Psalm 23 and John 10:11-18
Sunday, April 26, 2015 - Creation Care/Earth Day
First Congregational United
Church of Christ – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
Today, we begin with a question. You don’t need to answer it
out loud, but it’s not rhetorical. I would like you to actually take a moment
and try to find the answer in your mind. Ready? Here it is: When was the last
time you spent a good chunk of time outdoors with no real agenda?
I’m not 100% sure of the answer, myself. I spend a lot of
time outdoors with my kids. I am often just sitting there while they play. I
might read a book or a blog. I might just watch them play. We go on walks
together as a family quite often….so I’m not sure if that really counts as an
agenda item. I mean, it’s just a walk.
I can remember a time, though, when “going outside” was, in
and of itself, the only item on the agenda. What I can piece together from my
own memories and what I have noticed in my own children is this: children go
into nature as if it were a friend. They don’t know what they will do once they
get there. They don’t have plans. Their plan is just to greet their friend, the
outdoors. They trust that something wonderful will happen once they are there.
We’ve been big into Winnie
the Pooh at our house lately. At the end of the second book, The House at Pooh Corner, there is a
poignant interaction between Christopher Robin and his dear friend Pooh.
Christopher Robin asks Pooh, “What do you like doing best in the world, Pooh?”
and Pooh thinks for a while and finally responds, “What I like best in the
world is Me and Piglet going to see You.”
Christopher Robin says, “I like that, too, but what I like
best is doing Nothing.” Pooh wonders what doing Nothing is and Christopher
Robin responds, “Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going
off to do it, What are you going to go, Christopher Robin, and you say, Oh,
nothing, and then you go and do it.”
Doing Nothing is, of course, what children do when they greet
nature. When they go out into the world looking for nothing in particular and
find that dear friend, the Earth, waiting for them.
And then Christopher Robin goes on to explain that he’s not
going to do just Nothing anymore, that when you get older you aren’t allowed to
do just Nothing.
And, gosh, isn’t that true? Adults don’t do Nothing very
often, do they?
I don’t think it’s an accident that after God creates the
heavens and the Earth in the first chapter of Genesis, the first thing God does
when the work is done is what? Nothing. God rests. God goes out and greets the
day as if it were a dear friend, walking into the open arms of the Earth as a
child settles into a patch of grass to look up at the sky and do….Nothing.
This past week we celebrated Earth Day, an international
holiday that happens on April 22nd each year. The first Earth Day
was in 1970. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin launched a massive effort to
raise awareness about issues of environmental sustainability. As a result, 20
million Americans took to the streets on April 22nd demanding
radical changes in the way we humans interact with our planet. In the months
that followed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was founded and the Clear
Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts were passed.
Twenty years later, Earth Day was rekindled in 1990 on a
global scale, mobilizing 200 million people from 141 countries. Earth Day has
always been about making massive shifts in the way we treat our planet – public
policy, putting pressure on corporations, launching major educational
initiatives to help people make better individual choices.[1]
I could easily preach an entire sermon talking about what we
should and shouldn’t do to care for creation. Recycling, lowering our carbon
emissions, getting informed and talking with our politicians about public
policy that affects water use, industry, agriculture, animal welfare, our food,
our household products, and more.
I’m not going to preach that sermon today, though I do hope
that you will use the occasion of Earth Day to talk with your friends and
family, read up, and make some new commitments that will benefit our planet.
Instead, I am struck by a line from the film at the Flint
Hills Discovery Center. I’m paraphrasing, but somewhere in the film, one of the
speakers says something like, “You can’t love what you don’t know.”
We can reduce and reuse and recycle, and bike or walk to
work, and eat less meat, and write impassioned letters….and those are all good
things.
And I would also add that we, as humans, are called to
something else. We are called to organic love.
I’m not talking about buying fruits and veggies with the
little USDA Organic logo on them. I’m talking about the other meanings of the
word organic. Organic stuff is stuff that is living or derived from something
that’s alive. Not synthetic. Organic. We need to love things that are organic.
