Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
The Third Sunday of Easter
April 22, 2007
W. Gregory Pope
CREATION SPIRITUALITY
Genesis 1:1-2:4
Today is Earth Day, established thirty years ago as a day for us to remember and act upon our responsibility to care for the earth. It is not about worshiping the earth. It’s about taking care of God’s gift of creation.
What is perhaps the saddest part of our neglect of creation is that so many Christians have spoken out against environmentalism and against taking steps to decrease pollution in the atmosphere and in rivers. They work hard to deny changes in the global climate.
There are two reasons why some Christians and others deny these changes:
The first is Money. Those who benefit financially from the things that harm God’s creation deny the truth of global warming. From the wisdom of scripture we read that money is the root of all kinds of evil, especially the evil of destroying the environment of God’s creation. When proposals are made to stop the production of carbon dioxide gases, the proposals are criticized because of what they will cost. And so we set out on the foolish expedition of economic growth at the expense of environmental destruction. A lot of good wealth is going to do us when the earth cannot produce food for us to buy and there are no beaches or snow-capped mountains for vacation spots.
A second reason some Christians oppose taking costly steps to care for the earth is their belief that Jesus is going to return soon and the earth will be destroyed anyway. But we cannot neglect care for the earth simply because we believe it may not be here much longer. What if it is here another five hundred or a thousand years? At the rate of global change, many will die or be forced to move for water will cover what is now their home.
Christians, people of the Book, believers in the God of creation, should be wiser and more diligent stewards of this world God has made.
There are four Christians for whom I am very grateful, who have spoken out and acted upon what very well may be the most crucial issue of our time. Those four Christians are Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry and Matthew Fox.
Al Gore and his Academy Award winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which was shown here on Friday night, has done much to get the truth out. The name of the documentary tells the story. The reality of global warming is indeed “an inconvenient Truth.”
To correct the damage we’ve done will be inconvenient and will come at a considerable cost. It will call for changes in our lifestyle. Changes like:
Asking what our forms of entertainment do to the environment.
Getting rid of certain automobiles we love and driving all automobiles less because they harm the earth.
Dividing trash into what is recyclable and what is not, and cutting down in the use of what is not recyclable.
Refusing to eat food out of season because it has to travel thousands of miles to get to us. Eating only what is locally grown.
Buying clothes and other goods that are made close to home, even if it costs more because it was made by those earning a fair wage.
And refusing to live for the rise of the stock market. To begin looking and listening with suspicion on the word “growth,” asking what is dying that something else might be “growing.”
The reality of our environment and what must be done is indeed an inconvenient truth.
Another Christian who has been helping us face this inconvenient truth, making us aware of how much damage we are doing to creation, is Bill McKibben. Bill was recently interviewed here in Louisville at the Author’s Forum by Wendell Berry, who’s been warning us from decades about the harm certain technologies and farming practices are doing to the earth. I didn’t get to go to the interview because my church was having a business meeting, and I had to make sure they behaved, which they did. But I saw a video of the interview on Public Television a few weeks ago. It’s worth viewing.
McKibben helped organize the nationwide Day for Climate Change last Saturday, in which several of us took part. He carries a passion for this because he is very much aware that significant changes in the earth’s climate are already happening and the effects are visible.
McKibben recently published an article in which he writes: “The temperature rise has been enough to start melting every frozen thing on earth . . . In the Arctic Ocean, nice white ice that reflected lots of the sun’s rays back to space is quickly turning into nice blue water that absorbs much more of the sun’s heat, amplifying the warming. The thawing tundra is releasing huge quantities of methane, which is another potent global warming gas. Scariest of all, the great ice sheets above Greenland and the West Antarctic appear to be melting faster than predicted. There’s the very real chance of a catastrophic rise in sea level, one that would endanger the world’s coastal cities, inundate much prime farmland, and drive hundreds of millions from their homes.”[1]
What we have discovered in recent years is that we have much less time to act than we thought, and that action has to be dramatic. James Hansen, the country’s foremost climatologist said last year that we have a decade to reverse the flow of carbon into the atmosphere or else we will live on a “totally different planet.”
The changes we can make in our homes and churches as individuals and congregations are vital, he says, but they cannot deliver change at the speed we need to slow climate change.
McKibben says what is needed to stop the great harm of global warming is to convince our federal government to make a commitment to cut carbon emissions. He believes we should set a goal of cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. That will be an inconvenient though necessary endeavor. I like the goal because it gives us some time to be creative about economic and job-related alternatives that will be necessary.
I know some of you get a little nervous when the church talks about political action. And while justice toward the environment is a political issue and requires political action, taking care of creation is not a secular political activity. It runs to the heart of our Christian spirituality. Surely we cannot believe that harming something God made is not sinful.
