Traveling Light
August 19, 2007
August 19, 2007
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Luke 12:49-56; Hebrews 11:29-12:2
My family has had a cottage in the Poconos on a small lake. Every morning when eating breakfast at the Lake, we observe the flow of the waves across the horizon. If they are moving north to south, a good day is promised. If they are moving south to north, stormy weather is ahead. Many of us have harbingers in the natural world that we look to in forecasting the weather – although some of us seem stuck at the level of “red sky at night, sailors’ delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning.”
Knowing which way the wind is blowing can help us understand coming changes, like in the book Mary Poppins about the nanny who blew in on a east wind, who said she would stay until the wind changed. And when the wind did change, away she went on the west wind – and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
We’ve all been used to thinking that we can’t do anything about the weather, but recently, like the wind changing, we have had a kind of paradigm shift. We have grown to understand that not only can we do something about the weather, but we have inadvertently done a very great deal about it, and we must do more a great deal more, intentionally, or we will have missed the important challenge of our era.
Today’s readings help us to understand our responsibility in the world. The Gospel reading, the words of Jesus, is not one of those readings that people memorize, or hang on their refrigerator, but perhaps we should. These words are not gentle, and they’re not “nice”. Jesus wasn’t nice. But he has been saddled with this image of mild niceness throughout Christian history that distorts his message and misleads his followers.
I heard that in some dictionary, one of the definitions for Christian, is “nice”. I looked around and couldn’t find such a definition. However I did find in the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary one of the definitions for Christian was “commendably decent or generous” and in the American Heritage College Dictionary, one of the definitions listed was “showing concern for others…humane”. While Christians certainly are called to generosity and concern for others, these seem to dilute Christ’s message to simply one of kindness, even extraordinary kindness. Jesus was much more challenging than that – kindness doesn’t get you killed. By misunderstanding Jesus as simply kind, we fail to understand that he was killed precisely because he challenged the people of his time. We make him easier to follow, and we tend to think that all we are called to is kindness.
Jesus wasn’t nice. Jesus describes himself repeatedly as a prophet. Prophets, in the Biblical tradition, were not “nice”. They also weren’t fortune-tellers. Prophets were folks who spoke God’s word to and about the world. They challenged people by presenting God’s perspective on contemporary behavior. The prophets were, to say the least, a cranky bunch. They were not known for kind and gentle speech. Jesus was well within this model – a truth-telling, irascible prophet who speaks challenge to the people of his time and ours. Our failure to understand prophetic speech is part of the problem – by misunderstanding prophetic speech as telling the future, we think of it as something that should not be understood, and does not call for a response. Once we realize that the prophet is talking to us about the world right now, we begin to understand the sense of urgency that often characterizes prophets. And we begin to also see that prophetic speech challenges us to speak God’s truth to our own times. Jesus calls us, in this passage, to be actively discerning what our times call us to, and tells us that faithful living will not bring peace to our lives, but will separate us, perhaps even from people dear to us.
Last week, I talked about the importance of reading the times that we are living in – that our discipleship is about radical involvement with the world, and actively discerning what faithfulness calls us to in our times. Christianity isn’t some vague call to benevolence that is the same in all times – we are called to engage with the particular pain of God for the world in our own time.
While God suffers with everyone who suffers, there are some issues of huge importance in our time – issues that must engage us if we are serious about being faithful – these big issues are: the fate of the earth, the global AIDS crisis, and hunger. All of these issues have both local and global dimensions, and each of these is an issue of massive importance in our world.
Roughly 30,000 children die every single day from hunger. Every week, as many people die from hunger as died in the tsunami two years ago. Week in, week out, another tsunami’s worth of death – each of us has to find ways to help.
AIDS is certainly a problem in this country – estimates are that 30% of the people who are HIV-positive are unaware of it and continue to spread the disease. But still in our country we have less than 1% of adults infected. AIDS in Africa is creating staggering losses of life – 18 countries have more than a 5% infection rate, while 4 countries have more than 20% of adults infected.
