Psalm 23 and John 10:11-18
Sunday, April 21 - 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 did you last spend 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. I enjoy going on walks. But I’m usually focused on where I’m headed or the podcast in my ears. I love sitting in my hammock but I’m almost always reading a book. Or sometimes napping. I almost always go outside with another purpose in mind. I’m doing something else and just choosing to do it outdoors.
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 from observing young 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.
Speaking of young children, have you ever noticed that some of the best wisdom is found in children’s books? Here’s an example. At the end of The House at Pooh Corner, there is a poignant interaction between Christopher Robin and his dear friend Winnie the 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.
Tomorrow is 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 environmental sustainability issues. As a result, 20 million Americans took to the streets on April 22nd, demanding radical changes in how humans interact with our planet. In the following months, 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 how we treat our planet – public policy, putting pressure on corporations, and launching major educational initiatives to help people make better individual choices. [1]
I could easily preach an entire sermon about what we should and shouldn’t do to care for creation. Talking with our politicians about public policy that affects water use, industry, agriculture, animal welfare, our food, our household products, and more. Buying local food as much as we can. Reducing our own carbon emissions.
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 pay attention to where our food comes from, and write impassioned letters….and those are all good things.
And I would also add that we 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 happens 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 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 and 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.
Many congregations observe Good Shepherd Sunday on the 4th Sunday of Easter (that’s today). You may have noticed this theme in our readings. 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. The 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 love blossoms organically from that knowledge.
Barbara Brown Taylor is a retired Episcopalian priest and arguably 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 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 be present with creation and let our love grow.
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 for this wonderful, astounding, endangered planet we inhabit blossom organically. May it be so.
NOTES
[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.
