creation care

“Open Your Hand”

I’d like to say a few words about generosity.  It’s a topic that made headlines this week when Warren E. Buffett announced that he would give 31 billion dollars to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support the foundation’s effort to find cures for the world’s 20 leading fatal diseases — including a vaccine for HIV/AIDS — and to ensure that every American has a chance at a decent education.  I’ve been trying to imagine what it might be like to have $31 billion – to experience that sense of fullness, wealth, abundance, and plenty – and then to give the money away so that it could go to work in the world to heal the sick and to bring life and hope to the poorest of the poor.  I don’t know what Warren Buffett has been feeling this week but what I want to imagine he’s feeling is joy.  I imagine him sensing a fresh sense of connection with the poor – and actually with the whole human race – for he has stepped beyond the bounds of his own small self, past that tendency to hoard and hold back and look out for Number 1, and has opened his hands to share himself and his possessions with those in need. 

As far as I know it’s unlikely that any of us in this room has had – or ever will have — $31 billion to give away.  But generosity is a powerful energy and it seems increasingly clear to me that one of the best ways to navigate these turbulent times, when so many people are so justifiably anxious about so many things, is to cultivate a spirit of generosity within ourselves, our community, and in our country as a whole.

Generosity is obviously a basic value of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and it runs like a thread through three of today’s four readings.  The passage from Deuteronomy is an extended meditation on the importance of giving generously to the poor. “If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor.  You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need… Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so… Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.” 

The psalm picks up the theme, declaring that “Light shines in the darkness for the upright; the righteous are merciful and full of compassion.  It is good for them to be generous in lending and to manage their affairs with justice… They have given freely to the poor, and their righteousness stands fast for ever; they will hold up their head with honor” [Psalm 112:4-5, 9]. 

The whole eighth chapter of Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians is an appeal to be generous to the church in Jerusalem, and in the excerpt that we heard this morning, Paul praises the churches of Macedonia for their exemplary generosity. “…During a severe ordeal of affliction, their abundant joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity.  For, as I can testify, they voluntarily gave according to their means, and even beyond their means” [2 Cor 8:2-3].  Paul goes on to say, “I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance” [2 Cor 8:13-14].  And then Paul remembers from the Book of Exodus how God provided just the right amount of manna every day to feed the people in the wilderness, and he adds, “As it is written, ‘The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little'” [2 Cor 8:15].

I’d like to say 3 things about generosity. 

1) True generosity begins with God.  Even if we’ve worked very hard for every penny we own, everything we have – everything that is – is ultimately a gift from God: this breath, this moment in time and whatever moments we have until we die, our capacity to think and feel and remember and hope, the family and friends we’ve been given to love, the whole living breathing planet with its goldfinches and cougars, its foxes and salmon and birch trees – all of it is gift.

The generosity of the Creator flows into the generosity of the Redeemer, who in the act of self-emptying that we call the Incarnation, came down from heaven to become one of us, and gave himself to us on the cross so that we might share in his divine life.  Here is how Paul puts it in today’s reading from 2 Corinthians: “…You know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich [that is, equal to God], yet for your sakes he became poor [that is, human], so that by his poverty you might become rich” [2 Cor 8:9].

God is infinitely generous, and acts of Christian generosity spring from the grateful awareness of how much we’ve been given.  At the same time, remembering the generosity of God can be a wonderful antidote to compulsive giving, the temptation to think that we have to give and give and give without asking for anything in return.  As Henri Nouwen pointed out, “We may think that this is a sign of generosity or even heroism.  But it might be little else than a proud attitude that says: ‘I don’t need help from others. I only want to give.'” (1) Knowing that generosity begins with God gives us grateful hearts and the humility to recognize that yes, we too, need to receive.  Giving without receiving is like breathing out without breathing in.  We won’t last long.

So that’s the first point: true generosity begins with God. 

Here’s the second.  

2) Authentic generosity expresses kinship.  The root of the word “generosity” is the Latin word “genus,” which means “race, kind, or kin.”  To be generous is to make others kin.  This is a very different notion of generosity than what we might call patronage or noblesse oblige, in which a powerful person or group of people deigns to share a little of its abundance with the poor and dispossessed but does not experience, or want to experience, any direct contact with the poor.  Giving in this spirit can actually function as a power play, in which the rich congratulate themselves on their supposed generosity, while the poor remain dependent and disempowered. 

True generosity, it seems to me, expresses kinship.  It recognizes that rich and poor alike are the beloved children of God, equally human and equally worthy of respect.  Human societies tend to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few and to relegate the poor to the margins, but a religious vision of our kinship with one another calls us to a generosity that inspires us to struggle for social and economic justice and not to settle for giving charity and handouts.  And if generosity is all about kinship, maybe in this time of ecological devastation we’re ready to expand our notions of kin to include not just our two-legged relatives but also the four-legged kind, those with fins and those with wings.

Here on the brink the Fourth of July, I want to lift up some of the new social movements that are calling our country back to a vision of mutual generosity and interconnectedness.  I think, for instance, of Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, a Christian progressive community in Washington, who just a few days ago launched what he calls “A Covenant for a New America,” whose goal is to overcome poverty with religious commitment and political leadership.

As Jim Wallis puts is, “Poverty is not a family value! …If the gospel that we preach does not ‘bring good news to the poor,’ well then, it is simply not the gospel of Jesus Christ – and it is about time that we said that.” [www.sojo.net]

I think, also, of Rabbi Michael Lerner, founding editor-publisher of the liberal interfaith magazine Tikkun, who is forming a national interfaith initiative, The Network of Spiritual Progressives, whose goal, among other things, is to create a New Bottom Line for American society. The Old Bottom Line in this country, says The Network of Spiritual Progressives, is materialism and selfishness.  The New Bottom Line that the Network wants to be build is “love, caring, generosity, kindness, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation.”  No small vision there!

And here’s my last point:

3) Generosity may be one of the key spiritual practices that can keep us sane and connected with Spirit in a time of turbulence and anxiety.  Generosity has the power to ward off despair.  I remember the response of some of you who came with me on Wednesday – almost 50 of you! – to watch Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”  Many of us were shaken by the powerful images of melting glaciers and drowning polar bears, of disrupted seasonal cycles and intensifying droughts and storms.  Is it too late to save the precious web of life that our species is so wantonly destroying? As Al Gore pointed out, when it comes to the ecological catastrophe already upon us, it can be easy to move directly from denial to despair.

I wonder if generosity is a practice that can guide our actions and help heal that despair.  Skipping one car trip a week can be an act of generosity.  So can deciding to walk or carpool or to ride a bike.  Buying locally grown food can be an act of generosity, since the average bite of food travels something like a thousand miles – releasing who knows how many pounds of carbon along the way – before it reaches our lips.  Replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents can be an act of generosity, as can reducing the use of our clothes dryer or air conditioner.

I do not know whether our individual and corporate acts of generosity will be enough to stop the most catastrophic effects of climate change, but I do know that when we are generous, we become a living sign of hope.  When despair comes calling, I invite us to go back to point #1: true generosity begins with God.  And so we turn to God and notice the gifts of the moment.  We recall our belovedness to God in Christ and the power of the cross and resurrection.  We let ourselves fill up again with the presence of the Holy Spirit and discover within ourselves an interior abundance and sense of plenty.  What God has given each one of us is much more precious than billions of dollars!

We can also remember point #2: generosity expresses kinship, our connection to each other and to all beings.  We are not alone. 

Our gratefulness to God and our awareness of connection to all beings can help us re-connect with the flow of divine love.  Generosity becomes possible again.  And with every act of generosity, a little more love becomes visible in the world.

I am no easy optimist when it comes to solving climate change or any of the other daunting issues that beset us, but I do put my trust in the creative, redeeming, and sustaining love of God.  In the words of the American poet, W.S. Merwin, “On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.”

 

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(1) Henri Nouwen, Bread for The Journey (HarperCollins, 1997)

Wounds of Creation,
Wounds of Christ

O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!
For your dew is a radiant dew,
and the earth will give birth to those long dead.
-Isaiah 26:19

Every year on the Sunday after Easter we listen to that marvelous and mysterious story we just heard from the Gospel of John, the story of Jesus showing himself to the disciples on the evening of Easter Day and then returning a week later to reassure and convince the disciple we call Doubting Thomas that yes, the Risen Lord is real. 

“Put your finger here and see my hands,” Jesus says to Thomas, showing him the wounds.  “Reach out your hand and put it in my side.  Do not doubt but believe.” And then Thomas finds his faith, saying, “My Lord and my God.”