As we consider the passage from Hebrews, we are reminded of the faithful women and men who felt the pain of the world, and who challenged the world, often suffering for it. And in the closing verses of the passage, the writer calls us to the same kind of faith, and using the metaphor of running a race reminds us that it will require change and sacrifice: Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.
The letter reminds us to lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely – particularly apt words in our time – for if we don’t take very seriously the crisis of global climate change and decreasing water supplies, we will fail both God and our own children by failing to preserve the earth. The science is decisive on the issue of climate change – it is not in doubt. While there have been some natural variations in climate in past history, the changes we are experiencing are indisputably caused by humans, particularly by the excessive use of fossil fuels. Recent scientific evidence has shown that the changes are taking place much more quickly than had been thought earlier, and we are also realizing that there is some lag to the warming, so that even if we were to stop the growth in emissions, the climate would continue to warm for a while.
Western lifestyle is placing an intolerable burden on the earth – and we are exporting our lifestyle all over the world, partly to create new markets. China and India are both quickly assimilating western values into their cultures. If their populations adopt Western patterns of consumption, we would need something like 7 planets to support the burden. Our lifestyle turns out to be the weight we need to lay aside and the sin that clings so closely. Some people may feel that sin is too strong a word, but it is indeed a sin to take more than our fair share, especially when others are hungry. As I was preparing this sermon, I took the ecological footprint quiz at www.earthday.net/footprint which is one of the more complex evaluations – it takes into account what kind of food you eat, for example, and whether it is locally produced. Although I eat very few animal products, and live close to where I work, according to the quiz, if everyone lived like me, we would need 4.7 planets.
We don’t have 4.7 planets, and we don’t have much time to figure out how to live on this planet. I have heard some folks ask why we talk so much about the environment, saying, after all, most of us are doing enough. Clearly, I’m not doing enough – I’m using more than my fair share, and most of us are. Some people in our congregation, and I’m not one of them, are real leaders – they buy as little as possible, have changed the way they heat their homes, they rarely use a car. These are hard issues for me – there is probably no one on the planet who loves air conditioning as much as I do. And right now, I can’t afford a more efficient car. But over the last week, I started thinking about all the easy changes many of us could make – for example:
• Turn things off when not in use – that includes the computer, lights in rooms we’ve left, even unplugging the cellphone charger. Each of these makes a difference.
• Replacing bulbs with compact fluorescents – I’ve mentioned this before but it is a biggie – and most of us still have bulbs to replace. This has the potential to have a big impact – if each home in the U.S. replaced just one bulb, we could save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year. Imagine the savings if we changed more bulbs.
• Adjust the temperature a degree or two – go cooler in the winter and slightly warmer in the summer.
• Buying more locally-produced food, or growing your own. Food production, including transportation, is one of the biggest uses of fossil fuels.
• Buying energy star appliances. These are appliances that have been evaluated by the government as being particularly efficient. Sometimes they cost more to purchase, but they save money over the long run, and they reduce our use of fossil fuels. The church’s refrigerator recently broke, and the new one, which will be delivered this week, is an energy star refrigerator.
• Check your car’s tire pressure every month.
• Change the air filter on your furnace.
Those are easy things to do, but they matter. The small changes we're willing to make will accomplish more than the big changes we don't make. And small changes will help prepare us for bigger changes. We are also going to have to learn to use water much more wisely, because water supplies are already decreasing, and if we think that fuel shortages are challenging, they’re nothing compared to what water shortages will be.
In our lifetimes, we are going to have to move beyond the easy changes to more dramatic and difficult changes that will make the difference in whether or not the earth can survive. We need to all become aware that the situation is much more critical than we understood. When someone gets a bad medical diagnosis, they change their plans to begin treatment, and they change their lives to make recovery possible. It’s time for us to make changes, and demand changes from our government. We’ve received the diagnosis – it’s time to make the changes before it’s too late.
