creation care

“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.”  

---

 

(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).

Water Into Wine

Water into wine. When in your life have you experienced water turning into wine?

Maybe one night you have a bad sleep. You toss and turn, fretting about something that you just can’t shake – maybe a financial concern, or a conflict in your family, or the increasingly hellish war in Iraq. Feeling utterly defeated, somewhere before dawn you finally haul yourself out of bed, pull on your clothes, and go outside. The last stars are shining, the morning air is cool on your cheeks, you breathe in the tang of frost and grass, and for some reason your worry and preoccupation fall away. You take a deep breath and you know you can go on – and not only go on, but go on with fresh energy and hope. Standing there in the front yard, you are inexplicably happy, for suddenly it comes to you that life is good, life is a gift. The day ahead of you is wide open, full of possibility. You can’t help but rejoice.

Water into wine.

Or maybe it happens one evening after a long hard day at work, or a long hard day at home. It’s that strenuous period in the late afternoon, early evening, when everyone is tired, everyone is hungry, and everyone is getting on each other’s nerves. You feel so tempted to lash out, so ready to give someone a piece of your mind and just let loose with all the pent up frustration of a difficult day. But instead for some reason you contain yourself. You remember how much you love these dear people, how much you want them to be happy even if they bug you sometimes, and all at once your turmoil drops away and the path ahead of you is clear. Out of your mouth come words that are gentle; you say something kind or you make a little joke, and before long everyone is laughing and your household is at peace.

Water into wine. When in your life have you experienced water turning into wine?

Here is when it last happened to me: last Wednesday. I spent a week at a wonderful writing conference in California and then came the time to to fly home. Before I got on the plane I called my sister from the airport, and she warned me about the high winds moving up the East Coast.

“You’d better take some Dramamine,” she suggested, very kindly. “It will put you right to sleep so you don’t worry about a thing.” She knows I can be a bad flyer – I’m the type who notices every little bump and air pocket, and peers anxiously out the window and clutches the armrest.

I decided not to buy any Dramamine but I did keep in mind the possibility of ordering a glass of wine once I got on board – something to take the edge off my anxiety. I got on the plane and we took off, and I began reading a book about God’s creativity. The flight was smooth, so I forgot about ordering any wine, and I put the book down and began to think about my life. You know how it is on a plane sometimes, when you are above the earth and from that height you seem to see your life whole, so that you can look back into the past and ahead to what comes next? I surveyed my life and all the things I was grateful for – all the people I loved, the dear friends I’d left behind in California and the dear friends and family I looked forward to seeing in Massachusetts, all the work I had done in the past and the work I still hoped to do in the future, and before long I was launched into that prayer of thanksgiving that I’d grown up saying in services of Morning Prayer – “Almighty and most merciful Father, we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving kindness to us and to all whom you have made. We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life…” [BCP, p. 58]. I know that some of you know that one by heart.

I was completely immersed in the desire to thank God, completely filled with expressing love and praise. It was as if my eyes, my attention, my whole spirit was fixed on God and filled with God. We began to make our descent into the Hartford airport, and sure enough, the gusts of winds became very strong. The airplane began to bounce around violently, up and down, side to side, and it got very quiet in the cabin. I knew that the passengers around me were nervous, and I heard the man across the aisle say to his friend, trying to sound nonchalant, “I sure hope the pilot has both hands on the steering wheel!”

But for once the turbulence didn’t bother me. I was completely absorbed in gratefulness and joy, completely caught up in praising God. My only regret was that if the plane crashed, my family would think that I had died full of fear, and I wanted somehow to tell them, “Don’t worry – I died happy! I died giving myself to God, and I died full of joy!”

Water into wine.

Well, as you can see, the plane didn’t crash, and I’m here to tell you what you already know from your own life: Jesus turns water into wine. He did it not only once, in that long-ago wedding at Cana when the wine ran out and Jesus took the six large stone jars of water and turned their contents into the finest, most delicious wine anyone could imagine. He also does it today, in my life and yours, in all those occasions when we find ourselves caught up in that mysterious, unlikely transformation of despair into hope, of fear into gratefulness, of sorrow into joy.

There must be a river of divine creativity at the very center of things, ready to pour into the most ordinary moments of our lives so that we are filled again with reverence and wonder and fresh possibility. I wonder if we are rather like those stone jars in the story, standing in place full of plain, everyday water, stuck in our habits and fixed ways of thinking, repeating our endless stories of argument, worry and lament, and then along comes Jesus to quicken our hearts and wake us up and fill us with his wine. It’s better than drinking hard liquor, that’s for sure, and I wonder, as Carl Jung once suggested, whether an alcoholic’s addiction to spirits isn’t a misplaced search for the Holy Spirit, that delicious and intoxicating presence that gladdens our hearts and draws us out of ourselves and gathers us up in love.

