January 21, 2007 Third Sunday after Epiphany
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 36; I Corinthians 12: 4-13; Acts 2: 1-4, 43-47
Last Sunday evening an overflow crowd packed into the Newcomb Room
to see the movie An Inconvenient Truth. If you haven’t seen it yet, copies are
available at the Latham Library. The movie documents the effects of global
warming that are already happening, and talks about the world-wide cataclysm
that is coming if we do not make a radical change in the way we live.
After the movie, Jim Merkel asked me a provocative question. Jim is the
Sustainability Coordinator at Dartmouth and the author of the book, Radical
Simplicity. He is also a neighbor, living not far from Union Village in Norwich.
Jim observed that the root of our climate problem, like so many others, is that we
are living in disharmony with nature. He asked, “Isn’t that a spiritual problem?
Doesn’t it take a spiritual solution?”
I told him that it certainly seems that way to me. We talked about it a
while, and on my way home I found myself thinking about it more. Other
questions followed, like, what is the spiritual solution to disharmony? How can we
find that solution? Have people moved from disharmony to harmony in the past?
How did it happen?
The reason I believe this is a spiritual issue is that I define God in part as
the force in the universe that loves harmony and tends to move things toward it.
We see this in the life and teachings of Jesus and in the works the Bible attributes
to the Holy Spirit. That force is present in nature and also in us. I recognize my
spirit as the part of me that knows harmony when it feels or hears or sees it, and
that longs for harmony when it is missing—when I am in disharmony.
Disharmony takes many forms and has many causes. Greed can lead to the
disharmony of one person or nation fighting another to get what it wants. One
person’s lust for another may be harmonized in a covenant relationship of mutual
respect, or it may lead to the disharmony of jealousy, infidelity or abuse. It is
surprisingly easy to live in disharmony with our own true self, caused by our
desire to please others or caused by the addictions or compulsions that overpower
what our spiritual self knows would be the right thing to do.
Our disharmony with the environment is clear to see, especially for those
who feel a spiritual connection to nature, but the causes are not always apparent,
and are often complex. Human disharmony with nature can come from our greed
or carelessness or stupidity or wanton violence or sometimes by accident even
when we are being careful and are well intentioned.
Disharmony has many forms and causes and can be complex, but the return
to harmony is essentially simple and one and the same for every form of
disharmony. That is not to say it is easy, but it is straightforward.
When we lose the harmony in something we are singing and veer into
discord, we need to listen and try another note to get back right. The same is true
with every form of disharmony. We cannot solve it by singing our wrong note
more loudly, although some have been known to try that. We cannot solve it by
shutting our ears to the true melody. We have to quiet down some and listen. We
each know in our ear or heart or spirit what harmonizes and what does not. We
need to listen and let the spirit teach us the way back to harmony.
If the disharmony is a war, you do not reach harmony by sending in more
troops and shedding more blood. That may kill all the people in the world but it
will not establish harmony. If the disharmony is a stressed out, overbusy life,
working or worrying even harder is not going to establish harmony. It may lead to
a fatal stroke and the silence of the grave, but it will not establish harmony. If we
are in disharmony from an attack or loss we have suffered it will not help to avoid
the grief we feel. We will not heal until we have listened to the pain in our heart
and let it teach us what harmony means when we are wounded.
To Americans caught up in the giddy rush of our manic, materialistic,
more, more, more culture, this is bad news—because to stop means to suffer the
pain of an addict’s withdrawal. The bad news is that we need to stop and listen
and suffer the truth of our disharmony, but the good news is that when we do, we
may begin to hear the true melody of God. We may hear what in our life
harmonizes and what does not. If we can quiet the discordant strains in ourselves,
we find that we can know in our heart of hearts what is right and what is wrong.
Our spirit can hear the song of the Holy Spirit in nature or flowing in our veins,
however faintly, and we can become attuned to it.
Some people do not let go and quiet their compulsiveness to that extent
until they are on their deathbed, when suddenly they see what really matters in life
and find they have missed it. Others get a wake-up call—a serious illness or the
loss of someone they love. Al Gore talks about that in An Inconvenient Truth. His
son almost died in an accident, and it made him stop and listen, and he changed his
life according to what he heard. Suffering can teach us the way, and sometimes
that is what it takes. Those who listen through their grief and suffering often
become the wisest among us.