We need to be discerning observers of our world, and be ready to speak boldly and live faithfully. And we need to do this as a community of faith – Quaker writer Elton Trueblood writes in his book The Incendiary Fellowship that “the miracle of the early Church was a partial fulfillment of Christ’s expressed purpose about setting the earth on fire. Of course this did not involve all of mankind, but there is not doubt that the fire burned brightly enough, in the lives of those who were involved in the Movement, to make a miraculous difference in the culture of the ancient world. What we know is that it was the incendiary character of the early Christian fellowship which was amazing to the contemporary Romans and that it was amazing precisely because there was nothing in their experience that was remotely similar to it,. Religion they had in vast quantities, but it was nothing like this…Much of the uniqueness of Christianity, in its original emergence, consisted of the fact that simple people could be amazingly powerful when they were members one of another.”
The challenges facing us at this point in history are not small – and the importance of our faithfully engaging these issues cannot be overstated. Paul Hawken has written in his recent book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, that all over the world, there is a movement arising of people working for the health of the earth and for social justice. He explains, “When asked at colleges if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren't pessimistic, you don't have the correct data. If you meet the people in this unnamed movement and aren't optimistic, you haven't got a heart. What I see are ordinary and some not-so-ordinary individuals willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in an attempt to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world....” He continues, in describing the importance of persistent hope in this work, “There is a rabbinical teaching that holds that if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, you first plant a tree and then see if the story is true. Islam has a similar teaching that tells adherents that if they have a palm cutting in their hand on Judgment Day, plant the cutting… Healing the wounds of the earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party, only gumption and persistence. It is not a liberal or conservative activity; it is a sacred act." He adds “Only one species on earth does not have full employment and that is Homo sapiens. When informed of the world's chronic unemployment, one third-grader responded, ‘Is all the work done?’”
The work is not done. We are not called to lives that are peaceful and easy, lives that are nice. We are called to this important work, to do it together – and to do it now, for Christ’s sake. Amen.
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Luke 12:49-56; Hebrews 11:29-12:2
My family has had a cottage in the Poconos on a small lake. Every morning when eating breakfast at the Lake, we observe the flow of the waves across the horizon. If they are moving north to south, a good day is promised. If they are moving south to north, stormy weather is ahead. Many of us have harbingers in the natural world that we look to in forecasting the weather – although some of us seem stuck at the level of “red sky at night, sailors’ delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning.”
Knowing which way the wind is blowing can help us understand coming changes, like in the book Mary Poppins about the nanny who blew in on a east wind, who said she would stay until the wind changed. And when the wind did change, away she went on the west wind – and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
We’ve all been used to thinking that we can’t do anything about the weather, but recently, like the wind changing, we have had a kind of paradigm shift. We have grown to understand that not only can we do something about the weather, but we have inadvertently done a very great deal about it, and we must do more a great deal more, intentionally, or we will have missed the important challenge of our era.
Today’s readings help us to understand our responsibility in the world. The Gospel reading, the words of Jesus, is not one of those readings that people memorize, or hang on their refrigerator, but perhaps we should. These words are not gentle, and they’re not “nice”. Jesus wasn’t nice. But he has been saddled with this image of mild niceness throughout Christian history that distorts his message and misleads his followers.
I heard that in some dictionary, one of the definitions for Christian, is “nice”. I looked around and couldn’t find such a definition. However I did find in the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary one of the definitions for Christian was “commendably decent or generous” and in the American Heritage College Dictionary, one of the definitions listed was “showing concern for others…humane”. While Christians certainly are called to generosity and concern for others, these seem to dilute Christ’s message to simply one of kindness, even extraordinary kindness. Jesus was much more challenging than that – kindness doesn’t get you killed. By misunderstanding Jesus as simply kind, we fail to understand that he was killed precisely because he challenged the people of his time. We make him easier to follow, and we tend to think that all we are called to is kindness.
