2023-05-02
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
Daniel Cooperrider April 30, 2023
Federated Church, Chagrin Falls OH Psalm 19
“Speak with the Earth”
The only place I could possibly begin is with full-hearted gratitude, and with a deep bow of thank you, as it’s an incredible honor to be invited to be your guest preacher today, and to be welcomed into a weekend of events here at Federated. Having grown up here in this church since about the age of 10, and with my mom Nancy being one of the former Christian education directors, I hold this church in a type of mythological esteem, even or maybe especially as I’ve journeyed elsewhere as a pastor in Massachusetts, then Vermont, and now Wisconsin. It was my formative time here where I experienced church as a community through which the love of God can be made known, can be glimpsed, tasted. I’ve tried to carry that with me like a compass or like a touchstone, reminding me of what church can be, can feel like at its best.
Two weeks from now, May 14th, will mark 12 years since the last time I was here, as I’ll never forget that as the date of my ordination here in this Sanctuary. I’ll never forget either the beautiful music Marcia offered at that event, the moving liturgical dance offered by Dawn Dole and the group, and the simple yet profound charge Hamilton gave me that day in his sermon (as he preached so powerfully as he does from this beautiful, and historical, and not at all intimidating! pulpit) – he said that my job was to go into every room, into every conversation, into every encounter, and to make sure the word “God” was spoken, to bring the depth and the summons of the sacred to bear in all aspects of life, and he was right, and that charge to make sure the word God enters the room has been the blessing and challenge of my vocation ever since. Remembering his words this week, I had to look over my sermon notes to make sure in fact the word ‘God’ was in it, and thankfully, we’re safe on that front today…
12 years. It makes me think of one of the best questions I’ve ever heard. Philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, upon greeting a friend that he hadn’t seen in some time, was known to begin the conversation, asking,- “What’s become clear since last we met?” Isn’t that wonderful, “What’s become clear since last we me?” It expects and encourages the notion that our thinking and our way of seeing things is ever evolving, and we can hope, ever -growing, ever-expanding, ever-opening.
What’s become clear – I’ll try to work my way there, but first we have Psalm 19, one of world literature’s masterpieces. CS Lewis deemed this to be “the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world.”
It’s long been a custom for many preachers to preface their sermon with the prayer that ends Psalm 19 – the prayer that the words I speak, and the meditations of our hearts, might be pleasing, might be aligned with, might bring delight to God…
With its reference to the sun rising and running its daily course with joy (and I love that little detail – joy not as something optional to life, like the cherry on top, but joy as inherent to life, built in to the very nature of things), scholars locate this as an early morning psalm, a prayer of thanks for the Sun as it returns, or as we turn back towards it. And so not just for preachers, this as a wonderful prayer for anyone to start their day with, waking up saying—let my words and actions today, God, and let my meditations, like the sun, be a natural expression of Joy to you…
Reading back from the end to the beginning, I’ve long counted the first verse of Psalm 19 as one of my all-time favorite scriptures, and when I compare it to the prayer at the end, I find myself wondering this—how might the sermon moment in worship be framed differently, how might it be heard or understood differently, if the preacher began by praying the first verse of Psalm 19 rather than the last verse, so rather than saying, “let my words and meditations be pleasing,” what if the preacher stood up, cleared their throat, and said:
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the skies proclaim the work of God’s hands.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
Beginning here with these words, they remind me that, really, it’s not just me as an individual that is preaching right now, but in the bigger picture, when we step back, we can see that it is God’s creation, it is the universe itself, that is the primary ongoing revelation—that life itself is a sermon that is forever preaching and forever being preached—that what is happening between me and you right now is as much a part of this day’s sermon as the wildflowers just emerging these weeks, like the hepatica that heralds spring when it blooms on the forest floor, a fragile white flower that nevertheless must be strong and hardy as it’s the first to bloom while the snow melts, opening at just that moment when the first pollinators, the small carpenter and sweat bees, wake up and seek its nectar, pollinator greeting pollen in a momentary orchestration of the particular and unique gospel of this ephemeral spring season...
+ + +
I was invited to speak with you today because I grew up in Federated, and because I’m the author of a new book of essays on connecting spirituality with nature, that I’ve heard rumors maybe some of you have been or will be soon reading– Speak with the Earth and It Will Teach You: A Field Guide to the Bible (Pilgrim Press). I’m grateful, to get to share some of the basic message of the book, and to share a bit of my journey in writing it—my journey being part of what I’d call an ecological conversion—a turning towards the earth in my thinking and in my spiritual life, a main part of what’s become clear for me since last we met.
As a path into it, I want to honor and give voice to the land who raised me—and I take that phrase from a wonderful question that I’d love to have the chance to explore with you sometime, “Tell me about the land who raised you?”— one of the lands who raised me, and is still raising me, is ancestral Ojibwe land now hosting a multigenerational constellation of family cabins on a small lake in northern Wisconsin, a place where I grew up spending about 3 months per year in summer and some winters too, a place where I’m grateful to live near enough now to visit about once a month, checking in with the land in all seasons. This is a land of white pines, oaks, birches and maples, leopard frogs and snapping turtles, eagle and heron, bass and pike, and yes, ticks and mosquitos, sweet smelling sandy soil, and cattail, lily pad, and tamarack bogs. It is a place where the full moon rises across the lake, casting its orange glow like a golden road on the waters, while loons wail back and forth…
Night to night declares knowledge….
