the Hall of Ocean Life. Big picture! You can walk through exhibits about forests and mammals and birds. You can walk through rooms where overhead you see bones of flying creatures and creeping creatures that went extinct long ago, and you can ponder enormous dinosaur skeletons with impressive teeth and claws and tails.

These days you can also check out a special exhibit on climate change, which features, as you walk in, a room with a red line on the wall that traces the levels of heat-trapping gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. The red line begins at the year 1600, and the line is well below your knees — where it has stayed steady for the past 2,000 years. As you walk across the room, the red line rises, and when you reach the other side of the room and get to the present moment, a mere 400 hundred years later, the line is well above your head and climbing steeply. As the exhibit points out, this is a level of carbon dioxide that hasn’t been seen on earth for at least 800,000 years, and probably much longer. Of course we know that the climate has changed many times in the Earth’s long history, but this time is different. This time, the global climate is growing warm because of human activities, and, as any scientist will tell you, whenever we see in the natural world something very sudden — like that sharp spike in CO2 — then we know that an abrupt change of some kind is upon us.

A few days ago I listened to author and environmental activist Bill McKibben speak about what climate scientists have discovered in the last 18 months. One thing they have discovered is that the climate models are wrong. The impact of global warming around the world is taking place much faster than the models had predicted and at a much larger scale. One of the signs of the times, said McKibben — what really got the scientists’ attention — was the rapid melt of sea ice in the summer of 2007. It was, said one scientist, as if the ice had fallen off a cliff. The same thing repeated this past summer, when the Northwest Passage was open for the first time in the life of our species. The ice is melting 50 years sooner than the models had predicted.

Here is another piece of the scientific big picture. When we raise the temperature worldwide and start to melt the sea ice, the process begins to take on a life of its own. For example, the shiny white ice that reflects the sun’s radiation is replaced by dark water that absorbs 80% of that solar radiation. The Arctic Ocean is now so warm that even in the winter, ice is melting from underneath.

This kind of feedback loop accelerates the rate of climate change that you and I cause directly when we burn coal and gas and oil to heat our homes, and turn on our lights, and run our cars, and power our engines. We know what is ahead if we don’t find a way to change course quickly — more droughts and floods around the world, more severe storms, a rise in infectious diseases, desperate shortages of water, millions of environmental refugees, and, as one study recently reported, a possible sea level rise of seven feet within this century. As McKibben pointed out, there is not enough money in the world to build walls and levees protecting every coastal city from that kind of rise in the level of the sea.

Big picture. Grim picture.

But we have a number. Scientists didn’t know this number even a year ago. It is a very important number, and if we know nothing else about global warming, we should know this number. And we do. It’s the number on the banner that is hanging from our steeple. It comes to us from James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, our country’s leading climatologist, whose latest research shows that any value for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is above 350 parts per million is not compatible with life on Earth as we know it. As Hansen writes, if human beings want “to preserve a planet that is similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,” then the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere must be no more than 350 parts per million.” ¹ ‘350’ means that life as we know it can continue. What is the level of atmospheric CO2 right now? About 385 and climbing.

McKibben compares it to going for a check-up and your doctor tells you that your cholesterol is way too high. If you don’t want to keel over from a heart attack or stroke, then you are going to have to change your behavior, and change it fast. Or we can think of 350 parts per million as representing our budget. Stay within our budget, and our lives function just fine. Go over that credit limit and we’re in danger; we’re in debt. Right now we’re living way beyond our means, living on borrowed time.

That’s why the world into which we were born is eroding before our eyes. That’s why, as McKibben says, “We are diligently in the process of de-creation,” reversing the story of Creation that is told in Genesis and taking down life forms all around us. Maybe half the world’s species could be gone before the century is out, more bones to add to a museum of natural history. Unless we move swiftly toward energy conservation and efficiency, unless we make a transition to clean, safe, renewable energy, unless we re-design the infrastructure of our economy so that it is no longer based on fossil fuels — and do this at top speed — then we face runaway climate change. As one scientist put it on a recent documentary on PBS, “We are standing on the precipice of hell.”

That is one big picture of reality. Here is another that is just as real. God is the maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. “In [God’s] hand are the caverns of the earth, and the heights of the hills… also. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands have molded the dry land” [Psalm 95:4-5]. Our Creator God loved the universe into being — every leaf and twig, every dolphin and galaxy. God in Christ redeemed it all, and fills it all, and longs to restore it all. And God the Holy Spirit empowers and emboldens us to become healers of the Earth, and to take action especially on behalf of those who are weak and marginalized and poor, for they are the ones with whom Jesus particularly identifies.

Here on this last Sunday of the church year, we lift up God’s well-beloved Son as King of kings and Lord of lords, the one whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, the one who searches for the lost and rescues the scattered, the one who brings back the strayed and binds up the injured, and gathers everyone and all Creation into a community of justice and love.

At the end of our service this morning, we will ring our bell 350 times. You should have in your pew a leaflet that briefly answers the question, “Why ring our church bell 350 times?” The fact is: there are as many answers to that question as there are people and places that we love.

