Aside

Sermon for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany, January 18, 2015. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Northampton, MA. 1 Samuel 3:1-10                                         1 Corinthians 6:12-20 Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17                                 John 1:43-51

    Martin Luther King, Jr. and the climate movement

Friends, it is good to be with you this morning. Thank you, Cat, for inviting me to preach. I serve the diocese as your Missioner for Creation Care, so I travel from church to church, preaching the Gospel and speaking about our call as Christians to heal the Earth. I am blessed by the timing of this invitation to speak, for across the U.S. this weekend Americans are celebrating the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who gave his life, quite literally, to the quest to heal our country’s great racial divide, and who dreamed of a world in which men and women of all races could live together with justice and mutual respect. Racism and racial justice is of course a vital issue in our country right now, a topic of intense debate as we observe in several cities the tragic tensions between some white police officers and the people of color that they were sworn to protect. Across the country people are exploring hard questions about white privilege and institutionalized racism, about how far we have come as a society and how much farther we have to go before we finally manifest what Dr. King called the Beloved Community.

Dr. King recognized that race relations do not exist in a vacuum. He understood that racism intersects with other patterns of violence, including poverty and militarism. If he were alive today, I believe that Dr. King would add a fourth item to what he called the “triple evils” of poverty, racism, and militarism. To that list I believe that he would add environmental destruction, especially human-caused climate change. For unless we stabilize the global climate and rapidly reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases, we will unravel the web of life and destroy any possibility of Beloved Community for human beings and for most of the other beings with which we share this precious planet. The struggle to end racism is linked to the struggle to end poverty, the struggle to end war, and the struggle to protect life as it has evolved on Earth. Racial justice, social and economic justice, environmental justice, climate justice – all these struggles intersect. In the end we share one struggle, one dream, one deep and God-inspired longing: the desire to build a peaceful, healthy, just, and sustainable world. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is God who whispers that dream into our hearts, God who plants  that longing in us like a seed that grows into a mighty oak, God who stirs us out of our complacency and sends us into action. It is God who gives us a heart to care, and strength to keep fighting the good fight. For it can be difficult to keep going, difficult to keep the faith in the face of sometimes brutal opposition and the sheer inertia of business as usual. There is a wonderful scene in the movie Selma, a movie that I hope you will see, if you haven’t already. The movie is set during the turbulent three months of 1965, exactly fifty years ago, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was leading a campaign to secure equal voting rights. Early in the movie we see David Oyelowo, the actor playing Dr. King, awake at home late at night, restless, anxious, and acutely aware of the threats against his own life and against the lives of his wife and children. Should he keep going and head to Selma? He is resisting the powers and principalities of this world and he has reached the limit of his strength. In that late-night hour he picks up the phone, dials, and says to the person on the other end of the line: “I need to hear the Lord’s voice.” The friend he has phoned is the legendary Gospel singer, Mahalia Jackson, and into the phone receiver she begins to sing very tenderly, “Precious Lord, take my hand.” It is an intimate moment, as intimate as the moment recorded in this morning’s first reading, when late at night the boy Samuel hears the voice of God speaking his name in the darkness (1 Samuel 3:1-10). When God speaks to us in that intimate way, often without any words at all, we feel mysteriously addressed. In that quiet, intimate encounter we feel known by name, touched very personally by a loving power that sees us, knows us through and through, loves us to the core, and gives us strength to carry on. This is the experience of the psalmist who writes – marveling and full of wonder – “Lord, you have searched me out and known me; you know my sitting down and my rising up; you discern my thoughts from afar” (Psalm 139:1). This is the experience of Philip, who hears Jesus call him to follow, and of Nathaniel, who realizes that Jesus saw, and knew, and thoroughly understood him even before they’d met (John 1:43-51). As Christians, we open ourselves to be seen and known, loved and guided by an intimate, divine presence that will never let us go. That is what prayer is, and it gives us strength. And when we’ve lost touch with that divine presence, when we feel frightened, despairing, or overwhelmed, we rely on each other to help us find our way back to God, just as Philip helped Nathaniel, as Eli helped the boy Samuel, and as Mahalia Jackson helped Dr. King. As people of faith, we are in this together, and when any of us lose heart, we try to help each other, as individuals and as a community, to turn again to God and to make our appeal: Precious Lord, take my hand. I feel as powerfully as ever that call to prayer, that call to community, and that call to active, faithful service and advocacy. I don’t usually carry a newspaper into church – actually, this is the first time I’ve ever done it. But I want to show you the front page of yesterday’s New York Times, which gives a map of the world colored in shades of red to indicate all the areas that were above average in temperature last year. The year 2014 broke the record for the hottest year on Earth since we started keeping records. But hey, we may be saying to ourselves, it’s been so cold in New England! It turns out that below-average temperatures in our region may be indirectly linked to climate change. Some scientists are studying the likelihood that the unusual dips they are noticing in the jet stream are connected to the rapidly warming Arctic and the exceptionally warm waters of the Pacific Ocean. Bottom line is that the phrase “global warming” is probably much too simple – a better term might be “global weirding.” As the world grows warmer we can expect more erratic and extreme fluctuations in local weather, and some places will sometimes become unexpectedly cold. Yet all the while the average global temperature is heading in only one direction: up. In just two centuries – a blink in geologic time – we have burned so much coal, gas, and oil and released so much heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are higher today than they’ve been for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of years. I heard a climate scientist say, “We are breathing from an atmosphere that none of our ancestors would recognize.” Sticking to business as usual could raise average global temperatures between 5 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit in this century. That may not sound like much, but in fact it would make the world extremely difficult for humans and other creatures to inhabit. Oceans are already heating and becoming more acidic; tundra is thawing; ice caps and glaciers are melting; sea levels are rising; coral reefs are dying; massive droughts are spreading in some places and heavy rains are intensifying in others. Last spring we learned that the huge West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to collapse and slide into the sea in a way that scientists call “unstoppable.” The latest climate report from the U.N. warns of food shortages, waves of refugees, and the mass extinction of plants and animals, if we keep to our present course. This is the sort of news that wakes me up at night and pulls me into prayer: precious Lord, take my hand. It is also the sort of news that propels me out of bed in the morning, eager to find a way to be of use. Once we have grasped what the bishops of the Episcopal Church call “the urgency of the planetary crisis in which we find ourselves,”1 there is so much we can do, so many ways that we can contribute to the healing of Creation. Thank you for the work you’ve done here at St. John’s to conserve energy, switch to efficient light bulbs, and use cloth rather than paper napkins. Our individual actions add up: we can recycle more, drive less, be sparing in our use of water, quit using bottled water. We can turn off lights when we leave a room. Maybe we can eat local, organic foods and support local farms and land trusts, maybe even leave them some money in our wills. I hope you’ll form a “green team” in this parish, and name a Creation Care Minister. I hope you’ll sign up to join a network of people in the diocese who care about Creation. I’d be glad to support you in any way I can. I also hope you’ll sign up to receive a weekly newsletter from the grassroots group, Climate Action Now, which is centered right here in the Pioneer Valley. If we work as isolated individuals, our success will be limited, for the scope and speed of the climate crisis require action on a much broader scale. So we link arms with other people and we join the movement to make it politically possible to do what is scientifically necessary. The climate movement is gaining momentum, and many of us are inspired by Dr. King and the civil rights movement. Last week I spent a day in Amherst with other local climate activists, studying the principles of non-violent civil disobedience as practiced by Gandhi and Dr. King. Along with more than 97,000 people across the U.S., I have signed a pledge of resistance, a pledge to risk arrest in non-violent direct action if the Keystone XL pipeline is approved. Stopping that pipeline has become a powerful symbol of the urgent need to keep 80% of the known fossil fuels in the ground, where they belong. Fossil fuel companies now possess five times the amount of coal, gas, and oil that, if burned, would force the average global temperature to rise far higher than the 2 degree threshold that gives us a 50-50 chance of preventing runaway climate change. So now is the time to make a swift transition to clean, safe, renewable energy, such as sun and wind. In this unprecedented time, many of us feel called anew to listen to the tender voice of love that God is always sounding in our heart, and then to embody that love in the world as bravely and clearly as we can. If ever there were a time to bear witness to our faith that life and not death will have the last word, now would be the time. If ever there were a time to take hold of the vision of a Beloved Community in which human beings live in right relationship with each other and with all our fellow creatures, now would be the time. The collapse of the ice sheet in Antarctica may be “unstoppable,” but so is the love that calls us to stand up for life. Archbishop Desmond Tutu fought for racial justice and against apartheid in South Africa, and now he is one of the world’s champions of climate justice. Reconciling human beings to each other, to God, and to the rest of Creation is what Tutu calls the “supreme work” of Jesus Christ. Thank you, my brothers and sisters in Christ, for joining me in that supreme work.
1. In 2011 the bishops of the Episcopal Church issued a pastoral teaching on the environment that begins with a call to repentance “as we face the unfolding environmental crisis of the earth.” For the full text of “A Pastoral Teaching from the Bishops of the Episcopal Church,” meeting in Province IX, in Quito, Ecuador, September 2011, visit here.  
Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent (Advent 2B), December 7, 2014. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Pittsfield, MA. Isaiah 40:1-11 Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13 2 Peter 3:8-15a Mark 1:1-8

Comfort, O comfort my people

It is a pleasure to worship with you on this Second Sunday of Advent, and I want to thank my friend Cricket for inviting me to preach. Since last January I’ve been serving the diocese as your Missioner for Creation Care, so I travel from church to church, preaching the Gospel and speaking about our call as Christians to protect the Earth. I am honored to be back at St. Stephen’s. Six or seven years ago – as if anticipating my present ministry – I visited this parish to talk about climate change, and I still haul my groceries in a canvas bag that someone gave me, emblazoned with the words “Living Green, St. Stephen’s.” Thank you for your ministry of Creation care!