I think of Creation Spirituality in two ways: as experiencing God through the beauty of nature, and caring for God’s creation as an embodiment of our spirituality. Both are acts of worship.
At the heart of creation spirituality rests the conviction that this is God’s world and any misuse of its resources dishonors the Creator. Caring for creation springs from a place beyond the urgent need to save the earth for our benefit; it is an act of worship, of glorifying the One who made us and the world.
There is a fourth Christian, Matthew Fox, who was the first I know to coin the phrase “Creation Spirituality.” But he acknowledges that creation spirituality goes back thousands of years, at least to the practice of Native Americans.
Fox offers what he calls “The Four Paths of Creation Spirituality,” each path offering a practical commandment for our living in these days.[2]
Path One is the via Positiva, teaching us that awe and delight in creation matter. All of nature and every being is a “mirror of God that glistens and glitters,” says Hildegard of Bingen. The commandment Fox offers on this path is: Thou Shalt Fall in Love at Least Three Times a Day. Fall in love with a galaxy, a star, a wildflower, a bird, a tree, a plant. Creation spirituality begins with awe and wonder and falling in love.
Path Two is the via Negativa, teaching us that darkness, suffering, and letting go matter. The commandment on path two is: Thou Shalt Dare the Dark. Dare to enter the shadow, the hidden or covered up parts of ourselves and our society to confront the cover up that often accompanies evil in self and society. It is only when we enter the darkness and grief of what is happening to creation that our hearts are broken and compassion can begin to flow through us.
Path Three is the via Creativa, teaching us that creativity and imagination matter. The commandment on path three is: Do Not Be Reluctant to Give Birth.
The imago dei or image of God in all persons is the image of the Creator. With our imaginations we are co-creators with God. To keep us from getting stuck on the path of via Negativa, we need to activate our imagination and creativity.
Psychologist Otto Rank said “pessimism comes from the repression of creativity.” Creativity, says Fox, is not about painting a picture or producing an object; it is about wrestling with the demons and angels in the depths of our psyches and daring to name them, to put them where they can breathe and have space and we can look at them.
Last Saturday at the climate change rally, various people stood to speak beginning with the words, “Hi, my name is Steve, Jane, John, Mary and I’m a fossil fuel-oholic.” And we said, “Hi, Steve. Hi, Jane.”
That kind of honesty is required on the path of via Creativa. To wrestle with our demons and addictions to our cars and to comfort and creatively cast those demons out.
Path Four is the Via Transformativa , teaching us that justice and celebration (which add up to compassion) matter. The commandment on this path comes directly from Jesus: Be You Compassionate as Your Creator in Heaven is Compassionate.
To be compassionate is also to be prophetic. Rabbi Heschel says the prophet “interferes.” The prophet interferes with the injustice, the unnecessary pain that rains on the earth and its creatures when humans neglect justice and compassion. The prophetic call to interfere with injustice resides in all of us. It is the call to transformative justice between humans and the earth and all her creatures.
Creation spirituality culminates in compassion - the combination of justice making and celebration. And acts of compassion flow out of our experience of interconnectedness with all creation.
We have felt that interconnectedness with the families of the Virginia Tech shootings this week. A place where the via Negativa is met by the via Transformativa.
We act out of that interconnectedness when we do things, small and large, to help care for the earth.
Fox says the four-fold path of Creation Spirituality is a journey of liberation: from the secularization of everything to the resacralization of all things, the discovery that the divine permeates all of reality.
It is a movement away from taking for granted and toward a life gratitude. It is time to refuse to take clean water and good food for granted. It may not last forever unless we act.
It is a movement from waste to recycling.
It is a movement from complacency to compassion. To be complacent means to be self-satisfied, and that is the goal of a consumer society. Compassion is to act on behalf of suffering people and a wounded creation, refusing to believe that consumption is the purpose of our life.[3]
It is a movement of ourselves away from the center of the universe. Notice that in the biblical creation story the world does not begin with the human but with creation itself. We are only a part of it.
To do what needs to be done, to travel the four-fold path of a creation spirituality, requires the movement from fear to courage, courage to act, courage to speak. It is a part of following Jesus to consider the lilies, and to believe that this is God’s world. And to hear the gospels’ oft repeated imperative: “Fear not.” Fear not and follow.
This world is God’s creation given to us to care for. “All creation is a trace, a footprint, an offspring of [God]. It is God’s shadow in our midst. It is sacred.”[4]
When we misuse the resources of earth, we are sinning against the universe and the One who made it. We are ignoring the second commandment of God. The first - “Be fruitful and multiply” - we have done in excess. We can slow down on that one for a while, and put our energy into caring for the earth and all that is within it. For it is God’s gift to us.
