I was hesitant to post this sermon online because in the course of putting it together, I wasn’t careful about keeping track of which quotation came from which source. But I’ve been asked to share it so here it is! The sources are all at the end, if you need to track something down .

This Genesis lesson is one of the odder bits of the Hebrew Bible. And it’s odd even if you’re reading Genesis chapter by chapter, not just in a random chunk in the Sunday lectionary. If you’ve studied mythology in school or college, you know that the many peoples have stories that explain why the stars are scattered across the sky, why caves will return an echo, and so on. This is the clearest example of anything of the sort in the Hebrew Bible: God putting God’s bow in the sky to remind God not to flood the world again. And it’s unusual. Much of the Old Testament tradition is pretty cautious about describing God as being very much like a human being – and certainly having anything as mundane as a bow, a human weapon, is a surprise. (Though it is nice that God’s bow is so colorful!) 

This passage is the end of the Flood narrative: the story of Noah and his family taking a pair of every type of animal on a giant boat, an ark, to survive a worldwide flood. Some of you, in school or college, may have learned that there are other ancient flood stories from this part of the world (and elsewhere). It makes sense; a thousand-year flood happens about every thousand years, and those events are catastrophic enough to be enshrined in story – stories that make meaning out of terror and survival, and offer a perspective on the human relationship with the powers that oversee the world. 

There’s a lot to say about the flood story in Genesis, and I’m not going to say it today! But I do want to say that the flood story of Hebrew Scripture isn’t just echoing or copying the other flood myths of the ancient Near East in some simplistic way. It is recasting the story of some primeval disaster in a way that says something distinctive about this people’s understanding of God and humanity.

Likewise this bit about God’s bow in the sky: It feels like something borrowed from the sacred stories of some other people, who like to envision their god in full battle dress. Yet still this short passage says something distinctive and important. And part of what it’s saying is that the relationship between God and God’s people, of whom Noah is a forerunner, is not a two-way relationship. It’s a three-cornered relationship that binds together God, humanity, and creation.

One name for this idea is the Triangular Covenant … and getting Christians today to see this in the Biblical text, and take it on board in our own worldviews, is the life work of Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis. Davis isn’t unique in this perspective, but she has been advocating for it, clearly and compellingly, for a couple of decades now.

And her advocacy is necessary, because this perspective is significantly different from the ways our culture and many of our churches have taught us to think. Broadly speaking, we think of humans as different from, and dominant over, nature. Even if we do not think that with our conscious minds, the way we collectively objectify and commodify land and living things reveal the deeper truth. And we tend to think of God as distant and abstract – not down in the dirt with the worms and roots and beetles and mycelia. Davis says, “No generation has lived as far from the way that the Bible would understand the existence of everything on earth as we do.”

To bring us back to a Biblical understanding of humanity’s relationship with creation – which is also an ecological, sustainable, hopeful understanding of humanity’s relationship with creation – Davis starts from this foundational assumption of the Biblical worldview: There is a triangular relationship among God, humanity, and creation. 

There are variations in how the relationship is described. Here in Genesis, it’s a covenant – a mutual promise, with benefits and consequences – between, in God’s words, “me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations.” In the book of the prophet Hosea, we see similar language: “I will make for you a covenant… with the wild animals, the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the ground…” (Hosea 2:18)

In many places, though, it’s not just animals but the whole created order that is in covenant relationship – often named simply as “the land.” Sometimes that means the particular land that God’s people understand God to have given them. But elsewhere it clearly means the land in general – Creation in general. Mountains and valleys, rivers and oceans, trees and all green growing things, sky, seasons and weather, birds and fish and wild and domesticated animals. 

This triangular relationship means – among other things – that we both flourish together, and suffer together. When Davis first got curious about how Scripture talks about Creation, several decades ago, she thought she would find just a few passages. Instead, “the Bible’s concern for an ethic of sustainability popped up everywhere she looked.” And the overwhelming message was clear: “Human communities cannot thrive apart from the health of nonhuman communities — land, water, animals and plants.” https://canadianmennonite.org/articles/ellen-davis-unearths-agrarian-view-bible

There are many Biblical texts that point to this deep truth. Davis quotes the book of the prophet Joel as an example: “The vine withers, the fig tree droops. Pomegranate, palm, and apple—all the trees of the field are dried up; surely, joy withers away among the people.” (Joel 1:10-12) When the crops and fruit trees wither, the people wither. Joy withers. 