I find it consoling, and strengthening to the heart, to turn to this morning’s readings and to hear the opening lines from the prophet Isaiah: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem” (Isaiah 40:1-2a). For couldn’t we use some comfort right now? Couldn’t we use some tenderness? So many issues are confronting us today, from racial injustice and economic disparity in this country to ISIS, and infectious diseases abroad and at home. As for climate change, I know I’m not the only one who sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night, anxious about the planet’s basic health. In just two centuries – only a blink in geologic time – we have burned so much coal, gas, and oil and released so much heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are higher today than they’ve been for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of years. The average worldwide temperature is rising, and if we stick to business as usual and keep to our present course, we could raise average global temperatures between 5 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit in this century. This may not sound like much, but in fact it would make the world extremely difficult for humans and other creatures to inhabit. I know that climate change can seem distant and abstract, like something that’s going to happen to somebody else in a far-off place at a distant time in the far-off future. After all, it’s been cold this week in western Massachusetts, and we’ve had snow on the ground. A couple of weeks ago many parts of the U.S. endured some record-breaking cold as Arctic air began pouring south across the Plains and Midwest, burying Buffalo in a snowfall that was unusually severe even by that city’s standards. Climate scientists have noticed in recent years an unusual number of extreme jet stream patterns, and they are studying how big dips in the jet stream are linked to the rapidly warming Arctic and the exceptionally warm waters of the Pacific Ocean. It turns out that the phrase “global warming” is too simple – a better term might be “global weirding.” In a warming world, we can expect more erratic and extreme fluctuations in local weather, and some places will sometimes become unexpectedly cold. Yet all the while the average global temperature is heading in only one direction: up. 2014 is on track to be the hottest year worldwide since record keeping began in the 1800’s, according to the World Meteorological Organization, and 14 of the warmest 15 years have occurred since the year 2000. So what I bring with me this morning, and what I want to place on the altar for God’s mercy and healing, is our painful awareness that climate change is not a future threat. It is our reality. Oceans are heating and becoming more acidic; tundra is thawing; ice caps are melting; sea levels are rising; coral reefs are dying; massive droughts are spreading in some places and heavy rains are intensifying in others. How do we pray with this? What would Jesus do? How does the Holy Spirit call us to respond as we watch the web of life as we know it unravel before our eyes? Last spring we learned that the huge West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to collapse and slide into the sea in a way that scientists call “unstoppable.” The latest climate report from the U.N. warns of food shortages, waves of refugees, and the mass extinction of plants and animals, if we keep to our present course. Of course, here in this country and around the world it is the poor who are hit first and hardest. In a situation that speaks so much of death, of hopelessness and fear, it is deeply reassuring to hear God say, through the prophet Isaiah: “Comfort, O comfort my people.” For of course we do need comfort. We need fresh confidence and hope, for we fear for our children and our children’s children. We know that if we just keep doing what we’re doing, just keep carrying out our usual daily activities in our usual way, then within two, three, four generations we will bring an end to life as it has evolved on this planet. Advent brings us the bracing and enlivening call of the prophets, the people who dare to face the world’s darkness and to proclaim that the light of God is coming and indeed is already here. Isaiah is speaking to a people in exile, a people who have lost their homeland and for whom everything familiar has been destroyed. All around him, Isaiah sees injustice, alienation, and loss, and he is keenly aware of the brevity of life: “the grass withers, the flowers fades” (Isaiah 40:7). Yet Isaiah can sense the enduring glory and power of God. He can feel God’s presence and sense God’s coming, and he knows in his bones that God’s justice, goodness, and beauty will prevail at last. “The glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together” (Isaiah 40:5). John the baptizer comes to us, as Isaiah did, with a call to prepare the way of the Lord (Isaiah 40:3; Mark 1:3). John may seem like a strange guy, a man on the margins who lives in the wilderness, eating nothing but locusts and wild honey and wearing nothing but animal skins. But this almost archetypal Wild Man is on fire with hope for God’s coming, passionately confident that the Savior of the world will come at last with power. Unlike most of us, John refuses to go through life with one hand on the parking brake. He doesn’t settle for cynicism, apathy, or phony optimism. He doesn’t settle for living grimly in the darkness nor does he try to pretend the darkness away. He faces the darkness of the world: he grieves it, protests it, and does everything in his power to bear witness to the light. In the end he is willing to endure imprisonment, even death, for the sake of the light that is coming into the world. Who will stand with John the baptizer and stand up for the long-term future of this planet? I see a line of prophets stretching from Isaiah to John the baptizer to Jesus, and beyond, to the prophets of today – to all the people whose lives proclaim that life, and not death, will have the last word, all the people who embody in words and actions their trust in the enduring love of God and their hope in the life of the world to come. For once we have grasped what the bishops of the Episcopal Church call “the urgency of the planetary crisis in which we find ourselves,” and once we begin to repent for our acts of “greed, overconsumption, and waste,”1 there is so much we can do, so many ways that we can contribute to the healing of Creation. We can recycle more, drive less, and be sparing in our use of water. We can turn off lights when we leave a room. Maybe we can eat local, organic foods and support our local farms and land trusts. We can install insulation and turn down the heat. I am so glad that you already have a “green team” here at St. Stephen’s, and if you’d like to join a network of people in the diocese who care about Creation, I hope that you will give me your name and contact information. I’d be glad to support you in any way I can. As individuals we should do everything we can to reduce our use of fossil fuels, but the scope and speed of the climate crisis require action on a much broader scale, too. We need to join with other people and make it politically possible to do what is scientifically necessary. We need to push our leaders to make a swift transition to clean, safe, renewable sources of energy, such as sun and wind. We need to quit our addiction to fossil fuel and to bring down the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to a level that allows life as it has evolved to continue on this planet. Here in Massachusetts we are blessed to have a growing network of volunteers called 350Mass.org, which is engaged in many local campaigns and has a group right here in Pittsfield. I hope that many of you will sign up with 350Mass.org to receive weekly emails, to read the news and connect. In these fearsome times, Advent reminds us that God longs to comfort our hearts, to speak in our depths a tender word of hope. And God calls us to be bearers of comfort and hope to the world around us, to be a “herald of good tidings” (Isaiah 40:9), as Isaiah says. If ever there were a time to bear witness to our faith, now would be the time. If ever there were a moment to hold fast to our vision of a world in which human beings live in right relationship with each other and with our fellow creatures, now would be the time. Now is the time, as theologian Sallie McFague would say, to recognize that the world is not a hotel, but our home.2 When we visit a hotel, we may feel entitled to use copious amounts of hot water, to throw towels on the floor, to use and discard everything in sight and then to head to the next hotel – in short, to exercise what she calls the “Kleenex perspective” of the world. But when we realize that in fact the earth is our home – that God created it and loves every inch of it and entrusts it to our care – then everything changes. We realize that we live here; we belong here; we can no longer tolerate a life-style that exhausts the planet’s resources and that treats land, sea, and sky alike as receptacles for waste. I will close with a prayer written for today, the Second Sunday of Advent, by one of today’s prophets, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. As you may know, thousands of the world’s diplomats are gathered right now in Lima, Peru, to negotiate the foundation of an international climate treaty that will be finalized in Paris next year. We urgently need that U.N. treaty to be just, to protect the poor, and to be strong enough to avert catastrophe. And we urgently need, as individuals and as a society, to awaken at last to the call to love God, our neighbors and our dear, God-given earth as ourselves. With hope-filled hearts, let us pray. Holy God, Earth and air and water are your creation, and the web of life is yours. Have mercy on us in the face of climate chaos. Help us to be keepers of your Earth: to simplify our lives, to reduce our use of energy, to share the resources you have given us, to raise our voices for justice, and to bear the cost of change. Amen.
1. In 2011 the bishops of the Episcopal Church issued a pastoral teaching on the environment that begins with a call to repentance “as we face the unfolding environmental crisis of the earth.” For the full text of “A Pastoral Teaching from the Bishops of the Episcopal Church,” meeting in Province IX, in Quito, Ecuador, September 2011, visit here. 2. Sallie McFague, A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008, p. 53.
Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent (Advent 1B), November 30, 2014. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at Trinity Episcopal Church, Ware, MA. Isaiah 64:1-9 Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18 1 Corinthians 1:3-9 Mark 13:24-37

Fatalism about the end of the world?

Here on the First Sunday of Advent we are beginning a new church year, embarking on a new season, making a fresh start. Now is the time, as our opening Collect says, “to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light.” During these four weeks that lead up to Christmas we prepare to celebrate the first coming of Christ, when God became incarnate in Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. And we prepare for his second coming, too. We look ahead to that last, great day sometime in the future when Christ will come again, when everything will be gathered up in love, when all that is broken will be healed, all that is estranged will be reconciled and forgiven, and the Lord of life will return at last to reign in glory.