Of course, organic also has another meaning: something that
happens naturally. And that’s what I think is likely to happen when we place
ourselves in nature. When we go out into the big, wide world to be among other
living things….just to do Nothing like Christopher Robin does….when we do that,
something natural and lovely happens. We begin to fall in love.
We slow down. We notice small things we didn’t ever notice
before. We begin to learn the Earth, to know the Earth. We can’t love what we
don’t know. And we can’t know the places and creatures of this Earth unless we
are present. We have to get out there greet the natural world as if it’s a
friend. Only then can we know the Earth. And when we do, love often blossoms organically.
Today in the lectionary cycle we get two passages that explore
this image of shepherds. From the 23rd Psalm, “God is my shepherd. I
shall not want. God makes me to lie down in green pastures, God leads me beside
the still waters, God restores my soul.”
And then in the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks, “I am the Good
Shepherd. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep,
sees the wolf coming and runs away – leaving the sheep behind and the wolf
snatches them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for
the sheep. I am the Good Shepherd. I know my own and my own know me.”
“I know my own.” It begins with knowledge. Not the knowledge
of facts and figures, but knowledge in a more intimate sense. Knowing that the
seasons are changing because the light is shifting – you know because you walk
that path at the same time every morning. Knowledge that we need rain soon
because the pond is low – and you know because you take time to sit by the pond
every few days. Knowledge that the baby birds have flown the nest– you know
because you’ve been keeping an eye on the nest in the big tree in your front
yard.
We can only love what we know. And we can only know when we
show up.
That’s what shepherds do, you know. More than anything else,
they show up. They are there day in and day out. Some days they don’t do much
at all. Just wander a bit with the flock and be on the lookout. The shepherd’s
most important jobs are to show up and pay attention. That’s why the hired hand
is useless – they run away just when they are needed. The good shepherd stays.
And that’s why the writer of the psalm feels secure. Because
God does not run away, either. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death, I fear no evil. For you are with me. Your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.” We are not alone. We live in God’s world. God is present with
us. Knows us. And loves blossoms organically from that knowledge.
Barbara Brown Taylor is a retired Episcopalian priest and one
of the best preachers in North America. In her book, An Altar in the World, she says, “My first church was a field of
broom grass behind my family’s house in Kansas, where I spent days in
self-forgetfulness. A small stream held swimmers, wigglers, skaters, and floaters
along with bumps of unseen things moving under the mud. When I blurred my eyes,
the sun sparkling on the moving surface turned into a living quilt of light.”[2]
As an adult, Taylor has learned that, “The easiest practice of reverence is
simply to sit down somewhere outside, preferably near a body of water, and pay
attention for at least twenty minutes. It is not necessary to take on the whole
world at first. Just take on the three square feet of earth on which you are
sitting, paying close attention to everything that lives within that small
estate.”
From there, Taylor describes what it looks like when love
blossoms organically. She writes, “With any luck, you will soon begin to see
the souls in pebbles, ants, small mounds of moss, and the acorn on its way to
becoming an oak tree. You may feel some tenderness for the struggling mayfly
the ants are carrying away…You may even feel the beating of your own heart,
that miracle of ingenuity that does its work with no thought or instruction
from you. You did not make your heart, any more than you made that tree. You
are a guest here. You have been given a free pass to this modest domain and
everything in it.”
When God finished the work of creation, God stopped and
looked at it all. God pronounced it good. And gave us instructions to care for it
all. To love it all. Let us follow in the way of the Good Shepherd, who refuses
to leave when the sheep are in trouble. Let us be present and pay attention.
May our love blossom organically for this wonderful, astounding, endangered
planet we inhabit.
[1] Information
about the history of Earth Day from http://www.earthday.org/earth-day-history-movement.
[2] Barbara
Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, p. 10.