Despicable Me

A Sermon delivered on the 11th of July, 2010

I hope you are comfortable, for this morning I plan to preach for 22,369.36 miles, give or take a few hundred miles. For this morning I have been asked to preach about environmental bumper stickers. You’ve seen them around, and if you haven’t there are a few on the cover of your order of service. They are completely familiar to me, for I spent three years in Cambridge, home of Harvard and M.I.T., and a place where our on-going destruction of the planet is the greatest of concerns. Of course, Cambridge is the home of many bumper stickers, half of which make no sense outside of the academic world. Bumper stickers like “Heisenberg Slept Here… Maybe.” One of my favorites, suitable for our mathematicians, says “Don’t drink and derive.”

In all seriousness though, one cannot preach on the subject of our relationship to the rest of God’s creation without noting its immensity. The distance I cited is in fact the distance the earth will travel in its orbit during the length of the average sermon. Never mind that our Solar System is moving within the Milky Way, or that the Milky Way is itself hurtling out into the cosmos from the source, from the moment and place of creation we can only guess at, but that we call the Big Bang. At the other end of the scale we have the beauty and fragility and sheer mind-blowing mystery of life itself, the evolution of new traits, the development of species. And smaller still we have the atomic, Newtonian Quantum mysteries of the atom and the sub-atomic, and it is mind-blowing too.

Creation is amazing, and we are destroying it faster than it can repair itself, and if you don’t believe it you are simply kidding yourself so get real. You are a sinner, for you are involved in the destruction of God’s creation. And so am I. And to do better might take another generation or two, if humans survive that long, but the least we can do is give it a try. So here goes: We must change. The church should be buying green products, not just whatever is cheapest. We should start a compost pile for our mountain of coffee grounds… and maybe those of us who live in apartments can contribute as well. We might do a better job of carpooling. We might finally put in those energy efficient lights Ed has been lobbying for. And all of this can happen if faithful entrepreneurs step up and say “I can do that project.”

Of course, we also need to make changes in our own lives. We can throw our hands up and say “It’s too much, I can’t make a difference.” That is called the Cycle of Cynicism. Or we can say, “Hey, today I can do one little thing to make the world better.” That’s called the Cycle of Hope.

The Psalmist writes of the amazing beauty of this creation, I grew up by the ocean and in the woods, surrounded by the beauty of this creation, you know this creation is beautiful, so why do we insist on destroying it? I know this for a fact, if I had the number of criminal convictions BP has, I would not be out committing new crimes. It is time we stop giving corporations the rights of a citizen with none of the responsibilities… just this week I learned that the same scientists who developed the tobacco industry’s strategy for undermining public trust in the science regarding smoking-related deaths are now actively involved in the effort to deny man-made global climate change.

But quite frankly, a sermon that explains why we should keep the earth alive for your grandchildren and great-grandchildren is a waste of time… you already know what you need to do, you just lack the will to do it. And I can’t give you will power, I can only invite you to pray, to read Scripture, and to listen for the Spirit. So what will I do with the many thousands of miles left in this sermon?

I’d like to look at the scriptural and theological reasons why we have such a screwed up relationship with nature. We could turn, for example, to the problem of translation. Was humankind given “dominion” over all other creatures, as some would translate the oldest Hebrew manuscripts? Or were we asked to be “stewards” of creation, as others would translate that ancient word? This is an interesting question, to be fair, especially to biblical scholars.