From the Bible’s perspective, these withering seasons have a message for us. The fundamental character of this three-cornered covenantal relationship is that when any one relationship is neglected or violated, the whole relational structure is affected. 

Humans have a vocation towards Creation. We are called by God to be caring and respectful stewards of the natural world and our non-human neighbors. Davis says, “We are answerable to God for how we use the physical order to meet our physical needs.” We often fail and fall short. This grieves and angers God. Our disordered relationship with Creation affects our relationship with God. 

Likewise, in the Hebrew Bible, when humans turn away from God and God’s ways – for example, by perpetrating or tolerating injustice, not being merciful towards the poor, and so on – the alienation in that relationship is reflected in the land itself. Davis writes, “The suffering of the earth itself may be the chief index of the brokenness in our relationship with God.” 

In the prophetic texts of the Bible, Davis argues, natural disasters like earthquakes and droughts are often understood as clues that something is amiss – as calls to collective self-examination and course correction. “The Earth and its non-human inhabitants [can] serve as divinely appointed witnesses to and agents of judgment.”    

This is a different message than we might hear from conservative Christian leaders who cast such events as punishment for a nation that’s gotten too lax about the Ten Commandments. Davis suggests instead that “natural” disasters – an increasingly muddy category, in an era of climate crisis – bear witness to disrupted covenantal relationships and the need for repentance and repair.

Because the God of the Bible, the God we follow, always wants reconciliation and restoration. The Hebrew Bible is chock-full of ecological language and imagery. Some tells of present or potential devastation, like the withered trees of Joel. Some tells of flourishing and hope – streams in the desert, flowers in the wilderness. Today’s Gospel gestures to those texts and images, so quickly that you might have missed it: “Jesus was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”

He was with the wild beasts.  I love how Mark tells the story of the temptations of Jesus, here at the beginning of his public ministry. It’s so short, yet there’s so much here to ponder. Let’s focus on those wild beasts for a moment! The image  of Jesus in the wilderness, accompanied by the wild creatures of that place, might remind us of Eden – that powerful and evocative vision of a beginning-time before all the ruptures of human progress and civilization, when humans and creatures and plants all lived in harmony and shared delight. The Book of Job is a richly ecological text; there’s a passage in chapter 5 when one of Job’s friends describes the ideal state of being reconciled with God: “[You] shall not fear the wild animals of the earth. For you shall be in league with the stones of the field, and the wild animals shall be at peace with you.” (Job 5:22-23)

Jesus – already named as the Son of God – leaves human space for wild space, is attended by angels and befriended by animals – jackals and lizards, vultures and hyraxes, ostriches, ibexes, leopards, and the other creatures of the Judean desert. This moment, this brief but rich description, offers a glimpse of the triangular covenant in its wholeness: human, divine, natural, all in one place, at peace. 

The Triangular Covenant arises in our readings today, but it’s also a timely topic for Lent. The word Lent itself is related to the lengthening of days in this season – we practice Lent in the weeks when winter begins to ebb towards spring. On Ash Wednesday, we acknowledge that we are one with the dirt, the soil of the earth. In the litany we use on Ash Wednesday and other Sundays of the season we confess our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, our waste and pollution of God’s creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us. 

In the Great Litany on the first Sunday in Lent, we pray to be delivered from lightning and tempest, from earthquake, fire, and flood, from plague, pestilence, and famine, and from dying suddenly and unprepared. Meanwhile we struggle to make sense of disordered seasons, of an El Niño winter exacerbated by climate change; flooding in California; a February tornado just south of Madison. Dozens of cities from the Midwest to the Northeast are about to log one of the warmest winters on record. We are called in so many ways to reflection, repentance, repair. 

I first encountered the Triangular Covenant in Ellen Davis’ Old Testament class at Duke in 2005. Since then, her sense of the need to reintegrate ecological awareness into our understanding of Scripture has only grown in urgency. In a 2013 interview she explained, “I’ve sort of taken a vow that every time I lecture or preach, when there isn’t a specific topic that I have to talk about, I talk about climate change and the Bible, and I do it because my experience is that the more we talk about it in community, the more possibilities we find to do something in response to it.” She says people need to feel they can engage with the problem *through* their faith. And it is powerful, I think, to know that the Bible speaks some deep wisdom and truth to one of the greatest challenges of our time. 

