Sowing the Seeds

Proper 10A

Some gardeners carefully space seeds out in straight rows in their vegetable gardens. That had long been my method, but this year I got interested in the idea of polyculture (see Hope: Planting and Prayer 4/11/11) which involves a method of sowing that is closer to that described in the Gospel lesson for this Sunday (Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23). While scattering seeds instead of placing them took some adjustment on my part, it was worth it; the garden has done well so far this summer. I have lost fewer plants than usual to bunnies, there are fewer weeds to pull, and there’s an abundance of produce in my small garden space.

This Sunday’s Gospel lesson touches on the work of environmental stewardship in a couple of ways. The passage begins with Jesus leaving the house where he had been and sitting beside the sea; when he speaks, he tells a story about seeds and thorns and different types of soil. In our theological wanderings, we may sometimes drift into the sort of dualistic thinking that divides spiritual things from physical things (and then almost always goes on to state that the spiritual things are superior to the physical things). Jesus comes along, though, goes outside and walks down to the sea, and speaks about seeds and soil, or fig trees, or birds and lilies. It’s hard to be convinced of this sort of dualism when Jesus goes down to the sea or up a mountain or into a garden, and when Jesus speaks so frequently about the created physical world, the world that God so loves.

Then we have the example of the sower. The sower sows generously, flinging seed around so profligately that some of it lands in places where it can’t grow. This method assures, however, that any place where there is deep, fertile soil will have a seed planted. The sower in the parable isn’t concerned with holding onto the seed (which will have a lower germination rate anyway if it’s saved for another growing season) but with growing as much as possible. If the sower focused on the seed that doesn’t grow, discouragement might set in; there would be a temptation to quit sowing so much seed, maybe to give up the whole task.

Our efforts as individuals and parishes to conserve energy and water, to reduce waste and recycle the waste we do produce, to advocate for the environment can begin to seem insignificant and futile when we look at the enormity of the task of restoring a healthy, sustainable environment and at the weak response from most governments. In a week in which oil spilled into the Yellowstone River, an unusually big dust storm swallowed up Phoenix, a report came out about the amount of plastic debris found in fish in the North Pacific, and the implications of the State of the Climate report continued to be realized (e.g. every month since 1985 has been warmer than the twentieth century average for that month), it’s difficult to see how or whether our efforts will make any difference.

But each effort we make is like planting a seed. Some efforts may not make a difference and some may. We usually won’t know one from the other. That doesn’t mean that our efforts are futile, though; it simply means that our job is similar to the sower’s job. God calls us to be faithful, to keep making the effort, as generous and extravagant an effort as we possibly can. Not every effort will take root and make a huge difference, but this method does ensure that a variety of efforts will be made in a variety of ways. If anything is going to take root and give results in the long run, the faithful efforts of God’s people to care for creation can plant the seeds, make the initial efforts, for the sorts of initiatives that take hold and help heal and sustain our environment.

Prayer for High Summer

Gracious God, creator of the world and giver of all good things, we thank you for the beauty of high summer: for flowers and fruits, for birds and crickets, for sunny days, starry nights, and sudden rains. Help us in the warmth and abundance of these days to remember how fragile our future summers are. Help us through our love for you and for your summertime creation to find the wisdom and will to so order our lives that the delights of high summer might remain with us for generations to come; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The old-fashioned phrase “high summer” came to mind as I sat outside this beautiful morning in central Nebraska enjoying the quieter sounds of birds and chattering squirrels after yesterday’s Fourth of July celebrations. I was praying in gratitude for the beauty of the morning, all the while aware of the need to continue praying for all the living things of the earth as global temperatures continue to rise.

While a few of the prayers in The Book of Common Prayer are close to what I was praying this morning, we lack prayers for the occasions of specific seasons. The prayer of thanksgiving For the Beauty of the Earth (p. 840) comes closest to what I was praying; it captures the gratitude for the beauty of this sort of morning and this time of year, and then turns to praying “that we may safeguard [these good gifts] for our posterity”. The idea of safeguarding something brings to mind a picture of keeping out external forces that would bring harm. In 2011, we know that the forces that threaten the gifts of summer are both internal and external; our own habits threaten the very things we love. Furthermore, we know how close we are to losing what we love; we know that the future of the environment we know and love is fragile. Praying that we can safeguard the gifts of summer sounds a little like praying for continued good health for someone who is terminally ill.