Water into wine.

Today’s passage from the Gospel of John is the first of seven so-called “signs” that John offers his readers to reveal who Jesus is, to disclose his true nature and divine glory. The image of turning water into wine isn’t original to John. The Greek god Dionysius – also known as Bacchus – was said to turn water into wine, and the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria wrote that the Logos, the creative power of God, gave the people wine instead of water. But I find it fascinating that this story is central to Christianity, so that the story of Jesus turning water into wine should have such primacy of place. John’s Gospel makes it the opening event in Jesus’ public ministry.

What does that mean? Among other things, it means that the Christian life is a life of ecstasy. “I have come that they may have life,” says Jesus elsewhere in the Gospel of John. “I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly” [John 10:10]. “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” [John 15:11]. As I learned from Henri Nouwen years ago, Jesus calls us to live the ecstatic life, a life in which we move out of the static place. That is the meaning of the word: ex-static. Jesus calls us to live away from the same old place, that tired, dead, fixed place where nothing new can break forth, nothing new can be born. If we don’t expect anything new to happen, life soon gets flat and dull and loses its vitality. We feel utterly defeated, we turn cynical and sour, and life becomes “the same old same old.”

But Jesus turns the water into wine. God intoxicates us with new life and new hope. The ecstatic life is the creative life, a life that is open to surprise.

There are disciplines that open us to the ecstatic life, practices that make us available so that when the Spirit comes, the water of our lives can be turned into wine. I’d like to mention just two of them.

One is to learn to praise God. We hear it all the time at the Eucharist – “it is right to give God thanks and praise” – but I want to add, it is not only “right,” it is not only “right and good and our bounden duty” as we say in the Rite 1 version of the Eucharist – it is also the secret of joy! There is nothing that opens us so quickly to God’s presence as the practice of giving thanks and cultivating a grateful heart. I can’t explain it, but finding a way to praise God and give thanks is like priming the pump of joy: before long our empty places are filled and what was once just another ordinary day has turned into something vibrant and alive. Prayer is the secret place where our inner waters turn into wine.

A second practice that opens us to the ecstatic life is the practice of healing. The question we need to ask ourselves is: Does what I do bring healing? Does what I do bring new life? Does what I do make new connections among people or encourage other people to open to new life? An ecstatic life is a life in which our focus is not so much on ourselves and the state of our own inner “waters,” but a life in which we plunge into the possibility of turning other people’s water into wine.

Take, for instance, the possibility of creating peace with every word you speak, so that what you say is so accurate and true, so filled with God’s loving Spirit that communication opens up with everyone around you. That’s a way to live an ecstatic life, and if that appeals to you, I hope you’ll show up on Wednesday night for the first in our series of evening programs on non-violent communication.

Or take the possibility of healing the Earth. You know that 2006 was the hottest year ever, and that 2007 is right on track to top that scorching record. OK – water into wine. What if we created the biggest demonstration against global warming in U.S. history? What if we decided that 2007 was going to be the year that American citizens reached the “tipping point” and finally pushed their political leaders to lead? That’s exactly what we intend to do with the Interfaith Walk for Climate Rescue, an interfaith pilgrimage that will begin in Northampton on March 16 and end in downtown Boston on March 24. I hope you’ll sign up to walk. I hope you’ll invite your friends and neighbors to sign up to walk – just go to climatewalk.org. You can sign up as an individual or as part of the “Grace Church, Amherst” team. You can walk for an hour, a day, a weekend, or the whole nine days. But I invite you to walk with us for at least a little while as we step very literally into an ecstatic life and move out of the static place.

I like to think that Martin Luther King, Jr. would be walking with us, if he were alive today. On the eve of his birthday, maybe he is the man to lift up as an example of what it means to live an ecstatic life, as you and I explore what it means to praise God in our own lives, to work for healing, and to give ourselves wholeheartedly to that mysterious, marvelous, God-centered alchemy of turning water into wine.

Birth Pangs

“Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering,
for he who has promised is faithful.” Hebrews 10:23

Have you ever read a Bible passage that spoke so directly to you that it went straight to your heart like an arrow?  That’s what happened to me 20 years ago when I first read this morning’s Old Testament story of Hannah and the birth of Samuel – or, as today’s Collect puts it, when I first began to hear, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest this section of Scripture.  I was 35 years old, newly married, and childless.  I badly wanted a child, but like a good number of women I was struggling with infertility.  During the long bout of medical treatments, I read with great interest the biblical stories of barren women who through the grace of God conceived and bore children late in life – Sarah, for instance, and Rebekah, Rachel, and Elizabeth.  But it was the story of Hannah that most captured my imagination.

