The Sunday Sermon: God dwells in all creation

Easter 5A, May 14, 2017
St. Paul’s San Diego
Creation Care Sunday, John 14:1-14

It’s a regular pattern. Disaster strikes-- maybe it’s a flood. Maybe it's a tornado, or a hurricane. Maybe it's an earthquake. There are many casualties and lots of devastation. And before relief efforts can really get fully underway, voices will start assigning blame. “God has rendered judgement on America for….” and you can fill in the blank with a variety of suspected causes.

Frankly, I don’t think I believe in the same God as those folks. This kind of exclusive, judgemental, distant God sits somewhere else and doles out punishment based on some kind of rigid standard of being-- a standard of being that tends to look suspiciously like the speaker of the pronouncement and less like God, at least to me.

While my God and that god don’t look the same now, it isn’t hard to find a common historical source of that God in the Christian tradition.

One of the primary models of understanding God in both Hebrew and Christian thought has been of God as king: Jewish thought, Christian medieval thought, and at the Reformation, thinkers explored their understanding of God using the dominant governance structures of their times, namely that of a king ruling over subjects (McFague, p. 63).

If the dominant model is king ruling justly over subjects, then it follows that when the decrees of the the king are broken they merit punishment. It isn’t hard to understand how, when following our trajectory of Christianity, a very misguided pastor today might set up a God is his image to imagine earthquakes and tornados reigning down as punishment of a king who is displeased with the breaking of a perceived commandment.

We aren’t immune in the Episcopal Church from seeing God as being on our side and still seeing God as a distant other-- in fact a high liturgy can exacerbate that, creating a sense that God is to be found nowhere except for in a special tabernacle. I might joke myself that God is unknowable except for in good liturgy and in a high understanding of the sacrament. That can become an idol for us.

But we do not in this country, have pronouncements from monarchs-- or at least I hope we don’t. If our understanding of power has shifted in this age and monarchs are not relevant to us, what does that mean for our understanding of God when so much of our historical understanding is based on a power structure of God as omnipotent monarch? I would like to submit to you this morning, on this Creation Care Sunday, that it is important not to be too complacent with the image of God as King, of God as Ruler.

Theologian Sallie McFague has spent her life playing with alternatives to that model. She is very clear that what she does is play- fanciful, metaphorical, imaginative, and not prescriptive or proclamatory. We are so accustomed to wanting to hear news about God that must come from the mouth of a kingly ruler, so that we must conform to in order to please the king-- even if it is at a subconscious level-- that it is hard to hear imaginative and creative, alternative pictures of God, but that is what she offers. Instead of God as patriarch, monarch, or Father, she offers God as Mother, Lover or Friend-- not as trinitarian doctrine but as ways to break the idols we have fallen into, the idolatry of thinking we have a firm grasp on understanding God and keeping that God in our understanding rather than seeking to stretch ourselves to grow towards God.

So on this creation care Sunday, I’d like to suggest that if you are open to it that experimentation with how we view God can be a good thing. We have this story of wonderful and warm hospitality in the gospel, a story addressed to followers of Jesus about Jesus going to prepare a place to stay. This passage was in the lectionary for Friday at the noon mass, and for the folks there the opening passage about preparing a place, a house with many dwelling places evoked images of openness, inclusiveness, and receptivity. Jesus says he is the way to get there. But Thomas and Philip, perhaps hearing this as an exclusive proposition, as a kingly command, get concerned they don’t have a map to this place. In the final paragraph, Jesus relates that the way is not so much a physical map to get to a place, but something else entirely. Jesus describes a kind of interdependence with God the Father that doesn’t look at all like a king-subject relationship.


And that is what the work of McFague offers us, I think-- a glimpse into the way, the truth, the life incarnate. What she presents is the idea of the world itself as God’s body. Take a moment, if you dare, and put aside whatever picture you have of God. If you have an image of God as lord, king, or patriarch, I invite you to try for a moment to set that aside. I promise lightning will not strike. If you have become jaded of those images, and God has become a myth for you, I invite you to try suspending that for a moment, to let some playfulness enter in.

Imagine instead the world as God’s body. We aren’t saying the world is God’s body, but imagine that God’s body is like the world. Imagine that you can be in the presence of God no matter where you are, no matter what you are doing. Imagine that you can’t escape the presence of God.