Jesus wasn’t nice. Jesus describes himself repeatedly as a prophet. Prophets, in the Biblical tradition, were not “nice”. They also weren’t fortune-tellers. Prophets were folks who spoke God’s word to and about the world. They challenged people by presenting God’s perspective on contemporary behavior. The prophets were, to say the least, a cranky bunch. They were not known for kind and gentle speech. Jesus was well within this model – a truth-telling, irascible prophet who speaks challenge to the people of his time and ours. Our failure to understand prophetic speech is part of the problem – by misunderstanding prophetic speech as telling the future, we think of it as something that should not be understood, and does not call for a response. Once we realize that the prophet is talking to us about the world right now, we begin to understand the sense of urgency that often characterizes prophets. And we begin to also see that prophetic speech challenges us to speak God’s truth to our own times. Jesus calls us, in this passage, to be actively discerning what our times call us to, and tells us that faithful living will not bring peace to our lives, but will separate us, perhaps even from people dear to us.
Last week, I talked about the importance of reading the times that we are living in – that our discipleship is about radical involvement with the world, and actively discerning what faithfulness calls us to in our times. Christianity isn’t some vague call to benevolence that is the same in all times – we are called to engage with the particular pain of God for the world in our own time.
While God suffers with everyone who suffers, there are some issues of huge importance in our time – issues that must engage us if we are serious about being faithful – these big issues are: the fate of the earth, the global AIDS crisis, and hunger. All of these issues have both local and global dimensions, and each of these is an issue of massive importance in our world.
Roughly 30,000 children die every single day from hunger. Every week, as many people die from hunger as died in the tsunami two years ago. Week in, week out, another tsunami’s worth of death – each of us has to find ways to help.
AIDS is certainly a problem in this country – estimates are that 30% of the people who are HIV-positive are unaware of it and continue to spread the disease. But still in our country we have less than 1% of adults infected. AIDS in Africa is creating staggering losses of life – 18 countries have more than a 5% infection rate, while 4 countries have more than 20% of adults infected.
As we consider the passage from Hebrews, we are reminded of the faithful women and men who felt the pain of the world, and who challenged the world, often suffering for it. And in the closing verses of the passage, the writer calls us to the same kind of faith, and using the metaphor of running a race reminds us that it will require change and sacrifice: Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.
The letter reminds us to lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely – particularly apt words in our time – for if we don’t take very seriously the crisis of global climate change and decreasing water supplies, we will fail both God and our own children by failing to preserve the earth. The science is decisive on the issue of climate change – it is not in doubt. While there have been some natural variations in climate in past history, the changes we are experiencing are indisputably caused by humans, particularly by the excessive use of fossil fuels. Recent scientific evidence has shown that the changes are taking place much more quickly than had been thought earlier, and we are also realizing that there is some lag to the warming, so that even if we were to stop the growth in emissions, the climate would continue to warm for a while.
Western lifestyle is placing an intolerable burden on the earth – and we are exporting our lifestyle all over the world, partly to create new markets. China and India are both quickly assimilating western values into their cultures. If their populations adopt Western patterns of consumption, we would need something like 7 planets to support the burden. Our lifestyle turns out to be the weight we need to lay aside and the sin that clings so closely. Some people may feel that sin is too strong a word, but it is indeed a sin to take more than our fair share, especially when others are hungry. As I was preparing this sermon, I took the ecological footprint quiz at www.earthday.net/footprint which is one of the more complex evaluations – it takes into account what kind of food you eat, for example, and whether it is locally produced. Although I eat very few animal products, and live close to where I work, according to the quiz, if everyone lived like me, we would need 4.7 planets.