Her story may not be familiar to you, since today’s reading is a new passage that we have been given because of our transition to the Revised Common Lectionary, so let’s take a moment to review it.  The first character we meet is Elkanah, who goes every year to worship in Shiloh, the city where the Ark of the Covenant and the tabernacle are kept.  Elkanah has two wives.  With one wife, Penninah, he has children, but the other wife, Hannah, is infertile.  Elkanah feels a special love for Hannah – he brings her a double portion of the sacrifice.  But the other wife, Penninah, is making Hannah’s life miserable, provoking and irritating her because she can’t bear a child, so that Hannah weeps and will not eat.  Elkanah tries to encourage Hannah, asking “Hannah, why do you weep?  Why do you not eat?… Am I not more to you than ten sons?” [1 Samuel 1:8].

But this doesn’t console her, and one day, “after they had eaten and drunk at Shiloh” [1 Samuel 1:9], Hannah goes to the temple and brings her suffering to God.  Weeping bitterly, she asks God for help and makes a vow: if God will give her a son, she will dedicate him to God’s service as a nazirite.  (Scholars don’t seem to know exactly what a nazirite is, except, as the story tells us, they don’t drink wine and don’t cut their hair.)

The priest, Eli, can see her distress, for she is weeping and moving her lips, but because she is praying in silence he misunderstands what is going on and accuses her of being drunk.  Hannah stands up for herself and tells him that she has been “pouring out [her] soul before the LORD” [1 Samuel 1:15], and Eli tells her to go in peace, assuring her that God will grant her request.

And so Hannah leaves the temple happy.  She believes him.  She believes that God will be faithful to her.  And sure enough, after Hannah and her husband worship one last time and return home, “the LORD remembered her” [1 Samuel 1:19], and before long she does conceive and bear a son, whom she  names Samuel.

When God grants you your heart’s desire, what can you do but sing?  And that’s what Hannah does, praising God in the Song of Hannah that we used this morning in place of a psalm: ‘My heart exults in the LORD; my strength is exalted in my God…There is no Holy One like the LORD, no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God” (1 Samuel 2: 1a, 2).  She praises the God of justice who has the power to cast down and raise up, the power to break the bows of the mighty and give strength to the feeble.  If the Song of Hannah sounds familiar, that is because it became the template for the Song of Mary, the Magnificat that Mary sings when she is pregnant with Jesus and praises God’s power to overthrow every expectation, to raise up the lowly and bring new life into the world [Luke 146-55; BCP pp. 91-92].

When I read Hannah’s story 20 years ago, I identified very literally with Hannah’s frustrated longing for a child.  I felt that I was sharing in her suffering and sorrow.  Like her, I didn’t feel that anyone, not even my beloved husband, could console me, and that the place to bring my grief was ultimately to God.  Like Hannah, I too made a vow: if God gave me a child, I would entrust that child to God – not that the child would be a nazirite, for I had no idea what a nazirite was – but in the sense that I would try not to cling to the child.  My child’s soul would belong not to me, but to God; the child would be a child of God, even more than he or she would be my own.

You can see why – after several years of infertility work came to nothing, after my husband and I decided to give up any further medical treatment and to relinquish our hope for a biological child – when I suddenly and almost miraculously conceived and bore a child, a son, we decided to name him Samuel. 

Twenty years later I come back to this story with a deep sense of gratefulness for how it carried me through a dark time and pointed me toward hope.  From Hannah I learned something about facing my pain and frustration, and bringing everything to God.  I learned something about persistence and passion, and about entrusting the outcome to God.  I learned about God’s power to bring forth life, though obviously it may not come in the way that we expect.  A Christian friend of mine who went through her own struggle with infertility recently decided to adopt a girl from China, and in gratitude for God’s power to bring new life, she named her daughter Hannah.

Now you may be sitting here thinking, “Well, fine, but this doesn’t relate to me since I have no interest in bearing or raising a child.”  But isn’t it true that in whatever stage of life we are, we sense deep within us a longing to bring forth life?  Psychologist Erik Erikson spoke of a middle-aged person’s drive toward generativity – the desire to encourage and support the younger generation and to pass on what we have learned – just as he spoke of an elderly person’s drive toward wisdom – the desire to look deeply into life, to make peace with one’s place in the big scheme of things.

Artists know the longing to let their creative powers be expressed.  A teacher standing in front of a classroom, wondering how to engage her students; a parent considering what to say to a cantankerous child; a doctor trying to diagnose and treat an illness; a consultant trying to untangle the dynamics of a dysfunctional workplace — each one knows the longing to say or do whatever will move the situation forward and create fresh possibilities so that new life can be born.