A lot of us live with climate anxiety and climate grief as daily companions. I don’t think we need more guilt or fear. Overwhelm and paralysis are already big problems. We need to feel our grief and our anger, move through them, and let them move through us. We also don’t need more tasks, more busyness. There are meaningful things we can do, changes we can make, ideas we can share. I love all that! It matters. But – and – I think there’s something deeper. 

We hear a lot, as Lent begins, about repentance. I think most of us hear that word as meaning: Being sorry for doing bad things, and trying to do fewer bad things – or at least different bad things – going forward. But the Greek word behind it is metanoia, and I think it’s a much more interesting word. It means a change of mind, a transformation of knowing. I like to translate it as “a change of mind and heart that bears fruit in a changed life.” 

There is a call to metanoia in recognizing the truth of the Triangular Covenant. The metanoia of integrating this triangular relationship into our understandings of faith, self, world. I’m challenging myself, this Lent, to work on thinking of my relationship with place, with earth, with non-human neighbors, with ecological systems, as utterly integral to my life of prayer and the practice of my faith. To thinking of the natural world as not something I look at out at but something to which I belong. 

That is a big shift. I don’t know how to do it but I’m going to try to start with something simple and concrete: Spending a little time outside, with intention and attention, every day. Every day. 

I’d like to conclude by sharing two poems. Both of them deal, in different ways, with the triangular covenant. One is angry and one is… not exactly reassuring, but a gentler call to remember that we belong to the world. 

I think my hope for myself this season, and for you too, is that we can find ourselves in the ambiguity, the tension, between love and anger, hope and despair, peace and urgency, as we walk the way of Lent as God’s people in and of the world.

Some of you probably know the first one. Mary Oliver, Wild Geese –  

The second poem is called Inventing Sin, by George Ella Lyon. 

Some sources: 

https://archive.org/details/podcast_payton-lectures-2013-spring_the-covenant-triangle_1000153922109

Interview with Ellen Davis: 

https://enterthebible.org/audio/4-14-is-there-hope-for-creation

A church talk by Ellen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ducopvj_zyw

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/carlgregg/2012/07/ellen-davis-a-hebrew-bible-scholar-you-should-know/

https://canadianmennonite.org/articles/ellen-davis-unearths-agrarian-view-bible

https://ia802802.us.archive.org/14/items/podcast_payton-lectures-2013-spring_the-covenant-triangle_1000153922109/podcast_payton-lectures-2013-spring_the-covenant-triangle_1000153922109.mov

This tender Gospel story is a favorite of mine, and of many. 

We meet these two disciples, Mary and Cleopas, on the way home a couple of days after Jesus’ death. They figure everything is over and they might as well get back to everyday life. 

But they’re still talking about it all, and grieving.

By the way: Luke only names Cleopas here, but John’s Gospel names “Mary the wife of Clopas” as one of the women who stood near the cross as Jesus was dying. Clopas and Cleopas are almost certainly variants of the same name. 

So, we have a couple, followers of Jesus, part of the group that came with him to Jerusalem, returning, now, to their home in Emmaus, about eight miles from Jerusalem. 

And on the way… a stranger walks with them. 

When Father John and I talked about this story last week, he pointed out something I hadn’t noticed before: that this Gospel story echoes what the church does when we gather. 

We meet one another. 

We check in, sometimes – how are you? How are things? You look sad… 

We read and reflect on Scripture – how does it speak to us? Is there something here to hep us find meaning or make sense of our world and what we’re experiencing?  

At Eucharistic services we share a meal – with one another and with Jesus. 

Then we get up and set out, shaped by our time together, perhaps – sometimes – with hope or good news to share with others. 

I love this Gospel story, but I’m not going to talk about it much today.

Instead I want us to notice how it’s one example of the physicality of the risen Jesus. 

He walks on a dusty road.

He sits down to share a meal. 

He breaks bread. 

He seems to be a person with a body – even though he also vanishes unexpectedly from the dinner table. 

Other resurrection encounters point in the same direction. 

Jesus eats fish. He breathes on people.

