EARTH DAY REFLECTION: Palmer, MA – April 21, 2024
· So, in the spirit of partnership with the cosmos I want to shift gears during my reflection to-day and tell you about an alternative Christian orthodoxy that starts with the affirmation that homo sapiens are not the only living beings that matter to the Lord. It’s a confession of solid-arity with reality rather than the traditionally anthropocentric celebration of humanity as the crown of creation.
· It’s a spiritual perspective brought to birth in the West first by our ancient Celtic ancestors in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; embraced and embellished later by St. Francis of Assisi in the 13th century CE; reclaimed and revived after WWII by the Rev. George MacLeod and the ecumenical monastic community of Iona; deepened by the French Jesuit botanist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; and popularized by the Franciscan scientist Illia Delio, Pope Francis, young evangelicals like Shane Claiborne as well as the late Rachel Held Evans.
This generous orthodoxy affirms a nonpartisan spirituality with room at the table for hunters, NRA members, and tree huggers alike: farmers and casual gardeners are involved along with city folk and suburbanites; intellectuals and utilitarian pragmatists; those who thrive in the countryside as well as those who dwell in apartments or assisted living communities. It’s a big tent spirituality that rec-ognizes climate change and other social problems without resorting to doomsday hyperbole. So, to open the door and help us center our hearts as well as our minds, I’m going to share a poem and a song that have become mentors for me. The poem is by the American poet William Safford called: “What the Earth Says.”
The earth says have a place, be what that place requires; hear the sound the birds imply and see as deep as ridges go behind each other. (Some people call their scenery flat, their only pictures framed by what they know: I think around them rise a riches and a loss too equal for their chart — but absolutely tall.)
The earth says every summer have a ranch that’s minimum: one tree, one well, a landscape that proclaims a universe — sermon of the hills, hallelujah mountain, highway guided by the way the world is tilted, reduplication of mirage, flat evening: a kind of ritual for the wavering. The earth says where you live wear the kind of color that your life is (grey shirt for me) and by listening with the same bowed head that sings draw all things into one song, join the sparrow on the lawn, and row that easy way, the rage without met by the wings within that guide you anywhere the wind blows.
Listening, I think that’s what the earth says.
And the song… well, some of you will know it right away…
Blackbird singing in the dead of night: take these broken wings and learn to fly all your life – you were only waiting for this moment to arise
Blackbird singing in the dead of night: take these sunken eyes and learn to see all your life – you were only waiting for this moment to be
Blackbird fly – blackbird fly – into the light of a dark, black night
Blackbird fly – blackbird fly – into the light of a dark black night.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night: take these broken eyes and learn to see all your life you were only waiting for this moment to be free
You were only waiting for this moment to be free
You were only waiting for this moment to be free
Often when I choose a popular secular poem or song to serve as a spiritual guide someone always asks: why not a traditional hymn or psalm? And that’s a good question – it tells me they’re listening and feel safe enough to take a risk - so my answer, respectfully born of decades of refinement, is this: artists have historically been a few generations ahead of theologians in naming and claiming the movement of the Holy Spirit in the world. Religion rightfully changes slowly: G.K. Chesterton said that tradition is the democracy of the dead that helps us pause and search for the big picture. Huston Smith, the granddaddy of contemporary interfaith dialogue, said: “The world’s enduring religions at their best reveal the distilled wisdom of the human race in history.” Traditional wisdom has been dragged through the cleansing sands of time and stripped of unnecessary distractions.
Artists and scientists, on the other hand, have been ordained to push the contours of culture, to point out as James Russell Lowell’s hymn proclaims: new occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient truth uncouth. They are the canaries in the mine shafts of reality who reveal both the blessings and the dangers of any given moment in time. Think of the abstract expressionists after WWI who gave shape and form to the chaos and angst of their generation with their paintings; or com-posers like Messiaen and Mahler after WWII who expressed audibly what a world on fire sounds like. Same for Black bebop jazz artists in the 40s and 50s who conveyed the soul of the Civil Rights freedom movement. One important reason I’ve been drawn to all types of non-traditional spiritual poetry and music is that they express this moment in time while religion rightfully evokes the time-less.