We are each like Hannah, standing before God and asking to be a channel for life, a vehicle through which God can tend and bless the world.   And we don’t bring just our personal longings — we also bring to God our longing for a renewal of the earth, a renewal of our human societies.  We ask for life to flow through us, so that through our own hands and words and deeds, new life can come into the world. 

For so many people these are such uncertain and anxious times.  Melting ice caps.  Erratic weather.  The prospect of peak oil and the eventual collapse of a petroleum-based economy.  The news that we have exceeded our planet’s carrying capacity, its ability to replenish the resources that are being used up. No wonder so many of us look to the future with some degree of dread.  Are we heading toward catastrophic climate change and social upheaval?

We want to turn things around.  We want to bring into being something new.  We want to stand up for life, to protect life, to bring new life to birth.  So, like Hannah, we stand before God in our helplessness and need, asking God to come with great power and to make a way where there is no way, to bring new life when maybe all we can see just now is only frustration or despair. 

Hannah didn’t know it, but when she finally brought her personal pain to God, she opened the path for God to change her country’s history. “The story of the birth of Samuel comes at a key turning point in the history of Israel.” (1) Samuel would be the last of the so-called “judges” – inspired leaders of Israel – and would move the nation out of a period of anarchy and chaos [cf. Judges 21:25] into a monarchy.  It was Samuel who anointed the first kings, Saul and then David.  Without Hannah’s persistence and passion, “there would have been no Samuel, and some other way would have had to be found to establish Israel and the monarchy.” (2)

We’re not looking for any monarchy, but many of us are hungering for new ways to organize communities, new ways to shape our economy so that is based on sustainable principles. Hannah’s story – and our Gospel passage, too – challenge us to live into these violent and uncertain times as if they are the inevitable pangs that accompany a birth.  They challenge us to live with the courage and endurance and patience and even the excitement that attend any birth.  That’s what Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel reading from Mark: “Do not be alarmed,” he tells us, when we “hear of wars and rumors of wars,” when nations rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there are earthquakes and famines.  “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs” [Mark 13: 7, 8].

God’s Spirit, God’s energy, is calling us to new life, and isn’t it true that even now something new is being born?  We see small signs of a new economic order and of people relating to each other in new ways. We see people supporting small, locally owned businesses and participating in community-supported agriculture.  We see people trying to live more simply, to waste less and to consume only what they need.  Even now, 6 weeks before Christmas, some people have decided to opt out of buying a bunch of stuff that will only end up in the landfill.  Right here at Grace Church we see small groups of people resisting the loneliness and alienation that seem to be part of this post-industrial society and starting up “pastorates,” gathering on occasional evenings in each other’s homes to pray and talk and build real friendships.

Signs like these are very small, but they are signs that something new is being born.  Of course we can always throw up our hands, say it’s too late to stop climate change – that we’re going to have to settle for a future of tribalism and fear, of extreme weather events and millions of refugees. 

But like Hannah, we turn to God in longing and in hope.  We want to bring new life into the world.  We want to create a world that is socially just and environmentally sound.  We want to pass on to our children the life that is here.  We want to be able to say to future generations: “Look! I give you polar bears.  I give you coral reefs.  I give you an intact ice sheet that is the size of a continent.  I give you seasons.  I give you moderate weather.” (3)

Like Hannah we want to say, ‘My heart exults in the LORD; my strength is exalted in my God…There is no Holy One like the LORD, no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God.”    (1 Samuel 2: 1a, 2)

  

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(1) Fred B. Craddock, John H. Hayes, et al., Preaching Through the Christian Year, Year B, Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, p. 467.

(2) Ibid, p. 469.

(3) Eban Goodstein of Green House Network used these images in October, 2006 in a talk at UMass Amherst about his new initiative, Focus the Nation.

 

“What God has joined together, let no one separate”

I had an aha! moment a week or two ago, just as the seasons changed and we began heading into fall.  I was eating supper with my husband on the porch of our home in Northampton, and as we sat there chatting about our day and digging into greens and raw vegetables that I’d picked up at the Food Bank Farm in Hadley, I had a sudden revelation.  It wasn’t a formal meal, so I had put down my fork and picked up a carrot in my fingers, and I was just about to take a bite when it suddenly came to me: this carrot had been planted, grown and harvested just a few miles from my house.  I felt a sudden sense of kinship with that carrot.  We were connected.  We’d lived through the same summer heat and the same summer downpours.  We’d felt the same wind blow across the valley, experienced the same warmth of the sun, the same cool of the clouds.  We were creatures together, this carrot and I: neighbors of a sort, some kind of kin.

I don’t suppose that human beings actually share very much DNA with a carrot, but in that sudden moment of illumination on the porch I realized that this carrot and I were creatures connected to the same soil, growing under the same sun, sprung from the divine Source.  