A far bigger problem is placing texts accurately within the Judeo-Christian trajectory, and understanding from that placement the theology that drives a people’s way of thinking. You have heard me use the word trajectory before, and you will hear it again. It is the term that best captures the notion that the human understanding of our relationship to our Creator has changed and evolved forever, since  before the earliest texts, and it continues to change. This is the post-modern theology caught up in our slogan “God is Still Speaking.” The historical trajectory goes something like this: A small band, far smaller than recorded in Exodus, escapes from Egypt. They encounter a Midianite god named “YWH.” They adapt this into their own name for their God, though they will also adopt some Canaanite titles. These people are henotheistic, they believe there are many gods, but that Yahweh is their god. We can see traces of this theology in the earliest texts, some of the Psalms. They came to believe that their god was the mightiest of gods, and that Yahweh would protect them. The Northern Kingdom and Southern Kingdoms split after Solomon, and the theologians of each kingdom developed their own theology, one imagining God as a super-sized human, the other as an abstract force. We can see remnants of this in the two very different versions of many stories found in Genesis.

By the time the Southern Kingdom fell and the Babylonian Exile began, they had abandoned the idea that God was their tribal god that would make them an earthly kingdom. They developed the notion of one god who was universal and who was good, not a super-sized human with a bad temper and a giant ego, but the God we know today, a loving God. Mind you, this was still the god of the Hebrews, God loved them best, but other peoples were welcome as long as they knew their place. Then Jesus came along. And Jesus changed everything. By the time the gospels were written, it was becoming clear that the followers of the Way believed that the one good loving God was not exclusively the god of the Hebrews, that God loved and offered salvation to everyone. Never mind that when Christianity met Neo-Platonism we got all sorts of distortions and corruptions in our Doctrine of God, we were still left with the same basic movement… in the theological trajectory as reflected in the scripture, God goes from being the god of one man and his family to being the god of one tribe to being the god of one nation to being the god of all people with primary interest in one tribe to being the universal loving God of all…

However, we have not evolved in one way. When the authors wrote Genesis in Samaria and Judah, when the redactors combined and edited Genesis in Judah and Babylon, they did so with an understanding that God’s focus was on humans. And we never got over that notion. Sure Jesus talks about sparrows and what-not, but we’re not really paying attention to that. We’ll keep our God human-focused, thank you very much… after all, didn’t they write that we were made in God’s own image?

The theologian Gordon Kaufman, under whom I was blessed to study, refers to this conception as the anthropomorphic and anthropocentric God. That is, that ancient idea that God is a super-sized human, albeit a good one, and that God is obsessed with humans in a weird stalker way. We still have bits and pieces of a theology that considered our role in creation to be to boost God’s ego through continuous praise and obedience. And I must tell you, the resulting picture is not pretty, God comes off as some sort of psychopathic stalker, and that is not a God and of us can worship.

The anthropocentric and anthropomorphic god is one that we can use to justify our own prejudices, it is idol worship at its worst. We use ourselves as the measure of God. And I don’t want to worship a super-sized despicable me! And I bet you do not want to worship a super-sized despicable you. Enough with our amazing egos, God is bigger than some giant human obsessed with humans. Our Creator is Big Bang and super strings and the mystery of life itself, and can create more and love more than we can ever know, and we are fooling ourselves when we think God created this world for us to do with as we please, to use up and destroy with complete disregard for the future.

We will never know the entirety of God, the scope and will and being of God. We can know a little of God in Christ, who taught us that it is never about us and it is never about what we have and it is always about selfless amazing love and it is always about announcing the Kingdom of God which was unfolding and is unfolding today.

We need prophets and entrepreneurs and dreamers of dreams. We need to re-envision our relationship to God so we can re-envision our relationship to God’s creation. Failing to do so would be a bold and mighty sin.

May the Spirit bring you the beauties of being, the wonder of creation. May God so overwhelm you that you abandon your pretenses, that you abandon your idols, the giant human that looks like despicable you, despicable me. May you be made new again… for this is what it means to be saved… and you can be saved again today, again tomorrow. Our God is amazing and limitless, as is God’s creation. God is the god of humans. And the god of brown pelicans. And the god of crabgrass. And the god of blackholes. God is the god of a creation that is beyond our comprehension, beyond our understanding. Live boldly into it, protect it, for this is the day that the Lord has made. Not for us. Just has made. And we should rejoice and be glad in it. Amen.