Today, across the country and around the world we are also celebrating Earth Day – rain or shine.  What happens when we hold Earth Day and our concern for God’s Creation up to the light of this particular Gospel story of the wounded and Risen Christ?  Here on Earth Day 2006, what word of hope or comfort or challenge might God be speaking to us in this Gospel text?   What might the wounds of Christ have to say to us about the wounds of God’s Creation?

And maybe that’s the place to begin: with the wounds of God’s Creation. To me, at least, and maybe to growing numbers of Americans, those wounds have never seemed so clear.  Take, for instance, global climate change.  You know that burning fossil fuels such as coal and gas and oil produces carbon dioxide and other gases that create a blanket around the Earth, making the climate hotter and more unstable.  You also know that what scientists are telling us with increasing alarm is that climate change is not some future event, something that only our distant descendants will deal with.  It is with us.  It is already here.  Maybe you saw the recent issue of Time magazine that proclaimed in big bold letters on the cover, “Be worried.  Be VERY worried.”

Here are some of the items that scientists reported in just the first two weeks of April.

“Dreaded warm air hovers over Antarctica,” reads a headline in The Los Angeles Times. “In the winter sky over Antarctica, scientists have detected a vast cap of steadily warming air, in the first sign that record levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may be trapping heat above the ice sheets of the South Pole” [Friday, March 31, 2006].

On April 1, an Associated Press article is headlined “Caribbean coral in hot water.” “A one-two punch of bleaching from record hot water followed by disease has killed ancient and delicate coral in the biggest loss of reefs scientists have ever seen in Caribbean waters. ‘It’s an unprecedented die-off,’ said [a] National Park Service fisheries biologist [Jeff Miller] … ‘We’re talking colonies that were here when Columbus came by [that] have died in the past three to four months.’  In the same article, another scientist [Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance] called what’s happening to coral worldwide “‘an underwater holocaust.'”

On April 3, ScienceDaily reported “Greenland’s Glaciers Pick Up Pace in Surge Toward Sea.” 

On April 4, BBC News reported “Europe’s Alps could lose three-quarters of their glaciers to climate change during the coming century” [‘Major Melt’ for Alpine Glaciers, by Richard Black, BBC News].

On April 11, scientists reported “Global warming will become a top cause of extinction from the tropical Andes to South Africa with thousands of species of plants and animals likely to be wiped out in coming decades… The scientists said their study broadly backed the findings of a 2004 report in the journal Nature that suggested global warming could commit a quarter of the world’s species to extinction by 2050… ‘It isn’t just polar bears and penguins that we must worry about any more,” said the study’s co-author [Lee Hannah, senior fellow for climate change at Conservation International in the United States].

Are you still with me?  Have you tuned out yet?  It’s hard to listen to even a quick sketch of the devastation that is going on around us without wanting to cover our ears.  It is painful and scary to face this die-off, this crucifixion, and if we don’t have moments of wanting to hide out, then I don’t think we’ve been paying attention.

That’s where the Gospel story comes in.  Just think about those disciples huddled fearfully in that locked up room.  We can say this about them: at least they were no longer in denial.  They had seen the crucifixion; they knew the reality of the violence and the wounds.  They were not about to tell you that Christ’s wounds on the cross were not real, any more than we can pretend that the wounds to God’s Creation are not real.  Like we who face global warming, the disciples had looked death in the face, and they were scared. 

I find it interesting that the text tells us that they locked the doors “for fear of the Jews.” Maybe they were afraid that the Jewish authorities would round them up as accomplices of an executed criminal and that they too would be killed.  We know what that’s like, the impulse to hide because some external force seems out to get us, whether it’s global warming or anything else.  But the irony is that the disciples who hid out “for fear of the Jews” were themselves Jews.  I wonder if it was also themselves that they were afraid of.  I wonder if, in the events surrounding Jesus’ crucifixion, they had learned some things about themselves that they never wanted to see – perhaps their own violence, their own impulse to do harm, as when Simon Peter drew his sword during Jesus’ arrest and cut off a man’s ear.  I’m sure the disciples felt guilty as they huddled in that locked room, for they knew they had abandoned the very one they held most dear.  One of them had denied him three times.  Maybe they were whispering fearfully to each other, “What have we done?”

Well, here’s the truth: sometimes it is me who is sitting in that locked room, and maybe sometimes it is you, too: guilty as sin and knowing it.  When it comes to climate change, we North Americans bear more than our fair share of the responsibility, because it is our cars and trucks, our appliances and computers, our airplanes and factories and power plants that are sucking up fossil fuels and churning out 25% of the world’s global warming emissions.  Historically our country is responsible for something like 80% of the extra carbon dioxide that is now circulating in the atmosphere, so when we look at the unraveling of the web of life, when we look at dying coral and melting ice caps, when we look at raging floods in one part of the world and growing deserts in another, we are looking at the consequences – unintended, to be sure, but very real, all the same – of the way of life that gives us such privilege and comfort.  No wonder many of us feel a twinge of guilt when we look at that, and maybe more than a twinge.  It’s a lot to face.  And so we lock ourselves in, paralyzed sometimes by guilt and sometimes by the fearful sense that it’s too late, the deed is done, death has already had the last word.

And then:

“When it was evening of Easter day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you'” [John 20:19].  Can you feel the impact of that moment? The Risen Christ comes to his guilty, worried, frightened friends and says “Peace be with you.”  It is peace that he gives them.  Forgiveness.  Acceptance.  However much they’ve abandoned and denied him, he loves them still.  In fact, in this one short passage Jesus says those words three times, as if the disciples need to soak up that message, to hear it again and again – not only to undo Peter’s three-fold denial but also so that all of them, all of us, will experience that forgiveness deep in our bones.  Maybe that is the beginning of our resurrected life: the moment we hear and take in how much God loves us and how completely we are forgiven.

And then Jesus says “Here.  See my wounded hands and side.”

I wonder what the disciples see as they look at his wounds.   I think they see the harsh reality of violent suffering and death, but now those wounds are radiant – they are lit up with love, as if light were pouring from Jesus’ hands and side.  I wonder what it would be like if we could look at the wounds of Creation in the same way.  I wonder if we could learn to see the wounded Earth as expressing not only the reality of suffering and death, but also as lit up with God’s forgiveness and love.  I wonder what it would be like if, in tending to the wounded body of Creation, we knew that we were also ministering to the wounds of Christ – so that in every act of love for Creation, in every compact fluorescent light bulb that we installed, in every decision we made to walk rather to drive to a car, in every push we made for a national energy policy that promoted renewable energy and tougher fuel standards, we were responding to the deep reassurance and forgiveness of the wounded and yet Risen Christ.

Fear and guilt can take us only so far in motivating our efforts to care for Creation.  It is only the forgiving love of God – that endless, self-sacrificing, hidden outpouring – that can sustain our efforts to become healers of God’s Creation and to share in what today’s Collect calls “the new covenant of reconciliation” [c.f. 2 Corinthians 5:17-20].

For it is not only peace that Jesus gives the disciples.  He gives them a commission.  “As the Father has sent me, so I send you,” he says, breathing into them the Holy Spirit, the same creative wind and energy that moved across the face of deep at the very beginning of creation.  Jesus not only loves and forgives us – Jesus also wants us to share in the divine life of the Trinity that expresses itself in acts of generosity and compassion.  Like Jesus, we too have been sent here on a mission.  We too have a job to do.

And that, believe it or not, is where we can have some fun, where we can share in the joy of the Risen Christ.  There is nothing more satisfying than living out your deepest values.  Making the switch to more efficient lighting, healing, and cooling can be an act of praising God.  So can supporting renewable energy technologies or becoming a member of a local group such as Co-op Power.  While you drink your cup of coffee after the service, take a look at the display that our Greening the Church group has set up in the Connector of products to “green” your home, from compact fluorescent light bulbs to environmentally friendly cleaning supplies and 100% post-consumer-waste recycled paper.  Find a member of the Vestry and thank him or her for agreeing to make this parish one of the National Council of Church’s Environmental Justice Covenant Congregations – a mouthful of a name meaning that as a parish we’ve made a commitment to care for God’s Creation.

We don’t want to huddle in fear.  We want to embrace the world with the love and peace and exuberance of the Risen Christ.  I am grateful for Doubting Thomas, for he can express our doubt – doubt that we can stop catastrophic climate change, doubt that we can make a difference, doubt that the Risen Christ will be with us, doubt that resurrection is even possible.  Whatever our doubts today, wherever we’re holding back, Jesus invites us to open ourselves to the gift of his forgiveness and his energizing Spirit.  Today at the Eucharist we will stretch out our hands to receive the body and blood of Christ, just as Thomas stretched out his hands to touch Christ’s wounded hands and side.  Like Thomas, we too want to know that the risen Christ is real and alive, and, like Thomas, when we feel Christ’s presence, we too can’t help but rejoice.

