Nehemiah 1:1-4, 2:1-6, 11-20
Psalm 92 or 111
Mark 1:16-20
Ephesians 3:8-12
It is a pleasure to worship with you today and participate in this beautiful service in the midst of a community that clearly loves the earth and takes seriously its responsibility to it.
I have been thinking a lot lately about a provocative book I read a few years ago by priest and prophet Thomas Berry. The book is called The Great Work. In it, Berry suggests that “history is governed by those overarching movements that give shape and meaning to life by relating the human venture to the larger destinies of the universe. Creating such a movement might be called the Great Work of a people.” He goes on to list some of the great works – the Great Works of Classical Greece, of Rome, of China, India and the First Peoples of the United States.
Berry then tells us that our time and our generation have great work to do. He describes this work as carrying out the transformation of a civilization, overseeing “the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.”
Thomas Berry calls this our “privileged moment.” To participate in it, is our moment of grace. He goes on to say that this is not a role we have chosen but rather one given to us by the “power beyond ourselves.”
If we accept this great work, he says, and make fundamental changes in our lifestyles, our economic system and our political priorities, then the planet survives and flourishes. If we do not accept this great work, we risk at best an uncertain future for us, our children, our grandchildren, not to mention all the millions of God’s other beloved creatures. And at worst, we risk global chaos beyond our imagination.
I believe that the church is called to this great work. This is the church’s moment of grace. That moment when we humbly acknowledge that God’s provision through creation is a wondrous gift, one that we are called to be grateful for and to protect and restore for the benefit of all of God’s beloved creation. This is our privileged moment.
Should this truly be the church’s great work? In the face of widespread economic injustice, horrific poverty, the spread of virulent disease, serious human rights issues, should caring for the earth really be the church’s highest priority? Where we give our concerted energy, our most consistent financial support, our highest political priority?
In 2005, several distinguished theologians wrote an “Open Letter to Church and Society,” saying that care of God’s creation is “the central moral imperative of our time,” and can no longer be just a competing program alternative. And why? Because all of our church priorities, from poverty to social justice to disease to war, are intertwined in, and interrelated with, a healthy home planet.
Consider for a moment Wangari Maathai, the effervescent, irrepressible 67 year-old Kenyan woman, who won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. She won the peace prize not by negotiating a complicated truce between warring nations, but by encouraging local women to plant trees. Her Green Belt Movement has resulted in the planting of 30 million trees in ravaged forests in Kenya and beyond. It has also resulted in increased agricultural output because of decreased erosion, created over 10,000 jobs primarily for women, thereby increasing their economic and personal power, and has dramatically increased the amount of firewood available to all.
In receiving the prize, Maathai said “the environment is very important in the aspects of peace because when we destroy our resources and our resources become scarce, we fight over them.” In presenting the prize to “Kenya’s green militant,” as she is called, the head of the Nobel Committee said “we have added a new dimension to the concept of peace.”
Planting trees for peace.
Closer to home, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it is now clear that decisions to spend decades straightening the Mississippi and destroying wetlands in the name of commerce had devastating consequences for the poorest and most marginalized among us. The poor will always suffer first from environmental destruction.
If we accept then this great work of helping to bring God’s beloved creation back into wholeness, where can we possibly begin? It’s overwhelming, isn’t it? We ask ourselves: how can one person really make a difference? Is there anything I can do that is really significant? And, how can I possibly find the time for one more thing?
As I wrestle with these very real challenges, I recall a recent article in Newsweek magazine. According to the article, scientists now believe the first humans were quite a bit smaller than we had thought -- 3 to 5 feet tall, no more than 100 pounds. Interestingly, skulls that have been found from these early humans have been marked by large holes and what appear to be long talon marks, suggesting that we were a little farther down the food chain than we have traditionally imagined.
The fact that we were probably hunted down by large raptors and huge beasts of prey calls into question the view that we survived evolution because we could out-muscle all of our competitors. Unlike those at the top of the food chain, prey populations tend to survive because they learn to work collectively. We may well owe our very survival to our ability to work together.
The great work of the church is an extension of this early human insight. When we gather together and act towards a common purpose, we will survive, and we will flourish.
After God instructed Nehemiah to re-build the wall around Jerusalem, Nehemiah did not go out and start gathering stones to begin the building. What he did do was to start gathering the community. “You see the trouble we are in,” he began (Nehemiah 2:17). He explained that God had called him to call them to this work. And the community’s response: “Let’s start building” (Nehemiah 2:18).
I have found myself thinking about Jesus in this regard. After his baptism in the Jordan that began his ministry, the very first thing he did was to establish a community around him, albeit a rag-tag often obtuse group of guys. To do his own transformative work in the world, his Great Work, even Jesus needed friends, compatriots, a team, what my husband calls his “posse,” his community, his church.