Slate.com has posted an essay Walking Home from Walden from journalist Wen Stephenson. In Part Two of the essay, Stephenson writes about walking along a favorite place, a “sacred spot”, and coming to this realization:

As these realities sank in, it felt like a turning point of some kind had been reached. That day at Stone's Pond, I could no longer pretend, and I knew, with a kind of visceral force: This place is already condemned. In the blink of an eye, it will no longer exist. Not like this. Not the way I know it. And not because some future builder and bulldozer will destroy it, but because they—we—I—already have, by what we've already done. Walking through a hayfield on a cold, bright, and gusty New England morning, it can be hard to believe that the Arctic is melting, the oceans acidifying, the great forests dying, ancient glaciers disappearing. But I knew that all of it was true, and that this sanctuary, this refuge, was a private delusion, a self-indulgent fantasy. There was no refuge. There was no sanctuary. Not for me, not for anyone.

I hope this prayer for high summer helps give words to that tension so many of us are experiencing between our continuing joy in the beauty and wonder we still experience outdoors and the knowledge that the things we love so much are in grave danger of being lost forever; I hope it helps us hold the earth in prayer.

Imagination

“Almighty and eternal God, so draw our hearts to you, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our wills, that we may be wholly yours, utterly dedicated to you…” [Prayer of Self-Dedication, The Book of Common Prayer, p. 832]

A couple of things that have happened this week have me thinking about imagination. It’s good that we pray for full imaginations; well-developed imaginations are helpful to people who want to care for the earth.

A penguin story

Last week an emperor penguin appeared on a beach in New Zealand. The last time an emperor penguin was spotted in New Zealand was 1967, so this is a rare occurrence. At first the penguin was left alone, giving it an opportunity to swim back out to sea. But it became apparent that the penguin wasn’t going anywhere and soon didn’t appear to be well. People were concerned; as the title of an Earthweek article about the penguin puts it: Wayward Penguin Captures New Zealand Hearts. The bird was given the name Happy Feet and taken to the Wellington Zoo for veterinary treatment. When penguins get warm or dehydrated, they eat ice and snow. Finding itself on a sandy beach rather than a frozen beach, the penguin had eaten sand and driftwood. According to the New Zealand Herald, Happy Feet’s stomach was pumped again today.

Most people are compassionate when they know of an individual – a human being or another sort of animal – in need. With x-rays, air conditioning, and medical procedures, Happy Feet’s stay at the zoo isn’t cheap, but people are willing to help out in this sort of case. A Google search of “happy feet penguin” resulted in a row of images of the cute cartoon film penguin by the same name followed by three results for the film. Then comes a link to “Happy Feet’s stomach to be pumped again”. A particular individual case of an animal in need, something concrete, helps people to care; it also helps when the animal in need is associated with a cute cartoon creature!

It takes more imagination to care about the emperor penguins we don’t see, the ones that aren’t named or experienced as individuals or identified with a cute fictional character. A press release from ECO (the Environment and Conservation Organisations of NZ) points out that emperor penguins are “at grave risk of extinction from climate change by the end of the century”. Not only do emperor penguins need ice, but they breed only in the Antarctic winter and they feed on krill, which is itself impacted negatively by climate change. To feel the same level of compassion for these unseen birds as people do for Happy Feet, we need to be able not only to understand the facts about warming temperatures, melting ice, and dying animals, but also to be able to picture this future scenario in our imaginations.

In all aspects of environmental stewardship, it takes imagination to step from the science to compassion and the will to act. It also takes imagination to figure out the best ways to address climate change and other forms of environmental degradation. Climate change on the scale we are experiencing it is an entirely new problem; its solution may very well involve the breaking of some paradigms. Certainly we have seen that treating climate change like any other social issue doesn’t work; we don’t have the luxury of time. The laws of physics and chemistry don’t allow for gradual social change or political compromise.

