2018-04-23
Brooke Strong
Scripture: Psalm 23
When I first came to Chagrin Falls, to interview for the position I have here at Federated, one of the events the search committee planned was for me to hike with a couple of its members down to what is now called Henry Church Rock in the South Chagrin Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks. It was a hot July day, but what I still remember was my surprise at the stunning beauty of the area. Not having been here before, I had always thought of Ohio as flat and somewhat dull. What I saw that day was a striking loveliness.
To be honest, I’m not all that attuned to nature. I whirl through my days largely oblivious to the sounds of birds and the sights of plants. At yesterday’s Family Ministries event at the FLC, a Federated member pointed out a plover nesting in the ground near the path to the labyrinth. I had no idea that was a plover. I can identify pigeons, robins, cardinals and bald eagles but that after that, I get a little shaky. Likewise with flowers: I know carnations, roses and dandelions but not much more. As for trees, it’s pretty hopeless: weeping willows and sugar maples are about it.
And there’s a kind of poverty in my ignorance, not just because I can’t name them, but because my focus is so often elsewhere. I suspect I’m missing out on something of the fullness of God’s creation. Many of you will remember the line that gives the novel and movie, The Color Purple, its title, when Shug says she thinks it “[ticks] God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” I must regularly tick God off.
The environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote a piece recently in which he talked about taking an extended break from work and walking in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. At first his mind chattered nonstop. He was absorbed in thoughts and plans and ideas: “What was I going to work on next? Who would win the presidential election? What were some neat things I could buy? My mind was buzzing, following all its usual tracks though I was in the deep woods.”
Slowly, though, as he spent this time alone, with little outside stimulation, “the buzz [of his mind] turned to hum, and once in a while to quiet.” He became more peaceful, and animals, he thought, sensed it. A hawk stayed close. Some deer were not spooked by his presence, some merganser chicks trailing their mother paid him no heed. “That night I was aware of every second of the endless sunset: the first long rays of the sun as the afternoon turned late, the long twilight, the turn of the sky from blue to blue to blue to—just as it turned black, a heron came stalking through my tiny cove, standing silently and then spearing with a sudden spasm; I couldn’t see her, not really, but I knew where she was. The sky darkened, the stars in this dark place spread across the sky bright and insistent. We were unimaginably small, this heron and I, and extremely right” (https://newrepublic.com/article/143797/thoreau-think-climate-change).
McKibben and the heron; the plover and me: unimaginably small and extremely right. Walking by the color purple and being sure to notice it. Then there’s today’s psalm. Surely the most well-known and beloved of all psalms, and maybe of all scripture, Psalm 23 is often thought of as a comfort at time of death. At maybe three-quarters of the memorial services I lead, we read that psalm. It has an uncanny ability to evoke peace at a time of turmoil and shattering grief. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (23:6). Many of you who have lost someone dear to you know how crucial it is to hear that reassurance when what you love has been snatched away.
The Twenty-third Psalm is an unsurpassed comfort when we grieve at someone’s death. At the same time, though, this is a psalm that’s about more than death. It’s about life. It’s about God walking with us through whatever haunts and unnerves and pains us. It’s about God shepherding us through all our various “valley[s] of the shadow of death” (23:4).
And part of what’s striking, on this Earth Day, is the images the psalmist uses to convey the way God leads us, or, as in the last verse, the way God “follows” us, or, even more accurately, “chases after” us. What does the Holy One do? This shepherd God “makes [us] lie down in green pastures” and “leads [us] beside still waters” (23:2).
At the heart of this psalm is the assurance that God feeds us and gives us drink and keeps us alive. When it begins by saying “I shall not want” (23:1), what’s really being said is “I shall not lack for anything”—in other words, God gives me everything I need. God provides, is the simple way of putting it.
But it’s not inappropriate to leave those words as we traditionally hear them: “I shall not want.” These are striking words, aren’t they, because we do want, don’t we—we want all kinds of things all the time. We want a nice shirt we see on the store rack; we want the latest tennis racket; we want the hottest new car. In a society as consumer-driven as ours, these wants are ever-present. Marketing departments, in fact, are making sure of it. You might like to guess how many ads we see every day. In the 1970s, you might see 500 ads a day. Now, the estimate is we see 4000-10,000 ads each day. And each ad is trying to find a way to get us to buy something. We’re being plied with images and stories that make us want to own this make-up or that detergent or a certain watch.
Not only do we want all kinds of things, though. We want in other ways, as well. We want happiness and forgiveness and peace, of course. And in our day and age, we want desperately to stay connected. We’re bombarded with incessant alerts on our phones and in various social media: look what breaking news just happened; look what concert is playing; look what you’re missing! Fox News and MSNBC are trying to win us to their perspective on the world. Social media keep us so informed of everybody’s goings-on that there’s a low-level fear among many of us that we’re missing the big thing we should be at. FOMO—the “fear of missing out”—induces enough anxiety that we may constantly think we’ve been left out of something fun.
So all of that swirl is going on in our brains, begging us to buy more and do more and above all want more. And at the same time, much of the “more” that we’re doing and wanting—especially the burning of fossil fuels—depletes the earth’s atmosphere and strains its climate. So as McKibben suggests, “To prevent it getting worse won’t require some technical change; it will require doing with less, living more lightly.”