We ring our bell to bless 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.

We ring our bell to bless 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 cold enough.

We ring our bell to bless the tens of thousands of acres in California that burned to the ground this month by wildfires exacerbated by the droughts and changed weather patterns that are linked to climate change.

We ring our bell to stand with our brothers and sisters in Haiti, a country not so far away but by far the poorest country in the western hemisphere, a country that was battered from mid-August to mid-September by two hurricanes and two tropical storms, storms that are typical of what we can expect from global warming.

We ring our bell to stand with the poor in faraway countries who are already affected by climate change, with the men, women, and children who are on the move in sub-Saharan Africa because Lake Chad has dried up, and with those forced to leave their homeland on the Pacific island of Tuvalu, because the sea is rising.

We ring our bell to stand with the poor in this country who struggle to pay high heating bills and who need help to weatherize their homes.

We ring our bell to express support for the U.N. climate negotiators who will soon meet in Poland to work out a framework for a new international treaty to stop global warming.

We ring our bell to express support for the growing climate movement in this country and our hope that it will stand up to the corporate powers that be. As Bill McKibben observed, “ExxonMobil made more money last year than any company in the history of money.”

We ring the bell for polar bears, and for every species that is threatened with extinction because of climate change.

We ring the bell for our children, and our children’s children, because we love them and we want to leave them a habitable world.

We ring the bell because we want to be filled with and to manifest in our own lives the love of God in Christ that reaches out to every human being and extends to every creature on this planet, weaving us all into one web of life.

Above all we ring the bell because Jesus is Lord, because at the end of the time we will be judged not by how much money we made or how many awards we achieved, not by how rich or thin or smart we were, not by whether we belonged to the right church or believed the right thing or confessed the right creed, but by one thing, and one thing only: by whether or not we learned to love. The mystery and the surprise of our Gospel reading this morning is that when we feed and hungry and clothe the naked — when we reach out to our fellow creatures who are in need — it is Jesus himself that we meet, Jesus himself that we serve.

How wonderful it would be if, fifty and one hundred years from now, our descendants looked back at us with gratefulness for having stepped up boldly in the face of the ecological crisis and for having responded swiftly and lovingly to protect life on this planet. That would be a judgment that would make our hearts sing.

If you would like a turn at the bell, let me give you two instructions.

First, after the service, please form a line on the organ-side aisle. A shepherd will guide you, an acolyte will keep count, and at 12 Noon we will begin to ring. If you want to attend the Forum and hear Sandy Muspratt speak about his recent trip to Haiti, please stand near the front, and, after ringing the bell, head straight to the Parish Hall.

Second, please take a moment to bring to mind a child you love, or a place in nature, or a species that is at risk. I invite you to dedicate your bell-ringing to that person or place or species. If you like, when you ring the bell, say its name aloud or call on the name of Jesus, so that your loving intention as you ring the bell can be as clear and focused as possible.

May God bless our ringing, and may the power of this symbolic action inspire and bless and strengthen everyone who hears its sound.

1. Michael D. Lemonick, “Global Warming: Beyond the Tipping Point,” Scientific American, October 2008: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=global-warming-beyond-the-co2

Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled

“Do not let your hearts be troubled.” What reassuring words these are, words of comfort as Jesus says farewell to his disciples. But this consoling message may be difficult to absorb as we honor Earth Day today and look very soberly at what human activity is doing to our planetary home. How can our hearts not be troubled as we hear the increasingly grim reports of climate change? To cite just one example, more than half the Arctic Ocean was covered with ice year-round in the 1980’s. Last summer we watched the Arctic melt, and last September the entire Northwest Passage between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans was ice-free for the first time in recorded history. Last week NASA released its latest satellite data on the deteriorating condition of Arctic ice, and, as someone working with Greenpeace remarked, “The rate of sea-ice loss we’re observing is much worse than even the most pessimistic projections led us to believe.”1

James Hansen, our leading climatologist, just issued what may be the most important scientific assessment of global warming in years. He argues that significant greenhouse gas reductions must be made immediately “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.” We need, he says, to limit carbon concentrations in the atmosphere to under 350 parts per million. 350 – that’s the magic number, the amount of CO2 that the atmosphere can tolerate if we’re going to sustain life on Earth as we know it. What is the current amount of CO2 in the atmosphere? 385 parts per million, and climbing.

We have work to do.

Global warming makes us anxious – and with good reason. Two years ago, when the reality of climate change finally broke into the popular media and into the consciousness of the American public, the cover of Time magazine [April 3, 2006] was emblazoned with the headline, Be Worried. Be Very Worried. I’m no advocate of worry, but I must admit to thinking that if fear was going to galvanize the American public to demand the urgent changes we need to make, then maybe fear was not such a bad thing. As they say, if you’re not worried about climate change, then you haven’t been paying attention.

