EARTH CARE/GOD CARE
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

April 26, 2009

Psalm 8; Luke 24:36b-48 

On Wednesday of this last week the estimates were that 1/6th of the world population stopped sometime during their day to participate in an Earth Care Day event.  1/6th of the world's population!  That is right at a billion of us. 

Relatively speaking, in a very short amount of time—a mere 39 years—Earth Day has become a recognized, greatly maligned, and highly respected day of concern.  For me, that is my whole adult lifetime.  An increased focus on care for the Earth—as a place that can sustain over six billion human beings and the myriad life forms that we share this planet with—has been an active concern since I was sixteen years old.  Today, children in a great many cultures are taught a loving concern for the earth much like they are taught the same concern for human beings.  Even former President George W. Bush was, by the end of his second term, willing to acknowledge that global warming and climate change are real and something our government must manage in its origins and its impact on our long term sustainability as a nation. 

My father, Paul, suffered for the last twenty years of his life with an incurable lung condition that stole from him so much of the active participation in life that many of us take for granted.  Many in my father's generation of farmers have died early deaths due to significant changes in farming methods.  Many of the farmers who were my father's parent's generation are still alive in their nineties.   

In my father's generation there was, for the first time, the mass application of chemicals in farming.  I have told some of you about my early childhood introduction to farm chemicals.  On an eighty-acre family farm, everyone is born to work on that farm, and you begin work as soon as physically possible. 

We were tomato farmers.  By the time I was old enough, around age five, my job was rather simple: Our fields were one mile long.  We would have one-mile-long rows of tomatoes, twenty acres worth.  We would have twenty one-mile-rows of tomatoes, divided by a driveway from the next twenty one-mile-rows.  We picked the tomatoes in boxes; after filling a box, you would carry your box out to the driveway, so that they could be loaded onto a truck.  At the end of the day we would have three to four hundred boxes of tomatoes, all in a line, to be picked up.   

One of my jobs as a five-year-old was to walk the mile-long driveway in the late afternoon, before the loading of the boxes, with a gunny sack filled with white powder.  I would drop this sack of white powder on each box.  The powder would drop out of the sack through the porous holes and create sort of a cloud of white dust that I would go home and wash off each night.  That was my job for two years, until it was my sister's turn.  The powder was DDT, great for killing bugs, but of course, today a banned, cancer-causing substance.  

My father was the last of a generation of small acreage farmers.  In order to make ends meet financially, he joined with a local fertilizer salesman to do commercial spraying of farm chemicals.  After ten years of non-filtered breathing in of these toxins, my father's partner was dead and my father's lung capacity shrunken to less than twenty percent of normal.  What little oxygen he could transfer went to basic biological processes like digestion and brain and heart function, which rendered him nearly unable to walk much at all without huffing and puffing; it even significantly reduced his ability to think and process information on bad days.   

My dad and I have a very similar sense of humor.  On his bad days I would remind him that as a teenager I never thought he was very smart at processing information, so there was really no change in him from my perspective.  He would smile at me and whack me.  For an old sick man he could still hit pretty hard! 

Human history has been cruel to countless billions who have suffered and died in mines, in cities, and on farms, from innumerable environmental catastrophes.  While it is not just our generation, the cumulative tide of poisons, unchecked waste abuse, and population growth are having a global impact of previously untold proportions, and the task of dealing with the cumulative impact is ours to deal with responsibly. 

On Wednesday there were a lot of us who in some way demonstrated active concern for the environment which sustains us.  What has long been absent in the crowd views that I watch on television and see pictured in the papers and even from denominational literature, is the obvious presence not only of the Churches of Jesus Christ the world over, but that all faith groups are absent in truly large organized fashion.  Denominations are failing and mainline churches are shuttering their windows across the country.  Could it be that we are too often lagging behind the real-time concerns of people in our spirituality and religion?  Whenever a billion people gather would you not, if you were the Pope, want to be there?  Where was the church on Wednesday?  Where was I? 

I try to significantly bicycle my way through as much of life as makes common sense and sometimes, my family tells me, my bicycling even goes beyond common sense.  And I have, along with many of you, downsized not only my driving, but also the size of my car.  I drive one of the lightest, most fuel-efficient gasoline cars on the market.  One of the ironies of last Wednesday was that while I was out bicycling, I got knocked into the ditch, off my bike, by one of the most earth-friendly cars on the road, a Prius. 

The church that seeks to follow the ways of Jesus has had a significant theological problem, since the beginning of our existence, that feeds our too-often blasé attitude toward environmentalism.  The problem is reflected in our resurrection narrative in Luke's Gospel reading this morning. 

Luke's gospel, like John's last week, has Jesus returning after death in a physical form.  Last week John's Jesus miraculously appeared to the disciples, who are hiding behind locked doors, and says, “Here, touch my hands, touch my feet, and see the holes made by the nails of crucifixion.” This week, the same general story scene appears, and this time Luke's Jesus eats a piece of broiled fish to show how humanly present he is. 

The theory was, if Jesus were just a ghost, if he ate a piece of broiled fish it would have just dropped straight to the floor when he ate it.  Did Jesus come back as a ghost, a spirit, or as a fully fleshed human being?  If you think this is a problem in your mind and mine as 21 st century believers, it was equally to the earliest faith believers in Jesus, the Resurrected-from-earth-Lord. 

I beg your indulgence because this is so crucial to our understanding of our faith and dedication to our environment.  Jesus died in the year 30 CE, give or take a few years.  The earliest written records we have of how that death and resurrection were being understood are not from the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.  Those stories come late in the development of early Christian thought.   