This is the challenge for us. Climate change is not some hypothetical “what if.” It’s happening now, as we speak. The science is so overwhelming that it’s somewhat mystifying that there is, in some quarters, such ferocious denial. The scientific evidence is so persuasive that the only explanation for the denial is our reluctance to change our habits. We know that saving the earth requires us to find new ways. And for many of us, that change is so unnerving, so threatening, that it seems preferable to pretend the danger is not so great.
On Monday evening, our Social Justice Advocacy Ministry showed the film A Plastic Ocean. It’s a sobering, even horrifying, story of the damage we’re doing to the earth with the plastics that are ubiquitous. In the U.S. alone, for example, we throw away 38 billion plastic water bottles every year. Around the globe, every single person will use 300 pounds of single-use plastic this year alone. Eight million tons of plastic are dumped into the ocean every year. The film showed video of dead birds’ stomachs being cleaned out after they had died, only to find, in one typical case, 276 pieces of plastic in that one stomach.
The remarkable psalm we read today says, ‘You don’t need everything you think you need. You already have what you need. God provides, in every circumstance. But you’ll only know that if you’re aware of and attuned to the grace that embraces us at every moment.’
For Bill McKibben, it took a long walk in the wilderness, free of the endless stimuli and chatter, to remember that there is unsurpassed care and nourishment in the lap of God. The always beckoning, always sustaining God is nothing if not bountiful. This is the God who makes us to lie down in green pastures and leads us beside still waters.
McKibben reflects on Henry David Thoreau, the great nineteenth-century naturalist. Thoreau, he says, “posed the two intensely practical questions that must come to dominate this age if we’re to make [the] changes [we need to make]: How much is enough? and How do I know what I want?” For Thoreau, “Simplicity, calmness, quiet—these were the preconditions for a moral life, a true life.”
Thoreau answered the first question—How much is enough?—in a particularly austere manner. He lived in an extremely simple one-room cabin with almost no furnishings and not much more than a single change of clothes. He went further than most of us would go, even though there is now a noteworthy movement for “voluntary simplicity” in our country. His point is largely that simplifying life has a way of enriching it.
The second question Thoreau asked—“How can I hear my own heart?”—is, says McKibben, a striking assault on the Information Age in which we live. “How do I know what I want? What is my true desire? . . . Try disconnecting for a while and see what the hum has done to you, see what it’s made of you.” Often, Thoreau would lay aside his books and even his beloved gardening, just to get a sense for what he himself was thinking and feeling. We are so bombarded with words and images and ideas and notifications and phone pings that many of us barely know what we ourselves believe or are committed to. We know only the din, the cacophony of noise that constantly assaults us. McKibben calls it “the big Hum.” Even when you turn the TV off—after watching it, as we do, on average, two to four hours a day—“even when you hike deep into the Adirondack woods, your mind keeps up a constant vibration, playing and replaying words and images and ideas so that you hardly notice your surroundings. So that you rarely notice your thoughts.
“[Notice] this . . . : How long can you watch a sunset before you get bored? How long can you look at the night sky before you seek some entertainment? The idea that we know what we want is palpably false. We’ve been suckled since birth on an endless elaboration of consumer fantasies, so that it is nearly hopeless for us to figure out what is our [thought] and what is the enchanter’s suggestion. And we keep that spell alive every time we turn on the radio or the television or the net. Because when someone is whispering something in your ear, there’s no way to think your own thoughts or feel your own responses.
“This is an environmental problem not only because the main function of the Information Revolution is to sell stuff we don’t need, stuff that gives off carbon dioxide or gathers in dumps. It’s a problem most of all because it confuses us as to our place in the scheme of things. Without silence, solitude, darkness, how can we come to any sense of our true size, our actual relationship with the rest of the world?
“What nature provides is scale and context, ways to figure out who and how big we are and what we want. It provides silence, solitude, darkness: the rarest commodities we know. It provides reality.”
You and I could go on for hours this morning itemizing specific things we can do to improve the environment. You know them as well as I do: use LED light bulbs, don’t waste water, decline plastic straws in restaurants, bring your own bags into grocery stores, reduce the use of fossil fuel, make do with less, reuse rather than throw out, recycle everything that can be refashioned. On a bigger scale, the film A Plastic Ocean mentions pyrogenesis, an advanced technology used on at least one U.S. aircraft carrier, in which a plasma torch turns waste back into its core elements with no detrimental effects on the environment. These and so much more are critical to ensuring the health and well-being of the natural world. All of it is going to be crucial if we’re to reverse the environmental degradation that has been running so rampant.
At the root of it all, though, is the need to notice the color purple, to regain a sense of wonder for the world in which we live, to reconnect nature with the God who has created all things. The great preacher William Sloane Coffin once said that “only reverence can restrain our violence toward nature.” He quotes G.K. Chesterton’s pithy observation, “The world does not lack for wonders, only for a sense of wonder,” and he reminds us of the heart of the matter: “It is primarily our lack of wonder that prevents our foreseeing and forestalling the havoc we will leave in our wake” (A Passion for the Possible: A Message to U.S. Churches, p. 33).
Green pastures and still waters beckon us, these and so many other wonders of God’s creative genius. God gives us life on this brilliant and beautiful earthly home. So let’s notice. Let’s remember that our wants are not the center of the universe. Let’s adore what God adores, and devote ourselves to the care and keeping of this astounding and sacred place. In the name of the God who is our shepherd, and in whose house we will dwell, by grace and love, now and forever.