But fear can only sustain you for so long, and a steady diet of anxiety can erode the soul and cloud the mind and leave us helpless in a heap of despair. Besides, fear is not the Gospel truth. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus says to us, and this from a man who knew he was soon to be arrested, tortured, and killed. Jesus was hardly in denial about the reality of malice, greed, and other forms of sin, and he faced squarely the fact of suffering and death. Yet his consistent message was one of hope, not fear. Why was that? 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 this 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, dedicated to a life of praising and serving God, whatever the cost might be.

Last week I flew to Seattle to take part in a national Episcopal conference entitled “Healing Our Planet Earth.” In a stunning couple of talks on climate change, our Presiding Bishop remarked that “the partner of urgency is hope,” and that “sharing the work and sharing the dream always engenders hope.” That’s what brings us together every Sunday – to share the work, to share the dream, and to engender the renewed flowering of hope.

You might think that fighting global warming is a technical business that requires enormous skill and expertise. But in fact many of the tools for stabilizing the climate are very ordinary and simple. If we want to re-build this beautiful world of ours, if we want to be healers of planet Earth, we need a set of tools, and as it happens, I brought a sample tool kit with me.

Let’s start with the compact fluorescent light bulb – you knew I was going to pull out one of these, didn’t you? They last up to 10 times longer than regular incandescent bulbs and use ¼ of the electricity, so they save both money and energy. By now your house and work place are probably full of these bulbs, and if they aren’t, they should be. During coffee hour we’ve got a display of compact fluorescents to show you, but I suppose it’s worth adding that no matter what kind of light bulb we use, the best way to save electricity is to turn off unused lights. If no one is in the room, why is the light on?

Here’s another tool: a sweater. In the winter and on chilly days, we can put on a sweater instead of cranking up the furnace to burn fossil fuels. Since we’re heading into warmer weather, using the air conditioner as rarely as possible will also reduce carbon emissions.

What else? A rope. String this up between two trees and you’ve got an instant, solar clothes dryer – sun and wind will do the job for free. Standard clothes dryers suck up enormous amounts of energy, and quite a few of us have given them up entirely. If you like, put duct tape across the front of your clothes dryer, to make it clear to your household what the deal is.

Another tool: a shoe. Putting one foot in front of the other is a way to walk the talk. One hundred years ago, 99.9% of people got by without cars.2 They rode a bicycle, they used the train, they lived near their workplaces – and they walked. Do buy a fuel-efficient car, if you have to drive, but we can save even more fuel simply by driving less.

Another tool: a stainless steel bottle filled with water from the tap. We need to quit the bottled water habit. Americans now drink more than 30 billion single-serving bottles of water a year, an indulgence that consumes vast amount of fossil fuels – and most plastic bottles never get recycled. Instead, we can carry a refillable stainless steel bottle. And when we feel the urge to grab bottled water, we can imagine the bottle being ¼ full of oil – for that’s what went into its being manufactured and shipped and chilled.

And how about the bag itself? That’s another tool. When we bring re-usable canvas bags with us when we shop, we waste neither paper nor plastic, conserving both trees and fossil fuels.

When you have a moment, do take a look at the list compiled by Lucy Robinson that is in your service leaflet, for there you’ll find more tools for personal action to join the battle to save the Earth.3

It’s important that as individuals we do what we can in our household and workplace. But the scope of the challenge is so vast, and the time for effective action so short, we also need to join hands and work together in larger groups. We need bold political action. We need to demand that our country join an international treaty within the next two years that cuts global warming pollution by 90% in developed countries and by more than half worldwide. We need to stop building coal-fired power plants that don’t have the capacity to safely trap and store carbon dioxide. We need to create millions of green-energy jobs.

Religious communities also have a part to play. Last year, Bishop Steven Charleston, the President of Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge and a Native American elder, began to ask himself, what if we could move beyond particular parishes taking individual action here and there to reduce their carbon footprint? What if not just a handful of Episcopal churches – such as Grace Church – but all Episcopal churches took big strides toward energy conservation and efficiency? What if the national leadership of the Episcopal Church made a commitment to cut in half within ten years the carbon footprint of every facility it maintains – not just its churches, but also its camps, schools, offices, and seminaries? And not only that – what if the top leadership of every faith tradition across the country, Protestant and Catholic, Jewish and Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist – what if every national religious community in the United States made the same commitment to reduce its emissions and worked together on a single, unified effort to stop global warming?

Thus was born the Genesis Covenant, which was officially launched in Seattle last Saturday. I am on the steering committee of the Genesis Covenant, and if you go to genesiscovenant.org you can read how it works and how you can help to bring it to life. We’re depending on your help, for the Genesis Covenant is a completely grassroots movement with minimal organizational structure. We’re praying that the Holy Spirit will take hold of this moment to breathe new life into us and give us new energy for action.

For 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 said at the conference in Seattle, to recognize that the world is not a hotel, but our home. 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 called 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 entrusted 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.

I don’t know if human beings will act quickly enough to prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate change, but I can’t think of a mission more inspiring than to stand up for life on this planet. What you and I need to create is the most diverse, bold, visionary, wide-ranging, powerful, hope-filled, hands-on, feet-on-the-ground, shoulder-to-the-wheel social movement that humanity has ever seen.