This God is infused in everything, but God is not reduced to the world even though God’s body, the world, is ‘at risk.’ In the words of McFague, “The world as God’s body may be poorly cared for, ravaged, and as we are becoming well aware, essentially destroyed, in spite of God’s own loving attention to it, because of one creature, ourselves, who can choose or not choose to join with God in conscious care of the world… In [this metaphor] the notions of vulnerability, shared responsibility, and risk are inevitable. This is a markedly different basic understanding of the God-world relationship than in the monarch-realm metaphor, for it emphasizes God’s willingness to suffer for and with the world, even to the point of personal risk. The world as God’s body, then may be seen as a way to re-mythologize the inclusive, suffering love of the cross of Jesus of Nazareth.” (McFague, p. 72). Our lack of care for creation in this imagination is, perhaps, a crucifixion.

“I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” “The Father who dwells in me does his works.” “The one who believes in me will do the works that I do.”

McFague fascinates me because she takes a completely different approach to environmental justice. Most theologians take an ethical approach, that is: “What should we do to care for creation?”, or “What, in caring for creation, serves the good?” There is nothing wrong with that, but ethics is a tricky business, and most of us are at risk of running right into the same problem the televangelist runs into: do good stuff or God the king will be mad at you. (There are much more robust ways of doing ethics, of course.) Ethics is not necessarily but can also be a detached intellectual and cognitive process, removed from the emotional and spiritual drivers that I believe truly affect change.

But McFague’s approach for environmental care is not based on ethics, not based on political revolution, but based on this idea of who God is at God’s very being and what that means for discipleship and personal transformation: If God’s body is offered to us in the radical self-giving of the world, how does that inspire consumers to resist the temptation to consume more and more of God’s body, and to live more simply? That call comes not simply from an ethical mandate to conserve resources but from deep personal transformations to live changed lives that are mindful of the self-emptying love of God-- a transformation that is contagious, and spreads, and loves the world- God’s body- as neighbor, because what else might one do when faced with such a radical, self-emptying love? This is a body, a world, that gives so generously of itself, depleting itself of its own resources to those who it sustains without regard for its own sustainability! It is no wonder that McFague invokes the sense of motherhood in her terms for God (putting aside for a moment the painful experience of those whose experience with their mothers is not of a nurturing self-giving figure). But invoking that self-giving being demands an emotional response- a spiritual response- of transformation.

A few years ago, I was visiting my brother in Hawaii. My brother is a marine biologist. We were out on his boat and came across a milk jug that was mysteriously floating through the bay. Without hesitation, my brother cut the engine, jumped into the bay, and called for a knife-- I had no idea what was going on. He dove down and came up with a giant turtle. It was entwined in fishers line attached to the floating milk jug. The line had been there so long there were grooves on the turtle’s shell. My brother struggled in the water to hold this terrified giant turtle still while working to free the line with a knife, and in the process cut himself. But then the turtle went free. That was a holy moment for me, and God was there, both in the suffering of the turtle, in the willingness of my brother to risk himself for the turtle, and in the new life this turtle now had. There aren’t any shoulds for me in that story. I care for creation simply because that story is beautiful. It’s a love story. It demands my all, my love, and my own self-giving- my own mothering, if you will.

We will go across the street into the park in a moment to perform a liturgy of blessing for creation. There is a view that a blessing sets something apart as holy. I think that view is problematic and perpetuates the dualism of the monarch/subject problem. Barbara Brown Taylor in her book An Altar in the World describes the act of blessing as “seeing things from the divine perspective, participating in God’s own initiative, and sharing in God’s own audacity.” If we have the imagination to try on the idea of the world as God’s body, then as we go across the street and bless the park, we are calling forth the holy that is already present in that park. Because God dwells in all of creation: in the mountains and beaches; in the birds and the bugs; in me, and in you too.

The Rev Jeff Martinhauk

---

Harwood, John T. “Theologizing the World: A Reflection on the Theology of Sallie McFague.” The Anglican Theological Review. http://www.anglicantheologicalreview.org/static/pdf/articles/harwood.pdf, accessed 5/13/17.

McFague, Sallie. Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987.

The Sunday Sermon: Water of LIfe?

Water, water everywhere ... Did you notice that water is a feature of three of our Scripture readings this morning? How fortuitous that we are celebrating Creation Care Sunday today with a special focus in our forum on oceans, and our lectionary hands us the opportunity to meditate in our worship on water.