· The other is that celebrating songs from OUTSIDE the canon reminds us that in the eyes of the Lord there’s NO such thing as secular and sacred: God’s presence fills the world. If you know the work of Martin Luther, father of the Protestant Reformation, you know he insisted that everything we do is for the glory of God – and just to make his point he stole the melody of a German drinking song to be the foundation of his most famous hymn: A Mighty Fortress is Our God.
· Evangelicals, liberals, Protestants, Catholics, Anglicans and Orthodox have ALL affirmed this in their own unique way as Baptist preacher, Dallas Willard, said so well: “There is truly no division between sacred and secular except what we have created.”
That’s why the division of the legitimate roles and functions of human life into the sacred and secular does incalculable damage to our individual lives and to the cause of Christ. Holy people must stop going into “church work” as their natural course of action and take up holy orders in farming, industry, law, education, banking, and journalism with the same zeal previously given to evangelism, pastoral ministry, and missionary work.
And that’s why I chose “Blackbird” by the Beatles as my compass for Earth Day: it not only looks to nature as a time-tested guide into the heart and soul of the Lord’s creation; it does so by celebrating a humble and ordinary blackbird. This alternative and generous orthodoxy, you see, takes the first creation story in the Old Testament book of Genesis as its foundation – and posits original blessing instead of original sin. In the beginning, tradition teaches, God created: created the heavens and the earth, the water and the land, the sun, the moon, the animals, the insects, the birds as well as order out of the chaos. And when the cosmos was almost complete, God then created hum-an beings and called ALL of this creation good. Very, very good – hence original blessing rather than original sin.
· Not that sin is to be ignored or denied; not at all, just that sin does not define our essence eternally. This spirituality trusts that when the Lord God said, “Let us make human beings in our own image, according to our likeness” God wasn’t kidding which is a very different starting point than the second creation account in Genesis 2 that we know as the story of Adam and Eve, right?
· Their fall from grace has dominated Western Christianity since the 4th century of the CE when St. Augustine, brilliant African bishop of Hippo in what is now Algeria, tried to understand the incarnation of Jesus as the sinless Son of God. Given his literal reading of Scripture, Augustine concluded that the one reality that set the birth of Jesus apart from the rest of us is that Jesus was not born of concupiscence – lustful fornication – from the Latin con meaning with and cu-pere meaning ardent sensual obsession. All the rest of us, concluded Augustine, are descend-ants of Adam and Eve and poisoned by their rebellion against God.
To make matters worse, given the limitations of his era’s science – and his own misogyny – August-ne mistakenly concluded that the only way sin could be passed on from one generation to the next was through a woman’s birth canal – essentially naming women to be the source of original sin.
Now it’s critical to note that neither our spiritual cousins in Judaism nor our sisters and brothers in Eastern Orthodoxy accept this interpretation of the Adam and Eve story. They see it as a mythological description of humans entering the world pure and created in God’s image with the ability to choose either good or evil via free will.
· These traditions teach that a person always has the power to avoid sin and its negative effects IF we’re willing to own our failures, accept them are real, and then learn from our mistakes as the Serenity Prayer teaches, ok?
· God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference: one spirituality starts with creativity, humility, and trust, the other celebrates sin and shame.
And I don’t think it was accidental that the author of the Serenity Prayer, Reinhold Niebuhr, not only hails from OUR spiritual tradition, but crafted this life-changing prayer in the dark days before WWII when, at our church in Lee, he was asked for a prayer to kick off Vacation Bible School. Despite the dangers of that era and the suffering that followed, Niebuhr proclaimed that the heart and soul of Christianity always starts with Jesus and God’s grace NOT judgment. “Nothing worth doing,” he wrote, “is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. And nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.”
· And that’s what I hear happening in the New Testament reading from St. Matthew today where the disciples ask: “Who is the greatest in the kingdom?” That is, who shows us what kingdom living looks like? Who models God’s soul for us in real life?