Jesus whispers in my ears, and in yours, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. I am with you always.”

I heard another climate activist say something that I want to pass along to you.4 We want to be able to say to our children and to our children’s children:

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

Thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing this mission with me.

Do not let your hearts be troubled.

——————————————————————————————————-

1. Carroll Muffett, deputy campaign director with Greenpeace USA.

2. World Wildlife Fund, 10 Simple Things You Can Do to Help Save the Earth!

3. The list is based on David Gershon, Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5000 Pounds, Woodstock, NY: Empowerment Institute, 2006.

4. Eban Goodstein, founder of Green House Network and Focus the Nation, speaking at UMass, Amherst in 2007.

Healing the Planet: Blessed Unrest

This is an unsettling Gospel passage, one that some of us heard in church several weeks ago and may not have liked very much the first time around.  But even though it’s an edgy and uncomfortable Gospel, I chose it because I needed to hear it again today and because I wanted to reflect on it with you.  Why?  Because Jesus wants to set us on fire. 

That’s how he puts it, right off the bat.  “I have come to start a fire, and how I wish it were kindled!”  Jesus comes with fire – that traditional biblical image of judgment and purification. “I have come to change everything,” Jesus says.  “I have come” – and now I’m quoting a contemporary rendering of this passage – “I have come to turn everything right-side up.”¹  He is on his way to Jerusalem, facing his passion and death, and you can hear the urgency in his voice.

Fire is what Jesus brings this afternoon – the loving fire that burns away apathy, indifference, and every tinge of despair, the fiery, passionate, and steady love of God that alone can stand up to the fires of hatred and violence.  Jesus has come to kindle the divine fire that alone can stop the scorching of the planet, and that alone can heal and mend a world that is crying out for our care. 

Divine love is a tender fire, a gentle fire, and the only resource that is always renewable.  But it is also a disruptive fire.  “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to earth?” (Luke 12:51, NRSV) asks Jesus. “Do you think [that I have come] to smooth things over and make everything nice?  Not so.” (Luke 12:51, The Message)  I have come not to bring peace, but division.  “I’ve come to disrupt and confront!  From now on, when you find five in a house, it will be – three against two, and two against three; father against son, and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother….” (Luke12-51-53, The Message) And so on.  You know the rest.

It’s not that Jesus wants us to be troublemakers for trouble’s sake, or to incite division for division’s sake.  Heaven knows the ordinary family has enough conflicts and misunderstandings of its own, and doesn’t need anyone, even Jesus, to encourage further division.  But when we wake up to the crisis this planet is in, and cast our lot with love, we start making waves. 

Oh, sure, it may begin quietly enough – a few compact fluorescents here, a little recycling there, maybe a decision to use public transportation from time to time, or even to spring for a hybrid car.  But before long who knows what we may get into?  Maybe we’ll start eating local, or eating less meat.  Maybe we’ll downsize our house or move closer to our place of work.  Maybe we’ll quit buying new stuff and start buying second-hand.  Maybe we’ll walk away from the voices and values that urge us to shop till we drop and that claim that happiness is found in things.  Maybe we’ll start refusing the enticement of going to sleep in front of a screen and instead wade ankle-deep into the blooming, buzzing, living world that begins outside our door.  Maybe we’ll start figuring out a whole “re-do” of a society whose economy is based on the fantasy of endless growth and on gobbling up the living resources of our planet and throwing them away as trash.  Maybe we’ll not only abandon our energy-intensive lifestyle, but also push our lawmakers to lead.

Who knows?  Maybe we’ll end up finding our way to a life that is more connected with the natural world, with our neighbor, and with God.  A Gospel life, the very life to which Jesus is calling us with such urgency in his voice.

And you can count on it: a Gospel life is always disruptive.  When we commit ourselves to following Jesus, we dare to upset the status quo, to be passionate, to be set on fire, to give ourselves utterly to the quest for the wholeness and flourishing of all beings.  We become willing to stand up for the deepest truth we know, the truth of God’s all-embracing love, even when it risks disrupting some long-standing patterns, behaviors, and relationships.

Blessed unrest – that’s a good term for it, our refusal 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.  Blessed Unrest is the title of a new book by environmentalist Paul Hawken that traces the extraordinary upwelling going on around the world right now as people and groups devote themselves to the renewal of life on this planet.  You won’t read about them in the newspapers.  You won’t see them on TV.  Most of their work is carried out under the radar of politicians or the corporate media.  But, Hawken writes, across the planet, “tens of millions of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people [are] willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world” (“To Remake the World, Earth Letter, Summer, 2007, p. 12).  “They share no orthodoxy or unifying ideology; they follow no single charismatic leader; they remain supple enough to coalesce easily into larger networks to achieve their goals… [And] they are bringing about what may one day be judged the single most profound transformation of human society.”²  This, Hawken believes, is the largest social movement in all of history.

