Aside

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.”.