“Brother Carrot,” I might have called it, before I took a bite.

I know this is a rather fanciful way to start a sermon, but my story has a point: we human beings are on a long journey back to understanding our connections with the Earth.  “What God has joined together, let no one separate” (Mark 10:9). That’s the task before us, as I see it: how to find our way back to union with God and all God’s Creation, how to reclaim our partnership not just with our human fellows but also with all living creatures.  I savor every moment of ecological consciousness that is given to me, and to you, because every such moment is a moment of healing. 

All week we’ve been celebrating St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of ecology, whose Feast Day was on Wednesday and whose vision of God’s presence in the biophysical world we will honor again this afternoon at 4 o’clock in a service of blessing the animals.  Heaven knows that in many ways we human beings do not live in right relationship with the land and sea and sky, to say nothing of our relationship with our brothers and sisters who are four-legged, feathered or finned. 

I don’t think I need to belabor the point.  Some of you are fresh from seeing “An Inconvenient Truth,” when on Friday about 85 people packed the Parish Hall to watch the movie.  We are one of 4,000 congregations across the country that showed the film this week, as people of faith take hold of the urgent need to curb global warming. 

Even if you haven’t yet seen the movie, you may know that climate scientists reported at the end of September that the Earth may be close to the warmest it has been in the last million years (1).  At the end of the summer scientists also reported that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting much more quickly than they had anticipated, and that in a drastic and unprecedented thaw, this summer an area of Arctic sea ice that normally stays frozen all year briefly opened a channel that was “big enough to allow a ship to sail to the North Pole… Polar bears have drowned and receding Arctic glaciers are uncovering previously unknown islands.” (2) The effects of global warming are being felt not only in far off places but right here in our beloved Pioneer Valley.  Maybe you read the front-page news this week about the new study “projecting that the Northeastern climate will become like that of the deep South by the end of the century unless greenhouse gas emissions are lowered.” (3) 

We all know we’re living in an unsustainable way.  Depending on non-renewable energy and resources is by definition unsustainable.  Consuming more resources than the planet can provide is by definition unsustainable.  Producing a killing level of greenhouse gases is by definition unsustainable.

So what are we to do?  As Christians, one thing we do is dive into Scripture and tradition, looking for wisdom as we struggle to articulate what a religious environmental worldview might look like.  We read familiar texts with a new ecological eye, pressing them to deal with questions that human beings have never faced before. 

Today’s reading from Genesis is a good case in point.  It’s a section of the mythic story of our creation, and the first time I read it through in preparation for this sermon, all I could see was a justification for human alienation from nature.  I interpreted it like this: God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner” (Gen 2:18).  OK, fine, but God apparently creates animals only to relieve human loneliness.  In other words, man is supreme and is created first, and animals exist only to serve his purposes and needs.  God then trots the animals out to the man, who slaps a name on each one – cow, bird, crocodile, whatever – as a way of expressing his dominance and control — there is power in assigning a name.  The animals prove to be inadequate companions for the man, so God decides to create woman. 

The moral?  Well, I decided, this text could be read as a Judeo-Christian rationalization for human dominance and exploitation of the natural world.  Taken alongside Psalm 8, with its lines “You give him mastery over the works of your hands; you put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, even the wild beasts of the field, The birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and whatsoever walks in the paths of the sea” (Ps 8:7-9) – well, I thought, now there’s a mandate for plundering and spoiling the natural world.

But we can’t settle for interpretations like that – they’re not adequate today, if they ever were.  I went back to the Genesis text and considered a different way to read the story.  God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.”  OK, I thought. Humanity is built for relationship.  We can’t exist by ourselves or for ourselves alone. God has created us to seek connection. 

Out of the ground God then forms “every animal of the field and every bird of the air”  (Gen 2:19).  You may remember that in an earlier verse Adam himself was formed “from the dust of the ground” (Gen 2:7).  It’s as if the storyteller wants to show that humans and non-human creatures are intrinsically linked, because we spring from the same soil.  We’re made from the same stuff.

Then God brings the animals to the man “to see what he would call them.”  Clearly human beings have a special role in God’s creation, but is it one of domination and exploitation?  Naming a living creature, or discovering the name that it’s already been given, requires care and curiosity, not high-handed authority. From this perspective I imagine Adam contemplating each God-given creature one by one, and taking time to get to know and interact with it before deciding on its name.  How can you know the name of one plant or another, or distinguish one bird from another, until you’ve looked at it closely? 

