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“The Whole Earth – Full of Glory” |
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Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin Isaiah 6:1-8 Luke 5:1-11 |
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So how many of you turned off your electricity at 10:55 on February 1st for five minutes? This was an initiative of The Alliance for the Planet, a group of environmental associations. The idea was to give the planet a five-minute breather and to signal to governments all over the world that global warming needs to be top of mind as we go forward into the 21st century. (See www.lalliance.fr) February 1 was chosen because this was the day that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was issuing their comprehensive report on climate change from Paris, France.
This is the report representing the consensus view of 2000 of the world’s top scientists on climate change. They have issued three previous reports. The first one was in 1990 when hardly anyone was talking about global warming. The second one, in 1995, stated that the “balance of evidence” showed that climate change was due to human activity. This report gave impetus to the international meetings that resulted in the Kyoto Protocol. The third report, in 2001, was more direct and alarming, concluding, “most of the observed warming in the last 50 years has been due to the increased concentrations of green-house gas.” This latest report is unequivocal: “it is possible to detect the effects of global warming in virtually every region of the world.” (Dr. Weaver, climatologist: See Globe and Mail, January 27, Sec. A7, Why It’s Peak Time to Hit the Brakes, Martin Mittlestaedt)
On the other hand, The Fraser Institute, a think tank partially funded by the oil and gas industry just issued a statement that continues to refute the findings of these 2000 independent scientific experts. Their website is www.fraserinstitute.org if you want to examine their evidence.
Does anyone else find it remarkable how suddenly climate change is the number one issue for the Canadian public? It surged ahead of health care. Our health care minister is suddenly making connections between planetary degradation and health. Our governing party is scrambling to adjust their priorities. The liberal party is running on the platform of the environment. The entire planet is blanketed by an email – I received at least 50 separate E-mails – encouraging me to give the earth a five-minute Sabbath.
It’s truly phenomenal. There is every reason I think to hope. Time will tell whether this mini-Sabbath last Friday will translate into more sustainable practices. When it becomes truly inconvenient – when gas prices triple, when carbon caps are imposed on us, when the cost of shipping our food in from half-way around the world is reflected in the price we pay for lettuce, when we feel the ethical obligation to travel less by air because of the excessive carbon emissions from jet fuel – this will be the test of whether we’re serious. But for now, it seems to me that we’re in the midst of a shift in public consciousness.
In my book I tell the story of Dr. Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist, who studied weather patterns on a global scale. He fed mathematical equations into a supercomputer that represented as many variables as his team could imagine that might affect weather patterns. They were trying to get better at forecasting the weather on a global scale. One day, to save some time, he decided to shave a few decimal points off one of the equations, an infinitesimally small difference. Then he went for a coffee. Upon return he could not believe what he found. This minute change made an enormous difference. It led him to ask his now famous question: “If a butterfly flaps its wings in Mexico, does it cause a hurricane in Texas?”
What he stumbled on to was the power of subtle influence. In a radically interconnected universe – exemplified powerfully by the worldwide web – the smallest difference can lead to enormous change. Turning off our electricity for five minutes can seem like a ridiculously small gesture given the enormity of the challenge. On the other hand, we need to take into account the lesson of subtle difference. We may be seeing a vicious cycle of running rough shod over the earth and her creatures being transformed into a virtuous cycle.
Why do we care as Christians? Why do we have an environmental team giving us leadership in this congregation? Traditionally, the answer to this is that God gives us responsibility to be stewards of the earth. In one of our creation stories found in Genesis, God gives us dominion over the earth, to “conquer and subdue it” – but to do this the way any good king would rule over his property. I have concluded that the theology inherent in this creation myth is bankrupt. We can no longer afford to live as rulers over creation, even benevolent rulers. Conquering and subduing is done.
In the second story of creation there is more hope. Humans are presented as gardeners on earth. Any good gardener knows that for a garden to flourish, she must tap into the genius inherent in the land and in the plants themselves. If you learn to listen carefully, observe intently, the land and the plants will offer their wisdom to you. A relationship develops between the living garden and the patient gardener. This is a more helpful metaphor.