Thomas pokes at his wounds.

He cooks breakfast.

He returns to visit, console, and commission his friends, in his real, physical body. Scars and all. 

That’s important not just because a ghost would be an easier story for the early church to tell… expected, almost. 

But it’s also important because of what it says about the material world, this world we live in. 

The idea of transcending material reality and returning as a spiritual being was just as present and perhaps just as tempting two thousand years ago as it is now.

Some of the core ideas of New Age spirituality have been around for a long, long time. 

Like the idea that this world is a flawed crappy knockoff of a superior spiritual plane, and that the goal of existence is to achieve enlightenment and escape from this physical world. 

The cave allegory of the Greek philosopher Plato – the idea that the things we perceive in this world are just shadows of a more true reality elsewhere – had been around for hundreds of years by the time Jesus was born. 

We can see the pull of these kinds of ideas now and then in the New Testament – of a strong dualism between the material and the spiritual, with the material being deemed bad, flawed, lesser.

John’s Gospel, for example, walks right up to that line now and then, in passages that feed the development of Gnostic Christianity a few decades later, in the late first and early second century. 

For Gnostic Christians, this world was the creation of some lesser, malevolent god, not the supreme and good God. Jesus was a divine being who came into our world to show us that we can transcend material reality and become divine ourselves. 

Gnostic Christianity thrived for a while, but ultimately was declared a heresy – not consistent with the emerging theology of the Church – largely because it did not honor the incarnation and resurrection, the physicality and this-wordliness of Jesus’ life and teaching. 

So: First Judaism, and then Christianity, were well aware of various versions of the idea that this world – nature, our bodies, human wellbeing – don’t really matter, because spiritual reality is primary. 

And first Judaism, and then Christianity, reject and resist that idea. 

This world matters. 

How we act in this world matters. 

Our human wellbeing matters. 

Our use of resources, our stewardship of creation, matters. 

Which brings me to Earth Day. 

Early Christianity was perhaps not hugely interested in creation and the health of ecosystems. 

But significant parts of Old Testament Judaism were. 

Parts of the Hebrew Bible take God’s care for – and human responsibility for – Creation and the land very seriously indeed. 

And over the millennia, many Christians have, as well. 

We have seen that the world that God called good, the world that God came into and redeemed in Jesus Christ, merits our care, curiosity, and commitment. 

We’ve looked on the diversity, complexity, beauty and strangeness of Creation in wonder, seeing it as a window into the heart of the Creator. 

I think something like that was probably at work for Father Childs, the founding rector of St. Dunstan’s, who had an inordinate fondness for conifers. 

He oversaw the planting of a wide range of conifer trees on our church grounds. 

Many of those trees – imported from different climates – have not survived the decades, but we still have enough diversity on the grounds that UW professors regularly bring students out here for identification practice. 

Appreciation of, and care for, creation as a value goes back to the earliest years of this parish. 

We’ve given it fresh attention in the past decade – including the work of a Task Force in 2016 to develop our parish Creation Care Mission Statement. [You can read it in your bulletin.]

There’s a lot I love about that work. 

I continue to find these to be helpful guideposts. 

And: I think it lacks a note of urgency that might be present if we did that work today – just seven years later. 

As the signs of climate crisis become more evident month by month, year by year, I think that for many of us creation care feels less like a sort of ethical hobby, and more like a core concern that weighs on all our plans and decisions. 

We don’t know how to make sense of it or handle it, but it looms on the horizon like a dark cloud of uncertainty, fear and grief. 

Unprecedented floods, storms, fires, droughts, species and ecosystem losses pile up in the news, week by week. 

And it doesn’t feel like anyone with the power to change the trajectory has the will to do so. 

 

In our Epiphany Climate Circle discussions – based on materials developed by the All We Can Save Project – one of the the session themes was Reframe. It invited us to think about the role of language, story, and culture. 

One of the discussion prompts really caught my attention, in my role as a church leader: “Consider your organization’s role in shaping the ‘climate story.’ Does your [organization] leverage its storytelling and culture-shaping power for climate?” 

I wonder what that could look like. 

A church is most certainly a storytelling organization. 

And as liturgical Christians, we hope that our weekly worship forms us, over time, towards the kinds of people God needs in the world. That’s a kind of culture-shaping power.