Last week a naturalist took my husband and me on a walk around our land in Ashfield, teaching us how to identify wild edibles and healing plants.  Unlike many of you, I am clueless when it comes to naming trees and birds and mosses and plants, so I had to work pretty hard.  She had us comparing the edges of leaves, to see if they were wavy or rounded or sharp.  She had us squatting to examine mushrooms, and scraping birch bark to catch the root beer scent, and peering through a magnifying lens to study the patterns of veins on a plant and the spores on the underside of ferns.  She had us look and smell and touch so that we could notice the difference between one plant and another, and perhaps begin to remember its name.  As we walked out of the woods at the end of the afternoon, she remarked, “If you don’t remember the names, never mind: now you know how to look.”

So I like to imagine that Adam’s naming of the creatures had something of the same gentle, inquisitive, appreciative spirit that I saw in her.  I like to think that he knew how to look – that his naming of the animals was a sign of his willingness to abide with them and learn from them.  The best words for anything come only after we’ve experienced it deeply, not before.

And when Adam finally finds his partner, bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh, their shared task as human beings is to “to till and keep” (Gen 2:15) the Earth – that is, to exercise a “mastery” or dominion over non-human creatures that is marked by benevolence, not exploitation.  Some theologians define dominion not as domination but as “the mediation of divine blessings to nonhuman creatures.” (4) That’s our vocation, that’s our job – to mediate divine blessings to nonhuman creatures.  Imagine!

In a time of planetary crisis, we need to reclaim an ecological consciousness, to perceive and celebrate the sacredness of all Creation.  You may or may not be drawn to nature mysticism, and I’m sure that some people think it impossibly sentimental or eccentric to imagine speaking, as St. Francis did, of Brother Wolf, Brother Sun, or Sister Moon – to say nothing of feeling any kinship with a carrot!

But I would argue that one of the most urgent tasks of our generation is to move from a spirituality of alienation from the natural world to one of intimacy with it.  And we don’t have much time- for instance, some experts say that we have about a decade in which to avert – or not – the most catastrophic level of climate change.

The good news is that there are many things we can do right away, as you will see if you come for coffee hour in the Parish Hall and take a look at our little eco-fair.  We hope you’ll stock up on compact fluorescent light bulbs, which save both energy and money, and get off junk mail lists, since junk mail gobbles up the equivalent of 100 million trees every year. (5)

Like many of you, I’m trying to make changes at home.  A few weeks ago I set up a composter in the back yard and I’m figuring out that whole business of when to put in leaves, when to throw in food.  We’ve been driving a hybrid car for a while, we became members of Co-op Power, and soon we’ll set up photovoltaic panels to heat our hot water and produce some electricity. We’re trying to turn off unnecessary lights, and next week we’re getting a home energy audit.

 Personal actions are important, but participating in regional and national initiatives may count for even more.  Here in the Pioneer Valley we have a unique opportunity this month to participate in a public planning process to create a regional Clean Energy Plan.  During the month of October, all citizens of Franklin, Hampden, and Hampshire Counties are invited to join an online conversation that will help us set goals and develop action plans for how to increase our energy efficiencies and how to generate more clean, renewable energy right here in the Valley.  At the eco-fair we’ll have little cards like this one that will show you where to sign on. (6)

I’m also excited about two other initiatives.  Focus the Nation is a project to create a national dialogue about stabilizing the climate that will culminate on January 31, 2008, when teach-ins will be held simultaneously across the country.  Inspired by Earth Day 1970, this event will be held early in the presidential primary season. (7) Focus the Nation could help generate the political will to make our national government freeze carbon emissions and take the lead in curbing global warming.  I’m hoping that Grace Church will want to be a part of this effort.

I’m happy to tell you that Grace Church has already signed on to be a co-sponsor of another event: a global warming walk I’m helping to organize that will head from Northampton to Boston next spring.  The Interfaith Walk for Climate Rescue will begin in Northampton on March 16, and end in Boston on March 24, with an interfaith prayer service and rally. (8) You can walk for an hour, a day, or a week.  We’ll sing, we’ll pray, we’ll walk in silence, and we’ll bear witness to our commitment to the God “for whom and through whom all things exist” (Hebrews 2:10) and who connects us one with another and with the whole Creation. 

What God has joined together, let no one separate. 

And when I see you on November 4 at Grace Church’s Hundred-Mile Meal and we share a potluck feast of local foods, I’ll be the person bringing a pot of carrot soup.

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(1) “Earth May Be at Warmest Point in One Million Years,” by Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters, September 26, 2006.

(2) “Thaw and Storms Opened Channel to North Pole,” by Francois Murphy, Reuters, September 21, 2006.

(3) “Heading South? Reports: N.E. faces big climate changes,” by Richie Davis, The Recorder, Daily Hampshire Gazette, October 5, 2006, p. 1.