But in the gospel reading Jesus invites his followers to put out into deeper waters and I think we too can go deeper in our quest for why we should care for the planet. If you’re looking for a metaphor for the Christian journey here it is. To follow Christ is to go into the depths. He promises that we will find life in abundance in the deep waters. Our nets will be filled to the brim with new life.
Isaiah, the 8th century Jewish prophet, put out into the deep waters. He has some sort of religious experience. We’re not told what happens but following the experience he is sure that he has seen the Lord, “high and lifted up”. Angels were present, calling to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isaiah 6:3). When I was doing research for my book, I was surprised by that verse. I had always assumed that the verse read, “Heaven and earth are full of your glory”. The reason for this assumption is that our communion liturgy adds the word “heaven”. I don’t know why those responsible for the addition did it. Perhaps they associated God’s glory with other realms – heaven – but had more difficulty associating the very presence of God to the earthly realm.
But this is precisely what is so radical about the angel’s song. They know what some humans are just now beginning to realize. That earth is brim-full of the Holy One’s radiant presence. In our predominantly theistic models, we have imagined God to be located outside the universe. Every once in a while God makes a rare appearance, but then it’s back to the extra-terrestrial throne. But what if God is in the universe and the universe is in God? This is the theology known as panentheism.
To confess, with Isaiah, that the whole earth is full of God’s radiance is to go deeper than merely believing that God created it all – you can believe this, but still conclude God’s not in it. No, what mystics in every religious system have intuited is that the universe itself, the planet, all her creatures, including humans and their capacity for conscious self-reflection are sacred external manifestation of God’s very being. The universe doesn’t exhaust God’s being; it expresses it. Sri Aurobindo, perhaps the greatest Indian philosopher of the late 19th and early 20th century concluded that the universe was the body of God. Sallie McFague, a theologian at Vancouver School of Theology entitled her last book, The Body of God.
Now, we’re putting out to deep waters here. Do you feel it? Every thing and every body, including you and me are expressions of God’s own being. To take this in is to plunge into the very heart of mystery and undergo a radical reorientation. If this is true, for example, then the desecration of the earth is a sacrilege. It’s not just dumb. It’s not just that by doing so we will kill ourselves off – both are true. But push out into the deeper water. In our ignorance what we’ve been doing is sullying the radiant presence of Spirit shining out from all creation. At the deepest level, to wake up and see the earth and all her creatures as the unfolding story of Spirit is a spiritual awakening. An ecological ethic is inherently a spiritual ethic.
This is why Isaiah, upon discovering that God was present everywhere and in every thing upon the earth was horrified; “Woe is me. I am lost, a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips…” He had been missing what was right before his eyes – the universe itself revealed the presence of the divine. Now he understood that he had been looking for God in all the wrong places, and speaking out of ignorance, not wisdom, because he missed it. The good people at the Fraser Institute one day may one day wake up and find themselves understanding Isaiah’s terrible and tender awakening.
The Western world has been fixated for some three hundred years now on creating wealth and improving our standard of living. There have been many positive benefits to this economic definition of humanity’s purpose on earth. Most of us are truly graced by living through this age of prosperity. But our allegiance to the economic god called the market has blinded us to the miracle of life on this planet. We are on the verge of an awakening. The consciousness of the Western world is slowly emerging. We are gaining the insight that we must set economic goals within a more comprehensive, planetary context. We are awakening to the spiritual dimension of the earth and her creatures – an intrinsic sacred radiance separate and apart from their usefulness to us.
When we awaken to this sacred dimension of planetary life our economic models will naturally begin to redefine wealth and prosperity in terms of the health of the entire planetary system. Businesses will finally “get it” that any short-term wealth that is gained at the expense of the long-term health of the planet cannot be understood as true wealth. It is merely borrowing against future generation’s. It is entering into debt and handing the bill to future generations. We will wake up, like Isaiah, and understand why he felt his words had been unclean prior to his awakening.
So if Isaiah woke up and discovered that his words had been unclean, and that he lived among an unclean generation, what might be a vocabulary of grace as we co-create the future together? Here are just a few words that I would include in that lexicon of grace when we wake up to the inherent sacred mystery we’re involved with on our planet:
I encourage you to share your own sacred words with each other following the service. At this moment in the history of the planet, to put out into deep waters means seeing the whole earth as full of God’s glory. Amen.
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