HOLY
EARTH
In her book, Leaving Church, Barbara Brown
Taylor reflects on her decision to leave the life of a parish priest in the Episcopal church for a new life of teaching and writing. The move involved finding a new place to live. For the first time in their lives, she and her husband were looking for property to buy
— in the Georgia countryside. His requirement was running water. Her was being not more than ten miles from town. When they found the right spot among old oak trees and milkweed and blackberry plants, she says, "I found my place on earth." And then as she does so eloquently, she reflects theologically. "I know plenty of people who find God most reliably in books, in buildings, and even in other people. I have found God in all of these places too, but the most reliable meeting place for me has always been the creation. I have always known where to go when my own flame was guttering. To lie with my back flat on the fragrant ground is to receive a transfusion of that same power that makes the green blade rise. To remember that I am dirt and to dirt I shall return is to be given my life back again. Where people see acreage, timber and soil, and river frontage, I see God's body ... The Creator does not live apart from creation ... When I take a breath, God's Holy Spirit enters me."
Her description triggered one of my favorite memories of my many experience at the Summer Princeton Institute of Theology. During our free time, my friends and I would take walks through the Princeton University Campus, where there are many old trees. On one such
occasion, someone suggested that we stand underneath this great cypress tree and just look up. I was stunned by what I saw. If you have never done that I recommend it to you. Find a tree and go underneath it and look up. It is an amazing perspective that you don't get from any other vantage point. Wendell Berry found words to capture just such an experience:
Great trees, outspreading and upright, Apostles of the living light.
Patient as stars, they build in air
Tier after tier a timbered choir,
Stout beams upholding weightless grace Of song, a blessing on this place.
"The heavens are telling the glory of God," the psalmist wrote centuries ago. "The firmament proclaims God's handiwork. The creation in all its mystery and majesty, in all its fearful power and intricate beauty, tells us something of the creator. God revealed in
nature is an important theme in the Psalms. God is the Creator who: stretches out the heavens, sets the earth on its foundation, makes springs gush forth and grass to grow, trees and birds, mountains and wild animals, and wine to gladden the human heart.
(Ps. 104)
The Bible proclaims that God's good creation is holy, for it contains within itself the very essence of God. How many of you have met God, or seen God in creation. In Psalm 24 the writer proclaims, creation belongs to God.
The earth is the Lord's and all that is and temporary guest at that. And part of why we are here, part of the reason God made us and put us here, is to manage the place, to be stewards of God's creation. In fact that's our highest calling, our holiest vocation, is to manage God's creation.
"The Holy Earth" is a phrase Wendell Berry uses. Berry is a poet, essayist, novelist who farms in rural Kentucky. He is not happy with what has happened and is happening to
the earth and the air and the water. He is not happy with the way agribusiness and industry treat the creation. In one of his speeches he had this to say. "Jesus thought he was living in a holy world
... Much of the action and talk of the Gospels takes place outdoors; on mountainsides, lakeshores, river banks, in fields and pastures, places populated not only by humans but by animals and plants. And these nonhuman creatures, sheep and lilies and birds, are always represented as worthy of, or as flourishing within, the love and care of God." When he wanted to make a point about God's providential care, he said, "Look at the birds; they neither sow nor reap." When he wanted to convince his disciples to stop worrying so much about their lives- a bit of advice certainly relevant for people like us who spend much time worrying, fussing, obsessing, being anxious about our lives
— and to trust God's goodness and mercy, he said. "Consider the lilies, they neither toil nor spin, and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of those."
I suppose a sermon on God and nature could become an exercise in sentimentality or New Age spirituality except for the fact that the way we are treating the place has caused a major crisis
— for some scientists, a life and death crisis. The environmental crisis many are now saying, is the moral issue of our time. And so while this is about your own
experience of God in the sacredness of nature, it is also about our responsibility for managing the place in a way that will be life giving and life sustaining for our children and our grandchildren and for all who will come after us. And on that score we are not doing very well.