Hope in the Cross

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

Not too long ago, at the end of a meeting in the Parker Room, a parishioner and I got to talking about the suffering and anxieties that beset the world.

“There’s so much to worry about!” she said, shaking her head. “Suicide bombers. Terrorism. Global poverty. The carnage in Darfur. The war in Iraq. The possibility that Iran will get nuclear weapons or that our government will nuke Iran. And then,” she added, as if all this weren’t enough, “there is global warming. Peak oil. And avian flu! I mean,” she said – and here she turned and looked at me directly, searching my face – “where do you find hope?”

I looked at her in silence for a moment, considering.

“Well,” I told her, testing every word as I said it, to see if it were true, “in the end I’ve found only one place to put my hope: in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

You and I are here tonight because this is where we place our hope. We are here tonight with all our sorrows and fears, all our guilt and anxiety, everything that torments us, everything that wakes us up worrying in the middle of the night. Tonight we bring everything that is in us, everything that is around us, and here at the cross we put it all down, trusting that Jesus can hold it, Jesus can bear it with us and for us, and that in him and through him we and all Creation will be drawn to new life. We place our hope in the cross of Christ because something momentous happened long ago on that hillside in Golgotha.

It’s a bold claim that we Christians make. Scientists measure the age of the cosmos in billions of years. If I have the figures right – and scientists seem to be making new discoveries about our evolutionary history almost every day – the universe came into existence something like 15 billion years ago. Primitive life forms emerged on this planet maybe 4 billion years ago, the earliest members of the pre-human family showed up around 7 million years ago, and somewhere around 300,000 or 400,000 years ago the first members of our own species, Homo sapiens, began to walk the earth.

Against the backdrop of this enormous expanse of human and cosmic history, Christians dare to say that something pivotal happened over the course of three days early in the first century, something that affected not only human beings but the whole Creation. In a far-off, forgotten province in a dusty corner of the Roman Empire, a man was unjustly condemned, executed, and ignominiously buried – and everything changed. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection exploded into history. (1)

Jesus spent only one week in Jerusalem, his last week, but the story of that week takes up a large portion of the Gospels – a quarter of Luke, a third of Matthew and Mark, and fully half of the Gospel of John. The apostle Paul, who wrote most of the Letters in the New Testament, devotes more space to exploring the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection than he does to examining Jesus’ life and what Jesus taught. For Christians, the cross and resurrection of Christ – what theologians have come to call “the Paschal mystery” – is like the hinge of history, the turning point, the doorway through which we pass to enter new and everlasting life.

We’ve only had about 2,000 years to experience the reverberations of these events, and for all I know, human beings are just beginning to understand and articulate the power of the cross of Christ. So far, all kinds of images have been brought into play. Sometimes, as in tonight’s reading from Isaiah, we speak of the cross in terms of healing, or sometimes, as we heard in the Letter to the Hebrews, the cross is described in terms of sacrifice. Sometimes we speak of the cross as reconciliation, bringing peace to all who are alienated from God, from each other, and from God’s Creation. Sometimes we speak of the cross as ransom, suggesting that it is the payment that sets us free from being kidnapped by the power of evil. Or we use the image of redemption, to say that the cross purchased freedom for a humanity enslaved by sin. Sometimes we describe the cross and resurrection in terms of a decisive victory in the cosmic conflict between good and evil, life and death. (2) “Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle; of the mighty conflict sing” we will proclaim in the ancient words of our closing hymn [#166, Hymnal 1982], and the victory that takes place on the cross affects not only human beings, but the whole Creation: “From that holy body broken, blood and water forth proceed: earth, and stars, and sky, and ocean, by that flood from stain are freed” (3).

Whatever metaphors we use to interpret the cross, it is here at the cross that we find our hope.

It is here at the cross that all our malice and forgetfulness, all our pigheadedness and small-mindedness and hard-heartedness are continually met by the love of God.

It is here at the cross that we receive forgiveness for what may have seemed unforgivable.

It is here at the cross that we see God’s willingness to be vulnerable, God’s willingness to enter into and to share every pain and loss that we suffer, so that there is nothing we can experience that God in Christ does not experience with us.

It is here at the cross that we share our vulnerability with God’s vulnerability, here that we open ourselves to be found by the One who loves us, and suffers with us, and seeks us in and through all things.

It is here at the cross that we are set free from the power of death, and set free as well from the endless, futile attempt to save ourselves and to earn our own salvation.

It is here that we can throw ourselves into the arms of Christ and receive the inspiration and courage to go forward, for it is here that a dying man shows us the undying love of God.

The love that was let loose on the cross has no limits. When we stand at the cross and watch Jesus suffering and dying for us, we are looking into the heart of God. Christ’s suffering love embraces the lost and the forsaken, the embittered and angry — even someone like you, even someone like me, even someone like Zacarias Moussaoui, who told the courtroom this week that he takes delight in the pain of those who lost their loved ones on September 11.

Christ’s suffering love embraces even the darkest and most tormented places of the human spirit, and Christ’s suffering love can inspire acts of forgiveness that startle us with their power. I do not know whether the Harriott family in Dorchester is Christian, but it is Christ’s suffering and forgiving love that I see in five-year-old Kai Leigh Harriott, the little girl in Boston who wept yesterday on the witness stand as she faced the man who shot and paralyzed her two years ago, when she was 3. In a story reported this morning in the lead article of The Boston Globe and picked up this afternoon on the Internet, the little girl looked at the man who fired the bullet that severed her spine and said through her tears, “What you done to me was wrong. But I still forgive him.”

“We’re not victims here,” said the child’s mother. “We’re victors.” (3)

That is what was released on the cross of Christ: a love without bounds, a love without limit.

Tonight we venerate the cross, and we weep, and we marvel.

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(1) Grateful acknowledgement is offered to the author – whose identity I do not recall – who used this phrase years ago in an issue of Weavings.

(2) These images are laid out by Rev. Michael L. Lindvall, Senior Pastor of The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, in an unpublished manuscript, cited with permission.

(3) Quoted by Jonathan Saltzman, “I still forgive him,” The Boston Globe, Friday, April 14, 2006, p. 1.

End-Time and Judgment:
Christ the King

My son Sam is fifteen, and he’s been asports fan all his life.  In the summer, he follows baseball, and whenhe was a kid, I’d hear him shout, “The Red Sox rule!”  In thefall, because his father grew up in Wisconsin, Sam would announce withgreat satisfaction, “The Green Bay Packers rule!”  I alwayssmiled when I heard the exuberance in his voice.  There is somethingin the human spirit that is set free when we proclaim what we love.

Today is the last Sunday of the churchyear, the grand finale.  The sweep of the liturgical year that beginsin Advent and moves through the birth of Jesus, his baptism, ministry,passion, death, and resurrection, the coming of his Spirit and thebirth of the Church – this whole narrative reaches its conclusion andclimax today, the Feast Day of Christ the King.  To put it in termsthat even a child would understand, today’s the day when around theworld the Church gathers to proclaim, “Christ rules!”  Today’s the daywhen you and I get to say: we know where we’re headed – we’re headedtoward God.  We know where we’ve come from – we came here from God. God is our Alpha and our Omega, our beginning and our end. 

It is the ending that we look at today, onthis last day of the church year – the end of time, the moment ofreckoning, the day when everyone will be gathered at last before thethrone of God and everything will be sorted out.  Of all the biblicalvisions of the end-time, I can’t think of any more beautiful than thismorning’s passage from the prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel was among thefirst deportees to be carried off into exile when the Babylonianscaptured Jerusalem in 597 B.C., and thereafter he lived among afrightened, helpless people who had lost everything – not only theirhomes and belongings, but their very homeland and their temple, theirsecurity and their hope.  Like the slaves brought to this country fromAfrica, they had, it seemed, no future at all.  Into this place ofdesolation and despair a vision came to Ezekiel, a vision of returnfrom exile and restoration in the Promised Land. 

I haveno idea if this passage has ever been set to music, but it ought tobe, for its rhythm and repetition read like poetry – and, when itcomes to describing what God is up to, just look at all the activeverbs!  “For thus says the Lord God: I myself will search formy sheep, and will seek them out…I will seek out mysheep.  I will rescue them…I will bring them outfrom the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feedthem on the mountains of Israel… I will feed them with goodpasture… I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will makethem lie down, says the Lord God.” And then comes a longsentence where the pace quickens and the verbs almost tumble aftereach other: “I will seek the lost, and I will bring backthe strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak” – and then, listen!  The prophet sounds anote of judgment.  The fat sheep – or we might say, the fat cats -will be punished: “the fat and the strong I will destroy.  Iwill feed them with justice.”  I wonder what justice tasteslike?  To the hungry and poor its taste must be sweet, but to theunjust and unrighteous its taste is sharp.