We don’t have 4.7 planets, and we don’t have much time to figure out how to live on this planet. I have heard some folks ask why we talk so much about the environment, saying, after all, most of us are doing enough. Clearly, I’m not doing enough – I’m using more than my fair share, and most of us are. Some people in our congregation, and I’m not one of them, are real leaders – they buy as little as possible, have changed the way they heat their homes, they rarely use a car. These are hard issues for me – there is probably no one on the planet who loves air conditioning as much as I do. And right now, I can’t afford a more efficient car. But over the last week, I started thinking about all the easy changes many of us could make – for example:
• Turn things off when not in use – that includes the computer, lights in rooms we’ve left, even unplugging the cellphone charger. Each of these makes a difference.
• Replacing bulbs with compact fluorescents – I’ve mentioned this before but it is a biggie – and most of us still have bulbs to replace. This has the potential to have a big impact – if each home in the U.S. replaced just one bulb, we could save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year. Imagine the savings if we changed more bulbs.
• Adjust the temperature a degree or two – go cooler in the winter and slightly warmer in the summer.
• Buying more locally-produced food, or growing your own. Food production, including transportation, is one of the biggest uses of fossil fuels.
• Buying energy star appliances. These are appliances that have been evaluated by the government as being particularly efficient. Sometimes they cost more to purchase, but they save money over the long run, and they reduce our use of fossil fuels. The church’s refrigerator recently broke, and the new one, which will be delivered this week, is an energy star refrigerator.
• Check your car’s tire pressure every month.
• Change the air filter on your furnace.
Those are easy things to do, but they matter. The small changes we're willing to make will accomplish more than the big changes we don't make. And small changes will help prepare us for bigger changes. We are also going to have to learn to use water much more wisely, because water supplies are already decreasing, and if we think that fuel shortages are challenging, they’re nothing compared to what water shortages will be.
In our lifetimes, we are going to have to move beyond the easy changes to more dramatic and difficult changes that will make the difference in whether or not the earth can survive. We need to all become aware that the situation is much more critical than we understood. When someone gets a bad medical diagnosis, they change their plans to begin treatment, and they change their lives to make recovery possible. It’s time for us to make changes, and demand changes from our government. We’ve received the diagnosis – it’s time to make the changes before it’s too late.
We need to be discerning observers of our world, and be ready to speak boldly and live faithfully. And we need to do this as a community of faith – Quaker writer Elton Trueblood writes in his book The Incendiary Fellowship that “the miracle of the early Church was a partial fulfillment of Christ’s expressed purpose about setting the earth on fire. Of course this did not involve all of mankind, but there is not doubt that the fire burned brightly enough, in the lives of those who were involved in the Movement, to make a miraculous difference in the culture of the ancient world. What we know is that it was the incendiary character of the early Christian fellowship which was amazing to the contemporary Romans and that it was amazing precisely because there was nothing in their experience that was remotely similar to it,. Religion they had in vast quantities, but it was nothing like this…Much of the uniqueness of Christianity, in its original emergence, consisted of the fact that simple people could be amazingly powerful when they were members one of another.”
The challenges facing us at this point in history are not small – and the importance of our faithfully engaging these issues cannot be overstated. Paul Hawken has written in his recent book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, that all over the world, there is a movement arising of people working for the health of the earth and for social justice. He explains, “When asked at colleges if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren't pessimistic, you don't have the correct data. If you meet the people in this unnamed movement and aren't optimistic, you haven't got a heart. What I see are ordinary and some not-so-ordinary individuals willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in an attempt to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world....” He continues, in describing the importance of persistent hope in this work, “There is a rabbinical teaching that holds that if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, you first plant a tree and then see if the story is true. Islam has a similar teaching that tells adherents that if they have a palm cutting in their hand on Judgment Day, plant the cutting… Healing the wounds of the earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party, only gumption and persistence. It is not a liberal or conservative activity; it is a sacred act." He adds “Only one species on earth does not have full employment and that is Homo sapiens. When informed of the world's chronic unemployment, one third-grader responded, ‘Is all the work done?’”
The work is not done. We are not called to lives that are peaceful and easy, lives that are nice. We are called to this important work, to do it together – and to do it now, for Christ’s sake. Amen.