Earth Day Sermon
23 Aril 2023
I am not going to stand up here this morning and tell you we need to stop destroying the planet, because duh! If you are here, you already know that.
I’m not going to stand up here and tell you that neoliberal capitalism is a dumpster fire that was built on colonialism and slavery and that it is still based on exploitation and violence and has absolutely nothing to do with following Jesus. You don’t need to be ashamed of your privilege. It isn’t your fault. But you absolutely need to use your privilege to lift up others. But again, if you’ve been here more than a few times, you’ve already heard me say that.
Instead of preaching to the choir this morning, though it is a might fine choir up there, I am going to offer a challenge and name the theological task that is before us if we are going to save our species and our planet. And I start with the human brain.
It is simply miraculous. We know way more about how it works now than we did even twenty years ago thanks to functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, also known as fMRI. We know more about a lot of things, from the human genome to the Higgs boson. And yet, we are completely clueless about how the brain makes you you. We are more than a little terrified when we hear and sometimes witness how traumatic brain injury and diseases of the brain can make someone into another someone entirely. Being is mystery.
We are bipedal self-aware primates in search of meaning, fragile, finite, and fickle, and it is only natural that we begin with what we know, moving outward, the baby who discovers their own hand and slowly understands it as part of themselves.
We construct meaning, sometimes through discoveries, sometimes just making stuff up, which is totally okay, though sometimes that made up stuff needs to be adjusted for the discoveries. Which is exactly where we find ourselves today as Christians in a world on fire.
Ancient humans imagined the mysterious forces that impact our lives as having will and agency much like themselves. Eventually, in many cultures, gods were simply humans of another kind. Lightening and thunder became Zeus who became an embodiment of male sexual violence against women and children, among other things. Sometimes the line between powerful humans and gods became blurry, often a goal of those powerful humans who benefited from the implied power and divinity, so that kings and caesars declared themselves to be gods and sometimes believed it themselves..
The Jewish religious tradition, our source, was never the story of a single people following a single god from Abraham on, even though that became the dominant narrative. The Jewish religious trajectory included polytheism long after its peaked under King David and his son Solomon. There were incidents of child sacrifice as late as the lead-up to the Babylonian Captivity. But somewhere along the line, certainly by the end of the exile, they had crafted something like the faith we know today, and had a set of scriptures close to the Jewish scripture of today. Some refer to it as ethical monotheism.
The religion they constructed for themselves was truly innovative. While God was still human-like in agency and action, they prohibited depictions of God. Still, they centered the human in their understanding of God, using a text that declared that humans were created in God’s image to create a God in humanity’s image. They understood their tribe as being the preferred tribe among humans, and humans being the closest thing to gods on earth, given dominion over all of creation.
Human authority over creation was an appealing idea when humans had authority over bupkis, that being the technical term for pretty much nothing. Life is a terminal condition for all of us, more so before modern medicine and weather forecasting and Apple watches that tell people when we’ve fallen off a cliff. We imagined ourselves as being in a different category of being, “species” exceptionalism in the same way that the ancient Jews believed in their tribal exceptionalism and way too many Americans believe in American exceptionalism, the insane idea that somehow America is unique and more worthy or entitled than other nations and people, though as we have discussed, that definition of American is very small with high white walls.
The problem with the construction of a religion of species exceptionalism is that it simply isn’t true. While the ancient Jews were rightly proud that they had prohibited idols, not all idols are made of clay or gold. The God that was somehow human and so somehow made humans god-like was always an idol. It turns out we are never actually the center of the universe.
And I want to stop right here, before folks who are relatively new to our community or maybe even visiting for the first time freak out and call me a heretic, though it would be a label I would wear proudly. I want to be clear. Just because humans constructed the Judeo-Christian religious trajectory and are still constructing the Judeo-Christian religious trajectory does not mean it does not contain truth and beauty and the power to transform lives. Humans construct wells, but they do not construct the life giving water in the well.
Human exceptionalist theology was not the only option. Other cultures produced other theologies, many of them that understood humans as just one part of something bigger. We can romanticize and misappropriate religious practices from cultures we label “indigenous,” the tribes that were here before the European invasion, the islanders of the Pacific and First Peoples of Australia, but the simple fact is they constructed religions that de-centered the human.
It is not enough for us to change the ancient Judeo-Christian theology of dominion over Creation into stewardship of Creation, even though that is certainly an improvement, for that still leaves humans at the center. And while I still believe in the holy found in our experience of Creation, still believe in the living waters found in the stories of Moses and Jesus, there are elephants who grieve, and galaxies spinning, and our sun has an expiration date. Creation is bigger than us.
We need to tear down the religious constructions that center the human, and simply crawling into our neighbor’s sweat lodge is not going to cut it. We must do the work of building a Creation theology that is expansive and impartial, that denies human exceptionalism, but that is still true to our story. And that takes time.
And we’re way too busy. Better to just put the Judeo-Christian tradition in the closet, taking it out and dusting it off like some seasonal knick-knack a couple of times a year, loving the hymns, hating the theology.
I am not a Native American, despite the past fashion that had every white American family imagine a Cherokee great-great-grandmother, though more power to you if you have one that is legit. There was also a fashion that had every white American family imagine they were descended from royalty, but I can assure you that my home on North Main is not a lord’s estate, and if I’m wearing a tiara, it can only mean that I’ve just won the world’s worst drag pageant.
Let’s do the hard work of constructing a theology centered on life, and yes, we’ll have to deal with the dumpster fire of our economic system and it is not going to be easy to lift people out of poverty, fear, and tribalism, but you know, I’m crazy enough to believe that love, selfless love, creation-size love, may seem improbable but it is not impossible.
Building that theology is going to require personal, theological, and even species humility, which is hard but holy, as we are reminded by Micah 6:8 and the call to walk humbly with our God.
Embrace not knowing, because if we are honest, we can never know God. A god we could know, that fit into our cognitive and cultural framework, would not be God. We can only experience God.
The gospel reading traditionally assigned for today is the resurrection story of the road to Emmaus. You may recall that after hearing the news that Jesus was risen from the dead, two unnamed disciples set off for the village of Emmaus, seven miles from Jerusalem. They were joined along the way by a mysterious stranger, who explained to them how the resurrection fulfilled scripture. And for all that talking, they did not know him. All the words in the world would not have opened their eyes. It was only in the experience of breaking bread that they knew him.
Experience God. Experience God in creation. Experience God when reading about the Higgs boson or listening to Terence Blanchard’s new opera about a gay boxer with brown skin or watching that great-grandbaby discover that that thing out there that we call a hand is actually part of them, long before words.
You and that great-grandbaby might seem like the center of the universe, at least in the early morning hours when the house is quiet and the sunlight a airborne joy and mama is trying to get just a little a few more minutes of sleep. And that’s okay. But creation is a swirling mysterious dance. And you? You too are a mystery. May it always be so. Amen.