We pray, weekly, for the earth and the whole created order. 

Is that enough? Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. 

We used to use a longer version of our Prayers of the People that included these words: Spirit of Wisdom, move us from fear and despair towards courage and compassion.

Guide us to actions that protect and renew.

Maybe we need something like that, that lets us name out loud the feelings and challenges of this season, and ask for God’s help and guidance. 

Or maybe there’s some other way our shared worship could help form us for the days and years ahead. 

I don’t know the answer. But I wonder. 

I’d be interested in your ideas. 

How is your organization using its storytelling power for climate?  That question is why I decided to preach Earth Day today, instead of staying closer to our Scriptures. 

It made me want to think out loud, to wonder with all of you, how we’re called – as people of the resurrection, as Easter people – to Christian living as if this world really matters.

Even when that means taking on the grief and frustration and fear of rapid climate change and all that it might mean, for humanity and for the creatures and systems and places we love. 

One of the biggest deterrents to looking head-on at climate change is that it can make us feel really helpless. 

The material we used for our first round of Climate Circles – I hope we’ll do more! – wrestles with that helplessness and points at some important things that we can do. 

The first being: Sit with our feelings. Sit with the grief and frustration, anger and fear, the overwhelming uncertainty. 

Feel them. Process them. Share them. Find ways to release them together, and let them drive us to action, instead of overwhelming and paralyzing us. 

One important point in the readings for the Climate Circle group is that our feelings have been weaponized against us. 

For seventy years or so, Americans have been deliberately convinced that it’s our individual responsibility to protect the environment or save the planet. 

Whether by cleaning up litter, or recycling, or switching to LED bulbs, or using fabric bags at the grocery store. 

Those actions are all good! But they will not solve the problem. Huge, systemic changes in industrial, energy, and transit systems  are needed. 

But we have been intentionally taught to feel like it’s up to us – in order to deflect pressure from industry and government. 

That’s not a conspiracy theory; it’s historical fact. 

Feelings of guilt or shame over not consistently recycling, or not being able to afford an electric vehicle, or just generally not doing enough: those feelings just need to be named and released. 

To make room for more honest and fruitful emotions, like anger, grief, compassion, and determination. 

That said: It does matter for us to do the things we can, even small things, and to spread the word. 

I’ve gone to a couple of webinars on the Inflation Reduction Act – the IRA, and the incentives it offers for households to do various kinds of upgrades. 

And my biggest lightbulb moment was: Oh. 

This works if lots of people do it.

So, for example, the best thing a church can do is make sure its members know that the federal government would really like to pay you to put in a heat pump, or replace your gas stove with an electric stove, or buy an electric vehicle, right now. 

The more people use these incentives to help them take these kinds of steps, the more we shift, nationwide, towards electricity; and electricity can be, and will be, increasingly generated by sun and wind and water. 

I think the IRA is really important and I hope everybody will take a look at what it could offer them. There’s great info out there. 

But you may not be in a position to make home or vehicle upgrades! We all have different capacities and priorities. 

A couple of households have been able to make major gifts to help St. Dunstan’s install our solar panels. I’m so, so grateful.

And: Not everybody can do that. 

But we can all do something; and we can all spread the word. 

Our individual actions will not save the planet. 

But when our actions add up, they do have an impact. 

We can shift consumption patterns. 

We can shift habits and norms. 

We can shift public officials’ priorities. 

Another thing we can do is build local networks of mutual care and resilience. 

Get to know our neighbors. Share tools and ideas and resources. 

In an increasingly uncertain future – where larger systems may be more vulnerable to all kinds of risks – we’re going to need to look out for each other, and figure out ways to do what needs doing for ourselves and one another. 

Look: it’s not nothing that a committed group of five or six people made quite a lot of sugar, in March and April, right here on our grounds. 

Another thing we can do is cultivate imagination and hope. 

That’s perhaps a particularly important piece of the work for a church community. In our storytelling and culture-shaping role. 

A lot of the visions of the future that come at us are pretty grim – and the message can feel like, “You will have to give up everything you like to avoid this.” 

I’ve learned a little from a friend about solarpunk, a genre of art and fiction committed to developing visions of a green future that are actually attractive and motivating. 