You can visit the Union of Concerned Scientists’ new, interactive website to review findings from the new report by independent scientists and researchers on climate change in the Northeast and to consider how the choices we make today will determine our children’s and grandchildren’s future.

(4) 18^th century theologian John Wesley is one example cited by James A. Nash in Loving Nature: Ecological Integrity and Christian Responsibility, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991, p. 103.

(5) New American Dream calculation from Conservatree and U.S. Forest Service statistics.

(6) Sign up at: http://forums.e-democracy.org/pioneer-valley.

(7) For information and to sign up your school, college, church, or business, visit http://focusthenation.org .

(8) For information or to volunteer, contact Mathilda Cantwell, (413) 534-6488, email: walk@religiouswitness.org . 

Feasting on God

A few weeks ago a reporter from the Daily Hampshire Gazette invited me to be the subject of the newspaper’s weekly column “Hampshire I.D.”  Along with questions such as asking you to describe your funniest memory or your strangest job, the column asks you to name your favorite movie. As you might expect, I felt honor-bound to list An Inconvenient Truth because of its urgent message about global warming, but I also decided to mention a movie that has lingered in my mind since its release almost 20 years ago: Babette’s Feast.  Maybe you remember it.  Based on a short story by Isak Dineson, the film tells the story of a superb French chef who moves to a village on the desolate coast of Denmark and begins an anonymous, humble life as housekeeper and cook for two elderly, pious women.  For a long time Babette cooks nothing more exciting than boiled codfish and ale-bread soup, but one day she wins the French lottery and decides to spend every last franc on creating the most memorable, delectable, mouth-watering feast that anyone has ever consumed, even though her guests – the simple villagers – will have no idea what they are eating. 

Part of the pleasure of the movie comes in watching how the abundance flowing out of the kitchen transforms the rigid, anxious villagers.  As the guests feast at this banquet table of endless bounty, their feuds and quarrels are healed and their sins forgiven.  The wine flows freely, one delectable dish after another is presented and consumed, and gradually the guests’ mutual rancor turns into friendship, and their melancholy into joy.  When the feast is over, the guests walk out into the village square and there, under a starlit sky, they spontaneously join hands in a circle and dance.  Their happiness is complete.

The Hampshire Gazette never asked why I enjoy “Babette’s Feast” so much, but I will tell you: it is a story about the power of the Eucharist, and Babette is a figure of Christ.  Like him, she arrives mysteriously among her community, she takes the humble role of a servant, and then she gives away everything she has to provide a banquet that fills the deepest longings of the human heart. (1) As in the Eucharist, her feast transforms everyone who shares in it. The banquet’s food expresses the overflowing mercy of God, and in the course of this marvelous meal, everybody’s fear, hostility, and shame melt away.  The guests awaken to what we might call a higher consciousness or a deeper level of awareness: they discover that the ordinary things of this world – bread, wine, figs, a platter of meat, and – most wondrous of all – even each other, even themselves – are signs of the presence and mercy of God.  For them, ordinary reality – what we see and smell, what we touch and taste and hear – has become sacramental, all lit up with holiness.  What else can they do after such a meal than walk out under the stars, join hands, and dance?

Babette’s Feast comes to mind, of course, because of today’s Gospel passage from the sixth chapter of John, the last section of Jesus’ discourse on the bread of life.  In the very stark, even shocking, words that we just heard, Jesus invites his friends to share in the Eucharistic feast: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink” [John 6:53-54].

This is a very emphatic invitation to the Eucharist, but I have to say that these words may sound repugnant to us – as primitive and brutal as an invitation to cannibalism.  We may flinch when we hear them, for why would anyone want to eat a person’s flesh or to drink his blood?  If it’s any consolation, these words shocked Jesus’ listeners, too, and in the verse immediately following the passage that we heard this morning, many of the disciples reportedly say, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” [John 6:60].  Commentators point out that “if the idea of eating a man’s flesh would [be] repugnant to a Jewish audience, the idea of drinking blood would be even more so, because blood as food was forbidden under the Law.” (2)

One obvious thing to say about this passage is that Jesus does not mean the words in a literal sense. “Just as Nicodemus thought of rebirth in a purely physical sense [John 3:4] and as the woman at the well first thought of only natural water [John 4:11],” (3) so we too would be mistaken if we took the reference to Jesus’ flesh literally.  But in acknowledging that, I don’t want in any way to blunt the energy behind Jesus’ words and their insistent vigor and clarity: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them” [John 6:56].  In a way that words can never adequately express, Jesus is giving himself to us fully in the Eucharistic bread and wine. 

