The Disconnect
“Earth Prayers Part
2: The Disconnect”
Sermon by Rev. Dr.
John M. Best to the Pine Island Presbyterian Church
Psalm 148 Isaiah 55:6-13
July 28, 2019
In 1996 during a vacation in the west my family were at Ghost Rance for two weeks. On the Monday in between conferences, we drove down to Albuquerque to observe the
General Assembly meeting there. It was the day committees were working on their various tasks. My son, Nate and I observed the committee considering an amendment
to clarify boundary around ordination. That was the year the
church places a clear ban on homosexuals from ordination, a
restriction that took 16 years to undo, finally in 2010. The committee was in a
ballroom with 100s of people like Nate and me, observing. My wife, Eileen had just attended a week long seminar
at Ghost Ranch looking at the study
paper entitled “Restoring Creation” prepared for the Assembly. So she and our daughters observed the committee considering that paper. There was a hand full of
other observers in the much smaller room. After sitting there for
a while, Marta, who was 11 years old at the time said, “Why don’t
they stop talking and do something.” Perhaps the most prophetic statement that whole Assembly. That experience
demonstrated the disconnect with the most pressing issue of our day. Not that other issues
including gender equality and racism are unimportant. But if we don’t face our
existential threat in climate change, all else will be moot. This is a challenge which will need the unity and cooperation of people everywhere to address. In the years since 1996, the trend has been toward the individual, and nationalism seen in our country and in Brexit rather than cooperation.
Last week, I was inspired by Krista
Tippett’s interview on her NPR program “On Being”, with applied philosopher and chess
grand master, Jonathan
Rowson. He articulated my frustration with those
who struggle to acknowledge the existential threat of climate change.
“Getting things in their fullest, broadest, and
deepest perspective is necessary to actually feel this problem. The crisis of
climate change, in particular, is a crisis of disconnection between the facts
and the feelings. We know something is true; we don’t feel that it’s true. We
don’t live as if it’s true. There is what you might call a kind of stealth
denial. We speak as if we believed it, but it’s not obvious from our behavior
and the way we vote and what we campaign for, how we talk, that we accept this
as a real problem. And I think that is ultimately spiritual.”
Opening
statement in interview “On Being” NPR radio program, July 21, 2019
In 2014, on my sabbatical,
Eileen and I attended a week conference at Iona on “Facing the Climate Crisis." We joined 35 or so other participants from
around the world with the same concerns that we have. We were led by David Osborne a
member of the Iona Community, Anglican priest, and author of the book “Love for
the Future.” During the first session, David had
us identify the concerns. For the next 20
minutes we filled a couple of newsprint sheets. Then
he said, “That’s all we are going to do with those this week.” And asked
the question, “What
character traits do we need to live today in the 21st Century in order to face these challenges?” Then proceeded for the rest of the week to lead
us in a course on Spirituality 101 exploring
nine character traits and spiritual practices. Throughout the week
he summarized by drawing a wheel on a newsprint. At its
center he drew a fire of everlasting love of God. And from
that center arise ways to respond to the love of God. Each character pared with an action. These character/actions became nine spokes of the wheel on his chart.
What character traits and actions do we need to live face the climate crisis and every other challenge of living today in the 21st Century?
1.
Wonder & Awe---Contemplation
2.
Humility/Earthiness—Engagement
3.
Simplicity—Meditation
4.
Compassion—Listening
5.
Faith—Love
6.
Justice—Action
7.
Repentance—Reflection
8.
Courage—Memory
9.
Hope—Singing
10. Wisdom—Broad Thinking
All
these character traits, our identity and responses arise out of our response to the center fire of God’s everlasting
love. They
are the themes of worship which have grounded me, and which will guide me in my
remaining Sundays with you.
But for today, let’s turn briefly to HOPE and SINGING. In an earlier time, in the 8th C BC, in the Middle East, it
was the Bronze age when culture was changing. Warfare was getting
more violent with better weapons. The economy was
getting out of balance, with greater agricultural output, power was shifting from family to the marketplace. Life as they had known
is was falling apart. The eighth Century BC Prophets rose up
and called the king and all Israel to remember who they were; to remember the
character God and the values God instilled in them. After
a harsh scolding, in the early chapters of Isaiah, in the later chapters Isaiah gives hope in poetic form and a song.
“Seek the Lord while he
may be found.
Call
upon him while he is near…
For
you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace.
The
mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song,
And
all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” Isaiah 55:6,12
We’re going to sing
that in a few minutes.
Krista Tippett turned to hope as she
rounded out her conversation with Rowson, reading a quotation of Vaclav Havel (see footnote), Rowson provided her.
“Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. It is an orientation
of the spirit and orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is
immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in
this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going
well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for
success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not
just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation
in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is. Hope is definitely not
the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn
out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it
turns out.”
She then comments. And of
course, Havel had lived through extraordinary complexity and hardship. Those
were hard-won words.
Then Rowson responds: "I think hope is incumbent on anyone who would define their work
as being in some sense about changing the world — anyone who is trying to
fashion better forms of living, they need some working theory of hope. And I
like the definition of Roberto Unger, as well, which is that hope is the 'visionary anticipation of a direction.' So it’s not just so much about
thinking things will be better, but actually seeing a place that’s worth going
to and orienting your will towards that."
Roswon created a new organization called Perspectiva, and the
purpose of Perspectiva is to paint a vision of the future and a pathway of
getting there that does instill a certain amount of hope. He says, "the only way
we’re going to do that is if we get better at linking together what we call 'systems, souls, and society' — so, complex systems, including the economy and
politics and all that, the totality of our inner worlds, and then, how we talk
to each other and how we live together. If we can get better and more nimble
and more generous about how we move between those worlds, then the chance of
creating a hope that makes sense for all of us is all the greater."
In other words, we need to address the disconnect between fact and feeling, between
economics and politics, between science and spirituality and integrate them, not separate them. Hope rising in response to the burning fire of everlasting love of God in our center gives us courage to sing of a new better, integrated day.
Footnote: a Czech statesman, writer and former dissident, who served as the last President of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992 and then as the first President of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003.
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