April 26, 2009 Second Sunday of Easter, Earth Day Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 104; Acts 4:32-5: 5; Luke 12:15-21
Vincent Van Gogh said, “The best way to know God is to love many
things.” It is easy to love many things this time of year—the rushing waters, the
wildflowers and yard flowers, a warm breeze on bare skin, birdsong. Loving
these things that are dear to us we may know God better, and we may feel joy, but
we also know that there are forces in the world that endanger such things, and
that to love them is to open ourselves to grief.
The greatest threat is still the one Jesus warned against: human greed.
Greed says to build bigger barns. Jesus says to be rich toward God. Jesus makes
clear that this is a choice we must make, and it is a matter of life and death.
Today that is truer than ever. We need to decide what rule we will live by, the
building of bigger barns, or the loving care of God’s precious earth and all God’s
precious children.
Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of the book, Field Notes From a
Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change. She has written the lead, “Talk
of the Town” Comment in the most recent New Yorker (April 27). In it she
describes how the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970 gave voice to a massive
outburst of concern about the environment. Twenty million Americans took part.
Major environmental laws were passed in its wake.
That widespread enthusiasm for environmental health has now faded to its
lowest level since Earth Day began, despite the fact that there are severe
catastrophes that are unfolding before our eyes—the disappearance of species,
the collapse of fisheries, the draining or increased toxicity of major aquifers,
climate change. Kolbert says that in a recent survey the American public placed
the environment last on a list of 20 concerns that the government should address.
A recent Gallup poll found only 42% agreed that ‘protection of the environment
should be given priority, even at the risk of curbing economic growth.” This is
the lowest support in the twenty-five years that Gallup has been asking that
question. It may be understandable in these economic times, but Kolbert points
out that without the public demanding action, the government is not likely to take
the kind of bold steps needed to reverse the unfolding catastrophes.
This is a problem that the Kentucky farmer, writer and prophet, Wendell
Berry, foresaw all the way back at the beginning, in 1970. That year he wrote an
essay entitled, “Think Little” (as opposed to think big), in which he warned that
environmentalism was in danger of fading like a fad. If environmentalism were
to make a lasting difference, people would have to discover, in Berry’s words,
“that ‘the environmental crisis’ is no such thing; it is not a crisis of our environs
or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as
community members, and as citizens. We have an ‘environmental crisis’
because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working,
resting, traveling and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural God-given
world.” (“The Idea of a Local Economy” The Art of the Common Place, p 251)
Berry wrote, “A community’s health is largely determined by the way it
makes it living.” (“Conserving Communities” Another Turn of the Crank, p 18)
Berry’s hope in 1970 was that the awakening of environmental awareness would
lead people to change their way of living in fundamental ways. Berry wrote (in
the noninclusive language of 1970), “A man who is willing to undertake the
discipline and the difficulty of mending his own way is worth more to the
conservation movement that a hundred who are insisting merely that the
government and the industries mend their ways.” (Think Little,” Commonplace p
87)
It is far easier to try to change society than it is to change our own habits.
This is what made William Wilberforce so remarkable, the man the movie
Amazing Grace is about that we showed here last week. Challenged by his friend
William Pitt to try to change society, Wilberforce replied that he would like to
change himself first. The amazing thing is that he did. He lived what he
believed, and it gave him endurance and moral force in the effort to change
society away from the greed economy of slavery.
Wendell Berry says that the change we need to make in response to
environmental threats requires “a new kind of life—harder, more laborious,
poorer in luxuries and gadgets, but also, I am certain, richer in meaning and more
abundant in real pleasures. To have a healthy environment we will all have to
give up things we like; we may even have to give up things we have come to
think of as necessities. But to be fearful of the disease and yet unwilling to pay
for the cure is not just hypocritical; it is to be doomed.” (ibid. p 87)
We all have big barns in our lives. We all have them in part because our
society makes them seem to be necessities, as slavery seemed in Wilberforce’s
day. I read recently that the average American child uses over nine times the
resources of a child in low-income countries. (Christian Century, May 5, 2009, p
9) As Wendell Berry says, “We cannot deny the spiritual importance of our
economic life.” This is easy to see when you think of the social injustice of the
current distribution of resources, but it is also true of environmental impact.
Berry continues, “By our work we reveal what we think of the works of God.
How we take our lives from this world, how we work, what work we do, how well
we use the materials we use and what we do with them after we have used them—
all these are questions of the highest and gravest religious significance. In
answering them we practice, or do not practice, our religion.” (“Christianity and
the Survival of Creation” Commonplace p315)
This is why so many New Testament teachings are about money and our
relationship to the material world. Jesus condemns the greedy pursuit of material
comfort in today’s gospel passage. The man who has built up big barns to hoard
his harvest wants to kick back and eat, drink and be merry. Jesus says that to
follow that way of greed is to die into meaninglessness. The point of the material
world, the meaning of life that we can find through the gifts God has given us
here, is to become rich in God, to become one with God, to be in the Sacred Way,
as today’s Ojibway prayer of confession puts it. If we are in the Sacred Way, we
deal with material things as God does—as the means to promote life and health
and community, as the means of love.