Christianity is full of hope about where we are ultimately heading – into the loving arms of God – but it is also bracingly realistic about the suffering and turmoil that will take place in the meantime. Today on the first Sunday of Advent, as we do every year, we must grapple with the Bible’s portrayal of the end-times, which include frightening predictions of social breakdown and cosmic turmoil. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus foretells “wars and rumors of wars” (Mark 13:7); he speaks of earthquakes, famines, and persecution. As we heard in today’s passage, when the Son of Man comes at the end of time, we can expect that “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken” (Mark 13:24). It’s scary stuff. So what do we make of apocalyptic passages like these? How do these biblical passages about the end times help us to live with faithfulness, confidence, and hope? As you know, I serve the diocese as your Missioner for Creation Care, so I do a lot of speaking and preaching about climate change and about the urgent need for human beings to change course and to take action to protect and cherish the world that God entrusted to our care. According to a new poll about American attitudes to religion and the environment, about half – 49% – of the respondents believe that recent natural disasters are evidence of biblical end times. Apparently, about half of Americans believe that climate change caused by human beings is somehow preordained, part of God’s plan.
Fatalism...and the Seeds of Doubt (by Jack Ziegler). Used with permission.
Fatalism…and the Seeds of Doubt (by Jack Ziegler). Used with permission.
Could this be true? Should biblical accounts of the end times evoke and amplify a sense of fatalism about climate change? Should Christians settle for a helpless shrug of the shoulders as we consider the devastation that climate change is already causing or likely to cause, if it continues unchecked? I recall a cartoon in which a mother, father, and their young son huddle around a toaster. Two smoking slices of bread have just popped up, burned to a crisp. The mother looks mournfully at the burned toast and declares, “It is God’s will.” The father intones, “Had the toast been destined to be edible, it would be so.” The small boy grips the table with his two hands, looks up at his parents, and says, “B-b-but…” I admit it: I’m standing with that child and saying “But!” I refuse to believe that it’s God’s will that human beings burn the Earth to a crisp. I refuse to believe that destiny, fate, or the biblical end times give human beings permission to unravel the web of life and to destroy the world that God created and proclaimed “very good” (Genesis 1:31). I believe that God’s presence fills and sustains our precious, living planet, and that all of it belongs to God – meadows and rivers, soils and seeds, animals and oceans. As the psalmist says, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it” (Psalm 24:1). And the first task given to human beings is to care for the earth and to exercise a loving dominion as stewards and caregivers. We’re having some difficulty with that assignment. Climate change caused by human activity is already having drastic and far-reaching effects around the world. In only two centuries – just a blink in geologic time – human beings have pumped so much heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are higher today than they’ve been for hundreds of thousands of years. I heard a climate scientist remark, “We are breathing from an atmosphere that none of our ancestors would recognize.” When we burn fossil fuels such as coal, gas, and oil, we release vast quantities of carbon and heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, as if the atmosphere were an open sewer. This practice could raise worldwide average temperatures between 5 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit in this century, which would make the world an extremely difficult place for humans and other creatures to inhabit. Already our planet is changing before our eyes: oceans are heating up and becoming more acidic as they absorb some of the carbon dioxide released by power plants and cars; tundra is thawing, ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, coral reefs are dying, massive droughts are spreading in some places and heavy rains are intensifying in others. Last spring we learned that the huge West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to collapse and slide into the sea in a way that scientists call “unstoppable.” The Pentagon recently issued a report asserting decisively that climate change poses “an immediate risk to national security” and is a so-called “threat multiplier,” increasing the likelihood of terrorism, infectious disease, global poverty and food shortages. The latest climate report from the United Nations warns of waves of refugees and of the mass extinction of plants and animals, if we keep to our present course. Of course, here in this country and around the world it is the poor who are hit first and hardest by the impacts of climate change. How serious is the threat? As environmental lawyer Gus Speth puts it: “…all we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and [organisms] and leave a ruined world to our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today… Just continue to release greenhouse gases at current rates, just continue to impoverish ecosystems and release toxic chemicals at current rates, and the world in the latter part of this century won’t be fit to live in.”[1] So – is this the end times? I don’t know. No one knows. Jesus repeatedly told his followers, as he does in today’s Gospel, not to speculate as to when the end times would come (Matthew 24:3-8; Mark 13:3-8; Luke 21:7-11) – even Jesus himself did not know. But what we do know is that at some unexpected moment, the last day will come – whether it be the last day of our lives or the last day of the world. Until that day, Jesus urges us to be faithful witnesses to the enduring love of God. The biblical end time passages and their frightening imagery of chaos and distress were not given to us so that we can indulge in helplessness, resignation, or fatalism, but just the opposite: in order to sustain our hope and perseverance even in the midst of crisis. Again and again, in different ways Jesus came to say, “Fear not” (see, for instance, Matthew 6:25-34, Matthew 8:26, Matthew 10:31, Matthew 14:27). In Advent he summons us not to faint from fear and foreboding, nor to let our love grow cold, but rather to stay awake and be alert for the small but telling signs that God is in our midst, bringing forth something new. Just as the branch of a fig tree becomes tender and puts forth its first, soft leaves, assuring us that summer’s abundance is near, so Jesus urges us to trust that even in the midst of chaos, violence, and endings, God’s kingdom is drawing near.  In the very midst of endings, something new is being born. Will we take part in that birth? Advent and its end-time readings tell us that in the face of climate change, we should not give ourselves up to apathy, indifference, or despair. In this perilous time, God calls us to stand up, raise our heads, and bear witness in word and deed to God’s never failing love. “It is like a man going on a journey,” Jesus says in that tiny parable concealed in today’s Gospel. The man leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, “each with his work” (Mark 13:34). Each of us has our own work to do, as we keep faith with the God who is faithful to us. And when it comes to healing Creation, there is so much we can do! We can recycle more, drive less, and be sparing in our use of water. We can turn off lights when we leave a room. Maybe we can eat local, organic foods and support our local farms and land trusts. We can install insulation and turn down the heat. If you don’t yet have a green team or a Creation Care team (whatever you want to call it) here at Trinity Church, you can form one. If you’d like to join a network of people in the diocese who care about Creation, I hope you will give me your name and contact information. I’d be glad to support you in any way I can. As individuals we should do everything we can to reduce our use of fossil fuels, but the scope and speed of the climate crisis require action on a much broader scale, too. We need to join with other people and make it politically possible to do what is scientifically necessary. We need to push our leaders to make a swift transition to clean, safe, renewable sources of energy, such as sun and wind. We need to quit our addiction to fossil fuels and to bring down the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to a level that allows life as it has evolved to continue on this planet. Here in western Massachusetts we are blessed to have a strong grassroots group, Climate Action Now, which is involved in many local campaigns. I hope that you will sign up to receive weekly emails, read the news, and connect. Tomorrow an important U.N. climate change conference will begin in Lima, Peru, and I hope that you will join me in praying for its success. (I invite you to take part in #Light for Lima, a series of vigils that will take place around the world on December 7, right in the middle of these crucial climate talks.) Now is the time to clean up our act, to sort out our life, to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armor of light. Now is the time to abandon whatever stupefies us and puts us to sleep – whether it be the call of consumerism or a fondness for cynicism or helpless resignation. Now is the time to look ahead and to embody a robust hope, for, as Paul says, “the night is far gone, the day is near” (Romans 13:12). It’s as if we were standing in the doorway of a dark house, looking out to the hills beyond, and in the sky we can see the first glimmer of sunrise. Behind us is darkness, but ahead of us, light. Christ has come, so the dawn is shining on our faces. Christ is here, so we know we are not alone. Christ will come again, so we step out boldly through the doorway, leaving everything less than love behind.
1. James Gustave Speth, The Bridge on the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008, p. x (Preface).  
Sermon for the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 24A), October 18, 2014. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at St. James Episcopal Church, Greenfield, MA Exodus 33:12-23 Psalm 99 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10 Matthew 22:15-22

Show me your glory

It is a pleasure to be with you this morning, and I’d like to thank Heather, your priest, for inviting me to preach and worship here at St. James. I serve the diocese as your Missioner for Creation Care, and, as you know, during October and November this year, our diocese is celebrating its first-ever Season of Creation. Across the diocese we are reflecting on the preciousness and sacredness of the natural world, and God’s urgent call to protect the Earth and its creatures. I’m delighted that the sequence of readings from Exodus gives us today’s passage about Moses, who turns to God and prays, “Show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18).

We know something about that glory, don’t we? This very week we have seen God’s glory shining in the sight of orange and yellow leaves standing out against a clear blue sky, and – if we’ve been lucky and the timing has been just right – we have felt God’s glory in the wind that makes the leaves whirl and tumble all around us. This week God’s glory was revealed to me in a vivid sunset that played out for a good half-hour with all the drama and details of a symphony. This happens from time to time around here. I live in Northampton, and in the late afternoon when I’m heading west on the Coolidge Bridge, there are times near sunset when I think that we should all just pull over, get out of our cars, and stop to gaze, praising God and rejoicing. I know this would create a traffic jam and so far I have resisted the impulse. But you know what I’m talking about – those moments when something like scales suddenly fall from our eyes, and we perceive the beauty and splendor of the living world around us. We stop in our tracks, overcome by a sense of wonder and awe. “Show me your glory,” Moses prayed to God, and God granted his request. Because seeing the divine presence in all its fullness would be more than mortal eyes could bear (Exodus 33:20), God sheltered Moses in the cleft of a rock and tenderly covered Moses with his hand, so that as God’s glory passed by, Moses could see only what Scripture calls God’s “back” (Exodus 33:23). It is only after death that we will see God’s glory directly – as Paul writes in his First Letter to the Corinthians, “Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Until the day comes when we see God face to face, here on earth God grants us glimpses of divine glory, brief and holy glimpses that come to us when our eyes are opened, when, as poet William Blake puts it, “the doors of perception” are cleansed, and “everything appears… as it is, Infinite.” Nature is one of the primary places we perceive God’s glory. In fact, Christian tradition speaks of two “books” that reveal God – the book of Scripture and the book of Nature. As Martin Luther so wonderfully puts it, “God writes the Gospel, not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and the flowers and the clouds and stars.” The opening pages of the Bible tell us that God created the world, took a look around, and was filled with delight. “God saw everything that [God] had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). The web of life – what scientists call the biosphere – is radiant with God’s presence. The psalmist proclaims, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows [God’s] handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). Meadows and rivers, seeds and soil, animals, air and sea ultimately belong to God, not to human beings, for, as we also hear in the psalms, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it” (Psalm 24:1). Moses is a fine companion to keep beside us during this Season of Creation, for he was a man of deep prayer who spent much of his life outdoors and experienced there what theologian Rudolf Otto calls the “awesome and rapturous mystery” of God (mysterium tremendum et fascinans). Just think of Moses walking repeatedly up the mountain to commune with God, or of his vision, early on, of the ever-burning bush that conveyed God’s voice and presence. Most of us don’t live like that. Most of us don’t spend much prayerful, conscious time outside. I’ve heard that the average North American spends 4% of a typical day outdoors, including time spent in a car. What’s more, many of us work and play in ways that are mental, and we get absorbed in the “virtual reality” of the TV or smart phone or computer screen. When we lose touch with nature, it is easy to think of nature as “out there” and distant, to be ignored and taken for granted, or to be dominated and used up. And when we lose touch with nature, we lose touch with God. I invite us, this Creation Season, to do what Moses did: to take time for solitary prayer and silence, and to look for God’s glory in the natural world. For a while now – and I hope to keep this up until the weather gets too cold – I’ve been going outside first thing in the morning to walk barefoot and to put my body in direct contact with the body of the Earth. We live in a noisy world, a world of bustle, frenzy, and haste. I know that only if I spend regular time alone and in silence, as Moses did, will I come to see a bush that is aflame with God – in fact, come to see that every bush is lit up with God’s radiance. A quiet mind is a spacious mind, a mind that begins to perceive what we might call the hidden vastness or hidden depths of things. The change of consciousness that Moses repeatedly experienced, that “cleansing of the doors of perception,” is available to everyone who takes time to pray in silence and who learns some practices for quieting the mind and paying attention. It seems to me that one of the most essential tasks of our time is to move from a spirituality of alienation from the natural world to one of intimacy with all creation. Being attentive in nature with eyes and ears of love is a practice that can open our eyes to God’s glory. I take Moses as a spiritual guide, and I take him as a guide to activism, too. For what happens when he sees the burning bush? What happens when he sees the divine Presence shining out toward him and hears God addressing him intimately by name? What happens next is that he hears God calling him to become not just a mystic, but also a prophet, a healer and liberator. God calls him to confront the Pharaoh and to set the slaves free. Moses discovers – as we do, too – that God invites us into an interior, intimate, and sometimes ecstatic encounter with God in prayer, and then God sends us out into the world to engage in the struggle for justice, healing, and liberation. God’s Spirit is like a flow of air that moves through our body as we breathe: we breathe God in, and we discover God in our depths; we breathe God out, and we are sent out to heal, repair, and restore the world. As one of the Desert Fathers used to say, “Always breathe Christ.” Contemplation and action become the rhythm of our lives, like breathing in and breathing out. God’s Creation has never needed our help and healing more than it does today. The web of life is unraveling around us. Climate change caused by human activity is already having drastic and far-reaching effects around the world. In only two centuries – just a blink in geologic time – human beings have pumped so much heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air that atmospheric levels of CO2 are higher today than they’ve been for millions of years. I heard a climate scientist remark, “We are breathing from an atmosphere that none of our ancestors would recognize.” Burning fossil fuels, such as coal, gas, and oil, at present rates could raise worldwide average temperatures between 5 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit in this century, which would make the world extremely difficult for humans and other creatures to inhabit. Already our planet is changing before our eyes: oceans are heating up and becoming more acidic as they absorb some of the carbon dioxide that cars and power plants release; tundra is thawing, ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, coral reefs are dying, massive droughts are spreading in some places and heavy rains are intensifying in others. Last spring we learned that the huge West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to collapse and slide into the sea in a way that scientists call “unstoppable.” This week the Pentagon released a report asserting decisively that climate change poses “an immediate risk to national security” and is a so-called “threat multiplier,” increasing the likelihood of terrorism, infectious disease, global poverty and food shortages.” We live in an unprecedented time in human history, a time when our choices really matter and what we do, or don’t do, makes all the difference to what kind of world we leave our children and our children’s children. What can we do? Well, we can recycle more, drive less, and be sparing in our use of water. We can turn off lights when we leave a room. Maybe we can eat local, organic foods and support our local farms and land trusts. We can install insulation and turn down the heat. I know that this parish includes ardent recyclers and composters, and that you’ve talked about planting a community garden. I salute you for that, and I’d be glad to support you in any way I can. If you are interested in joining a network of people in the diocese who care about Creation, I hope you will give me your name and contact information. As individuals we can and should do everything we can to reduce our use of fossil fuels, but the scope and speed of the climate crisis require action on a much broader scale, too. We need to join with other people and make it politically possible to do what is scientifically necessary. Like Moses, we, too, need to stand up to the political and corporate powers-that-be and to push our country to make a swift transition to clean, safe, renewable sources of energy like sun and wind. We need to quit our addiction to fossil fuels and to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to a level that allows life as it has evolved to continue on this planet. We are blessed, right here in the Pioneer Valley, to have a strong, local, grassroots climate action group, which is called Climate Action Now. I hope you will sign up for weekly emails and read the news and connect. I am also happy to say that tomorrow night you can join me, Bishop Doug Fisher, and the Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Jim Munroe (whom many of you know), along with a crowd of other folks from the diocese who will be marching to Springfield’s City Hall to support a resolution proposing a climate action plan for the city. Springfield is the largest city in Massachusetts without a climate action plan, its residents suffer severely from asthma and other respiratory diseases caused by dirty air, and tomorrow faith communities from within and beyond Springfield will show their support for a resolution to develop a climate action plan that City Council members will be discussing that night. A range of folks in Springfield – including poor Hispanic, African-American and immigrant communities – is joining together in an extraordinary coalition to ask the city to prepare for and to slow down climate change. All the things they are asking for – such as more bike paths, better public transportation, better insulated buildings, and more trees and community gardens – will contribute to public health and safety as well as to a healthier and more stable environment. When climate justice meets social justice, I am truly thankful. If you come, please bring your church banner. This is a Jesus moment, a moment when God is making all things new. “Show me your glory,” Moses prays, and where do we see God’s glory? In the beauty and intricate complexity of nature, in every gesture of forgiveness and reconciliation, in every word of kindness, in every face that shines with love, in every mind and hand and heart that is devoted to creating a better world. The melting ice in West Antarctica may be unstoppable, but so, too, is the divine love that made us, that sustains us, and that calls us to stand up for life. Breathing in, we pray and give thanks. Breathing out, we serve.  Jesus is with us, offering us here at this table the nourishing gift of his presence and power, and then he will send us out to love and to serve in his name. I wish you a blessed Season of Creation through the end of November, and also in all the days to come.  
Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 21A), September 28, 2014 Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at Christ Episcopal Church, Rochdale, MA Exodus 17:1-7 Psalm 78-1-4, 12-16 Philippians 2:1-13 Matthew 21:23-32