I believe Jesus is calling us to be part of this sometimes disruptive transition to a more just and sustainable world, and Jesus is challenging us to choose.  Today we stand in the crowds with him, watching as he points out the clouds and lifts his face to the hot desert wind.  He knows that we can interpret the appearance of earth and sky.  The scientists have done their job: we know that global warming is upon us, and that human beings are to blame.  “Why,” asks Jesus, “why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”  In other words (as I hear it), are we willing to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into tending the Earth that God has entrusted to our care?  Are we willing to choose life rather than death?  Are we willing to “lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and… run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus”? (Hebrews 12:1-2a)

That is what I hear in Jesus’ words today: a call to passion, a call to fire, a call to stay true to God’s longing for the flourishing of life within ourselves, within our families and communities, within the world at large, even when standing up for life means that we go against the grain, provoke controversy, and refuse to do business as usual.

Healing the planet is demanding work, but it can be work that heals our soul.  Working together to restore and renew life on this planet can call out the best in us, so that we tap into and take hold of our deepest reserves of courage and creativity and compassion.  

If you have some time to give this great work, now is the time to give it. 

If you have a word of hope or encouragement to share, now is the time to share it. 

If you have some love to give, now is the time to give it.

If you are a person of prayer, now is a good time to pray. 

Now is the time to draw upon the sacred Power within us and among us that calls us to choose life, the divine Power that can sustain us for the journey ahead.

I pray that the words we hear, the prayers we say, and the sacrament we share will strengthen our intention to become people of fire.  Dear Jesus, give us courage to stand with you and to become fearless agents of God’s healing and reconciling love, in your name and for your sake.  Amen.

1. Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs, Colorado Springs, CO: Navpress, 1993, p. 155.

2. Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, NY, NY: Viking, 2007, from dust jacket.

Receive the Peace of Christ

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.  I do not give to you as the world gives.  Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”    (John 14:27)

Today’s Gospel passage is a good text for an in-between time, a time of transition in which something is coming to an end and the new has not yet come.  Jesus is saying farewell to his disciples at the Last Supper and preparing them for his crucifixion.  But because we read this passage in Easter-tide, we also hear it as the risen Christ preparing his disciples for the ascension, when the vivid resurrection appearances will come to an end.  Jesus assures his disciples that the Holy Spirit will come in all its fullness – but it has not come yet.  It is an in-between time.

 Can you touch into that sense of living in an in-between time?  Maybe some of you are finishing up the academic year.  The familiar schedule of your life is about to end and the new pattern has not yet started.  Or maybe you will soon complete a big piece of work, and you haven’t yet launched, or perhaps even discovered, whatever work comes next.  Life is full of in-between times.  I think of the interval between realizing that a relationship with someone or something needs to change, and finding a way to change what you can.  I think of the interval between becoming engaged and getting married, or the interval between becoming pregnant and giving birth. 

It’s an in-between time for our parish community, as we prepare for Rob’s sabbatical and for a summer without his wisdom, humor, and guidance.   

And I would say that it’s an in-between time for this country and, not to mince words, for the planet as a whole, as we sense the approaching end of an old way of being and wonder what new way of being we can create in its place.  Scientists tell us that modern industrial society, with its sudden expansion of our human 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.  The global climate with its delicate balance of gases turns out to be more fragile then we ever imagined.

 I know I don’t need to go on.  Many of us walk around with a more or less vivid awareness that a chapter of human history is coming to an end.  Just as the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago ended one form of human society and brought a new one into being, and just as the industrial revolution 300 years ago also changed the way that society is organized, so we now find ourselves on the brink of what some thinkers call a “third revolution.” [1] Modern society as we know it is coming to an end, and more and more people around the world are searching for ways to create something new – to bring forth a human presence on this planet that is “environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just.” [2] We don’t have much time to do this and to get it right, so it is a precarious and precious time to be alive and to take part – if we so choose – in this great work of healing. 

We live in an in-between time and we feel the ground shifting under our feet.  So with great interest we turn to see what Jesus has to say at an in-between time: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.  I do not give to you as the world gives.”  Jesus’ gift at an in-between time is the gift of peace – shalom, to use the Hebrew word – but you’ll notice that it is not any old peace.  It is, he tells us, his peace, the peace of Christ, something that is evidently quite different from the peace that is offered by the world.  Right at the center of the Eucharist, we exchange that peace among ourselves, when we say, “The peace of the Lord be always with you,” and we let that peace flow from one person to the next until everyone in the room is strengthened and lifted up by its presence.  And at the end of the service we often refer to it again, when the celebrant, quoting from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, blesses us with “the peace of God, which surpasses … understanding” [Philippians 4:7].

What is the peace of God, and how is it different from the peace of the world?  To answer that question, I’ve invited two guests to join me this morning at the pulpit.  My first guest is Industrial Society, who would like to speak to you about the peace it has to offer and the worldview that lies behind it.  Then we’ll hear from our second guest, the Holy Spirit, who will say a few words about the peace of God.

