Sermon: The Challenge Before Us

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The Challenge Before Us

By Tom Reiber

July 20, 2003

nce today is my very last sermon as a minister on staff here at Christ Church, I'll try and complete the process of saying goodbye that I began a couple of weeks ago. I pretty much said it all back in that “Bon Voyage” sermon. In fact, during the closing hymn when Julie and I got to the back of the church she leaned over and said, “What are you going to say next time?” I said I was wondering about that myself!

Seriously, though, since I managed to say goodbye in my last sermon, I thought to today would be a little more of a parting message, an attempt to sum up what I feel is most important from a theological or spiritual perspective.

The last time I preached I was just about to leave for Seattle to baptize my first wife's twins, who were just about to turn one. On my way out there I looked out the window of the plane at the landscape below and at first glance it was one of those, ‘Oh, hills. Now what did I bring to read?'

But then I remembered something I said in prayer earlier in the summer. I had prayed that God would helps us all see the Earth as a living being as we went on our various summer trips. So I thought to myself, well maybe I should try and do that myself. And at that point I looked out the window in a different way, being intentionally mindful that the surface of the Earth visible to me through the tiny airplane window was connected to the rest of the planet's complex web of life. I saw a river and realized it wasn't an isolated thing. It was like a vein in my own body, intricately connected to a complex system in the natural world. Just as I was alive, the Earth, too, was alive.

This experience of the Earth's living presence is one of the most cherished insight I can share with you from my own spiritual experience and, because of that, I'd like to tell you a little bit about how I came to it.

For the longest time I thought of environmentalists as a subset of hippie activists, people who screamed about Central America and the destruction of rain forests somewhere half-way around the world. Even after coming to see that the Gospel had sociopolitical implications, I tended to look down environmentalists with a certain self-righteous smugness. “People are killing and torturing each other, and you guys are worried about an owl? Come on!”

I remember when I first got to Union I saw that Larry Rasmussen, an ethicist whose work I greatly admired, had a new book out on the environment.[1] I was disappointed. Didn't this guy read the papers? There are more troubling things going on in the world.

Looking back on it all now I realize there were a number of things that played into my own increased consciousness around this issue. But the real turning point for me came about one year ago when I couldn't get to sleep. I got up and walked into my den. I was sitting there, not fully awake yet unable to sleep, sort of just zoning out, when a book caught my eye. The Great Work, by Thomas Berry. Some friends had just given me a few boxes of books and this was one of them.

I picked it up, having no idea at the time that it was destined to revolutionize my understanding of religion and the world around me. I've recommended it to several people here at Christ Church and I know of at least one person, Marion Glen, who's read it. You know when someone has read it because it engenders a very strong reaction. I recommended it to my mother, who was a professor prior to retiring and has always been a voracious reader. She devoured it and then sent me an angry email saying something like, “What the hell are we supposed to do about this?” I completely understood her feelings, since I had been feeling the exact same way since reading it myself.

What is most profound about the book is that Berry is able to take all the alarming observations coming from the environmental quarter and put them into a meaningful perspective—not only meaningful, but hopeful. Taking a big-picture view of historical developments, he lays out why we have become so alienated from nature. This in itself is a long, fascinating story, spanning centuries. One intriguing part of the story relates to the Black Plague that swept through Europe, creating a deep distrust of the natural world. The Scientific Revolution provided the capstone to the process, fueling the illusion that we could eventually overcome every natural obstacle, perhaps even death, if we could simply build the right machine.[2]

Of course it is precisely this blind faith in the fruit of technological progress that has stripped the Earth of its forests and poisoned its rivers and oceans. What's essentially called for, then, is a fundamental sea change in our thinking about the Earth. This is why Thomas Berry titled his book, The Great Work, because he believes the great work facing our generation is to bring about a fundamental shift in our attitudes about and relationship with the Earth. Speaking at Harvard he sized up the situation this way:

“In April of the year 1912 the Titanic on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic crashed into an iceberg and went down at sea. Long before the crash those in command had abundant evidence that icebergs lay ahead. The course had been set, however, and no one wished to alter its direction. Confidence in the survival capacities of the ship was unbounded. Already there was a multitude of concerns in carrying out the normal routine of a voyage. What happened to that ‘unsinkable' ship is a kind of parable for us since only in the most dire situation do we have the psychic energy needed to examine our way of acting on the scale that is now required.”[3]

Now, admittedly, the reference to the Titanic doesn't automatically inspire thoughts of hope and optimism. But Berry was simply trying to get people's attention. He's got a knack for doing that. That's why people put down Berry's book and have this sense of, “Oh my God, what are we to do?” You come away with an understanding of the problem and a sense of urgency, but still the problems seem so vast and overwhelming you don't know where to start.

Fortunately, Berry himself has a great deal to say about where we go from here. He says what is called for is a fundamental revolution of consciousness in relation to jurisprudence, the organization of our universities, and our understanding of religion. This morning I'd like to try and make a few suggestions pertaining to the last point, the necessary revolution as pertaining to understanding of religion.

