You can find a video of this sermon here.
March 12, 2023, Christ Presbyterian Church - Luke 12: 22-31
Sometime in the early 1970s, I went off to an individual retreat during the summer at what was then Campion High School in Prairie du Chien along the Mississippi River. I spent time reading, praying, talking with a spiritual guide.
One of my texts for the retreat was Psalm 103. Part way through are these words: “As high as heaven is over the earth, so strong is God’s love to those who fear God. And as far as sunrise is from sunset, God has separated us from our sins.”
At the beginning of 2021, at the church that our daughter and son-in-law attend in Chicago - a place that became one of our spiritual homes online during the time of the pandemic - the pastor invited people there to choose a word from a list she offered that would help shape their year ahead.
I picked the word “branch.”
I liked the image of being connected to a tree with roots reaching deep into the earth. For me, the tree would be Jesus, the roots the vastness of creation. My branch reached out a bit, growing each year, giving life to leaves that draw from the aquifer that runs below.
The branch holds steady through the seasons, emerging with the spring, offering shade in the summer, holding the colors of autumn and remaining in place even as the leaves fall away.
Of course a strong wind can take down a branch, so being a bit flexible in the midst of the storms helps. Letting nutrients flow helps with that flexibility. And then growth – slow, steady, continuous – adds strength.
The picture that you see on here has become a vital image for me, connecting my life, the creation around me and God. It’s a picture by one of my favorite photographers, Bryan Hansel of Grand Marais, Minn.
The branches are framed by the starlit sky – stars that stretch out far beyond what I can see, surrounding me with the glory of creation, reminding me that I am just a small being in an enormous universe, all shaped and sustained by a divine energy.
“Consider the ravens,” Jesus told his disciples. “Consider the lilies, how they grow.”
Jesus walked through nature all the time, resting under the stars, watching the birds soar overhead, seeing lilies bloom in the fields, praying among a grove of trees.
Augustine – the great Christian thinker who lived around the year 400 – once wrote: “Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Note it. Read it.”
That was the first articulation of what became known as the “two books theory” of coming to know God. Madison resident Daniel Cooperrider has a new book called Speak With the Earth and It Will Teach You where he explores how this might work in our time as he takes hikes into mountains and walks along rivers and wonders how we might change the world by remembering to learn from it.
In our time, when we are all vividly aware of the impact climate change is having on our lives – and on the lives of those living in more vulnerable situations – I think there is wisdom in that idea of reading the created world around us and noting what we might do to protect its livability not just for ourselves but for generations to come.
Let me reach back to a moment to someone with roots both among Presbyterian and Wisconsin ancestors. His name is John Muir. He was raised in a strict Scottish Presbyterian home near Portage and attended the University of Wisconsin starting in 1860.
Muir is a huge presence in the nation’s understanding of its natural environment, but we also know that his life was complicated by initially horrific attitudes towards the indigenous people who lived here first and the Africans brought here as slaves. His attitudes tempered in time, but are still part of his legacy, because we are a complicated people after all.
For now, though, I’d like to focus on how Muir found new ways to connect to God through nature. This is a brief clip from a brand new video our own Scott Wilson made exploring the spiritual history of the University of Wisconsin. Rebecca Crooks is the narrator.
Think about those words of John Muir: “God’s love covers all the earth as the sky covers it. And this love has voices heard by all who have ears to hear.”
John Muir was reading the book of creation. That, in turn, sustained him as he sought ways to expand the nation’s appreciation for and preservation of the earth on which we live.
There’s a contemporary story from UW as well. Some of you may know Cal DeWitt, who taught environmental science for many years as UW-Madison and has been one of the leading voices in the faith-based movement for creation care.
Here’s another brief clip from Scott’s video:
“Behold the earth through the eye of its maker.” What a wonderful phrase that ties together our exploration of the natural world and our call to protect it for generations to come.
Cal DeWitt was one of the advisors who helped shape publication of what is called The Green Bible.
This is a regular New Revised Standard Version translation of the Bible, but with phrases related to the natural world printed in green. At the beginning are ten essays from Jewish and Christian authors on how to live in ways that care for God’s creation. One of them is by Cal DeWitt, where he writes, “The Bible turns out to be a powerful ecological handbook on how to live rightly on the earth.”
Of course, the problem that we face today is that we are not living rightly on the earth.
You all know the litany of climate change impacts – rising temperatures, more violent storms, enormous fires, drought, floods, the glaciers receding, the oceans rising.