These images are carried forward in ourGospel passage, which marks the end of Jesus’ public instruction.  Theapocalyptic vision of the last judgment in Matthew 25 is Jesus’ lastpublic word to his disciples.  At the end of time, says Jesus, “whenthe Son of Man comes in his glory” – or, as one translation puts it,when the Son of Man comes “blazing in beauty” [The Message, byEugene H. Peterson] – he “will sit on the throne of his glory” and”all the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separatepeople one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from thegoats.”

I wonderif this passage was once easier to shrug off than it is today.  Inyears past, we might have dismissed this image of the world coming toa sudden end as something fanciful, a quaint relic of Christianbelief.  Life seemed likely to go on and on as it always had, onething after another: “same old, same old.”  We might likewise haveshrugged off the notion of God’s judgment by saying, “Why bejudgmental?  I mean – heavens!  I’m from Amherst!  I’m not into thisbusiness of God sorting people into sheep and goats, the in-crowd andthe out, the righteous and the damned. Aren’t we supposed to be tolerant?”  So maybe we hesitated, or dropped our voices, when wegot to the part of the Nicene Creed where it says that Christ “willcome again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”  No ending andno judgment – I think that’s what many of us liked to believe. 

But thisyear we hear the Gospel with different ears.  We’ve begun tounderstand endings.  Endings are upon us.  Take, for instance, the endof cheap oil.  Experts are telling us that we’ve reached, or are soonto reach, the moment of “peak oil,” the moment when the world’sproduction of oil reaches its peak and then drops off for good. Whether it comes quickly or slowly, we’re looking at the end of thecomfortable way of life that many Americans, along with the rest ofthe industrialized world, have taken for granted.  Or, as anotherexample, take global warming.  If the so-called “developed” and”developing” nations don’t make a swift transition to clean, renewablesources of energy, we’re looking at the end of the relatively stableglobal climate that the human race has known for millennia.  Maybe yousaw the pictures that circulated this week in newspapers and on theInternet: the polar ice caps are melting.  In two weeks politicalleaders from around the world will be gathering in Montreal for thefirst international summit on global warming to be held since theKyoto Protocol went into effect.  I’ll be heading to that city as partof a delegation of religious leaders from the United States invited tospeak out about the moral urgency of caring for Creation and to pressour own government to take leadership at last.  Along with our littlegroup, thousands of others will be converging on Montreal, and theslogan we share is “Time is Running Out.”

Endingscan be disruptive, even scary, whether it is the end of oil or the endof empire, the end of a stable climate or the end of our lives.  Wecan feel anxious when we realize that time is running out.  ButChristians have always lived in sight of endings.  Scripture is clearthat we live here only temporarily: all flesh is grass; the grasswithers and the flower fades [Isaiah 40:8; Psalm 103:15-16]. Christians always live on the edge.  As preacher Peter Gomeslikes to put it, “We live in the world with our bags packed.”

One wayor another life does come to an end, and whenever it ends, we will beheld accountable for the choices that we made.  There will be a moralreckoning, and today’s Gospel couldn’t be more straightforward andpragmatic in presenting how that judgment will be made.  Did we givefood to the hungry and drink to the thirsty?  Did we welcome thestranger and clothe the naked?  Did we care for the sick and visit theprisoner?   In short, did we reach out in love to those around us whowere in need?  What we do (or fail to do) to those in need takes placenot in secret but in sight of the King, who has authority to judge. What we do (or fail to do) to those in need is done (or not done) tothe King himself. 

Howhumble our King is, and how hidden!  The one who sits “blazing inbeauty” on his glorious throne consents to be mysteriously concealedwithin the single mother on food stamps, the prisoner at Guantanamo,the frail elderly with Alzheimer’s, the homeless African-American inNew Orleans, and the citizen of Tuvalu whose island nation, because ofglobal warming, is now subsiding beneath rising ocean waves.  Whetherwe know it or not, whether we see it or not, Christ humbly,stubbornly, and persistently makes his home within the very peoplethat society would most like to ignore or cast aside. 

This iswhere the vision of the mystic becomes the vision of the prophet.  IfChrist is in all things, but especially in the vulnerable and thepoor, the naked and the needy, then it matters what we do as anation.  It matters whether or not we choose to engage in thetorture and coercive interrogation of prisoners.  It mattershow we choose to structure our federal budget.  When we hurt the poor,we hurt more than the common good – we hurt Jesus himself.

And if Christ is in each person who is inneed, then what we do as individuals matters, too.  When we take astep toward reconciliation or healing – when we give someone a word ofcourage or hope – when we reach out to take whatever action we can,however small it may be, to make the world a better place – then, asthis morning’s Collect tells us, we share in the life of theeverlasting God “whose will it is to restore all things in [God’s]well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of Lords.”

Yes, we live in a turbulent, violent, anduncertain time – but we have everything we need. 

We haveour marching orders. 

We haveour moral compass. 

Like theslave down South making a break for freedom, we have our own NorthStar.  We know who we are and to whom we belong. 

Christis King.

The Blame Game

Today is September 11, 2005, four years to the day after September 11, 2001, and the end of a week in which once again we’ve been shocked by images of extraordinary violence and suffering on American soil.  This time it wasn’t New York but New Orleans.  This time it wasn’t crashing airplanes and falling towers but crashing waves and falling levees.  This time is wasn’t an act of terrorism but a natural disaster compounded by human failure and incompetence.  These two events – what we now call 9/11 and a hurricane named Katrina – are in some ways very different but both of them shake us to the core.  They leave us disoriented and dismayed, groping for meaning.  They are a stark reminder of human vulnerability and mortality, of how quickly an ordinary life, an ordinary day, can be up-ended.  They raise far-reaching questions about basic aspects of American society and our national priorities.  And they are tragedies whose aftermath will be felt for years.

As I thought about all this, I did some wandering on the Internet and came across a video clip that was made after 9/11.  It’s short, lasting no more than 60 seconds, and its graphics are simple, just a line tracing a circle that closes on itself.   Here’s its message:

Terrorism is bred in

FEAR
ANGER
HATRED.

The recent attacks on America have instilled

FEAR
ANGER
HATRED

in otherwise peaceful people.

Vengeful retaliation will also instill

FEAR
ANGER
HATRED

in innocent people who suffer from such attacks

Terrorism is bred in

FEAR
ANGER
HATRED.

Violence breeds violence.

Our mission now is to break the cycle. (1)

 

A Chinese proverb puts it even more succinctly: “The one who pursues revenge should dig two graves.”

Today’s Scripture readings convey the same urgent message: stop the cycle of revenge.  Break the long, bloody chain of recrimination and retaliation.  Relinquish fear, anger and hatred.  Have mercy.  Extend forgiveness.  “The vengeful will face the Lord’s vengeance,” we hear in Ecclesiasticus.  “Forgive your neighbor the wrong he has done… Does anyone harbor anger against another, and expect healing from the Lord?… Set enmity aside….Do not be angry with your neighbor” (Ecclesiasticus 28:  1, 2, 3, 6, 7).  The psalm lifts up the length and breadth of God’s mercy, and if divine forgiveness is that extravagant, shouldn’t human forgiveness seek to be as generous, too?  The passage from Paul’s Letter to the Romans exhorts us not to despise or pass judgment on our brother or sister, “for each of us will be accountable to God” (Romans 14:12).

Or take today’s Gospel reading: “How often should I forgive?” Peter asks Jesus.  “As many as seven times?”  No doubt Peter thought seven a lavish number – after all, rabbinic tradition counseled forgiving three times.  But Jesus says no – we shouldn’t forgive once, or twice, or seven times, but seventy-seven times – in other words, a number without limit, a number beyond calculation.  Some scholars interpret the forgiveness that Jesus proclaims as a reversal of Lamech’s malicious boast way back in the fourth chapter of Genesis that “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech is avenged seventy-sevenfold” (Gen. 4:24).  In other words, in Jesus we come to the end of the path of violence and blood revenge.  That path leads only to death and to the soul’s destruction.  Jesus opens up another way.