Wendell Berry remembers in an essay that in his childhood, "people in my part of the world drank fearlessly from springs and wells and swam without anxiety in whatever water was deep enough. Now we know that water pollution is only part of a package that includes air pollution, soil erosion, deforestation, urban sprawl, architectural ugliness, and other symptoms of a general disregard for the world's life and health."
For decades, environmentalists have struggled to be taken seriously —
dismissed in the political arena as liberal tree huggers, brushed off in religious circles as peripheral left wingers, and challenged by industry. But environmentalists, backed by hard evidence have fought the good and lonely fight. And now most folk acknowledge that they were right and we are in trouble environmentally.
I don't need to rehearse the statistics. We read them every day. What is new and critical now is that we thought we had decades or centuries to resolve these issues. But we now realize that the slow creep of
environmental decay gives way to sudden collapse. So it's time for all of us to pay attention. It's time for people of faith who believe in the Bible and the Judeo Christian tradition of God's holy earth to wake up and acknowledge what has happened and accept it as one of the moral issues of our day, and to change the way we think about the world, to demand that our leaders act responsibly, and to make adjustment and decisions appropriate to our faith.
In the last one hundred years, we have seen how our growing dependence on fossil fuels has harmed our atmosphere, warmed the earth, is
poisoning our health, and effecting all aspects of the environment. We have also learned that petroleum is a limited resource. But knowing all that, is the answer to
today's energy crisis to do more exploration and drilling, when we know that supply cannot keep up with demand even today. Where is the demand for conservation, for alternate cleaner energy sources. Instead we look for fixes that are painless and immediate
— take the easiest road without considering implications for the world's future.
As people of faith, we know and accept that there is a moral order to the universe, a moral shape to
human life and its interaction and its relationship to the rest of creation. In theological terms, we believe that our Creator has a will, an intent, for how things should go in creation and how human life should be lived. Today we are at a critical point. The creation is not morally neutral. Our lives are not morally neutral. There is a right way and a wrong way to live.
Part of our heritage as Reformed Christians stems from Celtic Christianity, preserved by our Scottish forebearers. From that tradition comes a wide selection of prayers and incantations for kindling the fire, milking the cow, for herding and sowing seed and fishing, prayers for cooking and hunting and reaping, for lying down and rising up, for loving and birthing and dying. It is a Christian tradition that has continued stubbornly over centuries when many Christians considered the world fallen and directed our interest otherworldly. The Celtic
tradition was based on the holiness of Creation, and the goodness and beauty of, the holy earth.
Francis of Assisi wrote love poems to creation and the God of creation,
"Be praised then my Lord God
In and through your creatures
Through noble brother sun
Through sister moon
In brother wind be praised, my Lord And in the air.
Be praise my Lord, through sister water And brother fire
Through our dear mother earth."
Let's remember that Jesus knew the psalms and probably committed most of them to memory. I like the thought that when he looked up into the night sky, those same words came to him, "The heavens are telling the glory of God." And that when he walked by
the lakeside in the early evening and greeted the fisherman, or when he walked by a field ripe with grain, or when he sipped good wine, ate honest bread, bit into sweet, delicious fruit, or when he saw a newborn deer, the words that came to him were, "The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it."
We believe he came into this world as God's son, into this very world as God's love.
And when he wanted to tell his friends that God is good and kind and that we can trust God with our lives, he used the things of this world. When at critical times in your life or mine - when we are anxious, worried about the future, our future, when we are sick, when we are dying, and he wants us to know that we can trust a kind and good God with our lives, even with our deaths - he uses the goodness of the creation where we have always met God, the Holy Earth, the birds
of the air, and the lilies of the field, illustrations, pictures, of that love and kindness and trustworthiness.
If that doesn't help us understand the holy earth as our home and challenge us to love it and honor it and manage it responsibly, protect it and hand it on to our children and their children, then may 1 suggest you find a tree and look up into its spreading branches.
Joyce Kilmer's poem Trees is known to most of us, well at least the first
phrase:
