Outside religion

Isaiah 40:21-31
Psalm 147:1-12, 21c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Mark 1:29-39 

One of the things I hear a lot in my profession is some version of the statement: “I don’t come to church because I experience God in nature.”  And I’m not the only one who hears this--I was at an interfaith gathering of clergy recently, and one of the participants was talking about a prospective new member of her congregation, one of those most rare and highly prized of creatures, a young male who comes to church.  She told us that during a recent conversation with him he’d been explaining his resistance to getting more involved and used the “I find God in nature” line—in this case while scuba diving.  There was an outburst of groans and shaking of heads around the circle.  “How unique!” cried out another pastor sarcastically, “I’ve never heard that before.”

I knew how she felt, but I also wondered to myself if there might be some better way to respond.  Because the truth is, nature is a good place to find God.  Many of my own most profound experiences of holiness have come outside; outside the artificially-lit, socially-constructed human world.  Haven’t we all had our moments of awe at the beauty and intricacy of the wild creatures, the round of the seasons, the grandeur of the mountains, the sea, or the sky?  Haven’t they spoken to us of a greater wholeness, a majestic presence to which we are in some way related?  So why belittle those who testify to the power of such experiences to move them to reverence?  It seems to me that as religious men and women in a secular age we ought to be celebrating transcendence wherever it shows up in people’s lives.  In a time when the human race casts a long shadow over the future of the earth, we ought to be affirming the sacred meaning and value of our connection with nature.

And if we feel that such moments of solitary communion do not make for a complete religion, we ought to be able to do better than to just get grumpy.  We ought to be able to begin a conversation on the common ground of our own experiences of finding God outside. Maybe we could ask people to tell us what those moments have taught them and how they inform the way they live every day.  Maybe we could give an account of what we have learned from them, and how they fit into a larger pattern of religious faith and ethics and practice.  It may not always work, but it seems worth a try.

Because I have a hunch that even the most confirmed nature mystic has found from time to time that right at the heart of the experience of the magnificent sunset or the thundering waterfall is a uniquely sharp kind of loneliness.  In part it is the loneliness of realizing that there is no way to communicate the experience to others.  Any words you could say, or picture you could draw, or photograph you could take would be inadequate to convey what you perceived at that moment, even to a lover or an intimate friend.  And there is also the loneliness of realizing how out of accord our everyday lives are with the harmonious and sacred order of God’s creation.  We come back from that day-hike or that vacation in peaceful natural surroundings and find ourselves in the midst of noise, waste, haste, confusion, competition, and struggle.     

You don’t have to have an overly romantic and idealized view of nature, or an overly jaded view of human society to recognize that things are failing to connect up in some very important ways.  And that is one way of explaining what biblical religion is about.   Because the bible is very clear that the God who orders heaven and earth in beauty and harmony, and the God who acts in history to liberate, to redeem and restore humanity are the same God. 

That is what the passage we read from Isaiah today is arguing.  “Have you not known?” the prophet says, “Have you not heard?”  It is God “who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in.”  It is God “who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.”  It is God who numbers the stars and calls them by name, and it is God who gives “power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.” God is the creator and sustainer of humankind and does so along with, and through, the goodness of the natural order, which testifies to his wisdom and power.

If human society does not reflect the harmony of God’s creation, if the goods of the earth are not shared equally but are hoarded by some and denied to others, if carelessness and greed are making a world that is violent and ugly, toxic to life and menacing to the future, it can only be in the spirit of rebellion against God.  The harsh language of the bible that is so distasteful to our contemporary ears, and leads so many people to dismiss it as the work of weird fanatics, comes out of grief, horror, and anger at that rebellion and the destruction it has caused.  The bible does not let us rest easy about the consequences of a life out of harmony with God’s work and God’s will.  But it never despairs.  It never loses faith in God’s purpose for us, the purpose that was there at the beginning.  And it never loses hope that God is able, that God is active, that God is sending another spirit to heal the spirit of rebellion in our souls and recreate us, a spirit of truth, of wisdom, of holiness and peace.

The New Testament is the good news about that Spirit, as it breaks forth into the human world in the person of Jesus Christ.  We have been reading in the Gospel of Mark about the first day of his public ministry.   It was a Sabbath day, the day of the completion of creation, and he began it at the synagogue, teaching with authority and casting out an unclean spirit.  In the Jewish reckoning of time the day ends at sundown, and immediately when the Sabbath is over the residents of Capernaum go to work, bringing the sick and the demon-haunted to Jesus to be healed. 

We don’t learn when he finally goes to sleep, but he is up again in the darkness long before dawn.  He goes out alone to a deserted place, where we can imagine him standing and gazing up into the heavens and drinking in the immensity of the universe.  We can imagine him listening to the silent music of the stars and feeling his whole being vibrate with the same song.  We can imagine his heart uniting with them in joy and praise and love for the creator of all this wondrous beauty.  And in this moment he renews his will to go out and to preach to as many people as he possibly can that the same creator is coming now to act in their lives.   He knows himself again full of the Spirit of the one he loves as Father, and he steels his resolve to confront the spirit that condemns and excludes and dominates, that fears and hates, wherever it may be at work.

In Jesus we see that the solitary encounter with God in nature has the purpose of sending us back to the human community, to find God there.  That is where our real work is.  It is there that the language of religious tradition helps us make meaning of our private moments of religious experience (which are, after all, only moments).  Religious practice extends the influence of these experiences into the choices we make and the actions we take day after day after day.    The common ground of scripture, of liturgy, of applied ethics and mutual concern, gives us a starting point for community.  It gives us a place to stand together, and a place to hold each other accountable for what it is we claim to have learned about God when we went scuba diving, or backpacking, or made that spiritual retreat.  In place of a lonely epiphany that cannot be communicated, religion gives us the proclamation of the Gospel, the shared experience of God’s love for us all.

Nothing but our bodies

Exodus 3:1-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28

In the last week, 381 people have been arrested at a sit-in in front of the White House.  The two-week protest, which has been interrupted by Hurricane Irene, is to urge the President to block the construction of a 2,000 mile pipeline that would bring an oily slurry from the Tar Sands of Alberta to refineries in Texas.  The demonstrators are opposed to the pipeline because its route passes through many ecologically-sensitive areas, and because of the destructive nature of the Tar Sands project itself, the largest industrial project in human history, which has strip-mined hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin forest and poisoned millions of acre-feet of fresh water.   But their most serious concern is the impact of the project on the global climate.  Tar Sands oil is one of the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, producing up to 20% more greenhouse gases than conventional crude oil.  Proceeding with the extraction and consumption of this resource, warns Dr. James Hansen, the nation’s leading atmospheric scientist, means “game over” for any hope of stabilizing the earth’s climate.

And so people have been going to the White House to make a statement and risk arrest.  Sometimes it happens that a need, an injustice, a threat to peace and order will take hold of our conscience and we realize that it is up to us to do something.  Sometimes the proper channels, the approved grievance procedures are not enough.   Sometimes we have to show up right where it’s happening and say, “this has to stop.”  Bill McKibben, an author and professor and Methodist Sunday school teacher from Vermont, is a spokesperson for the organizers of the sit-in.  In an interview after his release from prison on Monday, he described the political power and vast wealth of the interests lobbying for the construction of this pipeline.  “We don’t have the money to compete with those guys,” McKibben said.   “All we have, the only alternative currency we have, is our bodies. And that’s what we’re using.”

When Moses meets God in the burning bush, God tells him “I have heard the cry of the Israelites and seen how the Egyptians’ oppress them.   I have come down to deliver them and to bring them out of that land.”  That sounds pretty good to Moses.  Moses knows all about that oppression, he cares deeply about it.  He’s even killed a man trying to do something about it, which is why he’s on the lam out there in the desert.    But then God tells Moses, “Now you go do it.”  God’s wants to get involved in the Israelites situation, but it is Moses who has to go there, to stand before Pharaoh and do the talking.   No wonder Moses protests.

And no wonder Peter protests when Jesus starts talking about going to Jerusalem.  Peter is probably all for going to Jerusalem, but not yet.   Not until they’ve gathered an army and trained themselves to fight.   Not with nothing but their bodies.  Not in order to die.   Peter also probably wasn’t thinking about going to Jerusalem to confront the chief priests and the elders and the scribes of his people.  He was probably thinking about the foreign occupiers, the real oppressors, the Romans, about how to throw them out, and of course he was thinking  about how to do that and still be around when it was done, to mete out rough justice and settle old scores. 