In case we missed the point, he tells a parable of an unmerciful servant who is forgiven a ridiculously large amount of money and then turns around and refuses to forgive a tiny debt that amounts to no more than a small coin.  The man’s refusal to show mercy provokes the anger of the king, who hands him over to be tortured until he pays off the original debt.  And then comes the kicker: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you don’t forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

Are you still with me?  Forgive from the heart – that is what Jesus insists on this morning.  That is what all today’s readings proclaim.  But how do we take in that message against the backdrop of the double catastrophes of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina?  I’m going to put this bluntly.  Most of us are in no mood to forgive.  Forgive the suffering we’ve witnessed in the last two weeks, the sudden revelation to this country’s astonished eyes and to the eyes of the whole world that large groups of Americans are living in abject poverty?  That in this rich country of ours, there are millions who live as if they inhabited the so-called Third World?  Are we to forgive the racism that plagues the land, the desperate neglect of our African-American brothers and sisters?  Twenty-eight percent of the residents of New Orleans lived in poverty, and 84% of them were African-American.  Surely poverty and racism killed many of the victims of Hurricane Katrina just as surely as did the wind and waves, for it was the black and the poor who had no means to escape.  Are we to forgive the government for the inadequacy of its planning for the hurricane, or for the ineptitude and delay in its response?  Are we to forgive its appalling complacency about global warming, which scientists have long predicted will increase the intensity of hurricanes and storms?   Surely we should be angry.  We should be ashamed.  What can it possibly mean that Jesus also urges us to forgive?  What might forgiveness look like in this situation?  Let me sketch a few possibilities.

Forgiveness is a process that includes accountability. Forgiveness doesn’t mean permitting abuse or violence to continue.  It’s worth remembering that the passage we heard in today’s Gospel about forgiving seventy-seven times is placed after the passage we heard in last week’s Gospel, which invites us first to confront what must be changed. If, after a disaster, political leaders quickly urge critics not to play “the blame game,” we have to wonder whether the process of forgiveness has been co-opted.  If the causes of suffering are not confronted, the suffering is all too likely to be repeated. (2)

At the same time, genuine forgiveness means relinquishing a habit of blame.  It means refusing to find fault endlessly and to point fingers at everyone but ourselves.  Forgiving seventy-seven times means renouncing the delicious itch to judge and criticize, the insidious thrill of playing “Gotcha!”  When we maintain the discipline of a forgiving heart, we refuse to demonize our antagonists or to triumph in their mistakes.  We recognize with humility that they are as human as we are, and that, as St. Paul puts it, “we will all stand before the judgment seat of God” (Romans 14:10b). 

Genuine forgiveness takes our anger and channels it to creative use.  Feeling outrage over poverty, racism, and war, over shortsighted or selfish policies, over all the forces that diminish life, is a splendid thing when it gives us the energy to notice injustice and to change what should be changed.

So I see forgiveness in the campaign launched by Sojourners this week inviting Americans to sign the “Katrina Pledge,” a declaration that the poverty we’ve witnessed because of the hurricane is morally unacceptable, along with a pledge to renew our personal commitment to overcoming poverty in the United States.

I see forgiveness in the campaign sponsored by Sojourners, Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation, and other groups, to fast and pray for bold U.S. leadership to overcome global poverty during this week’s World Summit gathering at the United Nations.

I see forgiveness closer to home, in the efforts of this parish to help mobilize and coordinate hurricane relief in the Pioneer Valley.

I see forgiveness in the piles of donated supplies now rising up in the Connector, the growing stacks of diapers and toothbrushes, garbage bags and soap. 

I see forgiveness in this parish’s interest in exploring a possible work trip to the Diocese of Mississippi to volunteer some help, and in the checks that so many of you have sent to Episcopal Relief and Development, to the Red Cross, and to other agencies. 

Through the grace of God, forgiveness can be born at the very center of our outrage and sorrow, our repentance and compassion.  We don’t “forgive and forget” as if nothing wrong happened.  We “forgive and go forward,” building on what we’ve learned from mistakes made in the past and using the energy generated by reconciliation to create a new future. (3)

Forgiveness takes guts.  It takes work.  It takes commitment.  And it has the power to change lives.  I will close with a true story about forgiveness that is told by Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield (4):

Once on a train from Washington to Philadelphia, [he writes,] I found myself seated next to an African-American man who… [was running] a rehabilitation program for juvenile offenders in the District of Columbia.  Most of the youths he worked with were gang members who had committed homicide.

One fourteen-year-old boy in his program had shot and killed an innocent teenager to prove himself to his gang.  At the trial, the victim’s mother sat impassively silent until the end, when the youth was convicted of the killing.  After the verdict was announced, she stood up slowly and stared directly at him and stated, “I am going to kill you.”  Then the youth was taken away to serve several years in the juvenile facility.

After the first half year the mother of the slain child went to visit his killer.  He had been living on the streets before the killing, and she was the only visitor he’d had.  For a time they talked, and when she left she gave him some money for cigarettes.  Then she started step by step to visit him more regularly, bringing food and small gifts.  Near the end of his three-year sentence she asked him what he would be doing when he got out.  He was confused and very uncertain, so she offered to set him up with a job at a friend’s company.  Then she inquired about where he would live, and since he had no family to return to, she offered him temporary use of the spare room in her home.

For eight months he lived there, ate her food, and worked at the job.  Then one evening she called him into the living room to talk.  She sat down opposite him and waited.  Then she started.

“Do you remember in the courtroom when I said I was going to kill you?”

“I sure do,” he replied.

“Well, I did,” she went on.  “I did not want the boy who could kill my son for no reason to remain alive on this earth.  I wanted him to die.  That’s why I started to visit you and bring you things.  That’s why I got you the job and let you live here in my house.  That’s how I set about changing you.  And that old boy, he’s gone.  So now I want to ask you, since my son is gone, and that killer is gone, if you’ll stay here.  I’ve got room, and I’d like to adopt you if you let me.”  And she became the mother of her son’s killer, the mother he never had.

Now that’s a story of what it means, and what it costs, to forgive seventy-seven times.  Where in your life is Jesus inviting you today to take a bold step and to forgive from the heart?

 ——————–

(1) http://www.freerangegraphics.com/flash/fl_cycle.html

(2) Robert J. Schreiter, Reconciliation: Mission and Ministry in a Changing Social Order, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003, p. 19.

(3) Carolyn Osiek, Beyond Anger: On Being a Feminist in the Church, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1986.

(4) Jack Kornfield, The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace, New York: Bantam Books, 2002, pp. 44-46.

Seeds of God

Today’s parable of the sower brings me back to a crystal-clear summer morning many years ago.  I am standing in the hallway by the front door, trying to get everything organized so that my son will arrive on time for his first day of summer camp.  The lunch-box is ready with the foods that this particular seven-year-old will be likely to eat, there is a change of clothes in his bag, I have found the bottle of sunscreen, I am about to go looking for a towel, and surely Sam’s bathing-suit is around here somewhere.  Just then, Sam gets it into his head that he absolutely must change the shoelaces on his sneakers.  The white ones simply won’t do anymore: they’re too long.  What he needs, he tells me, are the brown shoelaces from his hiking shoes: they are just the right length for his sneakers.  So here I am, standing with Sam in the hallway, the two of us peering down at one of his hiking shoes as I try to untie the knot and pull out the shoelace so that we can thread it into a sneaker.  And suddenly I am overtaken by happiness.  I have suddenly discovered that this is the most wonderful moment in the world.  Here is this son of mine whom I love so much, all freckles and innocence; here are my hands, involved in a useful and simple task; here is a brand-new morning, full of infinite possibilities. 

If someone were to come up to me and ask, “How big is God?” I suppose I could start waving my arms around, make big, sweeping gestures.  I could answer, “Oh, God is huge, God fills the heavens and the earth, God is in everything, and everywhere, there is no way our minds can encompass the enormity of God!”  And I suppose I would be right.  But sometimes God is very small.  I hear that scientists have discovered a particle so small that it can pass right through the earth without bumping into anything, so small that it can pass right through our bodies without touching any part of us.  Sometimes God can be that small, so small that we miss the presence of the Holy One unless we’re paying close attention.  As Jesus suggests in the parable of the sower, God can seem as tiny as a seed, as tiny as a brief moment in a hallway when you look at your son and are suddenly pierced by joy.

Do you want to see God?  Well then, says Jesus, don’t go looking for God only in the high dramas, the big deals.  Look for God in what is small – maybe in the slant of evening light, as the setting sun casts a glow across the grass; in the eyes of a friend, as you pause in a conversation simply to gaze at the face of this person you love; in the last, lingering note of an aria from Bach as it trails off into silence.  Look for God in that quick-silver impulse to pick up the phone and call someone who is lonely.  Look for God in that hint of a desire to give someone a hand or to say a kind word.  Look for God in those moments when an invisible Someone practically tugs at our sleeve, urging, “Wake up now and pay attention!  I’m up to something here!”  God is in the details, Jesus says to us today–in the small stuff, in the seeds.