Maybe Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is something like the image that caught my eye this week as I stood at the checkout lane of Whole Foods.  One of those health-oriented, granola-crunch magazines had a peaceful cover photo of a mother nursing her baby.  Mother and baby were gazing steadily into each other’s eyes, and the baby was cradling its palm against the mother’s cheek.  Clearly the baby was not just taking in physical nourishment from the mother’s body; it was also drinking in her presence and the love that was shining from her eyes and smiling face.  Mother and baby were caught up in a love that embraced them both.

 That may seem an unorthodox, even irreverent image for what is going on at the Eucharist, but I am not the first Christian to have considered it.  Back in the 2^nd century, Clement of Alexandria compared God to a nursing mother and wrote of “the Father’s loving breasts” and of “the milk of the Father.”   In the 14^th century, the female mystic Julian of Norwich similarly spoke of Jesus as “our true Mother” from whose breasts we drink.  Again, this is metaphorical language for God, who is no more male than female, masculine than feminine.  We grope to put into words the intimacy of our union in Christ with the divine.

I think that some part of us does come to the Eucharist with the helplessness of a baby, knowing that we cannot feed ourselves with the bread of life, and that God alone can nourish our deepest hunger.  This is not to say that the Eucharist infantilizes us, for our task is to grow up in Christ.  Sometimes when we come to the Eucharist, it is our warrior self that needs to be fed, the part of us that takes initiative and takes a stand.  It’s all about growing into our maturity in Christ.  As Paul puts it, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways” [1 Corinthians 13:11] – or, as we heard in today’s admonition from the book of Proverbs, “Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight” [Proverbs 9:6].  But maybe it is only in the presence of the unwavering love of God in Christ – as steadfast and tender as a mother’s love – that our basic loneliness and narcissism can finally be healed and that human beings can grow up into the cognitive and spiritual maturity that we must attain if we are to heal our planet.

This week I have been reading again some of the work of Joanna Macy, the Buddhist teacher and deep ecologist who speaks and writes so eloquently about the social and ecological crises of our time.  Macy leads workshops around the world that explore what she calls the Great Turning, the transition from the industrial growth society to a life-giving society, the shift from a path of folly, a path, as she puts it, in which economic success is measured “by how fast materials can be extracted from Earth and turned into consumer products, weapons, and waste,” (4) to a path of wisdom, the path that moves us toward living in harmony with the Earth and with each other, and the only way of life that can endure for the future.  The Great Turning – the shift to a socially and environmentally sustainable way of life – is, she says, “the essential adventure of our time.” (5)

So this morning I think of Joanna Macy’s concept of the Great Turning when I hear in Proverbs that Wisdom is inviting us to visit her house and to sit at her table and to walk in the way of insight, not of folly, or when I hear the injunction in the passage from Ephesians, “Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time” [Ephesians 5:15]. 

And when it comes to the adventure ahead, I consider the Eucharist our greatest spiritual resource. 

Why? Three reasons.

First, the Eucharist teaches us to live with gratitude – the very word “Eucharist” itself means “thanksgiving.” Gratitude is the wellspring of all religions and one of the shortest paths to intimacy with God.  It is when we are grateful that we are most fully alive, and in the Eucharist we begin to learn, as we heard in today’s second reading, how to “[give] thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” [Ephesians 5:20].

Second, the Eucharist teaches us reverence not only for the consecrated bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ, but for the whole creation. Wendell Berry, the poet and farmer, put it this way: “To live we must daily break the body and shed the blood of creation.  When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully and reverently it is a sacrament.  When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily and destructively it is a desecration.” (6) Through the Eucharist, we learn to treat the whole creation with reverence and with restraint.

And third, the Eucharist teaches us to celebrate, to keep our vision alive even in the darkest times, to trust that new life can be born even in the midst of what looks like loss and failure.  “Praise the Lord, rise up rejoicing” – that’s what we will sing before we share Eucharist this morning and celebrate Christ’s victory over death.

A life of gratitude, of reverence, and of celebration – there are worse ways to live, and no better way I can think of to face into the challenges that are set before us.  In the joy of living such a life and of being sustained and fed by the one who comes to us in the bread and the wine, perhaps, like the villagers in Babette’s Feast, we too will find ourselves wanting to take hold of each other’s hands and to go outside and dance under the stars.

 

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(1) Drawn from “Babette’s Feast: A Religious Film,” by Wendy M. Wright, Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 1, No. 2, October, 1997, Section #22, posted at http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/BabetteWW.htm

(2) The Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond E. Brown et al (Prentice-Hall, Inc.: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1968), Vol. 2, p. 438.

(3) Ibid, p. 437.

(4) Joanna Macy, “The Shift to a Life-sustaining Civilization,” http://www.joannamacy.net/html/great.html#wheel

(5) Ibid.

(6) Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land, quoted by Sean McDonagh, To Care for the Earth: A Call to a New Theology (Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Company, 1986), p. 130.