By Rev. John Helmiere, preached at Earth Ministry’s 16th Annual Celebration of St. Francis: Creation-Care Sermon Contest on October 2, 2010. Rev. Helmiere may be contacted through www.valleyandmountain.org.
Good afternoon, sisters and brothers. Imagine with me that you’re walking in the Cascades one day and you come across a brass object in the undergrowth. At first, you’re annoyed to find that someone hasn’t been following Leave No Trace principles, but then you notice that it’s actually a brass lamp, so of course pick it up & give it a rub.
Predictably, a genie pops out of the lamp and says he’ll grant you a wish. Unpredictably, the genie claims that his wish-granting powers are limited to influencing the faith-based environmental movement. So, let me ask you: what would you request? What one concept would you like to see gain currency and become mainstream?
At one time, I would have wanted all Christians to embrace the ethic of stewardship. After all “earth steward” is humanity’s original vocation, the very first job description given to us in the Creation Narration of Genesis 1. At another time in my life, I would have wished that all Christians would accept the call to pursue eco-justice. As more of us discover that environmental degradation hits marginalized peoples hardest, we can no longer disregard ecological concerns when fulfilling our Scriptural mandate to work for justice. Truly, in a culture that promotes an ethic of isolated self-interest and heralds a call to unbridled consumption, the ethic of stewardship and the calling to pursue eco-justice must become contemporary hallmarks of the Christian counter-culture.
Yet, if I found that Genie today, there’s something else that I would want to embed at the core of faith-based environmentalism.
I would wish for this “other thing” because in the past few years I have persistently preached about stewardship and eco-justice and their subsequent demands and sacrifices. And I have found that the structures of stewardship and eco-justice need to be built on an ultimately more life-giving, inspiring foundation.
To put it another way, too often we who are zealous for mass behavioral and value-systems change, we who have become aware of the ecologically disastrous trajectory we are on, we preach and live as though consumed by a demonic vision of environmental doom instead of enraptured by a beatific vision of ecological resplendence! Compared to the stewardship ethic and eco-justice calling, this “other thing” is even more fundamental, more deeply built into human nature, and more evocative, poetic, and prior to any action that we might take.
It is an attitude …. of wonder.
It is an invitation to reverence.
What I would ask my genie for is to infuse the global Church with a perspective of dumb-struck, flabbergasted awe.
Let’s hear a few Biblical passages, just a few, to get a flavor of this attitude:
[read by various members of the congregation]
From Psalm 8: When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?
From Psalm 104: O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. Yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great.
From Psalm 145: On the glorious splendor of your majesty, and on your wondrous works, I will meditate.
The writers of these passages eloquently express the experience of rapturous encounter with God through her numinous creation. Biblical authors frequently called this experience: “the fear of the Lord.” It is the healthy kind of fear we feel in the face of the unknown, the unimaginably complex, the uncontrollable. It is born out of acknowledging our finitude and our limits, and it keeps us humble, human, and hubris-free.
Some folks seem to think that science has taken the mystery out of the natural world. Yet, when I recall my first college astronomy course with an eminent physicist named Marcelo Gleiser, I remember his voice dripping with awe and amazement as he spoke of the widths of galaxies, the diameters of atoms, and the age of the universe.
In the off chance that you might need to be reminded of some causes for a holy fear, let me take a moment to share with you just a few.
It seems that the Universe burst into existence about 14 billion years ago from a single point of unfathomable energy. Was anything happening one second before that? What is the Universe growing into?
These are questions which boggle the mind and which will probably always will.
Are you inspired by a holy wonder when you contemplate the possibility that every atom (out of which you, I, and everything you’ve ever sensed are made) just might be composed of tiny vibrating strings?
This is called string theory and it contends that the tone (the musical note) at which these strings vibrates determines what kind of thing they will make up. So, perhaps we human beings and all of the rest of Creation are made up of tiny little symphonies!!!
On a more tangible level, are you mystified by the cycles of life, death, and rebirth that permeate our planetary home?
For example, resurrection is the daily task carried out by countless red wriggler worms who transubstantiate what some call trash into nutrient-rich soil, from which springs new life. Friends, this is the Universe we inhabit. Our spectacular, jaw-dropping home! Yet… so frequently we fail to ground our stewardship and eco-justice work in this attitude of wonder.
There’s this great Calvin and Hobbes comic strip where Calvin says:
“Isn’t it weird that scientists can imagine all the matter of the universe exploding out of a dot smaller than the head of a pin but they can’t come up with a more evocative name for it than “the Big Bang?”
Hobbes says, well “What would you have called the creation of the Universe?”
Calvin pauses, strikes a pose, and says: “The Horrendous Space Kablooie!”
Calvin is speaking with the voice that religious people ought to be using.
We, who say we’ve been touched by the Author of the Horrendous Space Kablooie, should be gazing out at the stars in the vast expanse of space, clapping our hands, and saying “Bravo, Bravo!”
We, who claim to have encountered the Divine Composer, should be hearing angelic music in the creak of the swaying cedar and song of the thrush and joining our voices in their canticle of praise!
We should be plunging our hands into the ground, where our subterranean partners transform our trash into fertile earth, and proclaiming “Glory, Hallelujah!”
Certainly, we must educate ourselves about stewardship and EJ, and put energy and time into doing them. But, if all we do tally the many ways in which we harm the earth and guilt ourselves into minimizing them, then we’ll likely end up as eco-Pharisees: wearing ourselves out with an unending agenda of tasks, breaking our backs under the burden of environmental shame, and trading in reverence for rules.
So, instead let us undergird our advocacy, our behavioral change, and our sacrifices, with an attitude of awesome fear that we cultivate through contemplating and celebrating our glorious home.
For only when reducing becomes redemptive,
When re-using becomes reverential,
When simplicity becomes sacred,
When composting becomes consecrated,
When biking becomes blessed,
When diet becomes devotional,
And when advocacy becomes adoration…
Only then we will be living into the true and complex calling of our God,
the Author of the Horrendous Space Kablooie.