Today’s passage in Acts shows that the earliest church understood
Christ’s message perfectly and lived it to the fullest. They gave up things they
liked and considered necessities. They gave up personal possessions in order to
create a local economy modeled on God’s economy. All belonged to all, and
each received all she or he needed. It was an economy of love. The community
they created was so powerful, so super-charged with life, that to cheat and still
obey the impulses of greed amounted to death, as poor Ananias learned the hard
way.
God said to Moses and the children of Israel, “I have set before you life
and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants
may live, loving God, obeying God, holding fast to God.” (Deuteronomy 30:19f)
That is what we have to do in order to live in the promised land flowing with milk
and honey. If we choose the ways of exploitation and greed, we die. A
community or nation or global economy that chooses the ways of greed dies.
Choose God, and we live.
One of the good things to come out of the current economic crisis is that
people are turning away from the greed-based economy toward more of a local
love-based or God-based one. Wendell Berry would say this is the best and most
lasting thing we can do for the environment—to create a local economy, with the
local providing of food at its heart.
So many people are planting gardens this spring that seed companies are
running out of supplies. A new organization has sprouted in Thetford, The
Pompanoosuc Agricultural Society, reviving a name first used over one hundred
years ago during a similar crisis. “The new Pompanoosuc Agricultural Society’s
mission is to create a network of people from neighboring villages to promote
and nourish a viable local food system.” Through educational programs it hopes
to encourage “the sharing of knowledge, skills and resources.” It will “support
local farms and work to build needed infrastructure to create a healthy, reliable
and equitable food supply.” It intends “to forge self-reliance and foster
community, thereby improving our quality of life.”
Scot Zens has been instrumental in organizing this group, and he has
brought a map and listings of local food producers that you can see today after
the service. You do not have to be a food producer to be part of this local
economy—we need consumers too.
These efforts may not completely fulfill the vision that Christ gave the
earliest church of how to live in relation to one another and the created world,
but they go a long way toward an economy based on love of neighbor, love of
place and love of God. They are a lasting form of environmentalism.
In order to see the true worth of what the Pompanoosuc Agricultural
Society and others around the country are doing, we have to reprogram our
minds. The greed economy has brainwashed us to think big, and to think that
only big is good. But if we think as Jesus taught us to think, we will think little,
and that new vision will change our night to day. Listen one more time to the
voice of Wendell Berry, who wrote:
In this difficult time of failed public expectations, when
thoughtful people wonder where to look for hope, I keep
returning in my own mind to the thought of the renewal
of the rural communities. I know that one revived rural
community would be more convincing and more
encouraging than all the government and university
programs of the last fifty years, and I think that it could
be the beginning of the renewal of our country, for the
renewal of the rural communities ultimately implies the
renewal of urban ones. But to be authentic, a true
encouragement and a true beginning, this would have to
be a revival accomplished mainly by the community
itself. It would have to be done not from the outside by
the instruction of visiting experts, but from the inside by
the ancient rule of neighborliness, by the love of precious
things, and by the wish to be at home. (“The Work of
Local Culture” What Are People For? p 168f)
Let us pray, and as we pray, let us call to mind our own love of precious things.
Let us allow to float up into our mind’s eye the things of God here in our own place
that we love. As we see the views or faces or garden or woods or waters or creatures
we love, let us ask ourselves if we feel moved by them to change the way we live in
order to contribute to their preservation by participating in a growing local economy
and culture. What do we feel moved to do for the love of these precious things?
Let us pray in silence…
Our Waters Shape All Thetford’s Life and Look Copyright 2009 Thomas Cary Kinder
tune: Old 124th (PH#451) 10.10.10.10.10.
Our waters shape all Thetford’s life and look:
Steep forest blessed by song of falling brook;
Ompompanoosuc’s carved, stained copper rocks;
Splashes of children jumping off pond docks.
Our waters shape all Thetford’s life and look.
Our love of waters leads to care for land.
Farms, roads and leach fields, how new use is planned:
Choosing wise ways, soil saved and rich and clean,
Keeps our streams healthy and our hillsides green.
Our love of waters leads to care for land.
Our care for land leads to community:
Hands helping hands; shared town economy.
Only together can we make health thrive.
Strong local culture keeps wise ways alive.
Our care for land leads to community.
Community leads to the love of God:
Awe shared for wonders: rain and sun and sod;
Faith bred by watching life rise new from death;
Praise to the source of brain and brawn and breath.
Community leads to the love of God.
Sustain the life we love here ever more:
Long view of mountains; blooming spring woods floor.
Childs, Cobble, Houghton, all our stone-walled hills,
East and North Thetford, Post and Rice’s Mills:
God bless our loving care here ever more.
Sermon 04/26/2009