The early written and verbal witness is the Apostle Paul and his authentic letters.  It is generally accepted that Paul was converted to Christianity, baptized in water, as Kelsey was.  Paul was converted about one year after Jesus' death.    His last letter was to the Romans, and that is dated around 63 or 64 CE. 

Paul's whole ministry was complete before the first Gospel was penned in 70 or 72 CE.  Paul talks about meeting with all the disciples and the other Apostles in Jerusalem.  He learned from those who knew Jesus.  He argued and fought with Peter himself.  Read Paul's authentic letters.  You will read that Jesus appeared to the disciples and to the twelve and to hundreds of others and to Paul all in the same way—spiritually. 

Paul talks of Jesus having a bodily spiritual form.  You could recognize him.  But Paul says flesh cannot inherit heaven, only spirit can.   For Paul, Jesus was changed at death, in a twinkling of the eye, and became spiritual and remained and remains spiritually available to be encountered today.  Paul's worship style would scare those of us at scholarly, staid, and well-heeled First United.  Paul's style of worship had raised hands, speaking in tongues, being slain in the spirit and seeing heavenly visions.  It was what you and I would call today “charismatic Pentecostal type experiential worship services” where Paul and his followers saw Jesus. 

The first Gospel is written after Paul's death and it is Mark's.  We used Mark's reading on Easter Sunday, and as you are aware, there was no bodily resurrection in Mark. Not until the year 80, when Matthew is written, fifty years after Jesus' death, do we have the first story that has Jesus bodily, in the flesh, re-appearing to the disciples and the Apostles.  And there is a reason for it and it is about an argument, a really big argument. 

There arose in early Christian traditions the belief that God in Jesus did not die on the cross.  The belief was that God came into Jesus as a spirit and took over Jesus' body and then just before death, God skipped out of the body and the body that God had been living in died.  It was abhorrent to some early Christian followers to think that to the degree that Jesus was God, that God could be killed.  So they created this spirit/body dichotomy. They were a significant group called the Docetists, and they came to believe and teach that all things of the body were bad and things of the spirit were good.   

The bodily resurrection stories came to be included in the late gospel stories by the mainstream followers of Jesus in order to answer this argument with the Docetists.  Yes, Jesus died and his body was resurrected along with his spirit.  Had the Apostle Paul still been living he would have written those believers that God skipped out of Jesus' body a very nasty letter, and I am sorry that he didn't and that we don't have it. 

Those early followers of Jesus who believed that God is only spirit have their hooks in the church still today.  They are alive and well and having their way with us when we fail to recognize that when we poison the planet we are killing part of the body of God in the same way that when the Romans crucified Jesus their spear was thrust into God's body.  The early group of believers, the Docetists, did not want to look into the face of the dead and see God.  God is spirit and only seems to have been really in Jesus.  That very easily gets translated into today's most cruel talk about using up the earth however we want because we are going to be in heaven anyway, so we can use people, and the earth, and its resources however we want.  God has nothing to do with the physical, they claim. 

Whenever in human history we human beings have wanted to do horrible things, we have had to make up our minds that those we are about to harm and abuse have neither God nor common humanity in themselves.  We have continued the tradition of Docetism and the Apostle Paul in viewing our bodies and this world as the seat of all evil.  We've done a good job of saying that God cannot be in our essence, because we do and think such horrible things.  God can't be in the animals that we mercilessly slaughter.  Nor is God in the essence of the earth that we over-use and abuse and spray with chemicals without paying attention to their ultimate impact. 

Not seeing God as fully present in all things, in all people, has allowed us to find African Americans less than human and hold them as slaves for centuries, and in segregation and ghettos for decades after slavery became illegal.  I have heard in the last 100 days men and women in common conversation acknowledge themselves as racist and proud of it and find them selves looking forward to a race war in this country.  Still many are able to separate common humanity and the essence of God from those who have variant skin colors from theirs. 

Thinking of women as less then men, not fully human, even as  property, has brought us through centuries of abuse of women and sustains misogyny for so many to the current day.  Even as our GLBTQ friends continue to win rights state by state, country by country, hate crimes grow in number against them. 

We very easily forget that God is very much present not only in our similarly skinned, similarly gendered friends, but that God is as fully present in all those others, even fully in those we call enemies.  Can I strike you and hurt you, even kill you, if in you I fully affirm the presence of God?  Not easily. 

We doom ourselves to violence against people different from us when we refuse to openly embrace the presence of God in others who rather simply call God by some other name.  We doom violence and abuse to nature when we fail to allow ourselves to know the full presence of God in the physical-ness of our world.  How we treat the planet is a reflection of our belief in the holy presence of God in it.  How did the Psalmist say it this morning, “The earth is the Lord's and is fully within it!” 

I applaud our attempt as a nation to deal with the reality of torture as an inappropriate act, no matter the crime that might have been previously committed.  It would be wonderful if we were to discover ourselves to be a Christian nation; if by that we mean that we are always Christ-like.  Jesus did not torture, nor did Jesus fight back, even against the Roman empire .   

This is God's world, both physically and spiritually, and we are called by God to be God's agents, God's vocal presence to the world, to be God's advocate for the parts of the world too often unable to speak until it is too late.  Let us rise up to be new creatures in Christ, followers of the Ways of Jesus that love not only those similar to us, but love especially well those who hate us and who would do us harm.  Let us love the world in which God is fully present.  To be lovers of the earth is to be a lover of God.  

Amen.

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