Fox says, “The universe loves us every day the sun rises, and the creator loves us through creation.”[5] We love God back by taking care of creation.
Elizabeth Canham writes: “Now is the moment to resist relentlessly every act of violence against creation . . . Our prayer needs to be one of discernment: How does God want me to act, choose, pray in this moment so that my way of life embraces the goodness of creation? . . . We are woven into the ‘web of the universe,’ and nothing we do is without significance to the rest.”[6]
John Carter has provided us with an insert in the bulletin of ways large and small that we can help take care of creation. I urge you to read over those and begin to make changes in your daily life.
It is easy to despair and refuse to believe that the small things we do can have a lasting impact on the global problems of our day. But you know, all we can do at this point is repent and live more simply and more wisely, to live with integrity, to express the truth as we perceive it, and to trust in God’s ability to use what we offer.
Joanna Macy says that what passes for apathy is in fact a cover-up of despair. And that the key to ending apathy is to tackle despair, which we do by reminding people of their connection to divinity, their capacity to create and co-create.[7]
We are not in this alone. We are not helpless. God is in this with us and will work to take our evil and violence to creation and turn in into something good.
I want to close this morning with the reading of a parable of Jesus retold by Matthew Fox. I have added a couple of minor changes, but for the most part it is his. It is a warning to heed while we still have time.
There was a rich nation whose people used to dress in whatever clothes they wanted every day and buy whatever cars they wanted, which emitted untold amounts of carbon dioxide. These people ate beef at fast-food restaurants whenever they wanted; they created a whole new industry around beef eating even when it was grown by tearing down rain forests where the poor lived in another country far away, even though it was explained to them how they and especially their children depended on these very rain forests so far away for their health.
Now at the rich country’s border there lay many poor countries to the south; these countries were called “Third World.” They were covered with sores of poverty, unemployment, lack of food and medical care, and debts owed the rich nation. Much of their land and soil and forests had ben stripped bare by the nations’ companies, who paid to support the dictators and their military guards. The sores of the “Third World” included five hundred million persons starving; one billion persons living in absolute poverty; one billion, five hundred million persons with no access to basic health care; . . . two billion people with no dependable water supply; the wiping out of forests and the erosion of soil. These sores and more were present daily for the rich nations to behold, but they tuned their backs and pretended that such suffering was not “newsworthy.” They built a culture of denial and left the dogs to lick the sores of the poor.
For years the “Third World” longed to fill itself with the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table. But most of the assistance that “Third World” received from “First World” was in the form of military weapons and money to support dictators and their armies because their armies were needed to keep the unhappy people from rebelling. . . The rich nation received fruit and coffee and sugar and cocoa and eventually cocaine and other drugs to feed all its insatiable needs.
And the poor nations died and were carried by the angels to the bosom of Abraham. The rich nation died and was buried.
In its torment in Hades the rich nation looked up and saw Abraham a long way off, with the “Third World” beginning to rise from the dead straight out of Abraham’s bosom. So it cried out, “Father Abraham, pity us and send the ‘Third World’ to dip the tip of its finger in water and cool our tongue, for we are in agony in these flames.’
“My child, Abraham replied, “remember that during your life good things came your way, just as bad things came the way of ‘Third World.’ Now the ‘Third World’ is being resurrected here while you are in agony. But that is not all: between us and you a great gulf has been fixed to stop anyone, if they wanted to, crossing from our side to yours, and to stop any crossing from your side to ours.”
The rich nation replied, “Father, I beg you then to send ‘Third World’ to the other nations of the ‘First World’ since I have five brother nations in our common alignment . . . to give them warning so that they do not come to this place of torment too.”
Abraham said, “They have the biblical prophets and scientist-prophets and nature itself telling them how dire the situation is, let them listen to them.”
“Ah, no, Father Abraham,” said the rich nation, “but if someone comes to them from the dead, they will repent.”
Then Abraham said to the rich nation, “If they will not listen to the prophets of the Bible and science and nature itself, they will not be convinced even if someone should rise from the dead.”[8]
There are prophets speaking God’s truth to us. Will we listen? Will we act? Before it’s too late.
______________
1. The Christian Century, “Running Out of Time on Global Warming,” February 20, 2007, 22
2. Matthew Fox, Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts For the Peoples of the Earth, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, 17-23.
3. Ibid., 90-114
4. Ibid., 9
5. Ibid., 11
6. Elizabeth J. Canham, Heart Whispers, Upper Room Books, 1999, 62-63
7. Cited in Fox, 79
8. Fox, 142-144
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CRESCENT HILL BAPTIST CHURCH
2800 Frankfort Avenue
Louisville, Kentucky 40206
(502) 896-4425
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