Some need an extreme loss or threat to change them, but others develop a
practice of listening on their own. This is what meditation or centering prayer can
be, like what we practice at the Prayer of the Heart. It is also the intended purpose
of the Sabbath that we are each commanded to take one day a week. The Sabbath
is supposed to be a day to stop and listen to the Spirit and regain our harmony.
Wendell Berry, the Christian American farmer, writer and prophet, talks
about finding harmony on Sunday afternoons spent in the wild. Many of his
Sabbath poems are about finding the song or light of God in the ridge-top woods.
The title of his collected Sabbath poems is A Timbered Choir. Here is how one of
them begins:
What if, in the high, restful sanctuary
That keeps the memory of Paradise,
We’re followed by the drone of history
And greed’s poisonous fumes still burn our eyes?
Disharmony recalls us to our work.
Berry talks about how hard it is to come from the sanctuary of the Garden
of Eden woods down to the human world, to come out of God’s light down to the
“peopled dark” and “the grief of waste, the agony of haste and noise.” Yet having
been up in the woods on the Sabbath, we come back to the fields with a vision of
what harmony could mean, and we can guide our actions to be in tune with the
light. “Disharmony recalls us to our work,” and that work is creating harmony
around us, which is to say, creating something like heaven on earth.
Berry says that, “Though mortal, incomplete, that harmony is our one
possibility of peace.” And he ends the poem saying,
But harmony of earth is Heaven-made,
Heaven-making, is promise and is prayer,
A little song to keep us unafraid,
An earthly music magnified in air.
Harmony is heaven-made and heaven-making. That is what we learn in the
second chapter of the book of Acts. The disciples begin in a state of disharmony,
hiding out and directionless, praying and waiting. They are in disharmony, but
listening and seeking. They become heaven-made when the Holy Spirit comes
upon them at the beginning of the chapter, and they are heaven-making, creating
the realm of God in their midst, by the end. This is how the Spirit of harmony
works: it remakes us so that we will remake the world.
The reason why we need to listen carefully and all the time is that the Holy
Spirit is a wild and unpredictable composer. It can come as a dove, or it can come
as a violent wind and tongues of fire, if that is what it will take to move us toward
harmony. It can call us to the contemplative life one moment, and in the next
moment it can ask us to risk our life speaking truth to power, confronting the
forces of injustice and hate. It can call us to help heal others or to a long, painful
healing of ourselves. And as Paul points out, the Holy Spirit can make harmony
itself a challenge by giving us each different gifts and temperaments and
viewpoints, and yet we are miraculously harmonized into one body by each being
attuned to the one Spirit.
In a disharmonious world the great hope we have is that, as the Psalm says,
“In your light we see light.” If we want to help create a new way of being that will
harmonize all things, that will “bring justice to our land” in the words of our last
hymn today, and “bring to our world of strife God’s sovereign word of peace, that
war may haunt the earth no more and desolation cease,” if we want to create a
sustainable way of life that ends the threat of global warming, then the first step is
for us each to be in God’s light so that we can see light, to be listening to the Spirit
so that we can harmonize with the Spirit when it comes to us.
The second step is for us to join together as one body, each with our own
spiritual gifts to share. In God’s light, we see light, and so if we are a community
in the light, seeking the way God would have us shine that light into an
overshadowed world, we can trust that we will see the way. We can trust that the
Holy Spirit will give us our part to create more harmony and more light.
We can also trust that the Spirit will be able to use even the humblest body
of Christ. Those original disciples were about the same size congregation that we
are, and they were just as far from the center of the Empire. Their voice was weak
at first, but over the centuries it grew to be the most powerful ever heard. As
Margaret Mead said, and we need to remind ourselves often, “Never doubt that a
small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s
the only thing that ever has.”
Let us pray a listening prayer, seeking to hear the Spirit’s melody within us
so that we may be in harmony with it, seeking God’s light so that we may see
light. Let us pray in silence…
Sermon 01/21/2007