We here in Wisconsin can often seem pretty isolated from all this. Yes, our winters are less cold than a few decades ago, but it’s pretty clear that we still have winters. Water is abundant. Our four seasons are still well defined. People talk about our state as one of the places that will grow in desirability as other parts of the nation reel from climate change.
We are not free of the impacts, though. And we know that every part of our world has a part to play in countering the causes of that lead to climate change. We are all truly connected.
Beyond looking out for ourselves, I believe one of the messages from Jesus is that we are called to look out for each other. And it is the most vulnerable people in our world that will suffer the most from climate change.
Yes, some expensive homes along the shore in Florida eventually may be under water. But the horrific impacts are going to fall on struggling people in nations all around the globe.
Our own Angie Dickens recently gave a presentation to a group called 350 Wisconsin on the connections between climate change and migration. Rising sea levels, droughts, food scarcity are all contributing to migration that is hugely destructive of individual lives but also destabilizing to so many nations.
These are stunning numbers she cited from a report by the World Bank:
By the year 2050 – that’s only 27 years away – 40 million people in South Asia will have been forced to migrate within their own county. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of those internal migrants will be 86 million. Our neighbors in Latin America will see 17 million internal migrants. Of course, migrants who ultimately leave that region tend to seek refuge in the United States.
And here, in the U.S., we are looking at some 13 million Americans forced to relocate due to sea level rise. That’s five times the size of the Dust Bowl migration in the 1930s.
All of this makes me want to shout out the first words of Psalm 69:
Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold;
I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.
I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched.
Whew!
There are lots of ideas about what we as individuals, as communities, as a nation, as a world can do to offset the pace of climate change and adapt to its impacts. I’m not going to recite those today. You can find many good sources of information for those.
What I want to consider is where we might find the hope we need to carry us forward.
I can sit and revel under a starlit sky. I can walk down to the shore of Lake Mendota. I can watch as the sandhill cranes set up a nest in the pond near our home. I can appreciate the beauty of this earth, give thanks to God, read the book of nature alongside the books of the Bible. It all makes me want to do something that will sustain our futures.
But then I read about National Public Radio host Ari Shapiro asking author Michael Pollen – known for his books about plants and food and the human relationship with the natural world – why Pollen had not written a book about climate change.
Pollen’s response?
He likes to write books that give people hope and he doesn’t know how to do that with climate change.
That’s not an uncommon feeling. So one of the things we can do as a congregation of followers of Jesus is to think about who we are becoming with the earth, to think about how we can make a difference in the effort to slow down climate change, how we can give ourselves and others hope. Because without hope, we will all be stuck.
To do that, first we need faith. Listen to the words farther along in Psalm 69, which began waters up to our necks and our feet stuck in the mire:
I will praise the name of God with a song; I will magnify God with thanksgiving.
Let the oppressed see it and be glad; you who seek God, let your hearts revive.
For the Lord hears the needy and does not despise God’s own who are in bonds.
We are not doing this alone. God is at our side.
To act, we need love – love for the world as we experience its beauty, love for our fellow human beings as together we look out for each other. Love is at the core of being followers of Jesus. After all, they will know we are Christians by our love.
To act, we need hope. And that’s when I turn to Katherine Hayhoe.
“Hope has two beautiful daughters,” he wrote. “Their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”
Hayhoe quotes UW-Madison ecologist Rick Lindroth as saying he is hopeful because of his kids who are taking the challenges of climate change seriously. That is an answer she hears from many people. Then she adds, “Our hope isn’t based on an expectation that they will fix it for us. Rather, we want to fix it for them.”
She acknowledges that success in slowing down climate change is not inevitable. That’s where the courage Augustine wrote about comes in. And hope – well, we need to find that in the things happening around and within us that make protecting the earth possible.
Hayhoe writes about making hope a practice – recognizing reality, identifying what we hope for, then taking steps in that direction, even if we are not sure we have it all figured out. “Together,” Hayhoe concludes, “we can save ourselves.”
At the beginning of this reflection, I talked about sitting under a tree sensing the presence of among the stars, being inspired by the role branches play for a tree and how they can be a metaphor for my life.
This is my granddaughter Ellie. She is 19 months old. She delights in new discoveries about the world every day. Here I see her reaching out into the future.
One of my tasks is to work to protect that future for her. One of all of our tasks is to protect that future for all of our children and grandchildren, for all of today’s children living in every part of our globe.
So we need to touch the earth lightly as we live. The song I am going to invite you to sing is based on a Celtic melody, which fits into one of the threads running through our time together today. The words “touch the earth lightly, use the earth gently” speak to the task before us.
Please join in as we sing this global hymn that comes to us from New Zealand.