 But Jesus was thinking about something else.  He was thinking about Israel and Israel’s God.   He was thinking about the Father in heaven whose children are the peace-makers.  He was thinking about the kingdom of heaven, and how it belongs to the poor in spirit. He was thinking about the law and the prophets, and the light to the nations and the city on a hill.  And he was thinking about the temple in Jerusalem, and how the worship of God had been reduced to an endless butchery of animals, and rigid enforcement of the rules of ritual purity.  He was thinking of the elites in charge of the temple system and how they’d twisted a religion of justice and compassion into one of exclusion and control.  He was thinking of how they collaborated with the Romans one moment and plotted violent insurrection against them the next, always seeking their own advantage, only concerned with their own survival.   

Sometimes you have to go there yourself.  Sometimes you have to go right there where it’s happening and do something to show that it’s not okay with you.   Sometimes all you have to use is your body.   We are so used to thinking of Jesus’ willing journey to death as a metaphysical bargain between him and God, that we have a hard time seeing it as a human choice, as an ethical response to a historical problem.  But today’s story from Matthew reminds us that whatever spiritual benefit may come to us through Christ’s passion, it’s not something he did so that we wouldn’t have to do anything.  He went to Jerusalem to carry his cross so that we would know how to carry ours.

But he also knew from the start that on the other side was resurrection.   This is extremely important for us to remember.  Because Jesus didn’t go to his death because he hated life, or found that the world wasn’t worth staying in.  He went out of desire for real life, life in its fullness, which is getting involved in the love, compassion, and justice that are the life of God.  "The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet," wrote Frederick Buechner.  The mainspring of faithful action in the world is not duty, or guilt, but our joy in being alive.  This joy that is not taken away from us when we allow ourselves to be summoned into the places of injustice, suffering, and need, because it is the joy of giving from an inexhaustible source.   The teaching of Jesus is that we don’t really know how abundant that source is unless we are freely and joyfully willing to give away that little bit that we think of as ours.  To put it another way, you don’t really know what it means to love life if there’s nothing you’re willing to die for.

The last time there was any kind of consensus in this country about what is worth dying for was in the fight against Fascism.  We are proud to acknowledge the greatness of the generation that rose up to meet that challenge.  But that was 70 years ago, and now there are threats to the survival of our country and our civilization more dangerous than Fascism.  They’re not so easy to see, or so easy to defeat.  Their causes are complex and it doesn’t help that one of the main causes is the way we  all live every day, just going around minding our own business.  It also doesn’t help that the crisis is slow in slow in coming.  James Hansen first warned the U.S. about the danger of global warming in 1988, and yet people of my age or a little older might still be able to live out our days believing that he and 98 out of 100 of the world’s climate scientists are wrong.   We might be able to keep pretending that all the huge wildfires and epic droughts, the killer heat spells and hurricanes and floods and tornados are a run of bad luck, and soon life will return to normal.  But our children and grandchildren won’t have that luxury. 

So we’ll just have to do what needs to be done, because we love our children, and we want to leave them a world that still has more beauty in it than dread.  We want them to have a chance at something more than a grim and relentless struggle for survival.   We want them to be able to choose self-sacrifice from the nobility of their souls, not have it forced on them by iron necessity.  We love life, we have faith in the God of life, and his power to renew life and redeem it from fear, from selfish grasping, from death in all its guises.  So we’ll pick up this cross, and I think we’ll find it’s really no heavier than the ones our ancestors had to bear. 

We’ll go to where the world’s deep need calls us, now that it  is the need of the world herself for our care and concern.  Now we find that we must care for our mother earth as she has cared for us since life began, and there I think we will find a deep gladness, one so deep we scarcely have a language to describe it.   We’ll follow the call of Christ to where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger, and there we’ll begin to gather up the shattered pieces of the kingdom.

Look at the birds

Isaiah 49:8-16a
1 Corinthians 4:1-5
Matthew 6:24-34
Psalm 131

Last week I attended the annual conference of the ordained Clergy in our diocese.  The featured speaker was an academic specialist in what used to be called Christian Education, but is now more often called “Formation.”  Her presentation boiled down to a couple of ideas, neither of which was new to me.  I had heard these ideas and discussed them and even promoted them when I was in seminary.  I thought I had incorporated them into my world view.  So I was surprised when I had a strong emotional reaction to the conference program.  I experienced sadness, even despair, and gripping anxiety that kept me awake long after the portly priest I shared a room with had stopped snoring —anxiety about the future prospects for the church.

So what were these ideas?  The first is the broad historical narrative of a transition to “Post-Christendom.”   Basically this means that for about 15 hundred years, the church has served as an integral pillar of a society which was assumed to be completely and irreversibly Christian.  The church was the air that the people breathed and the water in which they swam.  Individual lives would wax and wane, and the church would be there to bless and give meaning to all the crucial thresholds of human experience--birth, coming of age, marriage, parenthood, and death.  But the church itself, and the social order of which it was the religious DNA, was as stable and eternal as the mountains.