Speaking and living our “Yes”

It is a pleasure to be with you this morning, and I’d like to thank Molly, your rector, for inviting me. I serve the churches in this diocese as your Missioner for Creation Care, and I am just back from last Sunday’s exhilarating experience of walking through New York City in the People’s Climate March alongside literally 10,000 people of faith. As you probably heard, the march drew a record 400,000 people from all over the country to express their concern about climate change.

I’d like to speak about why Christians care so much about protecting the world that God entrusted to our care, and we have a wonderful parable to guide our thoughts, the parable of the two sons, which is found only in the Gospel of Matthew. We just heard the story: a father with two sons asks the first son to go work in the vineyard, and the boy replies, “Nope, no thanks. Not interested.” But sometime later he changes his mind, heads to the vineyard and gets to work. The father asks the second son to work in the vineyard, and the boy says, “I go” (Matthew 21:30). But he doesn’t go; he stays put. The question is: which of the two sons did the will of his father? The answer, of course, is the first son, the one who, despite his initial no, actually carried out his father’s request, not the son who said yes, but did nothing. What counts in the end is what we do, not what we say we will do. I confess that I smiled when I realized that this was one of today’s readings, for this parable means something to me personally. My son is now 24, but when he was a kid, I remember asking him one day to turn off the TV and go clean his room. “Sure, Mom,” he said, “I’m on it.” But he kept sitting on the couch, absorbed in the TV, and didn’t move. I gave him a couple more minutes and asked him again. Again he said yes, just a sec, sure, he’d go, but he kept on staring at the screen. I waited a while longer until finally – exasperated – I decided to tell him the parable of the two sons. Which is better, I asked: to say no but then do what is right, or to say yes and do nothing? With a hangdog look my son went off to clean his room. I was pleased about that, though I can’t say that my irritated lecture deepened his appreciation of either the Bible or Christianity. Still, I think there is something here for all of us to consider: this story invites us to notice the places in our lives where we know what the right thing to do is, but we’re not doing it, the places in our lives where our lips say, “Yes, Lord, I love you, I’ll do what you ask,” but our actions express something else entirely. We all have places in our lives where what we believe and what we do don’t quite line up, places where what we intend to do and plan to do and know is right to do somehow never gets done. We say yes with our lips, but our actions say no. It is a powerful moment, a moment of healing and integration, when our actions finally line up with our values, when we start doing the things that we know are right, when we say yes to God’s will and desire for our lives and then actually follow through. That is one reason why last Sunday I found the People’s Climate March so exhilarating. Here we had people of all the world’s faith traditions – everything from A to Z, Agnostic to Zorastrian, and people of every religion in between – Episcopalians, for sure, but also pagans, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Greek Orthodox, indigenous people, Evangelicals, Buddhists – you name it, the world’s religions were represented – and all of us, with our different rituals and different doctrines and different ways of talking about the Holy, all of us were saying yes: yes, we recognize that the living world of which we are a part is sacred and precious, and we take action today to heal and protect it. As I imagine it, it was as if members of all the world’s religions had in their own way heard God the Father say, “I need you to work in my vineyard; I need you to play your part in the urgent work of healing the Earth that I entrusted to your care,” and last Sunday members of all the religions said yes, and went out to the vineyard and got to work. Values and actions lined up. It was a day for rejoicing. I’ve talked a bit with Molly, and I’ve heard many good things about how here at Christ Church you are already taking action to make care for Creation an important part of your mission and ministry. I’ve heard about your replacing throwaway, disposable cups at coffee hour with cups that can be washed and reused. I’ve heard about your community garden, which is a terrific way to build local resilience and food security. I’ve heard how several years ago you raised thousands of dollars to build a well in Liberia. I want to salute you for efforts like these, because doing our utmost to protect the ongoing web of life on this planet, and caring for the water and soil and air upon which our good health, and all life, depends is central to what it means to be a faithful Christian. In our Creation story at the beginning of Genesis, we meet a God who loves the Creation into being and who takes a look around at what he just made and is filled with delight. “God saw everything that [God] had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). The created world, the web of life that scientists call the biosphere, is created by God and reveals God’s glory. As the psalmist puts it, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows [God’s] handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). Land and rivers, animals, air and sea ultimately belong to God, not to human beings, for, as we also hear in the psalms, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it” (Psalm 24:1). As humans we are part of the created order, not above it or separated from it, and the Book of Genesis tells us that the very first task that God gave to human beings was to take good care of the earth (Genesis 2:4b-8, 15).  This is God’s Creation, not ours. We are here to shepherd and protect what is ultimately God’s possession, not ours. Well, we’ve got some hard work ahead of us in that department. Even a quick look at the news reveals how far humanity has fallen away from God’s vision of our species living in a loving relationship with each other, our non-human neighbors, and the rest of the natural world. Because of our burgeoning population, powerful technologies, and ever-expanding appetite for “more,” we’ve reached a point where human activities are unraveling the web of life. My particular concern is how humans have affected the global climate. As no doubt you’ve heard, climate change caused by human activity is already having far-reaching effects on the world’s continents and oceans, and the creatures that inhabit them. In only two centuries, we have pumped so much heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air that atmospheric levels of CO2 are higher today than they’ve been for millions of years. A while back I heard a climate scientist remark, “We are breathing from an atmosphere that none of our ancestors would recognize.” Burning fossil fuels, such as coal, gas, and oil, at present rates could raise worldwide average temperatures between 5 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit in this century, which would make the world extremely difficult for humans and other creatures to inhabit. Already our planet is changing before our eyes: oceans are heating up and becoming more acidic as they absorb some of the carbon dioxide released by cars and power plants; tundra is thawing, ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, coral reefs are dying, massive droughts are spreading in some places and heavy rains are intensifying in others. This past spring we learned that the huge West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to collapse and slide into the sea in a way that scientists call “unstoppable.” As the environmentalist Bill McKibben has written, “Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.” 1 Given the many pressures on the planet’s web of life, we are now in the midst of Earth’s sixth major extinction event. Maybe half the world’s species could vanish before the century is out. Our planet is 4.5 billion years old and has endured other extinction events, but this is the very first time that an extinction event is being caused by one species: us. We live at an unprecedented moment in human history, a moment when our choices really matter and what we do, or don’t do, makes all the difference to what kind of world we leave our children and our children’s children. What can we do? Well, we can recycle more, drive less, and be sparing in our use of water. We can turn off lights when we leave a room. Maybe we can eat local, organic foods and support our local farms and land trusts. We can install insulation, turn down the heat, and cut back on AC. As individuals we can and should do everything we can to reduce our use of fossil fuels, but the scope and speed of the climate crisis require action on a much broader scale, too. We need to join with other people and make it politically possible to do what is scientifically necessary. We need to push our political leaders to get this country and other countries on track to make a swift transition to clean, safe sources of energy like sun and wind. We need to quit our addiction to fossil fuels and bring down the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, which is the uppermost level that many scientists say is safe for life as we know it to continue on this planet. What is the level today? Nearly 400 parts per million – and climbing. So we have work to do. Hope springs up when we take hold of that work and move into action. So I hope you’ll form a “green team” or a Creation Care committee (whatever you want to call it) here at Christ Church, and start to explore what you can accomplish together. I hope that those of you interested in building a network of people in the diocese committed to Creation care will give me your names, so that we can work together and support each other. I hope you’ll read the blog posts on my new Website, Reviving Creation. I hope you’ll take full advantage of our diocese’s first-ever Season of Creation, which begins next Saturday and lasts through the end of November. We are fortunate to have a bishop who recognizes what we Christians must do. I hope you’ll be thoughtful and creative and have some fun as you find ways to line up actions that express your values. The news from scientists is grim. But the good news, as we saw last Sunday, is that people the world over are finally beginning to organize, strategize, and mobilize. And the Gospel good news is that God is with us. God is with us. “God so loved the world” – literally, in Greek, the “cosmos” – “God so loved that cosmos that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16). The melting ice in West Antarctica may be unstoppable, but so is the divine love that made us, that sustains us, and that calls us to stand up for life. Jesus is among us now, offering us here at this table the nourishing gift of his presence and power. There is so much left to save, so much good that we can do, so many ways that we can help to build a better world. Like the two sons in the parable, we have a chance not only to say yes, but also to embody that yes: to go to work in the vineyard and to learn to live more lightly on the earth.  As the poet Wallace Stephens once wrote: After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends.   1. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Times Book, 2010, p. xiii.
 
Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 13A), August 3, 2014. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Williamstown, MA Genesis 32:22-31 Psalm 17:1-7, 16 Romans 9:1-5 Matthew 14:13-21

Feasting on hope

It is a pleasure to be with you on this green, summer morning, and I’d like to thank your rector Peter Elvin for inviting me. I serve the diocese as your Missioner for Creation Care, and today’s Gospel passage provides a wonderful story for us to consider as we reflect on our call to protect the Earth.