Maps and Charts

Gardeners are familiar with maps of hardiness zones that help us figure out what varieties of plants can thrive where we live. These hardiness zones are changing, as some Nebraskans may have guessed from our own gardening experience. To help us imagine this on a national scale, an animated map of the changes in hardiness zones is helpful. Seen in this form, the changes from 1990 to 2006 are obvious.

The State of the Climate report for 2010 from the American Meteorological Association has been published. (See a summary here . NOAA summarizes some highlights of the report on this webpage.) The summary report of long-term trends – rising greenhouse gas emissions, rising global surface temperatures, and a sharply shrinking Greenland ice mass – includes helpful graphs of these climate indicators, making it easy to picture these trends on one level. But here again, it takes some imagination to begin to grasp the reality of these trends well enough to cause us to see the necessity for action.

The limits of our imaginations

Our limited imaginations can keep us from understanding our situation and from seeing how to best address the challenges we face. May God fill our imaginations so that we can be better stewards of the earth!

But realizing the limits of our imaginations can also be a blessing, because we know that no matter how good we get at imagining the possibilities for the future of our planet, we can never fully understand the bigger picture. In The Book of Common Prayer, one of our options for concluding Morning Prayer begins “Glory to God, whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine…” Remembering that God can do more than we can ask or imagine gives us hope. When we can’t imagine how we will live into our future, our prayers of self-dedication, of asking God to equip us with the hearts, minds, imaginations, and wills to do God’s work, may be answered in ways we cannot ask or imagine. The Prayer of Self-Dedication asks for God to equip us so that we can be wholly God’s and so that God might then use us to God’s glory “and to the welfare of your people”.

We very much need the gift of imagination at this time; we are also blessed to know the limits of our imaginations.

Worshiping Molech

Proper 8A

Genesis 22:1-14; Romans 6:12-23

Molech was an Ammonite deity who was thought to require child sacrifice. This week's lesson from Genesis (Genesis 22:1-14) about Abraham taking Isaac up the mountain because he has heard God tell him to offer Isaac as a burnt offering reminds us of Molech, first in the nature of the command Abraham hears, and then in the moment when God says, “Do not lay your hand on the boy”, revealing God to be very different from Molech and the other lesser gods.

It’s worth noticing that the same week our Old Testament lesson brings Molech to mind, we had news about the environment that once again told about the perils we and our children face in the fairly near future.

There was the summary report from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) which brought grim news about the deterioration of marine ecosystems. The report predicts that unless a massive effort is made to address the environmental stressors on the ocean, there will be a mass extinction of marine life sometime during this century. This is not good news for us, for our children, or for our children’s children, The same sorts of stressors affect the non-marine environment; these combined with the effects of the tragedy unfolding in our oceans do have and will have a profound effect on the world in which we and our children and grandchildren are living out our lives.

An article in Saturday’s New Zealand Herald, Toxic tide mankind’s next great threat, quotes a recent UN environmental program report known as Yearbook for 2011 describing plastics “lost” in the oceans as “the world’s new toxic time-bomb”. It seems that plastics floating in the ocean accumulate and concentrate chemicals we don’t want entering the food chain, such as PCBs and DDT. And as plastic photo-degrades, it eventually breaks into individual molecules of plastic that, invisible as they are, enter the food chain very easily.

These reports provide further evidence for what we already knew from looking at other forms of pollution and at climate change, its effects, and our failure to address the issue: we have chosen to sacrifice the lives of our children and our children’s children in the names of various gods -- gods of convenience and money and laziness and all sorts of sin -- gods too numerous to mention. These gods are today’s equivalent of Molech, deities that are not the true god but whom we mistakenly believe have so much power that we will sacrifice our children to them.

In this week’s lesson from Romans (Romans 6:12-23), St. Paul tells us “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Our understanding is that God offers us the gift of true life, ours for the taking, and that when we turn our back on that gift and instead choose to sin, putting all these lesser gods before our relationship with the Living God, the result of that is always death.