“Ladies and gentlemen – or, shall I say, consumers, for that is who you really are – my name is Industrial Growth Society,[3] and boy, do I have something great to give you: the peace of this world.  The main thing you need to know about yourselves is that you are alone.  You’re alone as individuals and alone as a species.  You are limited to the envelope of your skin – that’s who you are.  Your identity ends here – and your task in life is to focus on that isolated self – what it wants, what it needs, what kind of shampoo it likes best, what kind of breakfast cereal.   

“You know, it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and self-advancement is the name of the game.  The only peace an isolated self is ever going to find is the kind it can grab for itself.  Wielding power over everything around you – that’s the ticket to peace.  Domination is the path to peace – protecting your own interests, guarding your own small self.  So go ahead – drain the aquifers, clear cut the forest, over-fish the oceans – it’s all yours for the taking.  Never mind if indigenous cultures are being decimated, to say nothing of non-human creatures.  So what? It’s every man for himself. 

“Peace grows by focusing on what you like and by surrounding yourself with pleasant things.  You’ll definitely feel more peaceful if you pile them up – gadgets, information, boats and planes, credentials, clothes – and then go all out to keep them safe.  Don’t think about the collapse of honeybees or the deaths in Baghdad – ouch!  That doesn’t concern you.  Thinking about stuff like that just messes up your peace of mind.  Put up some walls – don’t take that in.  There, that’s better.  It makes much more sense to put your head down and focus on yourself and your family.  Get that promotion.  Get your kid into a good college.  Get that mortgage paid off.  Lose those five pounds.  Finish organizing your slides.  Then you’ll have peace — or something like it, anyway, and hey, if you still feel restless inside, or start feeling lonely, you can always go shopping, have another drink, pop a few pills, or stare at some TV.  We’ve got plenty of entertainment for you, plenty of distractions.”

Thank you, Industrial Growth Society.  Now let’s hear a few words from the Holy Spirit, who has consented to make a brief appearance before fully arriving at Pentecost, two weeks from today.

“Friends, you are not alone and have never been alone.  You were loved into being by God the Father-Mother of all Creation, and God so loved the world – so loved you – that God sent God’s Son to become one of you, to enter every aspect of human life and to draw you and all Creation into the heart of God. 

“The peace that Jesus gives you springs from your connection to the flow of love that is always going on between the Father and the Son and me, the Holy Spirit.  God has made a home within you, so there is nowhere you can go where God is not.  The Creator and Redeemer of the world dwell within you through the power of the Holy Spirit (that’s me), and with every breath you draw, with every beat of your heart, God is breathing into you and flowing through you.

“When you really understand that, you begin to see that you are much more than an isolated self – at every moment you are connected with God – and not only with God, but also with every other human being and with your brother-sister beings, [4] to whom God also gave life and with whom God has a loving relationship, just as God has with you. 

“So when you feel pain for the world – when you weep for rapidly disappearing species or the forests and wetlands we’ve already lost, when you feel morally outraged when narrow self-interest or short-term political or financial gain trump a larger good and a longer view – when you let your defenses drop and feel your sorrow and anger and fear about what is happening in the world around you, you are expressing how big you are, how connected you are with the whole web of life.

“The peace of God is spacious enough to stand at the Cross and to open itself to the pain of the world without closing down, without running away.  Christ bears that pain with you and for you, and by allowing it into your awareness – by opening the doors of your senses and the door of your heart so that sorrow and joy can flow through – then you allow the power of healing, the power of the Risen Christ, to move through you, as well.

“So now the walls around you can come down.  The peace of God is open to life, and it may impel you to move into the world’s most brutal and broken places, to be a warrior for life and to protest the unjust powers of this world.

“God bless that peace that is in you, a peace that the world cannot give you and that the world can never take away.”

Listening to these two voices in an in-between and turbulent time, it seems to me that if we steep ourselves in the peace of Christ, we will have everything we need.  Especially today, Mother’s Day, when we honor the mothers who bore us, and honor our Mother Earth, whose life is so in peril, we look forward with courage and hope to playing our part in the great task that God has given us – to create a truly sustainable and just world.   We have glimpses of what we and our neighborhoods will need to do – draw down our carbon emissions, buy locally produced goods and food, build different kinds of dwellings, develop new, sustainable and non-polluting energy sources – and there are changes that each of us can make now.  But only a shift in consciousness can sustain us in that crucial work, a deep rooting in the ground of our being, which is God.  We are engaged, together, in a great turning [5] – a third revolution – that will require new depths of wisdom, compassion and courage.  These are the depths that pour forth eternally in the peace of Christ.

So today, and every day, as we celebrate the gift of being alive at this crucial moment in the planet’s history, may the peace of the Lord be always with you.

When the Call Comes

I am not much of a fisherman.  Except for a single lesson in fly fishing, my experience of fishing is limited to a few summer afternoons, when as a kid I dangled a line off the edge of a dock in a Minnesota lake and tried to snag a sunfish.  I don’t remember ever catching any.