What are the seeds that God is sowing in you?  What are the little stirrings that signal the presence within you of this exuberant farmer-God who flings seeds so recklessly through the cosmos, hoping that they will somewhere find an answering heart?  Maybe you notice a restless stirring within yourself, some kind of insistent call to new life.  Maybe you feel a gentle coaxing to open up just a crack and to risk trusting, if just for a moment, that really and truly, you are loved just as you are.  Maybe you feel the tiniest of invitations to take a chance, take a leap: there is something that needs to be done, and you are just the person to do it.  Maybe you feel a tug to forgive someone whom you’ve refused for years to let back into your heart, or maybe you feel nudged to admit that the time has come to make someone an apology, and to ask for forgiveness.  Maybe you are suddenly touched by gratitude, overtaken on an ordinary day by the sheer gift of being alive.  These are just some of the many seeds of God, clues of the Holy One who gives the divine Self to us at every moment.

Here’s another story about a seed.  There was once a lawyer who was a good lawyer–indeed a very good lawyer.  But he kept feeling a persistent restlessness, an uncomfortable sense that his life didn’t quite fit, that he was called to do something else.  What began as a slight inner tug slowly began to grow.  One day this man was offered a partnership in a prestigious law-firm in downtown Boston.  That afternoon he walked all the way home to Cambridge, deep in thought–deep, as I imagine it, in prayer–and on that day he decided that No, he would not be a lawyer any longer. He would leave the law, go to Paris, and begin doing what he’d always longed to do: to write.  So that’s what he did.

The man was Archibald MacLeish, an old family friend who became one of the most popular American poets of the late 20th century.  I grew up listening to this story, and I have always loved it, because it speaks to me of a person who was entrusted with the seeds of God–though MacLeish himself might not have named it that way.  To me, it is a story of someone who listened with care to a deep inner call to follow wherever the Holy One might be leading, however disruptive and unsettling that call might be.

And we have to be honest about this: if the God who comes among us is often very small, the divine life that grows up in us will be no tidy little thing that we can tend quietly in our garden like a tulip.  The seeds of God do not grow into nice little posies, fit for a bouquet.  They are more like the magic beans in “Jack and the Beanstalk” that spring up through the floorboards and begin toppling the house.  When we open ourselves to a little rivulet of love, in the end we open ourselves to the whole river – as today’s psalm says, “the river of God is full of water” [bbllink]Psalm 65:9[/bbllink].  And so the divine life begins to travel through us, de-centering the ego and de-throning our claim to belong to no one but ourselves.  Our whole lives can begin to change, so that we become a new person, with new eyes, a new heart, a new way of living in the world.

One more things about seeds: it’s not only God who is a sower of seeds.  Like God, we, too, sow seeds for the future.  A kind word sends out a little more kindness into the world.  A harsh word sends out a little more bitterness, a little more fear.  What are the seeds that we are sowing?  Are we sowing seeds of contempt, selfishness, or anxiety?  Are we sowing seeds of respect, kindness, truthfulness, and courage?  I wonder how my life would change if I remembered that every single moment contains the seeds of the future.  Would I speak more kindly and listen with greater care?  Would I take more risks to love fully and freely, holding nothing back?  Would I learn to trust more deeply that every act of love, however small, has an effect and can bear fruit in ways I might never have imagined?

That’s the great promise in today’s passages from Scripture.  Today Jesus tells us that when we take in the seeds of God and let them root, our lives will bear fruit.  Whether it be a hundredfold, or sixty, or thirty times over, our lives will become a blessing to others, as if God has the power to take our small efforts to do good and to multiply them, grace upon grace.  God makes the same promise through the prophet Isaiah, proclaiming that “as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it” [bbllink]Isaiah 55: 10-11[/bbllink].  Hold on to this promise when your efforts seem futile and everything you’ve tried seems to have come to naught.  The word that God has sown in you will yet bear fruit, even if you know nothing about it.  If you consent, if you say Yes, God will accomplish in you and through you exactly what God has purposed.

This week I traveled to Washington, D.C., to spend a day fasting near the White House with about 30 other activists as part of a three-day event to protest the failure of the United States to act more decisively to slow global warming.  We were an unusual coalition of environmental, youth, and religious groups, conducting what was apparently the first-ever fast in this country to protest global warming.  Some of you took part in a companion fast here at home and some of you prayed with us, and I am grateful for that.

But did this small action make any difference?  Will this seed of an effort have any lasting effect?  In a world of violence and fear, of massive poverty in Africa, genocide in Darfur, war in Iraq, bombings in London, and an environmental crisis almost too large to face, do any of our individual actions make any difference?  Today’s Scripture readings tell us: Yes.  Trust the seeds of God.  Our exuberant farmer-God is casting seeds among us every day.  Notice them.  Give them room to take root and grow.  Cast the seeds that God gives you to cast.  Let God work freely in your life and don’t worry about the results: God will make use of you, and you will bear fruit, and the day will come, as Isaiah says, when “you shall go forth in joy, and be led back in peace; [and] the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands” [bbllink]Isaiah 55: 12[/bbllink].

So today we say Yes: Yes to the love whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, Yes to the mighty love that brought forth the whole creation, Yes to the love that is soft as a whisper, as persistent as a growing plant, as gentle as child’s hand that holds a hiking shoe and a brown shoelace.

Ascending into Heaven

Clap your hands, all you peoples;
shout to God with a cry of joy.
Amen.

I can’t remember a spring in New England that I’ve savored with more delight than this one.  After a long, hard winter, how sweet it’s been to watch colors rise to the surface, to see forsythia and then magnolia, crabapple and now dogwood trees bursting into bloom, to look up at the hills of the Holyoke Range and see a haze of pink, followed by so many astonishing shades of green that I found myself wishing that I knew as many words for “green” as the Eskimos apparently have for snow. 

Energy seems to rise in the spring.  Not long ago I took a walk in a nearby town.  It was one of our first warm days, the sun was shining, and I saw a young man walking down the sidewalk on his hands.  He’d taken off his shirt and his feet were waving in the air like two flags.  I saw a child holding hands with a woman with multi-colored dreadlocks, or maybe it was ribbons that she’d woven into her hair, for the braids dangling over her ears were pink and orange and green.  And I saw a sentence painted on an old brick wall and the sentence said, “Change the future.”  Let me tell you, joy rose up in me.  I thought to myself, Christ has risen.  The world’s gone topsy-turvy.  People walk on their hands, they wear ribbons in their hair, and they know the truth: anything is possible.  With God’s help we can change the future. 

My spirits soared.

Here on the Sunday after Ascension Day, it feels right to muse a bit about images of rising, of being lifted up.  A few moments ago we listened to that familiar passage from the book of Acts, the story of Jesus’ ascension into heaven [Acts 1:1-14].  It is the Bible’s only detailed account of how Jesus departed from his disciples and returned to God.  As we heard, for forty days after his crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus appeared on different occasions to his disciples.  At last, on the fortieth day, Jesus gathered his disciples together, promised them the gift of the Holy Spirit, and was then “taken up” or “lifted up” in a cloud.  Jesus disappeared from their sight, and the disciples returned to Jerusalem to gather in prayer with the men and women who had known and loved him.  Little did they know that ten days later, on the feast of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit would suddenly come upon them with great power.

Now the coming of the Holy Spirit was all well and good, but I have to confess that for a long time I didn’t know what to make of the ascension bit.  Every Sunday we repeat the line in the Nicene Creed, “he… ascended into heaven,” but secretly I suspected that one shouldn’t look at this part of the story too closely.  The thought of Jesus ascending into heaven evoked the irreverent and definitely unhelpful image of Mary Poppins slowly rising into the sky, umbrella in hand.  Surely, I thought to myself, surely the disciples’ last sight of Jesus was not of the soles of his feet. 

My difficulty came from assuming that I was supposed to take the image quite literally and to believe that heaven — and God — were literally “up,” a geographical place “above” the earth, and that after his death Jesus had to be re-united with God by going “up” — up and away.  On this point I was no better informed than the first Russian cosmonaut, Yurij Gagarin, who returned from the first manned orbit of the earth to announce triumphantly that he hadn’t seen God when he was up in space, proof positive (in his view) that God does not exist.  For years I avoided using the traditional imagery of heaven as “up” and the earth as “down,” precisely because taking those images literally invites such a simplistic response.

But this spring has reminded me that even if heaven and God are not literally “up,” and the earth and the rest of things not literally “down,” there is still something in our language, in our psyche, that links transcendence and joy with moving upward, with elevation.  “I was feeling down,” we say sometimes, “but now things are looking up.”  Happiness makes our spirits “rise”; we feel “uplifted.”  Joy, hope, inspiration — all these feelings of exaltation lift us up, they enlarge us, they carry us beyond ourselves, they may even move us to ecstasy, which literally means “ex-stasis,” out of a static place.

Is it possible that our moments of joy, our own experiences of feeling inspired or lifted up, are hints of Christ’s ascension, moments when we are aware that we are part of a great circulation of love that is always going on between heaven and earth?  For that is the great love story that we find in the Bible: God so overflows with love for God’s creation that — to use the familiar imagery — God in Christ descends among us, descends into our depths and finally into death itself, and then God in Christ gathers up all that he is and all that we are, and carries everything back to the Father, the Creator of all. 