Most of us have heard the story before – in fact, many times before – and evidently it was a significant story for the early Church: it’s told more often than any other story in the Gospels. A story of Jesus feeding a crowd of thousands shows up in every one of the four Gospels, and the Gospels of Mark and Matthew even tell the story twice (Mark 6:30-44, Mark 8:1-9; Matthew 14:13-21, Matthew 15:32-39; Luke 9:10-17; John 6:1-13)! That’s how important this story was to the first Christian communities. The stories vary in their details, but the basic plot-line is the same: a crowd gathers around Jesus in a deserted place. Jesus teaches them and heals them. Hours pass, evening approaches, and by now everyone is very hungry, but there are only a few scraps of food to be found and no grocery store in sight. The disciples are baffled – maybe even desperate. What can they do? All they have rustled up are five loaves and two fish. Yet when these small offerings are placed in Jesus’ hands, he takes them, blesses and shares them, and behold – everyone eats and is satisfied, with baskets of leftovers to spare. This is a story of hopelessness shifting to hope, of scarcity transformed into abundance, of empty places filled to overflowing. Generations of Christians facing hard times – times of poverty or war, of personal loss or societal breakdown – Christians in times like these have clung to this story, for it assured them, as it assures us still, that even if we feel depleted, tired, or afraid, even if our stomachs are growling or our hearts are yearning, even if we’re sitting in a great crowd of people and feeling anxious, helpless, and alone, there is Someone – capital S, a holy Someone – within us and beside us who will meet us where we are and in whose presence we will be filled with hope and new life, even in the midst of suffering and grief. Now is a very good time to find our selves in this story, for the crisis of climate change is leading many of us to feel as if we’re sitting among those hungry, late-afternoon crowds in the Gospel story, out in the middle of nowhere with night coming on; and the hour is late. Just to say the words “climate change” and most of us tighten up; we duck and draw back; we feel a weight on our chest. The reports from scientists are increasingly urgent and grim, and it’s no wonder, when we allow ourselves to pay attention, that we react with a mix of disbelief, sorrow, and fear. Strictly speaking, most of us are probably not climate skeptics: we believe what the scientists are saying. It’s just that the situation is too much to take in – we can’t deal with it, we don’t know how to respond to it or what we can possibly do about it. How do you respond when you hear from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group, that climate change is already having far-reaching effects on the world’s continents and oceans? In only two centuries, human beings have pumped so much heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air that atmospheric levels of CO2 are higher today than they’ve been for millions of years. Recently I heard a climate scientist remark, “We are breathing from an atmosphere that none of our ancestors would recognize.” Burning fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and gas, at present rates could raise worldwide average temperatures between 5 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit in this century, which would make the world extremely difficult to inhabit. Already our planet is changing before our eyes: oceans are heating up and becoming more acidic as they absorb some of the carbon dioxide released by cars and power plants; tundra is thawing, ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, coral reefs are dying, massive droughts are spreading in some places and heavy rains are intensifying in others. You know about that – you’ve been through Hurricane Irene. This spring we learned that the huge West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to collapse and slide into the sea in a way that scientists call “unstoppable.” As the environmentalist Bill McKibben has written, “Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.”1 Given the many pressures on the planet’s web of life, we are now in the midst of Earth’s sixth major extinction event. Maybe half the world’s species could vanish before the century is out. When we hear things like this, most of us freeze. We shut down. We stop listening. We go into shock, into denial, or into despair. We get paralyzed. Either we tell ourselves that it can’t be that bad, surely this is not going to affect me or my children, surely climate scientists are exaggerating and this is just some awful mistake. Or we slide into hopelessness: it’s too late, we tell ourselves; we’re not experts; we don’t have the skills or knowledge or leverage to turn this around; we can’t make a difference; we’re goners; we’re cooked. Either way, like the crowds in the Gospel story, we sit on the grassy hillside as the hours tick by, unable to move, feeling increasingly anxious and empty. And unlike the crowds in the story, we don’t have any nearby villages to which we can go look for food. We’re out here by ourselves, facing an unprecedented historical situation, in which the whole human enterprise on this planet is at stake. Where will we find the inner food, the inner nourishment to meet this crisis with courage and hope? Today’s Gospel story suggests three ways that Jesus’ presence nourishes and empowers the crowds. First, he loves them. He has, as the Gospel says, “compassion” (Matthew 14:14) for them. Jesus knew in his very bones that he was deeply loved by God. He knew that he was cherished to the core, and he came among us to us to show us what we, too, are cherished. We, too, are the children of God. We, too, are beloved. Whenever we know ourselves as precious – whenever we take in the divine love that is streaming through us in every moment, in the gift of this breath and this heartbeat – whenever a person we care about turns and looks at us with eyes of love – whenever we gather together as a community and tell the sacred stories and share the sacred meal that remind us that God is with us – we touch the divine love that will never let us go. Hope comes back to us when we know that we are loved, for whether or not our efforts are successful, we know they are worthwhile – because we are worthwhile, and because God’s Creation is worthwhile. Jesus’ first gift to the crowds is the gift of love. His second gift is empathy. He shares in our suffering, in our brokenness and fear. At the end of the day in our Gospel story, Jesus was just as hungry as the crowds were – just as tired, just as thirsty. Jesus was fully human and he shared fully in the human condition. When it was hot, he sweated. When he was hungry, he needed to eat. Not only that – in this version of the story, Jesus was also feeling an immediate and very personal sorrow. Right before Jesus fed the five thousand, Matthew’s Gospel tells us that Jesus heard the news that his dear friend John the Baptist had been brutally executed. Out of that well of shock and grief, Jesus withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself, presumably to grieve and pray. Only then could he come out of prayer to share the Good News. The God we meet in Jesus is a God who shares our grief. I know that many of us can’t even begin to feel the cascade of losses that has already been initiated by climate change. We may be afraid that sorrow will overwhelm us, and that we will drown in the grief. But unfelt emotions can keep us immobilized, so it is good to know that Jesus is with us in our grief, that Jesus shares it and understands it and can give us a heart to hold it without being overcome by pain. It is good to feel our sorrow about climate change, because tears can water the soul. It is good to feel our anger and protest, because anger can be an energy for life. It is good to invite Jesus into our hopelessness, because in that place of emptiness, impasse, and waiting, God’s hope, not ours, can be born. So Jesus offers us, just as he offered the crowds, the gift of his love and the gift of his empathy. He offers a third gift, too: the capacity to act, the power to make a difference. What we have to contribute may seem very small. I mean, come on – all I’ve got here are five loaves and two fish! I’m not a climate scientist or a politician! I’m just an ordinary citizen with a pile of other responsibilities on my plate! What can one person possibly do? But of course there is plenty that we can do. We can recycle more, drive less, and be sparing in our use of water. Maybe we can eat local, organic foods and support our local farms and land trusts. We can install insulation and cut back on AC. As individuals we can and should do everything we can to reduce our use of fossil fuels, but the scope and speed of the climate crisis require action on a much broader scale, too. We need to join with other people and make it politically possible to do what is scientifically necessary. We need to push our political leaders to get this country and other countries on track to bring down the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, the uppermost level that many scientists say is safe for life as we know it to continue on this planet. What is the level today? 400 parts per million, and climbing. So we have work to do. Hope arises when we move into action. I like to say that hope is love in action. So if you don’t already have a “green team” or a Creation Care committee (whatever you want to call it) here at St. John’s, I hope you’ll form one and will start to explore what you can accomplish together. I hope that those of you interested in building a network of people in the diocese committed to Creation care will give me your names, so that we can work together and support each other. I hope you’ll read the blog posts on my new Website, Reviving Creation. And I hope that some of you will join me on Sunday, September 21st, when the largest rally in the history of the climate movement will be held in New York City, the People’s Climate March. As Bill McKibben puts it, “If you’re wondering how to react to the devastating news that the Antarctic is melting out of control: New York. If you’re scared like I am by the pictures of the fire and drought across the West: New York. If you’re feeling like it’s time to change the trajectory of this planet: we’ll see you in New York.” The melting ice in West Antarctica may be unstoppable, but so is the love that made us, that sustains us, and that calls us to stand up for life. Jesus is among us now, just as he was among those hungry crowds, offering us here at this table the nourishing gift of his presence and power. There is so much left to save, so much good that we can do, so many ways that we can help to build a better world. I’ll close with the words of Edward Everett Hale: “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something I can do.” What is Jesus inviting you to do?
  1. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Times Book, 2010, p. xiii.
Sermon for Trinity Sunday, June 15, 2014. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Grace-St. Paul’s Church, Tucson, AZ. Genesis 1:1 – 2:4a Canticle 13 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 Matthew 28:16-20

Holy Trinity: Joining the dance

It’s a pleasure to be with you this morning at Grace-St. Paul’s, and I want to thank your rector for welcoming me back. Some things have changed since the last time I was here. An array of solar panels has shown up on every roof! It’s fantastic! Some things in my own life have changed, too. Last fall I resigned from my job at Grace Church in Amherst, Massachusetts. I went to my bishop and told him that I didn’t want climate activism to be only a part of what I do – I told him that I felt called to focus all my energy on awakening people of faith to the urgency of tackling climate change, and that my dream is to help build a movement to protect life as it has evolved on this planet. Through the grace of God, funding was found, a position was created, and since January I’ve been serving the Diocese of Western Massachusetts as its first Missioner for Creation Care. Now I travel around the diocese like an itinerant 19th century Methodist minister on horseback, or maybe like Paul Revere, spreading the word from church to church that climate change is not only coming, it is upon us, it is here, and that as people blessed and sustained and empowered by God we have the great privilege and holy responsibility to rise up and to do something about it.

