July 23, 2006, Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 23; Jeremiah 23: 1-6; Mark 6: 30-34, 53-56
NCH# 573 Lead on Eternal Sovereign
NCH# 576 For the Healing of Nations
NCH# 314 Community of Christ
NCH#575 O for a World
By now many of us have seen the movie An Inconvenient Truth. If you
have not seen it, please do. This movie is a prerequisite for understanding the rest
of our lives as the global climate changes around us, setting off countless other
changes that will leave nothing unchanged. The movie gives us information about
what is happening to us and why and what we can do about it.
It is remarkably understated and gentle. It seems to follow the advice that a
freshman at Yale gave the Rev. William Sloane Coffin when he was chaplain
there. The student said, “When you say something that is both true and painful,
say it softly.” Coffin added, “Say it in other words to heal and not to hurt. Say it
in love.”
An Inconvenient Truth shows that restraint, that healing intent, that love. It
does not exploit the potential for sensationalism or hysteria. It uses existing data
conservatively and draws moderate conclusions. Yet it is powerful enough as it is
to convince us that we must respond immediately to what is happening. It is too
late to stop a global catastrophe, but it is not too late to limit its extent.
This is unquestionably a moral, ethical and religious imperative. We can
see that suffering is already happening from global warming. We can see that
things we do every day are causing that suffering. We can see that far greater
suffering will result if we do not change our way of life and reverse our national
and corporate policies immediately. We can also see from what happened in New
Orleans that those Jesus helped most will suffer most—the poor and the sick.
“The Lord is my Shepherd,” the Psalm says. “He leadeth me in the paths of
righteousness for his name’s sake.” That phrase, “for his name’s sake,” sounds as
if God’s reputation is at stake, and in this case it is. If followers of the Good
Shepherd will not go to extraordinary efforts to prevent global climate change
from doing its worst, then the world will curse our religion with its dying breath,
saying, “What good is a flock that will not follow its shepherd, and what good is a
shepherd who cannot lead his flock?”
We need to follow where the love of Christ is leading us. We need to
follow the paths of righteousness now. What are the paths of righteousness in this
case? There may be many, but I will talk briefly about three—the Hobbit Path, the
Missionary Path and the War Path.
In J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, little people called
hobbits live in a country called the Shire. Their aim is to make life as smooth,
sustainable and enjoyable as possible. They love gardens and good food, stories
and songs, walks under the stars and a snug, comfortable room to come home to
afterwards and sit by the fire. Unbeknownst to the happy little hobbits, the wisest
and most valliant of the big people are busy watching their borders, keeping evil
from entering the Shire so that this little pocket of goodness can continue. They
guard it because it is as important to create and preserve a good way of living as it
is to prevent a bad one.
Following the Hobbit Path of righteousness we would work to create a
healthy, sustainable and enjoyable new way of living. We would make our lives
environmentally harmonious, with as little contribution as possible to global
climate change or resource depletion or pollution. We would also try to make our
way of life a thing of beauty and a pleasure to experience, as close to heaven on
earth as we could make it—a life of simple joys and peace and the love of
goodness.
The Missionary Path, on the other hand, would take us beyond our own
shire. This week the Valley News ran a front-page story about the Meriden
Congregational Church sending a group to visit Bolivia. Our congregation has
sent missionaries to various corners of the world in the past, as Rik Fowle has told
us. We sent Eleanor Zue to Nicaragua in the 1980s as a Witness for Peace. This
spring we sent a work crew to help rebuild a home damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
Following the Missionary Path leads us into areas of suffering beyond our
borders where we offer compassion and aid. As global climate change increases
its devastation far beyond Katrina, there will be more and more pain in need of our
comfort and assistance.
The War Path of Righteousness leads us into conflict with the massive
forces that are causing global climate change and refusing to stop. The War Path
leads us into conflict with war itself. War can be a cause of climate change, a
result of climate change, and a tool of those who are profiting from creating
climate change. The War Path of Righteousness leads us to fight against war in all
three cases.