This understanding raises questions that should puzzle and disturb us more than the question of how Abraham could ever have set out in obedience to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice. Given a God who offers us the good gift of eternal life -- life at its deepest levels -- why do we ever choose anything other than God’s freely given gift? Why is it so hard for us to choose life for ourselves and our children? Why do we give everything in the world precedence over ensuring that we leave our children a planet that can sustain human life? Why do we sacrifice our children and our children’s children to these lesser gods?

The Habakkuk Response

Mass Extinction in the Ocean

This week brought a report from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) that was labeled “shocking”. The shock value was at least as much about the rate at which marine ecosystems are deteriorating as it was about the specific observations and predictions. For those who follow these things, many elements of the report are not news, but the gravity of it all becomes more obvious with the timeline described and with consideration of the way these various elements interact with one another. The conclusion about the risk to both marine life and human life if we stay on our current course is grave: “the world's ocean is at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.”

According to the report, the greatest stress on the ocean is global warming with its twin effects of warming the temperature of the ocean and causing ocean acidification. Dr. Alex Rogers, the scientific director of IPSO who says “when the oceans go down, it’s game over”, talks about the main problems we are looking at with the oceans and some possible solutions:

“I find it very difficult to tell people what a scary situation we’re in at the moment,” says Professor Chris Reid of the Marine Institute, University of Plymouth. “The oceans are changing in a huge way, and I’m particularly worried for my grandchildren.” Here’s the rest of what he says about the speed of the changes that are occurring:

Even though care was taken in the report to talk about possible solutions to this crisis, the report was very discouraging given the political realities of today’s world that make it highly unlikely that these solutions will be implemented in time to ward off mass extinctions in the ocean and the attendant effects on the rest of the world, including human life.

I read something else this week, an interview from Christianity Today called The Joyful Environmentalists: Eugene Peterson and Peter Harris. In it, Peter Harris talks about the difference between their work – work done “in response to who God is” -- and the work of secular environmentalists. Noting that environmentalists who believe they’ll be able to save the planet may easily get “exhausted and disillusioned and depressed”, Harris goes on to say:

If, on the other hand, you do what you do because you believe it pleases the living God, who is the Creator and whose handiwork this is, your perspective is very different. I don't think there is any guarantee we will save the planet. I don't think the Bible gives us much reassurance about that. But I do believe it gives God tremendous pleasure when his people do what they were created to do, which is care for what he made.

The idea of doing what we can to care for the earth out of a joyful response to the Creator resonates with the verses near the end of Habakkuk. Though the crops have failed and the livestock is gone, says Habakkuk, “yet I will rejoice in Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation.” (Habakkuk 3:17-18). The Habakkuk response suggests a spiritual path to help us avoid despair and do the work of creation care as well as we possibly can in the difficult years ahead.

Dominion, Trinity Sunday, and Father's Day

Yours are the heavens; the earth also is yours; you laid the foundations of the world and all that is in it. (Psalm 89:11)

(Monday) This morning’s Psalm with its reminder that all of creation -- the heavens, the earth, and the sea -- belong to God echoed the account of creation from the first chapter of Genesis (Genesis 1:1-2:4a) that we read as one of our Trinity Sunday lessons.

While yesterday was Trinity Sunday on the liturgical calendar, most Americans thought of it as Father’s Day. I don’t know how many times around Father’s Day this year I heard people say something to the effect that there’s a big difference between being a biological father and actually being a man who acts like a dad, who cares for and protects and teaches and loves a child, whether his own biological offspring or another child: “Anyone can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a dad.” That Father’s Day thought came to mind when I was listening to Verse 28, “the dominion passage”, in yesterday’s reading. This is the verse that says that after the creation of humankind, God said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

Some people have taken the command to have dominion over other living things as permission to do whatever we want with the resources God has given us, to simply dominate other living things, while others look at having dominion as caring responsibly for other living things and the resources that support life. Those who support the latter interpretation look at this passage in the context of all of Scripture instead of in isolation. Passages such as today’s Psalm that remind us that creation ultimately belongs to God, not us, provide some of the context for the responsible care interpretation. The command in Genesis 2:15 to “till and keep” the garden also points to this latter interpretation. In his book For the Beauty of the Earth Steven Bouma-Prediger suggests that Genesis 1:28 and 2:15 taken together call us to be “earthkeepers”.