In the Acts of the Apostles Paul and his companions travel from what is now Turkey to what was then part of Macedonia in northern Greece, introducing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to Europe. In Philippi they are looking for a worshiping community, so they head to the river, because that's where they expect to find a gathering place of prayer. There's an ancient connection between water and the sacred, and sure enough Paul finds his first European convert down by the riverside: Lydia, an upscale merchant, who is ready to receive Christ and who promptly undergoes baptism, along with her whole household. At the water's edge Lydia receives the water of eternal life through the sacrament that welcomes her and us into God's household.

In the great Revelation that closes our Bible, St John envisions the holy city, with the river of the water of life running through it, sustaining both the city and the tree of life with its twelve mystical fruits and its healing leaves. The river feeds the world, both physically and spiritually. It keeps the city pure and ensures that the means of life - food and peace - will be eternally available to those who belong to God.

And in John's Gospel, Jesus comes to the pool of Beth-zatha, a natural spring with a mysterious intermittent turbulence. Now, there's a widespread belief that the spirit doing the stirring is a spirit of healing. So the stone porches surrounding the pool are crowded with people suffering from all kinds of ailments: skin diseases, infertility, rheumatism, birth defects, you name it. Whenever the water starts to stir there is a surge of wounded humanity, all trying to get in the pool at once. Anyone who is lame is obviously at a disadvantage.

So this man, who's been disabled for a lifetime, is fixated on somehow reaching the water, because it promises healing. What Jesus does instead is to raise him up with a word, the same word used later of the resurrection. He raises him up to new life, to wholeness and freedom and independence, and he begins to walk. Somehow I think "begins to walk" might be an understatement. I imagine him leaping and dancing and jumping into the air in joy and astonishment. Jesus brings living water to the wounded, who receives life in its fullness.

This week in the cathedral offices we had some plumbing issues. First of all the water supply for the staff coffee machine sprang a leak, and until it was fixed our water cooler was offline too, for technical reasons which I won't go into. Then, later in the week, there were more repairs underway, which meant turning off the water supply for some hours. I know I'm not the only one who takes entirely for granted that when I turn a faucet, clean water will come out. And yet there are 1.1 billion people in the world who don't have access to clean water. That's about one out of five of us. Because of that, every 15 seconds, a child dies from a water-borne disease. Let's just think about that for a few seconds: somebody's child dies now ... [Click, click, click, 15 seconds later ... ] Somebody else's baby just died. And that [click, click, click] goes on all the time.

The scandal, the sin of this is, it's preventable. UNESCO estimates that an investment of ten billion dollars a year for ten years would ensure clean water for everybody's babies. That's 1.2% of worldwide military expenditure, or 1% of the global illegal drug trade, or about 5% of what Americans spend each year on holiday shopping, according to the National Retail Federation. The money we spend celebrating the birth of baby Jesus in one year could pay twice over for every baby, every child, every adult on this planet to receive what we all take for granted as a basic necessity of life. And instead we are filling the oceans with microplastic trash and wasting millions on throwaway gifts.

Speaking of oceans, the water off La Jolla last weekend was turquoise and sparkling, as beautiful as I've ever seen it. Living near the ocean is a great blessing. As an island person I can't imagine living in the middle of the continent. But the oceans are rising, and our blessing is becoming a threat. The non-profit Climate Central estimates that between 147 million and 216 million people live on land that will be below sea level or regular flood levels by the end of the century, at the current rate of sea level rise. Other researchers pit the estimate as high as 600 million. Reputable scientists agree that human activities - our activities - our lack of stewardship - are responsible for climate change and the melting of the glaciers.

We revere water as critical for life, the means of baptism, and the medium in which all life began, but there can be far too much of a good thing, as when it starts pouring into your home and destroying your livelihood. How much of San Diego will be left by the year 2100 if the waters keep rising?

This week, as I studied St Paul's missionary voyage to Greece, I noticed that the maps of his travels bore a marked resemblance to the maps of the routes taken today by migrants from the middle east. The millions of refugees - over a million last year alone - who have fled death in Syria, Iraq, and Africa have traveled the same Mediterranean waters that Paul, Timothy, and Luke did. Thousands have died, drowning in inadequate boats and horrific circumstances, abandoned by callous traffickers and rejected by the European Union. My sparkling picture of La Jolla Cove has been overlaid by a haunting scene from the movie Titanic: hundreds of bodies covering the surface of a cold ocean, in another tragedy of human greed and short-sightedness.