As I wrote today’s sermon, I had to do some wrestling. How in the world does Trinity Sunday, which we celebrate today, connect with climate change? How does understanding God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit help to inform and inspire our struggle to stabilize the climate and to pass on to our children and our children’s children a sustainable, just, and habitable world? That is not an idle question, for the news from climate scientists in the last few months has been increasingly grim. Maybe you heard about the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group, which shows, in the words of one reporter, that “climate change is already having sweeping effects on every continent and throughout the world’s oceans… and [that] the problem [is] likely to grow substantially worse unless greenhouse emissions are brought under control…[I]ce caps are melting, sea ice in the Arctic is collapsing, water supplies are coming under stress, heat waves and heavy rains are intensifying, coral reefs are dying, and fish and many other creatures are migrating toward the poles or in some cases going extinct. The oceans are rising at a pace that threatens coastal communities and are becoming more acidic as they absorb some of the carbon dioxide given off by cars and power plants…” On top of this bleak news, last month two landmark studies showed that the huge West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to collapse and slide into the sea in a way that scientists call “unstoppable.” Researchers had expected that, despite human-caused climate change, the ice sheet would last for thousands of years, but the new studies found that the loss is happening much more quickly than scientists expected. The slow-motion collapse will eventually lead to a rise in global sea levels of 12-15 feet, “overrunning many of the world’s islands, low-lying areas, and coastal cities.”1 The environmentalist Bill McKibben has commented that it’s as if we were running Genesis backwards. Given the perilous situation in which human beings and all other living creatures now find ourselves, what can we learn from the doctrine of the Trinity? What gift of hope can we receive as we consider the God we meet as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? A quick word about history: probably no doctrine of the Church developed with more contentiousness and controversy than the doctrine of the Trinity. After the life and death of Jesus Christ, generation by generation Christians searched the Scriptures and found hints and clues that suggested how to think about the nature of God. They pondered passages such as the ones we heard this morning. At the end of Second Corinthians, Paul blesses his community by invoking “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit” (2 Cor. 13:13), and at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus commissions his disciples to baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:18). From these biblical hints and clues, from their ongoing lives of prayer, and from their forays into Greek philosophy, in the 4th century the teachers and scholars of the Church began to hammer out the doctrine of the Trinity. It took many acrimonious arguments to work out the phrasing of the Nicene Creed, and it took decades for that Creed to be accepted across the Church. In fact, one of the causes of the Great Schism between East and West was whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father or whether it proceeds from the Father and the Son – the so-called “filioque” debate, to use the Latin word, as you’ll see in your service leaflet in the note at the end of the Nicene Creed. That is how much it mattered to the Church that we get it right when we think about the Trinity – a thousand-year-old Church split over who proceeds from whom! I am grateful that our Christian forebears thought so rigorously about the nature of God, and that they gave us an intellectual framework for speaking about the divine. It matters how we think about God. But no matter how subtle, even brilliant, our analysis, there are limits to what the intellect can do. God is not an object – even a very big object – that we can separate from other objects and then analyze, dissect, and probe, as we might study a star in the sky or a specimen in a lab. God is not an object at all, but a mysterious Presence that abides within and beyond all things; not another being among many beings, but the very Ground of all being; not a monolithic, omnipotent Man in the Sky but a dynamic communion of self-giving love. We can’t know the Trinity from the outside, by thinking about it, but only from the inside, by experiencing it. As St. Augustine put it long ago, “We come to God by love, not by navigation.” And he describes the Trinity very simply as the Lover, the Beloved, and the love that flows between. Step into that flow of love, and we are caught up in a love affair that has been going on since before time began. The divine Mystery that we call “God” is an ongoing exchange of love between God the Father – the Lover, the Creator – and God the Son, the Beloved. Flowing between them is the never-ending, tender love of the Holy Spirit. God is one, and yet God is also three, a dynamic relationship, a giving and receiving of love. When the early Councils of the Church debated the nature of God, they came up with a wonderful image of the Trinity as a dance. The word in Greek is perichoresis and it means a “dance-around” of love. Imagine that! At the center of reality, a dance of love is in full swing! Jesus came to invite us to join the dance. He was completely caught up in a love affair with God, his beloved abba, which is the Aramaic word for Father, and through the Holy Spirit, our counselor and comforter and the guide who leads us into all truth, we, too, are drawn into the flow of love between God the Father/Mother and God the Son. Our baptism in the name of the Triune God signals the fact that God is not just “out there,” but also “in here,” and that from the very beginning, God has made a home in us. At its most basic level, that’s what it means to be a Christian: someone who, through the power of the Spirit, connects with and trusts in the ever-flowing love of God that is circulating everywhere. Someone who bears witness in very tangible ways – even in the face of suffering and death – to the ongoing love, power and presence of God that fills the whole creation. Someone who knows, as we heard in the creation story from Genesis, that we are made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26), who is a dance-around of love – which is why, when we give and receive love, we feel most joyful and alive, and most truly and fully ourselves. The so-called “dominion” that God gives to human beings in the Genesis story is permission not to dominate or exploit the other creatures of the earth, but rather to love as God loves, to exercise a dominion of love that protects the wellbeing and integrity of God’s creation. So in the face of the climate crisis, we Christians have a chance to show who we really are: people whose very nature and truest identity is to love as God loves; people who are willing to face squarely the most challenging, even devastating facts; people who can reach into our reserves of courage, faith, and hope and can step out to bear witness to the God who entrusted the world to our care. There is so much that we can do. We can recycle more, drive less, and be sparing in our use of water. Maybe we can eat local, organic foods and support our local farms and land trusts. We can install insulation and cut back on AC. As individuals we can and should do everything we can to reduce our use of fossil fuels, but the scope and speed of the climate crisis require action on a much broader scale, too. We need to join with other people and make it politically possible to do what is scientifically necessary. We need to push our political leaders to get this country and other countries on track to bring down the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, the uppermost level that many scientists say is safe for life as we know it to continue on this planet. What is the level today? 400 parts per million, and climbing. So we have work to do. And the dance of love that is circulating within us will empower us to do this work. The Diocese of Massachusetts recently decided to divest from fossil fuels, reasoning that if it’s unethical to ruin the world by burning fossil fuels, then it’s unethical to profit from that ruin. The Diocese of Western Massachusetts, where I serve, is in the midst of debating whether or not to divest its portfolio, and perhaps that it is a conversation that some of you can initiate or join here in the Diocese of Arizona. Divestment is one of the best strategies around for mobilizing a movement that will eventually accomplish what we really need: a stiff price on carbon and strong, binding international treaties. Meanwhile Bill McKibben has written an article calling for the largest rally in the history of the climate movement. It will be held in New York City on the weekend of September 20. As McKibben puts it, “If you’re wondering how to react to the devastating news that the Antarctic is melting out of control: New York. If you’re scared like I am by the pictures of the fire and drought across the West: New York. If you’re feeling like it’s time to change the trajectory of this planet: we’ll see you in New York.” I’m not going to ask you to expand your carbon footprint by joining me in September at what’s being called the People’s Climate March, but maybe you can invite your New York friends to come, and your friends in New England, and anyone who lives, let’s say, a half-day’s train ride from Manhattan. The melting ice in West Antarctica may be unstoppable, but so is the love that made us and sustains us and calls us to stand up for life. There is so much left to save, so much good that we can do – if we act right now, so many ways to help build a better world. On this Trinity Sunday we celebrate the living God who is beyond us, and among us, and within us, the God in whose image we are made, the God who meets us in every Eucharist and who sends us out to make love tangible and visible in the world. “Go,” the Risen Christ says to his disciples in today’s Gospel reading from Matthew. Don’t hang around and worship me. Go. Take part in my mission of mercy, justice, and compassion. Step into the dance and invite everyone else to join in, too. And, whatever comes, “remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).   c) 2014 Margaret Bullitt-Jonas
1. http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/may/nasa-uci-study-indicates-loss-of-west-antarctic-glaciers-appears-unstoppable/#.U3FiNflLWRO See also: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=131369&org=NSF&from=news; http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/center/articles/2014/los-angeles-times-05-12-2014.html    
Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter (Rogation Sunday), May 25, 2014. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, St. Paul’s Church, Stockbridge, MA. Acts 17:22-31      1 Peter 3:13-22 Psalm 66:7-18     John 14:15-21

In God we live and move and have our being

It is a pleasure to be with you on this Memorial Day weekend, and I’d like to thank your rector for inviting me to preach. As your Missioner for Creation Care, I am especially glad that today is Rogation Sunday. Celebrating rogation days is a custom that goes all the way back to the 5th century. The word “rogation” comes from the Latin verb rogare, which means “to ask” and also gives us the root of our English word, “interrogate.” Rogation Sunday, the Sixth Sunday of Easter, is all about asking: we ask God to bless the land and to give us a fruitful harvest.

In olden times, people would celebrate rogation days by a “beating of the bounds”: priests and parishioners would gather outside the church building and walk in procession along the boundaries of the parish, asking God to protect it during the coming year. They would rededicate themselves to good stewardship of the particular piece of earth that God entrusted to their care. As far as I know we’re not going to do an outdoor processional today, and the entire service will be held inside (right?), but today we acknowledge with joy the fact that we worship the God who loves all creation into existence – seas and sky, warblers and whales, penguins and peonies. Here at the height of Easter season we celebrate the risen Christ who restores, redeems and heals not only human beings, but also the whole natural world (Colossians 1:20). Like generations of Christians before us, on this Rogation Sunday, we, too, want to rededicate ourselves to the care of God’s creation. In this morning’s first reading, we heard Paul proclaim, in his famous speech in front of the Areopagus, a hill beside the Acropolis in Athens, that God “made the world and everything in it.” The God “who is Lord of heaven and earth” does not live in buildings, “in shrines made by human hands” (Acts 17:24), but everywhere – in the vastness of the great outdoors and in the intimacy of this breath, this heartbeat. God “is not far from each one of us,” says Paul. “For ‘In [God] we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:27). In God we live and move and have our being. That is what Jesus is saying in today’s Gospel passage, which starts where last Sunday’s left off, in the middle of the section of John’s Gospel that scholars call Jesus’ farewell discourse. Jesus is saying goodbye to his friends, and as he prepares to go to the Cross and to return to the loving Father who sent him into the world, he shows his friends the path to the same union with God that he experienced throughout his life. What is that path? To love God and one another, just as Jesus has loved us. To abide in his love (John 13:34-35; 15:9-12). To share in his mission of justice, mercy, and compassion (Matthew 28:19-20). Soon the disciples will no longer see the human Jesus, so in order to empower his disciples to abide in that never-failing flow of love between God the Father and God the Son, Jesus will ask the Father to give them what he calls “another Advocate, to be with you forever” (John 14:16). That advocate – that counselor and sustainer, that comforter, helper and guide who leads us into all truth and who abides with us always – is the Holy Spirit. At its most basic level, that’s what it means to be a Christian: someone who, through the power of the Spirit, connects with and trusts in the ever-flowing love of God that is always circulating among us. Someone who bears witness in very tangible ways – even in the face of suffering and death – to the ongoing love, power and presence of God that fills the whole creation. Given the frightening news about human-caused climate change that we’ve been hearing in recent days, it’s clear to me that we need people like that – in fact, lots of people like that: people who are willing to face squarely the most challenging, even devastating facts, people who can reach into their reserves of courage, faith, and hope, people who can step out to bear witness to the God who entrusted the world to our care and in whom we live and move and have our being. A quick scan of the headlines will show you what I mean. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group, shows, in the words of one reporter, that “climate change is already having sweeping effects on every continent and throughout the world’s oceans… and [that] the problem [is] likely to grow substantially worse unless greenhouse emissions are brought under control…[I]ce caps are melting, sea ice in the Arctic is collapsing, water supplies are coming under stress, heat waves and heavy rains are intensifying, coral reefs are dying, and fish and many other creatures are migrating toward the poles or in some cases going extinct. The oceans are rising at a pace that threatens coastal communities and are becoming more acidic as they absorb some of the carbon dioxide given off by cars and power plants….[Ocean acidification] is killing some creatures or stunting their growth.” On top of this grim news, two landmark studies disclosed a couple of weeks ago that the huge West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to collapse and slide into the sea in a way that scientists call “unstoppable.” Researchers had expected that, despite human-caused climate change, the ice sheet would last for thousands of years, but the new studies found that the loss is happening much more quickly than scientists expected. The slow-motion collapse will eventually lead to a rise in global sea levels of 12-15 feet, “overrunning many of the world’s islands, low-lying areas, and coastal cities.”1 When it comes to climate disruption, the scientific controversy is over. The science is settled. 97% of climate scientists worldwide are telling us with increasing alarm that climate change is not a future threat. It is our reality. Burning fossil fuels such as coal, gas, and oil emits gases into the atmosphere that make the climate hotter and more unstable. Of course there has always been some natural variability in the planet’s average temperature, but ever since the Industrial Revolution we’ve been forcing the climate to change in a way that human beings have never experienced before. Around the world we’re seeing the result in extreme fluctuations of weather. People in the American Southwest are experiencing a massive, record-breaking drought and a prolonged fire season, while people in the Balkans just endured an unprecedented deluge of rain that triggered thousands of landslides and forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes. Boats plucked countless people to safety from their roofs. When weather erupts in such extremes, no wonder global warming is sometimes called “global weirding.” The environmentalist Bill McKibben puts it succinctly: “We’ve changed the planet, changed it in large and fundamental ways… Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.”2 What must we do to turn this around? I wonder if we need a conversion of heart and a change of behavior as radical and transforming as Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, when he turned his life around and put his faith in Jesus Christ (Acts 9:1-19). A first step in that new behavior might be for us to recycle more, drive less, and quit using bottled water. Maybe we can eat local, organic foods and support our local farms and land trusts. We can install insulation and turn down the heat. As individuals we can and should do everything we can to reduce our use of fossil fuels, but the scope and speed of the climate crisis require action on a much broader scale, as well. We need to join with other people and make it politically possible to do what is scientifically necessary. We need to push our political leaders to get this country and other countries on track to bring down the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, the uppermost level that many scientists say is safe for life as we know it to continue on this planet. What is the level today? 400 parts per million, and climbing. So we have work to do. I invite you to imagine a church, imagine a diocese, in which every aspect of its life, from its preaching and worship services to its adult education and Sunday School, from its prayers to its public advocacy, grasps the urgency of protecting life as it has evolved on this planet. That is the kind of Church that we need today. We are facing the greatest challenge that human beings have ever faced, and as Christians we must take our stand in creating a world for our children and our children’s children that is habitable, peaceful, and just. I hope that you will form a “green team” or Creation Care committee – whatever you want to call it – here at St. Paul’s, and start to explore what you can accomplish together. I hope that those of you interested in building a network of people in the diocese committed to Creation care will give me your names, so that we can work together and support each other. I hope that all of you will consider joining me in New York City on the weekend of September 20th and 21st. Bill McKibben just wrote a new article calling for the largest rally in the history of the climate movement to be held that weekend in New York. As Bill McKibben put it, “If you’re wondering how to react to the devastating news that the Antarctic is melting out of control: New York. If you’re scared like I am by the pictures of the fire and drought across the West: New York. If you’re feeling like it’s time to change the trajectory of this planet: we’ll see you in New York.” On this Rogation Sunday, we ask God not only to bless the harvest and the land, the seas and the sky – we ask God to bless us with the Spirit as we take hold of our vocation to be healers of the earth. The melting ice in West Antarctica may be unstoppable, but so is the love that made us, that sustains us, and that calls us to stand up for life. There is so much left to save, so much good that we can do – if we act right now – to prevent the worst effects of climate change, so many ways that we can build a better world.Today, as we prepare to receive the bread and wine of the Eucharist, we open to the love that will never let us go, to the love that is stronger than death. We share in what Dante called “the love that moves the sun and other stars,” and we remember who we are – a people created by God to love and be loved, and sent out by God to make that love real in the world in every way we can. For in God we live and move and have our being. © 2014 Margaret Bullitt-Jonas
1. See also: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=131369&org=NSF&from=news; http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/center/articles/2014/los-angeles-times-05-12-2014.html 2. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Times Book, 2010, p. xiii and book jacket (http://www.billmckibben.com/)
Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter, April 27, 2014 (Earth Day/Creation Sunday). Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, St. Francis Episcopal Church, Holden, MA Acts 2:14a, 22-32        1 Peter 1:3-9 Psalm 16                     John 20:19-31