And after Jesus’ death, the Disciples, who were grief-stricken, discouraged, hopeless, gathered together to grieve. And after a time and after the spiritual renewal of Pentecost, what did they do? They started forming new churches. And as we know, Christianity spread throughout Asia Minor and beyond.
Why did they form new churches? We know through Acts that these churches were established to spread the good news of Jesus Christ. But the author of the letter to the Ephesians gets to another point. The author says that “through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities” (Ephesians 3:10). A bold statement, given that the rulers and the authorities at the height of the Roman Empire were working very hard to snuff out the fledgling new Christian religion.
I believe that this is the church’s great work, our privileged moment – to make known to the rulers and authorities and to society at large that this great earth, this holy creation, our home planet is in grave danger, and we need to, and indeed can, make bold, swift, deep changes in our individual and collective behavior.
Now we know that churches are far from perfect. And I’m guessing some of you might have some ambivalence about the church. But this very human, flawed institution has also been at the center of many, if not most, of the major social movements in history. The church has challenged slavery, poverty, human rights violations, racism and injustice. And now, churches on the left and the right, mainline and radical fringe, are beginning to tackle the ecological challenge.
This great work is at its core a counter-cultural movement. Like salmon, we are swimming upstream against a cultural understanding that our happiness is somehow inextricably linked with the accumulation of material wealth. Our consumer economy supports this view by valuing consumption while ignoring the costs of this consumption to the natural world.
Churches are places where we come together with shared values, draw conclusions and act outside of the cultural norm. In church we can answer Martin Luther King’s call to become “transformed nonconformists.”
We are unique in this important way. We do not need to worry about our next election. We do not need to concern ourselves with profit margins. We do not need to sell newspapers.
We come together to challenge the status quo, to question the assumptions of the economic and political and cultural systems in which we find ourselves, to hold politicians, businesspeople, the media and ourselves accountable to the health of the God’s beloved creation. Here, together, we can speak the truth.
And we can face the truth. We are bombarded with reminders that our earth home is in serious trouble. They make us anxious. Nervous. Afraid. Churches give us a place to process together the grief and the fear and the anxiety and the shame that we feel towards the earth.
And importantly, church is also that place where we can find hope.
And there are reasons to be hopeful. There seems to be an awakening worldwide to the problems of the planet. Time, Newsweek, The Economist, Vanity Fair and even Sports Illustrated have had recent covers on climate change. Even Oprah is getting into the act. Last spring she had a show dedicated to
“Oprah’s Favorite Green Things.”
Paul Hawken, who is an environmental author and speaker, collects business cards from people after his speeches and keeps them in bags in his closet. And every now and again when he gets discouraged, he dumps them out on his kitchen table to remind himself of the vast numbers of individuals and groups working around the world to help safeguard God’s creation.
Hawken estimates that over one million organizations, or possibly two, are out there working away. He says: “this is the largest social movement in all of history, no one knows its scope. . . tens of millions of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world . . . this movement is relentless and unafraid. It cannot be mollified, pacified, or suppressed. . . and I believe it will prevail.”
I do, too.
And there’s more good news. Those changes that we all will need to make for the planet might just be good for us as well. Imagine. Simpler lives. Slower lives.
There’s a new book out called More Fun, Less Stuff: A Starter Kit. The promo for it warns: “This Starter Kit contains subversive material. If you follow the directions it contains, your life . . . may change dramatically for the better.”
There is indeed good news to tell and reason to hope. And churches can be containers and conduits and communicators of the good news.
So, how do we do this great work?
Over the next few months, your eco-justice committee will be confronting this very question -- meeting and praying, trying to discern discrete ways in which Rock Spring can participate in this great work. I know that you are also going through a comprehensive strategic planning process that offers opportunities to think through this question in an integrated and thoughtful way.
In consideration of Rock Spring’s role in this great transformation, it might be helpful to turn once more to Thomas Berry who says that “we must believe that those powers that assign our role must in that same act bestow upon us the ability to fulfill this role.” We trust that God will give us the skills, the intellect, the strength, the patience, to participate in this privileged moment.
And, while we are called to join this great transformation, it might comfort us to remember that this work is ultimately not our work, but God’s work. Nehemiah played an important role in getting the wall construction started, but ultimately the success of the project was not up to him. After some local officials mocked him and the community for their work, Nehemiah responded: “The God of heaven is the one who will give us success, and we his servants are going to start building” (Nehemiah 2:20).
So, we proceed humbly, trusting that, if we are open to it, God will give us success in this great work of our civilization, this great work of the church. And, as God’s servants, we need only start.