But in a process that was slow and hard to see at first, all this began to change.   The pace of secularism, skepticism, pluralism and materialism which began advancing 500 years ago has picked up frightening speed in the last fifty.  In the modern West, there was a final surge of Christendom in the postwar boom of the 20^th century United States.  But that wave and its aftershocks are receding fast.  For the professional clergy, this phenomenon is a threat to their livelihood and to the survival of the institutions to which they have given their lives: Shrinking and aging congregations, diminished resources for staff and programming, fewer and fewer full-time stipendiary positions, and a general sense of social irrelevance. 

Maybe that’s why the conference made me so anxious.  It was one thing to talk about Post-Christendom when I was in seminary.  After all, I was not yet one of those who is supposed to know what to do about it.  It is quite another to sit with my colleagues, my fellow leaders of the Christian community, and listen to their heartfelt anguish about the challenges of sustaining a legacy fewer and fewer people seem to want.  And mingled in with their grief for the possibility of being the last elders of a vanishing tribe, was fear for their salaries, benefits, and pensions.

As I think we all know, anxiety about what we will eat and what we will wear is not limited to the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of Northern California.   And I hope you would agree that this is not just lack of faith.  For millions of people, this anxiety is not a spiritual failure, but is grounded in daunting material reality.  We live in a time when the economic system that is responsible for producing and distributing the necessities of life is largely failing.  Instead of offering people the means to realize a meaningful place in the social order, directed toward human development and the well-being of all, “the economy” seems more like a merciless juggernaut of cutthroat competition for a limited supply of goods, where one mistake or stroke of bad luck is enough to condemn a person to poverty or worse.

There are those who say that such an economy is inevitable.  Some say that is so because of the simple mathematics of an expanding population on a planet of limited size and carrying-capacity.  But there are others who find the cause in human nature.  We are inherently self-interested, this logic goes, and so the only possible economy, and the only one that is desirable, is one in which we struggle with one another in a ceaseless race to acquire more wealth and power for ourselves.  The winners and the losers, so it is said, deserve what they receive, for it is this struggle that tries and proves the moral worth of a person.   It is ironic that so many Christians, who bitterly fight against the teaching of Darwinism as a biological theory, uncritically champion it as a social one.  

These are not new ideas, not at their core, and Jesus explicitly rejects them when he says that no one can serve God and wealth.  There is no room in his teaching for the rationalizations that say it is God who made human beings greedy and covetous, and it is God who rewards hard work and thrift with prosperity.   According to Jesus, our material prosperity and creaturely survival does not depend on our work or our cunning but on the providence of God.  The correct model for our economic lives is not the farm or the factory, or even the “market”, but the wilderness. 

But the natural order that Jesus holds up as a demonstration of God’s will for us is not the “nature red in tooth and claw” of the Darwinian survival of the fittest.  It is the incredibly abundant world that the first European adventurers found when they came to the shores of San Francisco Bay: a sky black with clouds of migrating geese and ducks; the highest Grizzly bear population in the world feasting on the salmon that choked the creeks and rivers; oak trees bending under the weight of acorns that were cultivated with little more than carefully-set fires.

The second idea that we discussed at the Clergy Conference is that the fall of Christendom opens for us the opportunity to recover a deeper purpose, a more essential strand of our DNA.  This is the idea that the church came, as Jesus comes, for the sake of the people who are not on the inside.  The work of the church is to form disciples of Jesus Christ for the continuation of his mission.  His mission is to invite and incorporate people into the mission of God.  This mission is not about “growing the church” as a means to balance future budgets.  If it were, it would be service of Mammon, and deserving of failure.

Neither is it about converting heathen souls for citizenship in an otherworldly kingdom.  The Kingdom of God is at work wherever we go, and it is not divorced from the work we do every day, or Jesus would not have likened it to a man who went out sow seed, or woman who mixed yeast into her dough.  Christ’s body has a future because God has a future for the earth which is already present and visible for those with eyes to see it.  The future is the renewal of the abundance, beauty and harmony for which God created us.  This coming world is not simply the restoration of primal nature, the world as it was before the coming of human greed, violence, and folly.  It is Creation reverently beheld, tended, shared and offered to God by human intelligence, human desire, human will and labor, transformed by grace into that love and power we know as Christ. 