The distinction between dominion as domination and dominion as responsible care is parallel to the distinction between fatherhood as a purely biological matter and fatherhood as standing in a certain healthy relationship to a child. The fact of being a parent, of having authority over a child, doesn’t mean that it’s okay to treat that child any way we please. We expect good fathers and mothers to nurture their children, to protect them and teach them and certainly to love them. Having authority over God’s other creatures doesn’t mean that it’s okay to treat other living things and the resources that support their lives (and ours) any way we please. With that authority from God comes an expectation that we will care for creation, protect and tend and keep creation, and love God’s creation.

Anyone can be a member of the species homo sapiens, but it takes someone special to be an earthkeeper.

Wind of Pentecost

Feeling the Spirit outdoors

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.” (Acts 2:1-2)

According to Acts, Jesus’ followers were inside on the day of Pentecost. The congregation of St. Stephen’s, however, gathered outdoors this year at L.E. Ray Park in Grand Island. We baptized a teen-ager and three babies in the lake, celebrated the Eucharist using a picnic table as the altar, and had a picnic afterwards instead of the usual coffee hour. The weather forecast when we went to bed Saturday night was terrible for the next morning – an 80% chance of thunderstorms, possibly severe – but by Sunday morning a good breeze (as opposed to a violent wind) pushed the clouds to the south and east, the sun came out, and it was a lovely morning for an outdoor worship service.

The people who came said we should do this more often; there was something very special about our worship that morning. As I’ve shared our experience with others this week, it’s obvious that lots of people find something in worshiping together outdoors that is missing when we worship inside a building. People remarked on how peaceful it was; the sounds of the birds and lapping of the water, and the sights of the water sparkling in the sunlight and the trees moving in the wind contributed to that feeling of peace. People also seemed more joyful (not that we are lacking in joy when we are indoors); being outdoors and trying some new things was simply fun!

There are advantages, of course, to our usual space: we are sheltered from extremes in temperatures and from precipitation, the acoustics are better, and we don’t have to hold down the fair linen and the pages of the altar book with rocks to keep them from blowing around. But indoors we also can’t feel the sun beginning to warm the morning air, we don’t hear the birds sing, and, most notably on a day like Pentecost, we can’t feel the wind blow.

The Greek word for the wind (not a violent wind, but the sort of breeze we felt on Sunday) is pneuma; like the Hebrew word ruah this means wind and spirit and breath. As Jesus explained to Nicodemus (John 3: 7-8), the Spirit/wind is a moving thing. We experience it, but we don’t control it. We feel it, but we don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. We Nebraskans know about the untamed nature of the wind perhaps better than some other people would!

When the wind blows strongly, and especially when the wind turns very cold or very hot, it’s almost instinctive to shelter ourselves from it, but if we always avoid being out in the wind, we miss an opportunity to more fully understand the meaning of what Scripture tells us about the Spirit. Remembering the connections between wind and Spirit might help us see whether we are also trying to shelter or hide from the Spirit. We know that’s ultimately impossible to do – the Spirit rushed right into the house where Jesus’ followers were gathered – so on one level our attempts to hide don’t matter, but an openness to the Spirit can give us peace that evades us when we are trying to evade the Spirit.

A well-designed indoor space can provide sights and sounds that enhance our worship, but it’s good to occasionally leave those spaces and experience sights and sounds that we don’t control. During the homily Sunday morning, I watched a goose walk through the lawn chairs where the congregation was seated and on into the lake, where it swam out into the lake and then came back closer to the shore behind our temporary altar. It was so good not to have a wall separating us from that sight! It was a reminder that as much as we try to do everything in what we consider to be “good order”, God’s ideas of good order might be different from ours.

In The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis makes it clear that while Aslan is good, Aslan is not a tame lion. God is not a tame god and doesn’t always fit into the spaces – physical, intellectual, and spiritual – that we design. The wind blows where it will; the Spirit blows where it will. I’m thankful for our outdoor worship reminding us that the Spirit that brings us peace is also an untamed Spirit, a Spirit that blows where it will, leads us where it will, and fills us with the sort of power we experience when we pay attention to God’s creation.