You may know a lot more about fishing than I do, but even if you don’t, I think we can all imagine the moment when Simon Peter throws himself to the bottom of a smelly fishing boat and kneels at Jesus’ feet.  Peter and the other fishermen must be exhausted.  They have been working hard – they were up all night on the lake of Gennesaret (also called the Sea of Galilee), casting their nets again and again and pulling nothing in.  Fishing can be dangerous, as we know only too well from recent losses off our own Atlantic coast, and it can be frustrating, too.  So Peter and the other men are tired.  Their muscles are sore and their spirits are low.  Their hard work has come to nothing. 

As the sun rises, these dispirited men get out of their boats and wearily rinse their nets at the side of the lake.  As they wash up, wanting nothing more than the relief of going to sleep, Jesus arrives, along with a crowd that is eager to hear him speak about the ways of God.  Jesus takes a look at Peter and asks him to take him out in his fishing boat a little way from shore, so that everyone can hear what Jesus is saying.  Who knows how Peter feels about that request – whether it is annoying, because he wants to go straight home to bed and be done with his stupid boat, or whether he is glad, for news of Jesus’ power has begun to spread around the region and Peter’s own mother-in-law has been healed by Jesus’ word [Luke 4:38-39].  So maybe Peter invites Jesus into his boat with just a tiny sense of expectation, with just the slightest flicker of hope. 

Then Jesus sits down in the boat and begins to speak.  The story doesn’t tell us what Jesus says, but we know that Peter can hear every word.  I imagine how intently Peter is listening, how closely he watches the expression in Jesus’ face, noticing every gesture, hearing every intonation in his voice.  Whatever Peter heard Jesus say that morning as the sun rose and the waves lapped against the side of the boat, whatever Peter heard and saw in Jesus that day, “it won him heart and soul.” (1)

Common sense would tell Peter not to fish again – the time for fishing is at night, and after a long and futile night’s work it’s clear that no fish are anywhere nearby – but tired as he is, Peter does what Jesus asks him: “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch” [Luke 5:4].  So the fishermen throw their nets down again, letting them drop into the deep, and up comes an enormous and unexpected catch, fish upon fish, so that the nets are close to breaking and the wooden boats are creaking under the weight.

Something sends Peter to his knees – maybe Jesus’ power to create a miracle, to create life where there was no life – maybe Jesus’ sheer goodness, the holiness of this man, his astonishing transparency to God.  But in any case Peter is suddenly stricken with awe and with a piercing sense of his own sinfulness in relation to the goodness of God.  He throws himself before Jesus to the bottom of the boat, and there, with the smell of fish in his nostrils and the hot sun burning his neck, he whispers, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” [Luke 5:8].

And then the call comes, for this is a story about call.  “Do not be afraid,” Jesus says to Simon.  “From now on you will be catching people” [Luke 5:10]. The word translated “catch” means “to take alive in the sense of rescuing from death.” (2)  From now on Peter and the other fishermen will be sharing with Jesus in the work of plunging sinners into the waters of baptism and pulling them out into new life, of reaching into the deep waters of the psyche and bringing forth healing and wholeness, of gathering up the least and the lost and setting people free.

It is good to notice when the call comes: in that electric moment when Peter perceives the power and goodness of God and understands his own sinfulness, his basic unworthiness.  Peter knows that he is nothing compared to the glory of God.  And yet he is called.  The same power that casts him down is the power that will lift him up.  Despite his fear, despite his reluctance, he is the one that Jesus calls.

The same pattern shows up in the other two readings, too.  Isaiah is in the temple when his call comes.  Isaiah is given a vision of God, of “the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty” [Isaiah 6:1] and of the space being filled with holy presences from another world, seraphs that sing to each other the words that we’ve carried into our Eucharist, “Holy, holy holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory” [Isaiah 6:3].  In the blaze of that glory, Isaiah is overcome by his unworthiness: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips!” [Isaiah 6:5] Unworthy he may be, but God redeems him and sends him out to preach, and Isaiah’s hesitation and fear are transformed into quiet confidence: “Here am I; send me!” [Isaiah 6:8].

Or take Paul, who had a vision of the Risen Lord and who says in today’s reading from First Corinthians that he knew he was “the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because [he] persecuted the church of God” [1 Corinthians 15:9].  And yet by God’s grace his whole life has turned around and now he “[works] harder than any of them – though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” [1 Corinthians 15:10].

That is so often the pattern of call, whether it happens at the bottom of a boat, in the middle of worship, on the road to Damascus, or anywhere else: we are confronted by God’s enormous beauty and power and by a deep sense of our own weakness and unworthiness.  And yet God calls us. 

We try to object.  It doesn’t make sense.  Look, says Simon Peter, says Isaiah, says Paul, “You’ve got the wrong guy.  I don’t know why you are talking to me or why you are showing me these things.  I’m not up for this.  I’m not good enough.  I can’t do it.”  Jeremiah says, as we heard last week, “What are you thinking, Lord? I’m only a boy.”  Amos says, “Hey, I’m only a shepherd.”  Moses says, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt? I’m no speaker.  I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.  O, my Lord, please send someone else” [Exodus 3:11, 4:10, 4:13].