Here’s a little from the Solarpunk Manifesto: 

“Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”…  As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings. Solarpunk wants to counter the scenarios of a dying earth, an insuperable gap between rich and poor, and a society controlled by corporations. Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and also for the generations that follow us.”

https://www.re-des.org/a-solarpunk-manifesto/

I’m not proposing that we start developing Solarpunk Church – though, maybe? – but there is a lot to ponder here about how to bring creativity and hope to the challenges of this time. 

We can’t naively assume that human ingenuity will avert global catastrophe.

But we can lean into the places where human ingenuity is pointing towards better futures for all living things.

And let’s not count out God or God’s creation as partners in this season of challenge, adaptation, and possibility. 

This week I read a fascinating article in the Atlantic about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a massive collection of floating plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean. 

Everything I’d ever read about it before just posed it as a problem that we have to solve. A cleanup project.

This article said that scientists are discovering that various kinds of sea life are colonizing the plastic and making it their homes.

And in fact that it’s becoming a new kind of ecosystem, where organisms that usually live in coastal areas, and organisms that usually live in the open ocean, are cohabitating and interacting and thriving. 

Let me be clear: It’s not OK that there’s a huge amount of plastic floating in our oceans. Let’s stop putting plastic in the ocean, OK?

But it is a reminder of the vitality of the natural world and its systems. 

It makes me think of a favorite poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins – The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God. Writing in the mid-19th century, Hopkins expressed grief over the ways human activity and industry were marring and scarring the natural landscape – then writes: 

“And for all this, Nature is never spent;  

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

Let me close with one more short poem, by Adrienne Rich – words of sorrow and determination. 

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: 

so much has been destroyed 

I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, 

with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. 

May it be so. 

Amen. 

Read the lessons for this Sunday here: https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=26

A NOTE FROM REV. MIRANDA…  This isn’t a sermon about coronavirus. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing! Instead, it’s an invitation to reflect on our accountability to God’s Creation, as we enact it through our relationship with our church grounds. There’s an invitation here into some shared wondering that may help us look towards a future beyond the current public health crisis. Eventually spring will turn into summer; eventually we’ll be able to gather freely again; eventually we’ll be able to joyfully undertake shared work and song and prayer. Walk with me in that faith, friends. – Rev. Miranda+

 

“If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” (John 4:10) 

Living water. It’s a beautiful phrase. It had a concrete meaning as well as a spiritual meaning. Living water, for the Biblical texts, meant water that moves. Running water in a stream or river, but also water falling as rain or bubbling up as a spring. 

People living in an arid environment – as the people of the Bible largely did – were dependent for much of the time on still, stale water in cisterns and wells. For them, the attraction of living water would have been obvious. People have long understood that moving water is cleaner and clearer and tastes better. It doesn’t just slake thirst and allow life to continue, but offers beauty, delight, and satisfaction. 

Jesus is speaking metaphorically rather than ecologically, here. He is drawing a contrast between physical and spiritual realities, as John’s Jesus often does. The “living water” he offers this unnamed woman isn’t literal water, any more than the new birth he described to Nicodemus in last week’s Gospel is a literal second birth. Instead it’s a way of describing an inner state of being tapped in to something that sustains and refreshes you deeply – irrespective of physical circumstances. He’s offering this woman that kind of deep connectedness with the Divine, with grace, with Love. “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to the life of the Age.”

The Gospels are some of the least ecological texts in the Bible.They don’t say much about our relationship with the land and the whole created order. That’s somewhat unusual – pretty much anywhere you look in the Old Testament, you trip over ecological texts. (For just one example, consider our psalm today. It was chosen for the lectionary because it alludes to the Exodus story; but it also speaks about how all Creation belongs to God and how we humans are part of that divine created order, God’s sheep living in God’s pasture.) There are some significant creation-focused texts elsewhere in the New Testament as well – including later in Paul’s letter to the Romans; we’ll get to that this summer! 

We don’t necessarily notice the strong ecological themes in the Bible because generations of Protestant Christianity have taught us to think about faith as a matter between humans and God. But for the Old Testament, right relationship with God and neighbor and land are all inextricably linked. Justice and righteousness in society cannot be accomplished without a just and righteous relationship with the land – including sharing the produce of the land fairly, treating the land with respect and care by letting it rest and renew itself, and so on. 