That, to me, is one message of the ascension: we can trust our moments of joy, we can notice and value those moments of being uplifted by what is beautiful or noble or pure, or by the sheer exuberant creativity of life, because in those moments our hearts are rising with Christ to give thanks to the One who loved us into being.  And when we feel no joy at all, when we are in a time of sorrow or confusion or pain, we can trust that because of the ascension, all that is in us — our cares and concerns, our needs and our loves — have been taken up with Jesus to be drawn into the heart of God.  Through Christ’s incarnation, God came down among us and became one of us, and through Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension, Christ bore everything back up to God.

The ascension also means that we can have a living relationship with Jesus.  After the ascension, the life of Jesus Christ can never again be limited to one spot or identified with only one moment in history.  Because of the resurrection and ascension, Jesus Christ is not far off, a man who lived — as fairy-tales say — long ago and far away.  Instead he is radically present to us, intimately close.  As St. Augustine once put it, “Jesus ascended into heaven so that we might return to our hearts and there find him.”

Thanks to the ascension, we can also speak not only of an inner Christ, the Christ that lives within us, but also of a cosmic Christ.  The ascension means that Christ is everywhere, beyond us, around us, within everything that exists.  As the letter to the Ephesians puts it, Jesus “ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things” [Eph 4:10].  Because of the ascension we encounter a Christ whose living presence infuses all of creation, permeating everything with his life.

It can be tempting to think that we’ll run into Christ only in predictable places – only in church, maybe, or only in passages of Scripture, or only in the sacraments.  Yes, we do meet Christ here, but not only here, not only in the places we expect.  As Luke makes clear in his Gospel and in the Book of Acts, the risen and ascended Christ can also meet us where we least expect it.  This week I did something I’ve never done before: I put Luke’s story of the resurrection side by side with his story of the ascension and compared the two accounts.  I was surprised by their similarities.  In Luke’s account of the resurrection, the women can’t find Jesus when they go looking for him in the tomb.  “Suddenly,” says Luke, along come “two men in dazzling clothes” who stand beside the women and ask, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” [Luke 24:5].  In Luke’s account of the ascension, the disciples can’t find Jesus when they go looking for him in the sky.  “Suddenly,” says Luke, along come “two men in white robes” who stand by the men and ask, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” [Acts 1:11].

It seems that men and women alike need a couple of heavenly messengers to prod them with a question that helps them see that from now on, they’re not going to find Christ in some limited, predictable place.  The living Christ simply can’t be confined, whether in a tomb below or in the heavens above.  The living Christ now fills all things.  We look around and find him in the secret places of our own hearts, in the faces of the poor, in the trees bursting into bloom and leaf, and the ferns unfolding their tiny green fists.  We look around and find him in laughter and multi-colored ribbons on a city street, in the embrace of friends, in every truthful and loving word, in every act of kindness.  We look around and find him in each other’s faces, in the bread and wine that we share at the altar, in the hope that inspires us to restore our building stone by stone and to create a space that praises God. 

You know as well as I do how much suffering there is in life, how much loneliness and sorrow.  You know how daunting the problems that we human beings face, from war to global warming, and how hard it can be just to live a single day wisely and well, much less to “change the future.”  Will we have faith and strength to face life’s challenges in a creative way?  Will we rise to the occasion?   If we do, it will be through the One whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.  It will be through the One who lived, died, and rose for us.  When the celebrant calls out, “Lift up your hearts” we have the joy – and great privilege – of calling back in reply, “We lift them to the Lord.”

Conversion to Eco-Justice

“Be joyful in God, all you lands. Dear God, the earth bows down before you, sings to you, sings out your Name.” Amen.  

 Along with – literally – something like half a billion people around the world, this weekend we’re celebrating Earth Day.  Today is Creation Sunday – a day for giving thanks to God for the extraordinary mystery and miracle of God’s Creation.  And it’s a day for sober reflection and recommitment, as we consider the environmental perils that face us today. 

For several years I’ve been asking myself what inspires Christians to place care for the earth at the center of our moral and spiritual concern.  What needs to happen inside us – what deep change in perspective, what significant shift in values must we experience – before we become willing to offer ourselves to the great work of healing the earth?  One reason I’ve been asking this is that I’m trying to make sense of my own spiritual journey.  Some of you know that three years ago I was arrested in front of the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., during an interfaith prayer vigil organized by a group called Religious Witness for the Earth to protest our national energy policy and the intention to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  The decision to participate in non-violent civil disobedience came as a surprise to me.  I’m not “the type.”  I mean – hey, I’m an Episcopal priest.  I lead retreats.  I teach courses on prayer.  By temperament I’m a peacemaker, not a rabble-rouser.  When a photograph of me being led away in handcuffs showed up in the Boston Globe, more than one startled person told me, “You’re the last person I would have thought would get arrested!”

Of course, civil disobedience is not the only, or even the most important, sign of someone’s conversion to eco-justice, since God calls us out in many different ways.  But what inspires conversion to eco-justice in the first place?  Based on my own experience, here’s what I propose: for Christians it involves three steps or stages.  I call them “creation,” “crucifixion,” and “resurrection.”  I have no idea whether this model of conversion applies to every Christian who is committed to earth-care, for our journeys in faith take many different routes.  But I invite you to check this against your own experience as a Christian: to what extent does your conversion to earth-keeping include these three elements?

The first stage, “creation,” is when we fall in love with the beauty of God’s creation.  We experience amazement, gratefulness, wonder, and awe.  In this first stage of the mystical journey, we discover how loved we are as creatures made in the image of God and connected by breath, blood, bone, and flesh to the whole of God’s creation.

I don’t take this first step for granted.  It’s a huge discovery to experience creation as sacred.  Some of us grew up in a city, and to some degree city-dwellers are cut off from the natural world.  For the first time in history, more than half the planet’s human population now lives in cities, which means that they don’t see stars at night, don’t hear spring peepers, don’t smell hay.  Even living here, in the beauty of the Pioneer Valley, we may experience a certain alienation from the natural world. We are embedded in a culture that tells us daily in a thousand different ways that we are the most important thing on earth and that our deepest identity as human beings is to be a consumer: to buy, discard, and buy again.  We are conditioned to think of nature as a “resource” for us to exploit and use up, and in the midst of our busy, distracted, and often car-centered lives, I sometimes find it easy to think of nature as nothing more than the weather that does or doesn’t get in my way as I drive from one appointment to the next.

To add to our alienation from the earth, many of us grow up in families riddled with addiction, or we develop an addiction of our own.  If you’ve ever been close to an addict, you know that addictions function to disconnect us from the needs and rhythms of the body.  In my own years of addiction, I paid no attention to my body’s signals.  Addicts don’t much notice – or care – if they are tired or sad, if they are anxious or lonely – whatever they’re feeling, they just do their compulsive thing – grab the food, swig the drink, hunker down with the Internet, find something to buy.  Addiction of any kind dulls our awareness and cuts us off from our bodies and the natural world.

I began my recovery in 1982, and in the years that followed I gradually learned to honor the first bit of nature with which I’d been entrusted: my own body.  As I learned to listen to my body and to live within its limits, I began to connect more deeply with nature.  I began to see that God loved not only my body – God also loved the whole “body” of creation.  God began showing up all around me – in the pond, the hills, the willow tree – and I began to understand the words of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”  I began to understand the words of Genesis: “God saw everything that [God] had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).  

“Creation” is the stage when we discover the great love affair that is going on between God and God’s creation.  We enter that stage when we experience God’s love for us, and not only for us, not only for our own kind.  Because God’s love is infinite, this stage is one that we can never “outgrow,” never finish exploring.

The second stage is “crucifixion.”  Nobody likes this part of the journey, but it’s becoming harder and harder to avoid.  The more fully we experience the ways in which the creation reveals the love of God, the more we recognize the relentless assault on the natural world.  Clear-cut forests.  Vanishing topsoil.  Disappearing wetlands.  Acid rain.  Worst of all, perhaps: global warming.  The ice in the Arctic is melting so rapidly that there is now no ice in the sea during the summer; by the year 2050 there may be no ice in the sea at any time of year.  One news outlet [Reuters] reports that “Inuit hunters are falling through ice, permafrost is thawing…[and] the habitat of creatures from polar bears to seals is literally melting away.”  In recent months we’ve learned that up to 30 percent of the world’s species face extinction in the next 50 years, that more than 40 percent of birds in Europe face an uncertain future, and that North American wildlife species ranging from butterflies to red fox are “scrambling to adapt to Earth’s rising temperatures and may not survive” [AP report, 11/8/04].