· So, what does Jesus do and say to answer them but bring a small child forward saying that unless you become childlike, you just won’t get what kingdom living is all about.
He’s not advocating childishness ok? There’s already too much childishness in our politics, fears, bigotries, and all the rest. Rather, Jesus calls us to reclaim being childlike: open, curious, trusting, and dependent upon powers greater than our themselves for safety and sustenance. Walter Wangerin, a brilliant pastor and teacher, used to say that children under the age of 10 are organically mystics who experienced God’s presence everywhere.
And by mystic he means one who has experienced something of the holy within. Fr. Richard Rohr writes analytically that: “A mystic has the power of receptivity and sympathy; their souls are porous and have the ability to be so open as to stretch beyond the usual small and protective ego to something salvific.” Marcus Borg evoked the innate mysticism of children in a way that still rings true to me:
Once a three-year-old girl who was the only child in her family when her mom became pregnant. The young girls was wildly excited about having a baby in the house. So, on the day the mother-to-be delivers, this soon to be sister is ecstatic. Mom and dad go off to the hospital while she stays with her grandparents. A few days later, they come home with a new baby brother and she is just delighted. After they’ve been home for a couple of hours, the little girl tells her parents that she wants to be with the baby in the baby’s room, alone, with the door shut. She’s absolutely insist-ent about the door being shut. Which creeps her parents out: they know she’s a good child but they’ve heard about sibling rivalry and aren’t sure what they should do. They remind one another that they’ve recently installed an intercom system in preparation for the arrival of the new baby and conclude and if they hear even the slightest weird thing happening, they can be in there in a flash. So, they let their little girl go into the room and close the door behind her. They race to the listening post at the intercom, hearing her footsteps move across the room. They imagine her now standing over the baby’s crib and then hear her say to her two-day-old baby brother: “Can you tell me about God. I’ve almost forgotten.”
· I LOVE that story! It captures the essence of what Jesus was teaching about childlike humility and awe. It reminds me of our own two daughters who, as PKs – preachers’ kids – used to play giving birth to Jesus every year during Christmas.
· They were both born at home so one daughter would don a blue head scarf in the manner of the Blessed Virgin Mary while the other girl covered her sister’s lower body with a blanket like a midwife. They would hold one another’s hands until Mother Mary said: I feel the urge to push. So, her sister would kneel on the floor, put her hands under the blanket, say: count to three and then push momma before pulling a baby doll out from under the blanket saying: LOOK baby Jesus has just been born. Then they’d swap places so that both sisters could bring Jesus to birth. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven and whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. Indeed.
The alternative orthodoxy that resonates with me on Earth Day starts with a generous creativity rather than sin and judgment. By grace awe supplants cynicism, trust switches places with fear, and the rhythms of God’s FIRST word – not the bible but creation itself – teaches us how-to live-in harmony with the holy, with the human, and with the whole world. Small wonder that St. Paul began his letter to the church in Rome with this affirmation:
What can be known about God is plain to us all because God has made it plain: ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature have been seen and understood through the things God has created in nature.
The prophet Isaiah was equally effusive about nature guiding us into a harmonious life:
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. Trust this and you shall go out in joy and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle, and it shall be to the Lord as an ever-lasting sign that shall not be cut off.
On Earth Day we’re invited to reconnect to God’s creation, cultivate a childlike trust and awe of the Lord as a way of grounding ourselves in the divine community of the cosmos, and dare I say to do it playfully? We’re in this together, beloved, our humanity thrives in concert with creation’s totality – and not just kith and kin, but flora and fauna as well as earth, sky, and sea. In the early days of the pandemic, I was helping our church in Williamstown wrestle through our collective angst and un-certainty when nothing seemed to make sense.
A poem by Wendell Berry kept popping up that became a guide for us we re-learned how to stay grounded in grace even when life felt like it was go-ing to hell. It’s a practice – a spiritual discipline – and a taste of grace that I share with you now in the hopes it will help you get grounded in the community of creation and the blessings therein, too:
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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