This year, St Dunstan’s is part of a program called ChurchLands.It’s a pilot program inviting Episcopal churches and church leaders to explore and discern ways to reconnect faith and land in their parish context. It is specifically for churches that have land holdings of some sort – inviting us to reflect on how we might integrate our relationship with our land into our shared life as a community of faith. 

Our land is not especially well integrated right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if many newer members don’t even know about it. So let me tell you about it! St. Dunstan’s sits on about seven acres, in total. It was once part of the territory of the Ho-Chunk people. The U.S. government seized it after the Blackhawk War, and sold it off in parcels to settler farmers. In the late 1850s, the Heim brothers, immigrants from Bavaria, bought this land & built the farmhouse that still stands. It changed hands over the course of a century & eventually was given to the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee, which then gave it to a mission congregation who wanted to start a new church on the west side of Madison. And here we are. 

The church building sits near the northeastern corner of the lot. Behind the farmhouse and the Parish Center, our grounds continue down to Old Middleton Road, with about three acres of woodland, mostly black walnut with some oak trees and pines. That’s the part that it’s easy for us to forget about; to just have, year after year, without any real sense of purpose or engagement. Now and then we walk through it, or wander down to pick a few black raspberries. But mostly – even for me – it’s out of sight, out of mind. 

Three acres of woods – and a couple more acres if you count the grassy area around the church, the Pine Island out front, and so on – it’s not a lot. There are folks in the ChurchLands program who are trying to figure out what to do with ten acres, or more. But it’s here, and it’s ours; and we have named ourselves, from the earliest years of this parish, as a church that cares about God’s creation. So the ChurchLands program offers a great opportunity to wonder together about our grounds. 

The structure of the program itself is pretty simple. Two of us attended a retreat in Michigan in late January, where we and other program participants dug deep into some foundational values and questions. There will be a second, concluding retreat in December. In between, there are monthly online meetings for learning and check-in. Meanwhile, we’re supposed do… something, here. Some kind of project or initiative. I’ll come back to that in a moment. 

On that retreat back in January, we did a lot of Bible study – looking at some familiar and unfamiliar stories through the lens of human relationship with the land. One was the story told in Genesis chapters 41 and 47. Joseph – great-grandson of the patriarch Abraham – is in Egypt, in jail. (It’s a long story!) Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, has a strange and troubling dream. Joseph has a knack for interpreting dreams – and someone mentions that to Pharaoh, so Joseph is called to the throne room. And he interprets Pharaoh’s dream as a message from God: The seven fat cows in your dream mean there will be seven good years of harvest. The seven lean and ugly cows in your dream, who eat up the fat cows, mean that after the seven good years, there will be seven years of famine, that will devour all the surplus from the good years. Joseph goes on to suggest that for the next seven years, one-fifth of each year’s harvest should be gathered and stored as a reserve against the famine; and that Pharaoh should fin somebody discerning and wise to put in charge of that endeavor. 

(Let me say here that Joseph is right up there with King David on the list of people that your children’s Bible called a righteous hero favored by God – but whose story turns out to be a lot more complicated than that when you actually read it.)

Naturally Pharaoh puts Joseph in charge, and it all happens just as the dreams predicted: seven years of bounteous harvests – and then, the famine begins. And Joseph shares the stored food among the people of the land so that everyone survives, as God intended in sending the dream. 

Hah… no. That’s not what happens. Joseph makes people buy the food. First with money, until they run out of money. Genesis 47:14: “Joseph collected all the money to be found in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, in exchange for the grain that they bought; and Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh’s house.” Now, THAT is Employee of the Month. Then, when people are out of money, Joseph gives them food in exchange for their livestock, their flocks and herds. All of that ends up as Pharaoh’s property too – and incidentally, it’s Joseph’s family that has the job of tending all those animals. 

And the next step is inevitable – the people come to Joseph and say, “Buy us and our land in exchange for food. We with our land will become slaves to Pharaoh; just give us grain, so that we may live and not die.’… So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh… As for the people, he made slaves of them from one end of Egypt to the other.” (Genesis 47:19-21)

I think this is an interesting story for us to dwell with, because it’s a story about preparing for ecological crisis. Joseph and Pharaoh receive an insight from God – and they decide to use this privileged knowledge, and the power they already have, to further consolidate wealth and power, and to take away people’s freedom and livelihoods.