We try not to notice these things.  We try to shrug them off or look away.  But crucifixion is the place where God finally breaks through our denial.  When we reach this stage we finally dare to feel the pain, to mourn what we’ve lost and what our children will never see.  It’s important to feel our protest and grief because it’s an expression of our love.  We can’t sidestep this stage if we are to become truly human.  I wonder what the church would be like if it became a genuine sanctuary, a place where we felt free to mourn, free to express our anger and sorrow.

At the foot of the cross we express not only our grief, but also our guilt, because if we’re honest with ourselves, we must confess the ways that we ourselves benefit from the destruction of the earth.  We must admit our own patterns of consumption and waste.  When it comes to eco-justice none of us – at least, not most North Americans – can stand in a place of self-righteousness, because we, too, are implicated.  In penitence and sorrow we approach the cross of Christ, where God gives us grace to face and to confess our malice and ignorance, our grief and guilt.  We can take heart at the cross of Christ, because it is here that all evil and suffering are continually met by the love of God.  In a time of ecological crisis, we need to take hold of the power of the cross as never before. 

If in the first stage of conversion we fall in love with the beauty of God’s creation, and in the second stage we share in Christ’s crucifixion, mourning creation’s wounds and acknowledging our own deep grief and guilt, then, as we enter the third stage, we find ourselves sharing in Christ’s resurrection.  Filled with the love that radiates through all creation and empowered by the cross that like a lightning rod “grounds” our suffering and sin in the love of God, we come at last to bear witness to the Christ “who bursts out of the tomb, who proclaims that life, not death, has the last word, and who gives us power to roll away the stone.”*  When we’re led to resurrection we move out into the world to participate in works of compassion and justice.  We enter the stage when the mystic also becomes a prophet, standing up to the powers-that-be.  As we heard in today’s reading from Acts, the early Christians were known for being people who were “turning the world upside down” [Acts 17:6].

What we feel ourselves sent out to do can take many forms.  God’s creation needs healing at every level, so wherever you feel led to begin is a good place to start.  Commitment to care the for earth will affect what we buy and what we refuse to buy, what we drive and what we refuse to drive, how we heat our homes, how much we re-use and re-cycle, whether we’re willing to do something as simple as switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs, and whether we’re willing to go even further and engage in public protest and civil disobedience. 

Living out the resurrection begins right here.  I invite you to take a look at the green insert in today’s service leaflet for some local environmental events. I invite you to throw some extra money in the offertory plate, for it will go to Clean Water Action to support their efforts not only to protect clean water but to fight global warming and to get rid of toxic chemicals like mercury that threaten the health of our children. I invite you to consider signing the petition about climate change that the Episcopal Peace Fellowship has put on a table in the parish hall, along with some handouts on ecology and faith. I invite you to take a walk through the town common and learn how you can participate in protecting the earth while you enjoy the music and the fun.

I’m inspired by the commitment of those leading our parish’s Restoration Project to make the renovations as energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable as possible.  You may know that the Church School’s Sixth and Seventh Graders spent some time thinking about today’s biblical readings, including the passage from First Peter that calls us “living stones . . . being built into a spiritual house.”  The students commented that our church building is made of stone, and one child reported having heard that we’re named Grace Church because the stones are gray.  (Don’t you love it?) Well, the stones may be gray, but I’m happy to say that Grace is going green. 

Some people want to ignore the environmental crisis, to deny its urgency, to deal with it some other time.   As comedian George Carlin once remarked, “I don’t believe there’s any problem in this country, no matter how tough it is, that Americans, when they roll up their sleeves, can’t completely ignore.” 

Well, when we Americans do get past our denial and actually take a look at the challenges we face, what may come next is despair – the awful sense that it’s too late, it’s gone too far, we won’t be able to turn this around.  I know only two antidotes to despair: prayer and action.  Prayer roots us in the first stage of that 3-part journey: in the love of God that extends through all creation.  Prayer also gives us courage to enter the second stage, as we share Christ’s crucifixion, mourn the losses and feel the grief.  And through the Spirit of the risen Christ, we embark on the third stage: we are sent out to act, to do what we can to transform the world.  Conversion invites us to become people of prayer, people who take time to steep ourselves in the love of God.  And it invites us to become people of action, too, people who try in every aspect of our lives – from what we eat to what we drive and how we vote – to move toward ecological sustainability and to honor our first and most basic God-given call: to become care-takers of the earth.

  

*First written for “To Serve Christ in All Creation – A Pastoral Letter from the Episcopal Bishops of New England” (sent to the Episcopal Churches of Province One on the Feast of the Presentation of Christ, 2003)

 

Altar of resistance

The showdown has begun. On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered the holy city of Jerusalem.  The next day, as we heard in tonight’s reading, he entered its holy place – and caused a commotion.  He walks into the temple and drives out those who are buying and selling.  He overturns the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those selling doves.  Quoting Scripture, he cries, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.  But you have made it a den of robbers” [bbllink]Mark 11:17[/bbllink].

The temple is sacred space.  It is made for prayer.  It is no place for dishonesty, no place for greed, no place for the profit of a few.  Some scholars emphasize that the cleansing of the temple takes place in the Court of the Gentiles, the only area where non-Jewish people are admitted for worship.  If buying and selling is permitted in the Court of the Gentiles, then the Gentiles will have no place to join in worshipping with the people of God.  When Jesus cleanses the temple – when he drives out all commercial transactions, expels buyers and sellers, and declares the space so holy that no one can even carry a vessel through it – he is carrying out the first act of a Messianic king.  He is clearing out and protecting the sacred space so that all people, Jew and Gentile alike, may worship together.  He is proclaiming the kingdom of God.

Tonight we contemplate Jesus protecting sacred space that has been invaded by commercial interests.  I hold that scene side by side with another invasion by commercial interests of another sacred space.  Last week’s vote by the U.S. Senate to open the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil and gas drilling was not unexpected, but still it came to many of us as a shock.  It’s not just that so little oil is expected to flow from those pipelines, nor that the same amount of fossil fuel that is expected to come from the refuge could be saved by investing in clean, renewable energy and by improving the average fuel efficiency of our cars and trucks.  It’s not just that drilling for more oil in Alaska seems a particularly tragic and ironic project, given the fact that Alaska and the whole region of the Arctic is already bearing vivid witness to the perils of global warming, from thawing tundra to melting ice and changing patterns of migration.  Maybe you read in last week’s newspapers that it’s become so warm up there, Grizzly bears were spotted 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

But what especially appalls so many of us is that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is sacred space.  It is the last great, untouched, wilderness area in this country.  As Jimmy Carter writes, “There are few places on earth as wild and free as the Arctic Refuge.  It is a symbol of our natural heritage, a remnant of frontier America that our first settlers once called wilderness” [quoted from his foreword to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land]. Do we really want to hand it over to multinational corporations and to the politicians who champion their cause?  Are there no limits that we are willing to set on our greed?  Do we bear no responsibility to other forms of life on this planet and no responsibility for the quality of life that our children and grandchildren will inherit after we are gone?

Some of you may know that four years ago I went to Washington, D.C. with an activist, interfaith group called Religious Witness for the Earth.  We marched to the Department of Energy and held a worship service to protest the Administration’s energy plan and its intention to drill for oil in the Arctic refuge.  We didn’t turn over any tables, but we did kneel in front of the doors to the building and pray that the sanctity of the Arctic refuge be protected.  I was among the 22 of us who were arrested.

You may know that the indigenous peoples who live in the refuge, the Gwich’in people, are sustained by herds of caribou.  They are called the Caribou people, and 90% of them are Episcopalian.  In Washington D.C., we met a Gwich’in elder who told us that the land is so sacred to his people, there are areas that they do not even enter. 

This is not just a Republican issue.  It’s not just a Democrat issue.  It’s not just a political and economic issue.  It’s a human issue, a moral and spiritual issue. 

Tonight, as at every Eucharist, we come to a table like this one.  Tonight Jesus reminds us that this table is not only the altar of repentance, the place where our sins are met by the forgiveness and mercy of God.  Nor it is only the Altar of Repose, where the Blessed Sacrament is taken after the service on Maundy Thursday, the place where Jesus rests and where we receive his peace.  It is also the altar of resistance, the place where we receive strength to stand up to the powers and principalities of this world.  It is the table that gives us power to turn the tables on the forces of greed, oppression, and injustice.  It is the table that gives us strength to resist the forces of death and to proclaim the power of life. 

In the silence that follows I invite you to let Jesus draw close.  Are there tables inside you that he wants to overturn, places where you are stuck or colluding with the powers that be?  Is he perhaps inviting you to join with other people and to play a part in turning over the tables of injustice so that together we can proclaim the kingdom of God?