4/29/07 Rev. Marilyn Hedgepeth, Associate Minister, First Presbyterian Church, Durham
Psalm 23
Revelation 7: 9-17
John 10:22-30
Acts 9: 36-43
“The Green Cross”
Liturgically speaking, we church-types usually refer
to this fourth Sunday of Eastertide as “Good Shepherd Sunday”.
The texts are essentially the same every year:
a story of the passionate beginnings of the early church from Acts;
an episode about Jesus, the Good Shepherd, from John 10;
always the 23rd Psalm, about that other Good Shepherd, the Lord;
and epistle writings admonishing the saints to persevere
in spite of their great suffering.
What I feel inclined to do today, is to follow the leading
of Old Testament scholar, Terrance Fretheim,
who calls for a “less anthropocentric and more inclusive”
reading of scriptural texts.
He takes to task our self-centered preoccupation
with human beings as the center of the universe;
with salvation history that is focuses upon human beings alone;
with a political theology centered on the liberation of people only;
and with a theology of the word that includes only human beings
in its purview.
“In such views,” he says, “nature has often come to be seen
as having only an instrumental value,
to be used for the enhancement of human life. “
(Terence Fretheim, God and World in the Old Testament, p. 250-251)
Or as Emil Brunner once noted, “The cosmic element
in the Bible is never anything more than the scenery
in which the history of (hu)mankind takes place.”
(Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason, 1946, 33n)
So, with that caution in mind,
let’s look at today’s texts together,
less anthropocentrically and more inclusively,
in the way of the green cross,
bringing the so-called backdrop of nature to the foreground.
The Revelation passage envisions a bright future
for those who have endured great persecution,
abiding finally in the presence of the Lamb of God.
Salvation, it says, belongs to our God.
But look who and what is included in this picture of salvation:
angels and elders in white-washed robes,
not to mention the four living creatures, the non-scorching sun,
and the springs of living water.
Taking our son, Stuart, to school one morning recently,
I turned down a backstreet,
only to notice that it was not blacktop as expected,
but gold, covered with a fine layer of pollen.
And as I proceeded down that “street of gold”,
the dusting of pollen swirled around and enveloped our car
like a saffron cloud,
and I wondered if this were a vision of heaven;
(although those with allergies might think otherwise)
not the one with the gold-plated streets
and pearly gates, that only Elvis and Tom Parker might like,
but the one with highways and byways
covered with fertile effusiveness,
the result of being fruitful and multiplying,
according to God’s original intent for cosmic goodness.
In the end, at the end of time, the vision in Revelation reveals,
heaven and nature bound together
by God’s great plan for salvation,
and all of creation participating
in a hymn of doxology:
Amen!
Praise and glory
and wisdom and thanks and honor
and power and strength
be to our God for ever and ever.
Amen!
If this is the end towards which creation is straining,
then what are we, the church, doing now to promote this end?
Does the church have to be last to respond
to the unfolding crisis of the environment
which daily is being revealed to us in startling ways?
The 23rd psalm speaks of green pastures and still waters,
an idyllic environment
where God’s original intention of goodness for all creation
overflows like liquid pouring from a cup.
God seems to be pleased by things that are overflowing and poured out.
It comes up again and again in Scripture.
The antithesis of this idyllic environment is the legendary
valley of the shadow of death,
which we can either picture figuratively
as a predicament where alienation, fear,
sin and evil have their way with us;
or which we can picture literally as a death valley,
where streams dry up, where plant leaves wilt,
where greens turn to browns, where soil leeches out,
where animal life suffers and eventually dies,
where fertility goes belly-up.
I went to a poetry reading a few weeks ago
of one of my all-time favorite nature poets, Mary Oliver.
She usually begins a poem with an object from the natural world,
a hummingbird, a cloud, a rose, a black snake,
and then she draws deeper meaning from her observations
of that item – even spiritual meanings.
Let me share one poem she read for us that day:
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
(Mary Oliver. New and Selected Poems, Volume One. p. 94)
In commenting upon this particular poem
Oliver said it addresses an issue that continues to haunt her:
How do we go from observing and hearing about something,
to being moved to action by what we observe and hear?
It’s an interesting dilemma that applies to our worship life as well:
How do we make manifest in our lives
the baptismal claim of Christ upon our lives?
Is just a one hour weekly commitment required of us?
Or is it a lifetime of dedicated discipleship and stewardship,
lived out in community
that is in relationship with the world and the environment?
With all of the indicators pointing to alarming climate change
and other serious environmental issues that threaten
our green pastures and still waters,
is the church going to be the last to take up the green cross,
and participate in the restoration of God’s fragile creation?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
And lastly we have a resurrection story from Acts 9.
In our post-Easter world, resurrection is not merely for Jesus, it seems.
Peter is called to Joppa, where he finds the beloved seamstress, Dorcas,
laid out for her funeral.
He sends the wailing widows out of the room,
turns to the dead woman and commands boldly,
“Dorcas, get up.”
And she opens her eyes, sits up, and Peter helps her to her feet.
Resurrection life. Jesus is resurrected.
Jesus is an agent of resurrection.
Peter is an agent of resurrection life.
All believers of Jesus are now agents of resurrection life.
Things thought to be dying or dead are our purview:
people, failing marriages, broken friendships, cultures rent by conflict, universities living in fear and grief, denominations which are declining,
pastures, streams, wetlands, glacial fields, endangered species,
valleys of dry bones.
If we are serious about our faith,
then we are called to be agents of resurrection in all areas of life.
That is the vocation of the church.
The Apostle Paul notes in Romans, that all creation is waiting
in eager expectation, groaning, to be liberated from its bondage
to decay. (Romans 8: 18-21)
Who will be the agents of that liberation?
Who will be those freedom fighters?
Who will bring resurrection life to the natural order?
In April of 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
penned his now-famous letter to clergy colleagues
from his Birmingham jail cell.
In that letter, King laments his great disappointment in the church,
the church that he has loved,
the church that has nurtured him and sustained him.
King laments his great disappointment
in the church’s failure to see the justice of his cause,
which in this case is poverty and racial inequality,
and, with deep moral concern,
to serve as a channel
through which his just grievances could reach
the power structures of culture.
He said:
“I have watched churchmen stand on the sideline
and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities…
…too many others have been more cautious than courageous
and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security
of stained glass windows….
I have heard many ministers say, ‘Those are social issues
with which the gospel has no real concern.’
And I have watched many churches commit themselves
to a completely other-worldly religion
which makes a strange, Biblical distinction
between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.”
King goes on to say
that “if today’s church does not recapture
the sacrificial spirit of the early church,
it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions,
and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club
with no meaning for the twentieth century.”
Of course that was then, and this is now;
that was about poverty and racial inequality,
and this is about stewardship of the earth;
that was anthropocentric and about the salvation of people,
and this is cosmic and about the salvation of creation;
that was about taking up the cross, denying ourselves, our privilege,
and thinking about the equal rights of others,
and this is about taking up a green cross, denying ourselves;
our privilege, our creature comforts,
and thinking about the equal rights
and reverence for all of God’s creation.
I would hate for the church to stand by the side lines again and watch,
and be the last to act as agents of global resurrection.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do,
with your one wild and precious life? Amen.