By Rev. Paul Graves, preached at Earth Ministry’s 17th Annual Celebration of St. Francis: Creation-Care Sermon Contest on October 1, 2011.
On the 4th of July, my wife and I visited our son and his family at their rural home just outside of Spokane, WA. They live on 1 acre of land in a housing development. As I stepped out onto the back deck, I saw 2 horses grazing on the back half of the property.
I was surprised because our family doesn’t own horses. But their neighbors do. So our kids had arranged to have the horses graze on the property from time to time. This little story is the genesis of my sermon title: “Did Francis Have a Weed-whacker?”
The quick answer must be “no”, at least if we think of the weed-whackers we use on our lawns and acreages.
But when we let our imaginations out to play a little, we can see Francis watching horses, goats and other creatures munching their way around the open fields as he walked south down the dusty roads from Assisi to Rome.
There were no manicured lawns in the 1200’s. Life was very primitive compared to what we know today. But people lived their daily lives as they could. They cared for their land and their livestock as they were able. Francis and the men and women he invited to join him in both the Order of Franciscans and the Order of Poor Clare, responded to life as they were able. They were response-able.
The call for us to be response-able for the stewardship of our world is growing in volume and in intensity. The very survival of God’s earth demands that we do our part, our share, to protect and restore its vitality. We are called to respond to earth’s many crises as we are able. The call is not a timid whisper for only those who are “willing” to do something. I’ve not yet found the word “respons-a-will-ity” in any dictionary.
Willingness to respond is fine and dandy. But to depend only on those who are “willing” to respond whittles the work force down considerably everywhere we look – in our churches, in our communities, in our counties, our state legislatures, our national government and even internationally.
So we can drive ourselves crazy in the effort to turn those who are “able” into those who are also “willing” to respond to the creation crises we face.
I live in Sandpoint, ID. We are on the northern shore of 43-mile-long Lake Pend Oreille and at the base of Schweitzer Mountain Ski Resort. People are known to move to our area just so they can enjoy the year-round natural beauty.
As is true in most areas like ours, we have people who are able and willing to not only enjoy the natural wonders of Bonner County, but also to work hard to conserve and to responsibly manage our water sources and our forests. So there is a variety of non-profit conservation groups. They do good work.
But these groups, and hundreds like them in the Pacific Northwest – Earth Ministry for one — run the great risk of burning themselves out. Yet don’t we too often insist we must do all this work by ourselves? If not us, who will do it? If not now, when will it be too late to do the healing work?
Without much effort, we can develop a serious case of works righteousness. Ironically, that could block those who are able from also being willing to join us in whatever is the crisis du jour. We seem to be trapped in a “tyranny of the moment.” Our sense of urgency is so strong, but that too often combines with the hubris that only we can save our planet.
One result? We find it difficult to see solutions beyond our own. Is this where we might use the cliché, “You can’t see the forest for the trees”? Perhaps it is. If we feel overwhelmed by all of the trees around us, we don’t let ourselves step back far enough to get a better look at the forest, the Big View.
Yet when we do, our memories also begin to come back to us.
Among other things, we might remember that creation has been groaning since the beginning, not just in the last few hundred years that humankind has been messing with it.
We do well to remember God calls us to respond to nature as its partner. That means nature has its own rhythms and mysteries that we are called to honor. That means we are not called to control the natural world but to respectfully live in it and with it.
We are able — and hopefully more willing — to do that in more healing ways when we also remember that we didn’t create the world. But we do now have the capacity to destroy the world.
Francis didn’t have a weed-whacker like we have. But he responded to God’s creation as he was able, and left what he wasn’t able to do to God. As he should have.
That may be another thing we have forgotten. With our technical ingenuity and our innate self-centeredness running amuck, we seem to think we are more God-like than Francis likely ever thought himself to be. Contrary to the way we most often live our lives, we need to remember that God is still — in charge! And we are still able to respond as God always calls us to respond: with changed hearts.
The wonderfully radical Franciscan priest Richard Rohr published a new book recently. It’s called Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. He speaks of responding to God’s call this way: “Strangely, all of life’s problems, dilemmas, and difficulties are now (meaning in the 2nd half of life) resolved not by negativity, attack, criticism, force or logical resolution, but always by falling into a larger ‘brightness.’… This is the falling upward that we have been waiting for!
(Rohr continues:) “One of the guiding principles of our Center for Action and Contemplation puts it this way: ‘The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.’ I learned this from my father St. Francis, who did not concentrate on attacking evil or others, but just spent his life falling, and falling many times into the good, the true, and the beautiful. (I would add not the good, the bad & the ugly) It was the only way he knew how to fall into God.”
Regardless of our chronological ages or our spiritual ages, Father Rohr offers wise counsel. My hunch is that deeply changed hearts may lead to more imaginative, collaborative strategies in our efforts to re-energize those parts of creation we are able to change.
Creation care is a shared work of our spirits. But we must allow our spirits to BE changed deeply, before we can DO deep change.