But the main reason it can be called a War Path is that we need to wage war
against whatever is stopping us from reversing global warming. To some extent,
this is an inner war. We need to break down our strong inner resistance to change,
or the fear or denial or despair that paralyzes us. We need to wage war against
consumerism and greed, but also against the automobile and oil industries that
exploit our material desires with too little regard for environmental impact. We
need to fight government policies that allow climate-changing pollution. The War
Path addresses the systemic causes as opposed to treating the symptoms.
You may have heard the story of the people who were having a picnic
beside a river. Suddenly someone cried out in trouble in the swift current. The
picnickers rushed down and struggled to pull him to safety. Then they went back
to their meal, but soon they heard another person cry out, and rushed down and
saved her. This happened several times until finally one of the picnickers said,
“You stay here and help the people who are drowning. I’m going up river to find
out what’s going on and try to fix it.”
The Missionary Path helps those who are drowning. The War Path tries to
attack the problem at is source. Maybe it sounds too violent or too extreme to call
this a War Path, but as the Christian environmental writer, Bill McKibbon, has
pointed out, global climate change calls for a campaign similar to the Civil Rights
Movement, a nonviolent, strategic confrontation on a war-like scale.
The stakes are even higher than civil rights—we are looking at the possible
collapse of civilization—and now we have the added pressure of time running out.
It is time for a war like Gandhi’s war of independence, it is time for warriors and
heroes whose only weapon is their willingness to stand and if need be suffer for
the truth.
There is no question that the teachings of Christ and the systems of morals
and ethics based on those teachings all point us to these paths of righteousness,
insisting that we follow them. Go back and re-read today’s hymns and scriptures
and you will hear them calling to us loud and clear. We need to act, we need to be
part of this movement, we need to be good shepherds. Some of us will be drawn
more to the Hobbit Path, some to the Missionary Path and some to the War Path.
Our current church planning process may help us discern which path or
combination of paths we will take as a congregation. But it is clear that our place
is somewhere on these or similar paths, wherever the Holy Spirit guides and
empowers us to go.
It is also clear why we in the church have a special role to play—why the
world needs our leadership. The church has been preparing to serve at such a time
as this for two thousand years. We are acquainted with the concept of apocalypse.
We have thought about what it means to live in the travail of end times. We know
the sacred way of love and compassion that leads through the valley of the shadow
of death, and we know that along that path we need fear no evil. We have faith in
the shepherd we follow. We have comfort to offer others, we have reasons not to
despair, we have a peace that passes understanding, we have a contagious courage
and even joy to share as we go down dark paths together, because we can see a
light in the darkness that no darkness can overcome. We have an ethic of
nonviolence and redemptive suffering and sacrifice, of giving our lives to help,
heal and restore.
And we have a vision of how God means the world to be. We have moral
and environmental ideals going back to the Garden of Eden. These ideals can
guide us as we change the way of life that we must change. They can help us
replace old ways with something better, something closer to the ways of God’s
realm, something a hobbit or a wizard would recognize as good. We have a vision
of a just and merciful world that is worth risking our life to create for our children
and our earth.
A truth is inconvenient or fearful only as long as we resist it. Once we face
and engage the truth it becomes more than convenient—it becomes essential to our
life, and a source of purpose, meaning and energy. The terrible truth of our
planet’s crisis can become an opportunity for the Spirit to prove again that “all
things work together for the good for those who love God, who are called
according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28)
I will end the sermon with a familiar quote—one that can help us if we are
hesitating to respond to the inconvenient truth. It is a quote from a Scottish
mountaineer and conservationist, W. H. Murray. In his book The Scottish
Himalayan Expedition he wrote:
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back,
always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and
creation) there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills
countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely
commits oneself, then providence moves too. A whole stream of
events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of
unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no
[one] could have dreamt would have come [their] way. I [have]
learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!
Let us pray to God for the courage and boldness to commit to the
paths of righteousness that our time requires. Let us pray for the genius, power
and magic of the Holy Spirit that can help us find our way out of this crisis. Let us
pray in silence….
Sermon 07/23/2006