Do not doubt but believe

Every year on the Sunday after Easter we listen to the marvelous and mysterious story from John’s Gospel that we just heard. Jesus shows himself to the disciples on the evening of Easter Day and then returns a week later to convince the disciple we call Doubting Thomas that yes, the Risen Christ 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.” As I’m sure some of you noticed, two days after Easter Sunday we celebrated Earth Day, which means that this year Easter Week and Earth Week almost completely overlapped. As your new Missioner for Creation Care in this diocese, I’d like to reflect on Earth Day in light of our Easter joy. And what great timing for me, because I get to do this in a community named after St. Francis, a Christian who discerned God’s Presence in non-human creatures and in nature herself, and who experienced that connection so deeply that he called the sun his brother, and the moon his sister in Christ. Our Easter proclamation and our Easter hymns and prayers make it abundantly clear that Christ’s death and resurrection are good news not just to human beings but also to the whole and every part of Creation – to river and mountain, whale and sparrow, forest and field. At the Great Vigil of Easter, when we mark Jesus’ passing from death to life, one of the first things we do is listen to someone chant these ancient words:
Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth, bright with a glorious splendor, for darkness has been vanquished by our eternal King.
Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth! Christ is risen! Today’s Gospel story invites us to explore the good news of Christ’s resurrection by taking stock of our doubts and then letting them go. Doubting Thomas stands for all of us who wrestle with doubt – doubt about what Jesus accomplished on the cross and doubt about the reality of the resurrection. Doubt is a perfect theme for Earth Day, too, for when it comes to climate change, which is at the top of everybody’s list of concerns on Earth Day, we hear a lot about the doubters, don’t we? A Gallup poll released on Earth Day shows that one in four Americans is “solidly skeptical” of global warming and refuses to believe that human-caused climate change is real. Other members of the public are on the fence and don’t know what to believe, assuming that the jury is still out and that scientists have yet to reach a consensus on the reality and causes of climate change. I’m sure there are many reasons that some people still doubt that human-caused climate change is happening. If you’re a gardener or a farmer, you know how much you love the piece of ground that is in your care, and how precious and beautiful the natural world is. If you’ve gardened in one place for a while, you may have started to notice the subtle changes taking place as the years go by: how a particular flower now blooms two weeks earlier than it used to, or how migratory birds now arrive at a different time. In some respects climate change is very local, but many busy, rootless, urban folks don’t have that kind of intimate relationship with a specific ecosystem.1 Today, most people worldwide live in cities, and many of us who live in modern, post-industrial countries work indoors and travel to work inside a vehicle. Many of us spend a lot our work time and leisure time relating to a computer screen or a TV screen. The natural world can seem very far away, and we may be completely unaware of what’s taking place right in our own backyards. What’s more, a good many special interest groups are working hard and spending millions of dollars in a deliberate campaign of disinformation to make the American public stay confused. The same folks who spread doubt some years ago about the risk of smoking tobacco are throwing their weight behind some of the current efforts to mislead the public about the reality of climate change.2 But the truth is that the scientific controversy is over. The science is settled. 97% of climate scientists worldwide are telling us with increasing alarm that climate change is not a future threat – in fact, it is not a threat at all. It is our reality. Burning fossil fuels such as coal, gas, and oil is releasing gases into the atmosphere that are forming a blanket around the Earth and making the climate hotter and more unstable. Of course there has always been some natural variability in the planet’s average temperature, but ever since the Industrial Revolution we’ve been forcing the climate to change in a way that human beings have never experienced before. Around the world we’re seeing the result in extreme fluctuations of weather: droughts and floods, record heat waves and unusual bouts of cold weather. No wonder global warming is sometimes dubbed “global weirding.” The environmentalist Bill McKibben puts it succinctly: “We’ve changed the planet, changed it in large and fundamental ways… Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.”3 So when I hear Jesus say to Doubting Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe,” I hear Jesus inviting Thomas – and us – to face the truth of crucifixion. We might wish away the reality of the violence and the wounds. We might wish very ardently that none of this wounding of our dear planet were happening, that we weren’t seeing dying coral and melting ice-caps, rising seas and rising numbers of refugees. But it is happening, and just as on Good Friday the disciples couldn’t pretend that Christ’s wounds on the cross weren’t real, so we, too, can’t pretend that the wounds to God’s Creation aren’t real. Yet because of Jesus’ crucifixion, we know that God is with us in our suffering and in the planet’s suffering. We know, and God knows, that all Creation is groaning (Romans 8:22). And because of Easter we also know that death does not have to be the end of the story. “When it was evening of Easter day, the first day of the week,” Jesus comes and stands among his disciples and says, “‘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 “Peace be with you” three times, as if the disciples need to hear that message again and again – partly in order to undo Peter’s three-fold denial, but also so that all of them and all of us will experience that forgiveness deep in our bones. Maybe that moment marks the beginning of our own resurrected life: when we hear and take in how much God loves us and how completely we are forgiven, no matter what we have done. We humans are hurting this Creation, which God has given us as a free gift to love and to steward – and yet, we are forgiven. And from this place of being forgiven, we can now act to right the wrong and can live in a different way. So it is not only peace that Jesus gives to his disciples. He also sends them on a mission. “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 shares in our suffering, he not only loves and forgives us – he also sends us out to bear witness to the resurrection, to the wild, holy, and completely unexpected fact that through the grace and power of God, life – not death – will have the last word. Through the power of the Risen Christ, we are sent out to be healers of the Earth, sent out to take our place in the great work of healing the wounds of Creation, sent out to restore the web of life upon which we, and all creatures, depend. What can we do? We can recycle more, drive less, and quit using bottled water. Maybe we can eat local, organic foods and support our local farms and land trusts. We can install insulation and turn down the heat. As individuals we can and should do everything we can, but the scope and speed of the climate crisis require action on a much broader scale, too. We need to join with other people and make it politically possible to do what is scientifically necessary. We need to push our political leaders to get this country and other countries on track to bring down the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, the uppermost level that many scientists say is safe for life as we know it to continue on this planet. What is the level today? 400 — and climbing. So we have work to do. I invite you to imagine a church, imagine a diocese, in which every aspect of its life, from its preaching and worship services to its adult education and Sunday School, from its prayers to its public advocacy, grasps the urgency of protecting life as it has evolved on this planet. We are facing the greatest challenge that human beings have ever faced, and we refuse to get bogged down by doubt, denial, or despair. I am delighted to hear that you are forming a green team or a Creation Care task force – or whatever you want to call it – in this parish, and that you will start exploring what you can accomplish together. I hope that anyone interested in building a network of people in the diocese committed to Creation care will give me their name, so that we can work together and support each other. I am grateful for Doubting Thomas, for he gives voice to our doubt – doubt that we can prevent catastrophic climate change, doubt that we can make a difference, doubt that resurrection is even possible. But just as Jesus invited Thomas to move past his doubts, so, too, Jesus invites us to receive the gift of his forgiveness and the power of 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. There is so much healing that we can do, so much power-to-reconcile that God has given to us, so much life that we can help to bring forth. Do not doubt but believe.
1. Naomi Klein has written an excellent essay about why so many Americans are not responding to the climate crisis: “The Change Within: The Obstacles We Face Are Not Just External,” posted online on April 21, 2014; appeared in May 12, 2014 edition of The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/article/179460/change-within-obstacles-we-face-are-not-just-external 2. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/); see also Ross Gelbspan, The Heat is On (http://www.heatisonline.org/); and Union of Concerned Scientists’ 2007 report on ExxonMobil http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/solutions/fight-misinformation/exxonmobil-report-smoke.html 3. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Times Book, 2010, p. xiii and book jacket (http://www.billmckibben.com/)
Sermon for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, November 18, 2012. Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Grace Church, Amherst, Massachusetts. Daniel 12:1-3       Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25 Psalm 16            Mark 13:1-8

A heart for healing

“I will bless the Lord who gives me counsel; my heart teaches me, night after night.” (Psalm 16:7)

Let’s begin where the Gospel begins: with predictions of breakdown and distress.  As Jesus comes out of the temple, one of his disciples admires how solid the building is, how large it is, how grand.  Surely it will last forever!  But Jesus turns to him and says, “Do you see these great buildings?  Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down” (Mark 13:2).  All will be thrown down.  As if that weren’t enough, Jesus goes on to predict “wars and rumors of wars… Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines” (Mark 13:7a, 8).