Our new Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, the first woman to be elected primate in the Anglican Communion, spoke in a recent interview about her call to this position.  She is a woman of many gifts, but she is also innately shy.  She talked about how she lay awake, worrying, before making her first seminar presentation in graduate school, and then she added, “I think there is some incredible sense of divine humor in calling somebody who is that much of an introvert to do the kind of work I’m doing.” (3)

I’m impressed that she kept going despite her reservations about herslef.  It is so easy when we hear a call – when God speaks to our secret heart,  when we hear a world crying out for our help, when we feel invited to do something much larger and bolder than we imagined – it is so easy to pass the buck.  Isn’t that true?  I know that I do, anyway, half the time.  “Look,” we tell God, “I’m too young.  I’m too old.  I’m tired.  I’m an introvert.  I’m no leader.  I’m busy.  I have other things to do.”

Have you ever heard the story of how Martin Luther King got started as an activist during the Montgomery bus boycott?  I recently came across a short piece that tells the story: (4)

“In 1955, King was fresh from seminary, only 26 years old, and new to town. His church was one of the smallest, wealthiest, and most conservative of the two-dozen African-American churches in Montgomery. His personal ambitions at the time were to run a solid church program, be well paid for it, have a nice house for his growing family, write theology pieces for his denomination’s magazine, and do a bit of adjunct teaching at a nearby college. He was not dreaming of becoming a leader in the struggle for civil rights, economic justice, and a peaceful U.S. foreign policy.”

The writer, Steve Chase, goes on, “Indeed, if it had been left up to King, the Montgomery Bus Boycott would never have happened. The real organizer of this effort was E. D. Nixon, an experienced civil rights and labor activist who…   launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott within… four days after Rosa Parks’ arrest for refusing to move to the back of the bus. It was Nixon who recruited King to the civil rights movement.” Nixon bailed Rosa Parks out of jail, and then he “went home and started calling local ministers to line up their support for his boycott idea.”  First Nixon called Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and the man said yes.  Next he called Rev. H. H. Hubbard, and he too said yes.  And third he called Rev. Martin Luther King, who said to him, “‘Brother Nixon, let me think about it awhile, and call you back.'”

“When King finally agreed to come to a meeting, Nixon… told King, ‘I’m glad you agreed, because I already set up the first meeting at your church.’ At this first ministers’ meeting, King was… nervous about Nixon’s idea of conducting an illegal boycott campaign.  Several other ministers soon began to side with King against the campaign. In his own memoir… King recalls how Nixon exploded towards the end of the meeting and shouted that the ministers would have to decide if they were going to be like scared little boys, or if they were going to stand up like grown men and take a strong public stand against segregation. King’s pride was so hurt by Nixon’s comment [that] he shouted back that nobody could call him a coward. [To] prove his courage, King immediately agreed to Nixon’s plan for an aggressive community-organizing campaign to build up the boycott. Everyone in the room quickly agreed with King and the matter was settled.”

Then they had to decide who should lead the group.  “Everyone present… expected Nixon to lead. But Nixon said he wouldn’t be part of the group unless the man he named would lead.  Who was he nominating?  Martin Luther King.  Having just announced “his courage to the whole group, King felt… he had to agree to take on this responsibility.  Then, Nixon told King [that] he would have to give the main address” that night at the rally to announce the boycott plan to the black community.

“King rose to Nixon’s challenge” – and, we might add, to God’s challenge, too.  King served for the next 12 months as the leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and in the process he was changed.  He learned about the courage of ordinary people to work together to resist oppression.  He learned about the power of non-violent direct action.  He learned about his own power to inspire people to become active citizens.  As Steve Chase puts it, “King discovered just what kind of person he wanted to be in this life.”  He embraced his mission as an activist leader to build what he called the “Beloved Community.”

I love that story. Hardly anyone feels up to the call.  Sometimes we need a brother or sister in Christ to nudge us along – something that I know from my own life, too.  It feels too hard – whether God is calling us to fight racism, or to take hold of the Millennium Development Goals and eradicate extreme poverty by the year 2015, or to face the catastrophe of global warming and to push our leaders to make a decisive transition to clean, renewable energy. 

“Woe is me,” we may want to say.  “I am not up for this.  I am a man, a woman, of unclean lips.  Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful person!  Send someone else!” But here is Jesus, smiling at us in the sunlight, sitting with us in our small boat and asking us to set out into the deep and let down our nets for the catch.  “Do not be afraid,” he tells us.  “I will be with you all the way.”  And through the grace of God, maybe we will answer, “Yes, Lord, I will do it.  Here am I; send me.”  

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(1) G. B. Laird, Saint Luke, Middlesex, England; New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1963, p. 90.

(2) Fred B. Craddock, John H. Hayes, et al., Preaching Through the Christian Year: Year C, Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, p. 98.

(3) Quoted in “Grace Under Pressure,’ by Diane Rogers, in Stanford, January/February, 2007, p. 51.

(4) “Martin Luther King’s Journey to Activism,” by Steve Chase, Ph.D., Director, Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program Department of Environmental Studies @ Antioch University New England; Steven_Chase at antiochne.edu; 603-283-2336 (office).