We face impending ecological crisis today. There’s no secret about it, no mysterious dreams to interpret; many, many people are sounding the alarm. And there are absolutely people of wealth and power today who plan to use the years ahead just as Joseph and Pharaoh did. 

How can we face our frightening future with a commitment to  building relationships and sharing strategies and resources, instead of hardening social lines and deepening inequalities? How can we resist the quarreling and division that comes with scarcity and fear, as we see in the Exodus lesson today? 

Those are great big questions. The invitation of the ChurchLands program is to dwell with questions like that as we discern how to live more fully into our values on this land, our four-plus acres of woods and grass. The work is motivated by a conviction that reconnecting with Creation, with land, in very local, small-scale ways DOES matter, IS a step towards our hopes in the face of these frightening larger realities. 

This week I read about a beautiful example – at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Annapolis, Maryland. Like St. Dunstan’s, St. Luke’s had about four acres of woodland behind their church. Unlike our site, their woods back up to a creek, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. The land had been originally intended for a larger sanctuary, back when folks thought churches would keep growing forever. But a few years ago, the church began to envision another way to reclaim the land as sacred space. With help from a couple of grants, they undertook a project to turn those four acres back into wetlands, including restoring a stream that had been buried when the area was developed.

The project wasn’t driven by a naive desire to return the land to its original condition, but by current need. Climate change is raising sea levels and causing more frequent extreme weather. Along the Maryland coast, flooding is becoming more common, with seawater breaching sea walls to flood parking lots, roads, homes and businesses. In 1960, four such events were recorded; in 2017, 63. 

The marshland restored by St. Luke’s Church helps absorb extra water. Avery Davis Lamb writes, “By restoring their land to serve its intended purpose, the church created a climate sanctuary: absorbing higher tides, filtering polluted stormwater from extreme rain events, [as well as] hosting displaced [wildlife] and drawing carbon out of the air.” St. Luke’s itself sits high enough to avoid flooding, but their wetland restoration project serves their neighbors by absorbing water their houses cannot. 

The restored stream flows gently down the property towards the creek, surrounded by wet-loving native plants. Living water. 

St. Luke’s solution is obviously not our solution. But there are things we can learn. The people of St. Luke’s studied their land and how it fit into local systems. They paid attention to how climate change was harming their neighbors and neighborhood. They found non-church agencies to help them learn, fund, and do. And they held fast to their conviction that a restored landscape can manifest justice, wholeness, and holiness. 

At our initial retreat in January, we were invited to set goals. Carrie’s goal was to understand better what’s growing on our grounds, and how we might get to know those resources, as way to be in touch with the land and engage with it. My goal was just to get people together. Specifically, I wrote down an intention to gather at least at least 5 to 8 people, at least 3 times, between February and August, to bounce ideas around and come up with one or two specific things to do or try. 

It’s hard for me to come before you without a project, a plan; to have this be so open-ended. But in my nine years here, we have had lots of ideas for our grounds; what we’ve lacked has been follow-through. So I believe God means for me to come to this with my mind and hands open, and wait for ideas and directions to emerge and gather energy from among us. 

I invite you to consider whether you’d like to be part of those conversations – and/or part of the work, once we’re working on something. Even if you don’t feel called to that, maybe you have a connection or idea to offer. Please do! This is wide open! As Sharon Bloodgood used to say, it’s easier to tame a wild idea than to spruce up a dull one. 

Jesus uses the image of living water, this ecological image, because it is so evocative and so important in his context. Living, running, fresh, clear, satisfying water… Deeply meaningful, deeply attractive, to a desert people. 

What can we think of that’s not only life-sustaining but also delightful and satisfying for us? A strawberry still warm from the sun; the intoxicating scent of basil fresh from the garden; the color and detail of a flower in bloom; the smell of the earth just after a rainfall. What if things like these aren’t mere physical pleasures, but ways to tap into something that sustains and refreshes us deeply – means of connectedness with grace, with love, with the Divine? What could a landscape of justice, wholeness, and holiness look like here? Let’s wonder together. 

 

Read about St. Luke’s, Annapolis, and other examples here:

https://sojo.net/magazine/april-2020/how-three-coastal-churches-became-hubs-climate-resilience