This new world has been revealed to us in a historic person, Jesus of Nazareth, who manifested it in word and deed, and gave his life to bring it to birth.  When Jesus says, “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you,” the “you” to which he speaks is plural.  This Gospel is not a summons to individualistic striving, as if to say, “if only I can think positive thoughts, do only good deeds, and tot up my ‘spiritual experiences’” I will have plenty.  It is the call to become a holy people.  It is the charter to become a new kind of nation, ruled by Christ’s dependence on God, his forgiveness and love and servanthood. 

The Kingdom of God is not the church.  But without the church, how will we train our eyes to see the at workings of the invisible God?  Without the church, how will we see sign that points the way to this new world?  How will we recognize the Body--taken, blessed, broken, and shared with the world?  

CALL FROM THE FUTURE

CALL FROM THE FUTURE
BARRY LOPEZ considers what is really being asked of us.
(O Magazine, April 2009, p. 156)

IT's NOT AS IF WE DON'T KNOW. EVEN
if we live in the inner city and can't manage
to get to the countryside, we understand
that reconnecting with what is subtle and
profound in nature can take some of the
burning out of our souls. And we know,
too, that global climate change is upon us,
indifferent to our fate and menacing on a
colossal scale.
The question now is no longer about the
old polarity between nature and culture.
The effects of nature and culture on us are
intertwined. Each lends something to the
other; together they sustain us. The better
question is: Where from here? How do we
react so smartly to the complex social and
natural threats before us that a stranger to
our planet, looking back at our history; will
be moved to call us a just, courageous, and
reverent people?
Establishing better ethical relations in
every quarter of our lives-political, social,
environmental-is arguably the starting
point, one that will require, first, an instinct
for reconciliation. Instead of the numbing
rhetoric of"us" and "them," we will have to
invent a new kind of "we." It's the "we" al-
ready welling up in many of us, born out of
empathy, out of genuine love for each other
and the Earth, and out of sober assessments
about our predicament. It's a grittier, less
jingoistic "we," born of hard work.
We hear too often now that times are
rough. Considering global climate change
alone, we can argue convincingly that, in
fact, we're in a far worse spot than those
who have come before us. There are threats
to our physical and mental well-being on
the horizon the like of which humanity has
known only in the most limited way. These
unanticipated developments -collapsing
ocean fisheries, the human disturbance of
viral ecologies, the accumulation of non-
biodegradable plastic- are, rather suddenly
a scary part of everyone's everyday life. And
our apprehension, too, is of a different order than, say,
the fears of Europeans during the spread of
the Black Death or of peasants throughout history;
living precariously before nature's forces and at
the whim of despots. It's an apprehension calling
for something untapped in us.
What we need is uncommonly mature
people. A kind of courage is required we've
not seen before, that "we" in us that wants
to make a simple bow of recognition, with-
out judgment, toward all other people
caught in the same travail, and then simply
to start the work. As individuals we can,
each of us, assess our own faiths and beliefs,
measure our stores of energy; take account
of our own pressing personal responsibili-
ties, and then respond, inventing together
another way of life, one less harmful, less
cruel than the one we have now
We risk trying one another's patience
when we put too fine a point on precisely
which threats we face as a species or make
overbearing claims about the divine attri-
butes of"nature." Simply put, the impact of
human enterprise on nonhuman systems
has created an unusual and strange urgency;
In a relatively short time, we're going to
learn whether we are indeed a match for the
various threats science enumerates. We are
going to find out whether we can actually be
as empathetic toward one another, as toler-
ant, as imaginative as we believe we can.
To develop less cruel and better gov-
erned societies, we're going to have to begin
by trading in the old questions about what
kinds of darkness are forcing us into the fu-
ture and ask instead another question:
What is calling to us? What lies buried in
our destiny that is calling out to us now?
I look at my own task as a writer and hu-
manitarian and know this one thing: With-
out other men and women, hard at work
devising a safer future for every life on Earth,
my task is like the song of a man living alone
in a box: beautiful, perhaps, but of no great.
help to humanity. I need these men and
women. Before long, each of us will be look-
ing to our right and to our left for eyes that
we can believe in. It is with these women
and men that we will initiate the work that
will impel those still to come, including our
children, to praise us-and to understand
the fierceness of our determination that
they not be born in vain because, facing
great threats, we fell down.
Barry Lopez has traveled to more than 60 countries and worked on international humanitarian projects with Mercy Corps and Quest for Global Healing.