An ocean filled with the bodies of victims of war, famine, and flood; rivers polluted by industry and lack of sanitation; plastic garbage patches that stretch for miles in the Pacific: the water of life sometimes seems like a bad joke, in a world where some have too much while others have not nearly enough: our world, God's world, the only precious, beautiful, life-sustaining world we know.

Fresh, clean water is God's first and most precious gift to us, and the oceans are the cradle of life. We must cherish, care for, and share this amazing blessing, so that every one of God's children may enjoy life in its fullness and receive Christ's living water of healing and resurrection.

-The Very Rev Penelope Bridges
May 1, 2016 
Easter Six and Creation Care Sunday 

Creation Rights!!

On Sunday, September 21, people in New York City and around the world will take to the streets to demand real global action on climate change. St. Paul’s is supporting this effort by fielding a contingent for the People’s Climate March in downtown San Diego and by ringing our bells at 12 noon. I am very glad of these actions and proud of what we’ve accomplished at the Cathedral. There is also a lot more that we can and should do. I want to make the case for that from a slightly different angle.

When Mary, Sara, and I lived in Indiana, we were invited to my Episcopal priest’s home for dinner. This was a little after the Gene Robinson election and I remember the priest saying that this controversy over gays in the priesthood was a distraction from our real church mission. I suspect many of us heard similar arguments at the time. As I remember, I let the comment go, but thinking on it later (and I believe that I told him this later also) I came to the opposite conclusion. The movement for gays in the priesthood (and gay rights in general) was one of the most important things happening in our church and our culture, then as now. It represented what I call “an extension of the franchise”—equal treatment for yet another oppressed group in our society and, even more importantly, a broadening of how we understand ourselves, of what it means to be human.

I bring this up because, for me, the climate crisis and the environmental crisis (eco-system destruction, species extinction, ocean acidification, factory farming, etc.) point toward a further extension of the franchise, beyond the human, to include the rest of creation. The great lesson which I hope humanity will learn from this self-imposed crisis is that creation has its rights and “rules” which we ignore at our own peril. Human beings will continue to change creation, as we have since we first appeared on the planet. That change is part of creation’s unfolding. But, and this is a big “but,” it should be guided by an awareness that all created beings have an inherent dignity as created beings which should not be trampled in our pursuit of the good life.

Let me be clear—I am not saying here that an ant is as important as a person (gay or straight), but I am saying that when we act, we should consider how our actions will impact creation (including ants) and that this consideration be given much more priority than our civilization has previously allowed. Our economy, our political and cultural institutions, indeed all human structures are situated within the structure of the created world and we should do our best to bring our structures into harmony with what already exists—to work with it as much as possible not against it. That will mean big changes in how we organize ourselves and, even more important, how we see ourselves. So we must ring the bells in hope and concern, but we must also act for change—doing whatever we can to live out a yet more inclusive model of human, and for us Christians, Christian society.

Phil Petrie
 Convener, Simpler Living

Creation Care Sunday April 14

Most of us know plenty about climate change and sometimes all the mounting evidence—extreme weather events, melting polar caps, fires across the West—and the lack of major government action can be depressing. However, these events and the discussion they are engendering (Mike Bloomberg’s “It’s the climate, stupid!” comes readily to mind) are having a real impact on people’s attitudes.

 Approximately 70% of Americans now believe that climate change is real and over 50% believe that it is man-made. Compared with climate scientists, where the number is 97% for both questions, this is disappointing, but I still think we are in the middle of a sea change on climate that can lead to substantive changes in addressing it.

For that reason, Simpler Living decided to focus on climate change this Creation Care Sunday, April 14—we’re calling it Creating a Climate of Hope! The day will focus on solutions to climate change and what each of us can do to move these solutions forward.

  The Adult Forum at 9:00 a.m. in the Guild Room will feature Dr. Michael Boudrias, Chair of Marine Science and Environmental Studies at University of San Diego and renewable energy expert Bill Powers discussing the science of climate change and positive steps to mitigate it locally and worldwide.

 Michael and Bill are both major figures in San Diego’s environmental scene, so the forum is not to be missed! And, of course, the 8:00 and 10:30 a.m. services and our religious education classes will celebrate God’s creation and His call to build lives that sustain and renew it.

 Hope leads to action and the time for action is NOW! Please join us!!