One place we can find some guidance for this work is in the life and work of the great naturalist, John Muir. Muir was a prophet of the Earth and gave voice to a prophetic vision of its splendor.[4] Much like Jesus, he was at odds with the social world of his day and like Jesus, he seems to have found solace in the natural world. Writing about his social displacement, Muir biographer Frederick Turner writes, “about the only thing he could think of that he might enjoy doing would be to ‘preach Nature like and apostle.' But even that would perhaps be a problem, for Muir saw that if he should ever enter a pulpit with his message, ‘I fear I should be found preaching much that was unsanctified & unorthodox.”[5]

When he first entered the Sierras he realized he lacked an adequate capacity for beauty and set out to develop eyes to see. Eventually he got to point, “he felt nothing of that earlier defeated sense when looking into tremendous vistas. Scale did not numb or crush him because he had learned enough…to see that all things were related naturally and harmoniously to each other. Observing any one thing, you were quite easily led on to the next and the next, so into infinity.”[6]

In trying to put words to his own mountaintop experience in the Sierras, Muir wrote that

…the charms of these mountains are beyond all common reason, unexplainable and mysterious as life itself. “Mountains are ‘fountains,' ‘…beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.' In his Yosemite years he would write of the Sierras as being as holy as Sinai; of mountains so aglow with soul and life it seemed they had died and gone before the throne of God; of mountains wearing spiritual robes and halos….”

Another resource for rediscovering the celebration of nature within our Christian tradition is Jesus himself. Remember that Jesus was a Jew immersed in the wisdom traditions of Judaism, a simple tribal people whose origins were intimately joined to the Earth. He would have been familiar with the Psalm Julie read today: “Blessed are the man and the woman who have grown beyond their greed and have put an end to their hatred and no longer nourish illusions. But they delight in the way things are and keep their hearts open, day and night. They are like trees planted near flowing rivers, which bear fruit when they are ready.”

Jesus himself used images drawn from nature, and the experience of his temptation, let's remember, came after forty days without food, during which time he was alone in the desert. That's four weeks—a lunar cycle—alone in the wilderness.

In this passage we are given a window into Jesus' spiritual emancipation from the power of the social order. Like Buddha under the Banyan tree, Jesus strips himself of all ego and grasps the truth behind the world's illusions. When Satan dangles before him all the riches and power of the world, he is facing the temptation to settle for something less than full spiritual emancipation. But he remains so grounded in God in the face of temptation, he doesn't so much let go of riches and power as he does see through them. He has awakened.

Now a truly free individual is a scary thing. I like the line in Easy Rider and quote it in my book, where Jack Nicholson's character says to his motorcycling buddies around a campfire,

'Course don't even tell anybody that they're not free 'cause they gonna get busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah, they gonna talk to you and talk to you and talk to you 'bout individual freedom. But they see a free individual it's gonna scare 'em.

As Nicholson's character reminds us, true freedom is something we know very little about. We think we're free and we champion freedom, while all the while we are trapped in modes of behavior that are literally killing the Earth and jeopardizing not just our children's futures, but the future itself.

If we are to break free from our enslavement to our destructive patterns, we're going to have to harness the spiritual consciousness that fueled the life and teaching of Jesus. In our efforts to do that it helps to remember that we're not the first ones to try. The high-water mark of World Literature is Dostoyevsky's grappling with the temptation of Christ in The Brother's Karamazov.

The dialogue between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor serves as an echo chamber in which these Earth-shaking themes of freedom and enslavement resonate. The Grand Inquisitor basically says to Christ, “You fool, did you really think people were up to the challenge of thinking for themselves, of seeing through the artificial illusions of society, of speaking truth, of seeing life as it is?”

There's a popular opinion amongst literary critics that Dostoyevsky did too good a job crafting the arguments of the Grand Inquisitor, meaning that people come away from The Brothers Karamozov thinking that perhaps Christ did expect too much of us. Dostoyevsky himself said of this criticism—already voiced in his own day—that The Brothers Karamozov, in its entirety, was an answer to the Grand Inquisitor.

I like that response, and I think it's relevant for people of faith today. In the face of a world gone mad with greed and violence, many are asking if the naïve teachings of this homeless Jew named Jesus adequately address the challenges before us. Taken in isolation, the commandment to turn the other cheek, or to love our enemies, seem simply implausible, unrealistic. But as Dostoyevsky implied, the answer doesn't reside in any one teaching, but rather in the story as a whole.

It's the story of a human being who fell deeply in love with God and humanity, who loved the natural world and children and those on the margins. And when his message of love for all began to cause problems, he consented to capital punishment. Among his last words from the death machine of his day were a prayer for forgiveness for those who were killing him, because they didn't fully understand what they were doing. “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”

Let us make these last words of Jesus the first words in a new chapter in which we vow to understand, so that we might know what we do. Let us have the courage to truly break free, so that we can see not as we have been taught to see, but as Jesus saw. We'll need that kind of spiritual vision if we plan to

“…ring them bells, from the City that dreams,

from the where the four winds blow,

so that the people will know

that God is one.”[7]

Amen.

[1] Rasmussen, Larry. Earth Community, Earth Ethics.

[2] The Jungian analyst Robert Johnson has pointed out that the etymological root of machine means trick, which is how we get the word machination. I take that to mean the labor saving promises of machines deceive us into losing touch with the sacred.

[3] Berry, Thomas. “Ethics and Ecology,” a Paper delivered to the Harvard Seminar on Environmental

[4] Describing the sight of dawn illuminating a mountain peak Muir wrote in his journal, “Morning light rayless, beamless, unbodied of all its purple and gold. No outgushing of solar glory pouring in torrents among mountain peaks, baptizing them; but each pervaded with the soul of light, boundless, tideless, newborn… The trees, the mountains…are made one, unseparate, unclothed, open to the Divine Soul, dissolved in the mysterious incomparable Spirit of holy Light!”

[5] Turner, Frederick. John Muir: Rediscovering America (Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 1985) p. 170. First published by Penguin as, Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and In Ours.

[6] Ibid, p. 180.

[7] From the lyrics of the Bob Dylan song, “Ring Them Bells,” sung in church today by Jeannette Brown.