Whoa – these are not the consoling words that we want to hear when we come to church!  Jesus’ predictions of war and natural disaster resonate with what may already be on our minds this morning, we who are following the news of the accelerating conflict in the Middle East, with rockets striking the outskirts of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and Israeli tanks and troops marching toward the Gaza Strip.  The possibility of all-out war is alarming countries around the world.  Alongside our ardent prayers for peace, we lift up our sorrow for the death of innocents and our hope for a peaceful and just resolution.

Every year, as the cycle of the church years comes to a close and we head into Advent, our Scripture readings always turn our attention to the end times, giving us images of breakdown and violence, and reminding us that everything we suffer is being held in God.  Today is a good day to bring to mind not only the anguish of the Middle East, but all the places in the world and in our own lives that cry out for healing.  As usual, I bring to the conversation my concern about the wounding of the natural world on which we depend.  I heard Bill McKibben speak this week in Boston to almost three thousand people, so I am freshly reminded of the urgent need to tackle climate change and to stop the unraveling of life as we know it on this planet.

So here is Jesus predicting suffering and breakdown, telling us that “all will be thrown down.”  Yet in the very same passage he also tells us: “do not be alarmed” (Mark 13:7).  “Do not be alarmed,” he says. “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” (Mark 13:8).  Birth pangs?  It seems that Jesus is so deeply attuned to the loving purposes of God, so transparent to the creative Spirit and power of God, that even in the midst of suffering and war, even in the midst of violence and death, he sees beyond everything that is passing, everything that is mortal, and into the heart of God.  He knows that in God’s presence, something new and holy is surely being born, and he offers himself as a midwife, a healer, a peacemaker.

So here’s my question: how do we do that?  In the midst of the pain and fragility of life, how do we grow the heart of a healer?  Can we do what Jesus did – can we find the holy strength not to turn away from the world’s pain, but rather to turn toward it, to touch it with love, and to invite something new to be born?  Can we become divine channels that bring wholeness and wellbeing to a broken world?  How do we become the healing presence that intuitively we know we were born to be?  This is no small question, because as never before, the human community needs people with a healed and healing heart.

I’d like to propose a framework for the heart that can show us how to live into this scary time as healers in the midst of a hurting world.  I want to suggest three aspects of a healer’s heart, three places along the path of inner transformation as we grow a heart for healing. 

Here’s the first: healers have an awakened heart.  What is an awakened heart?  An awakened heart is a heart that is more and more deeply, more and more frequently, more and more consciously attuned to divine love.  A person with an awakened heart is someone whose heart is being touched again and again and again by a boundless love that seems to well up from nowhere.  A person with an awakened heart is someone who is learning to see themselves, and others, and all creation, with eyes of love. 

This is the stage of the journey when we perceive the beauty and preciousness of God’s creation.  We experience gratefulness, wonder, amazement, and awe.  Moments of our heart’s awakening may come very quietly, as when we gaze at a sleeping child or at a pond that is filling with rain.  For a moment our heart awakens, and we know that we are part of a sacred mystery that infuses all things and yet transcends them, too.  Somehow that loving, nameless, sacred mystery is giving itself to us in whatever we are gazing at – in the sleeping child, in the grass, the wind, the water – and we are giving ourselves back to that holy presence, saying “I love you, too.”  In moments like these our heart awakens.  We step into the great love affair that is always going on between God and God’s creation. 

Now, we can’t awaken our hearts by ourselves.  We can’t do that any more than we can make the wind blow.  But we can take up spiritual practices that make us available to the divine presence that awakens the heart.  We can keep the windows open, so that the wind of the Spirit can blow in.  Here are a couple of spiritual practices that help to awaken the heart.

One is to learn to be still and to pay attention.  Prayer is essentially paying attention.  You remember the story of Moses and the burning bush.  Moses was surely an attentive man.  It takes patient attentiveness to notice that a bush is ablaze, and yet not consumed by the fire.  Moses’ encounter with the flaming bush is the archetype of mystical experience: only a calm, patient mind can perceive the divine presence that burns in every bush.  So we learn to be quiet and pay attention, to still ourselves and to listen in silence to the inner voice of love that is always sounding in our hearts.

A second way to cultivate an awakened heart is to practice gratitude.  Gratitude unlocks the heart’s constricted places.  Gratitude reveals that all life is gift.  This day is a gift.  This breath is a gift.  Our next breath belongs more to God than it does to us1 – it’s all gift.  As we learn to breathe with gratefulness, we learn to trust the deep-down, God-given goodness of our life as it is given to us, moment by moment. 

So we cultivate an awakened heart, a heart that is grounded in God’s love.  But because divine love never holds itself back from the suffering places of the world – because divine love never closes itself off, never insulates itself in its own safe little bubble or cocoon – because divine love never tries to rise up and float away from the messiness and the brokenness of life, but rather comes down and abides with us, pouring itself out to touch and heal the world’s pain, healers have not only an awakened heart – they also have a broken heart.  A healer’s heart is willing to suffer, to feel pain.  So that is the second aspect of a healer’s heart: it is a wounded heart, a heart that is willingly pierced by grief.  Paradoxically, surrending to grief in the presence of divine love does not diminish us, but opens us to a new kind of empowerment and a completely new experience of hope.

Still, there are many reasons we resist exploring this aspect of a healer’s heart, many reasons that we fear and repress our grief.  Who wants to feel pain?  Nobody.  Plus I know that I don’t want to look morbid; I don’t want to bring anyone down; I don’t want to look weak and emotional.  Yet we do feel pain for the world.  We can’t help it.  No one is exempt from it, for we are part of the world, part of creation, part of the whole web of life.

So can we let ourselves feel our grief?  Can we let ourselves feel the pain of a broken heart?  How do we open to the pain of our precious world without drowning in it, without being overcome?  The place I go in prayer when I am overwhelmed by the pain of the world is to the cross of Christ.  As I experience it, the cross of Christ is planted deep within me, and at the cross I can express my anger, fear, and grief, for I trust that at the cross, everything is being blessed and transformed in the light of limitless, eternal love.  Whatever I need to feel and to express – rage, sorrow, fear, guilt, whatever – all of it is being met with love.  As I see it, crucifixion is the place where God breaks through our numbness and denial.  The cross is where we can finally face and bear all that we know about the pain of the world, and where God in Christ can bear what we cannot bear our selves.  I can’t bear it, but Christ can bear it in me.

Whatever sacred images we use to explore a healer’s broken heart, I think it is good to let our selves feel anger – because anger is an expression of love.  I think it is good to let our selves feel emptiness – because emptiness creates a space for something new to arise. I think it is good to let our selves feel fear – because in itself that is an act of courage.  I think it is good to let our selves feel sorrow – because shedding tears can water the soul and bring new life.

So, what are the losses you need to mourn?  What are the tears you need to shed?  As a spiritual practice for welcoming a broken heart, we can write a prayer of lament or protest.  We can make a confession.  We can spend time in intercession, praying for the hurting places of the world.  As my husband, Robert Jonas recently remarked, tears can be the dark river of hope carrying us to new life.

As healers with a broken heart, we know that the darkness inside us and outside us is real.  But even in the darkest places of our lives, a light is shining.  The light of the divine is tender, enlivening, and pure.  It speaks in silence, saying: I see you.  I know what you are going through.  I love you.  In the radiance of that light — which sees us in our entirety, which sees us whole — we learn to embrace and accept every part of our selves.  Slowly we learn to perceive the world like that, too, to experience its ugliness, peril, and beauty with an open heart.  And then we feel a desire to share this glimpse of God with others.

Now we come to the third part of this spiritual framework for sustaining our selves as healers.  Filled with love, because day by day our heart is being awakened, and open to the pain of life, because day by day our heart is broken and yet whole, we now want the love that is flowing into our life to pour out into the world around us.  We have been cultivating an awakened heart, we are accepting a broken heart, and now we want to express what I’m calling a radiant heart.  We want our lives to bear witness in tangible ways to the love that has set us free from the tyranny of suffering and death. 

This is what Christians call an experience of resurrection: we are filled with a divine spirit, a Holy Spirit, that sends us out as healers, as justice-seekers, as peace-makers.  We want to share in God’s mission of restoring all people and all creation to unity with God and each other in Christ.  We want 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.

I want to be clear that actions that are expressed by a radiant heart spring from freedom, not from compulsion.  I know that I can easily get very busy — all of us can.  But being busy does not necessarily mean that we are manifesting a radiant heart.  

For instance, sometimes I get busy because I have lost touch with my basic preciousness: I think that I must prove my worth, prove my value, earn my own salvation.  Then I have to say to myself, “Margaret, remember that you are cultivating an awakened heart.  Find a way to breathe in the love of God.  Let yourself rest in God’s goodness and let yourself know again how loved you are.” 

Or I get busy because I want to stay one step ahead of my feelings — I don’t want to feel the pain or grief; I would much rather keep moving, keep multitasking.  Then I have to say to myself, “Margaret, remember that you have accepted a broken heart.  Go back to the cross.  Let yourself stop for a while and bring whatever is in you to the crucified Christ, where everything in you is met with love.” 

When we know that we are cherished to the core, and when we discover that our pain and anguish is met again and again by the ever-renewed, ever-merciful, ever-abundant love of God, then our actions are more likely to spring from wisdom than from compulsion or fear, and we can carry them out with a sense of spaciousness and freedom, unattached to results.  Unattached to results.  We manifest a radiant heart. 

I give thanks for the wisdom in this room, for the awakened and broken and radiant hearts that you express.  I thank God for the healing that each of us has already experienced, for the healing that we will experience in the future, for the healing that we have already been graced to accomplish, and for the healing that we will accomplish in God’s good time.   

In a few moments we will have an opportunity to bring forward the pledges that will sustain this community in the coming year.  Thank you for sharing in this journey with me as brothers and sisters in Christ, as together – in the words of our second reading – in the midst of all life’s challenges we “hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering” and “consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds” (Hebrews 10:23a, 24).    

“I will bless the Lord who gives me counsel; my heart teaches me, night after night” (Psalm 16:7).  

1. This is a point made by Dr. James Finley in his excellent CD series, “Transforming Trauma.”.