The other land who raised me was of course was this land, the woods and rivers of northeast Ohio in the Lake Erie watershed, and especially the Chagrin River with its sandstone and shale cliffs and waterfalls that I would climb, fish, swim, kayak, rock climb in, and would also often kind of escape to as a place of sanctuary, bringing a book of poetry and a notebook, and find a little cleft in a cave to be alone for a bit with beautiful words, beautiful trees, rocks, water, sky. This was the land of my formal school education, as well, and being part of the Millennial generation, my early memories of environmental education, in particular, focus around key aspirational words like Save & Protect—our generational references weren’t Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland catching fire, but for us it was Free Willy and save the whales, it was Fern Gully and protect the rainforest, it was panda bear and then it was polar bear…it was global warming, and then it was climate change, and then, and now, it's climate chaos, climate crisis, climate emergency, and the feelings and perhaps mental health challenges that come with that, of eco-grief, climate anxiety, nature deficit disorder, the 6th mass extinction event, species loneliness, solastalgia (longing, not for a different time/place like with nostalgia, but longing for what your own time and place, your own homeland, use to be before being forever ecologically altered)… solastalgia…
Let the words of my mouth…
Fast forward a few years and a few landscapes later, and I began my ministry at a rural church in Vermont, excited and eager if not knowing quite how to connect my environmental concern to my spiritual vocation. I was trained with an academic background to think that my job as preacher was to be an interpreter, primarily of written texts. And so each week I would turn to the Lectionary and read the assigned scripture passages, read commentaries on those passages, read commentaries on those commentaries, hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other…
It took me a few years to realize that the congregation I was serving was engaged in a different type of reading. On Sunday mornings, I would announce the church calendar—today is the First Sunday of Advent, today is Pentecost, today is the Fourth Sunday of Easter. We would then open the microphone to share joys and celebrations. Slowly I came to realize that the congregation would use this time to announce a different type of calendar. “Today I celebrate my first bluebird sighting!” (Today is the First Sunday of True Spring). “This week I took a drive through the mountains and the fall colors were spectacular!” (Today is the Sunday of Peak Leaves). While I thought we were following the church calendar, this congregation, more attuned to the earth than I was, taught me that our journey was also one of following what’s called the phenological calendar—the calendar of when things happen on the landscape—and that as a community we were reading together for glimpses of God in the seasons of nature and its cycle of happenings.
Day to day pours forth speech…
I realized that if I was to make the Bible come alive there, I had to find a new way of interpreting it. Jewish rabbinic tradition has a wonderful image for this. They say that the Bible is like a gemstone, like a diamond. And that our task when we read it, when we turn our gaze on this treasured heirloom that’s been passed down to us generation to generation, the rabbis say that the point is to turn the gem—turn the gem—because when you turn a gem like a diamond, when you look at it from a new angle, it reflects light in new ways. What if, I thought, what if we were to turn the Bible towards the earth, turn it away from focusing only on the human characters and drama, but turn it towards the more-than-human world of trees, clouds, rivers, mountains…
What do the trees in the Bible, for example, have to say to us when we read things from their perspective—there’s a story about the prophet Elijah, on the run for his life after a conflict with Queen Jezebel’s prophets. Seeing no hope, he journeys alone into the desert, and falls to his knees beneath a broom tree. “I have had enough, God,” he says, before falling asleep under that tree. It’s said that an angel visited him that night, providing nourishment, and hope, telling the prophet that his journey, his purpose with God wasn’t don’t yet. This time under the tree heals the prophet from despair, this healing power of trees being something we’re just beginning to understand a bit more, be it studies that show that if you have a view of trees from your hospital room, you will recover quicker, or the growing popularity of forest bathing, (Shinrin yoku in Japanese) letting time among trees soothe and save you, or the fact that so many powerful medicines are derived from trees—aspirin from willow bark, the cancer-medicine Taxol from the yew tree. The broom tree happens to provide the best firewood in the desert, and nomads would cook dinner over its coals, then bury them under the sand, and sleep over them to keep warm, receiving from the tree both nourishment and comfort during the night. And from January through April, the broom tree in blossom is the most beautiful of sights and smells on the landscape, like the cherry and crab apple and then lilac soon to bloom here. Legend has it that when the angel visited Elijah, the broom tree burst into bloom, that very tree itself as I’ve come to see it, healing and saving the prophet, materially, physically, and also spiritually with its blossoming beauty. “I asked the tree, ‘tell me about God,’” as Indian poet Tagore put it, “then it blossomed.”
Or rivers, what if were to re-read the Bible from the perspective of rivers and see what wisdom and new light they might bring – there’s Jesus at the beginning of his ministry, traveling down to the Jordan River, which flows from high in the mountains of Syria down into the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth. Jesus goes down to this downward flowing river, goes down fully emerged under the water, and as he’s coming up a dove comes down from the heavens to bless him, and Jesus emerges baptized into the river’s wisdom, and when we think about what effect the Jordan River had on him, I think we can see him carrying that downward energy throughout in his ministry, seeking out like water the lowest places, the last and the least, the mustard seed, the widow’s mite, bending down to wash the disciples feet, saying “blessed are the humble and poor in spirit,” teaching a theology of descent that like a river, God and the kingdom of God comes down and meets us here, right where we are, like a flood of grace that reaches into the deepest cracks and seeps of our being…
Or mountains, what might we learn when we re-read scripture from the perspective of mountains….there’s Moses, hiking up and down Mt. Sinai 8 times in the book of Exodus, carrying on a mountaintop conversation with God on the meaning of life that resulted in him bringing back down to the people the Ten Commandments chiseled onto rock tablets, containing wisdom on right relationship with God, neighbor, and creation that has, like a mountain, stood the test of time…
Or clouds, which are often celebrated in the Bible as the most expressive aspect of creation, as in Psalm 104 which pictures the clouds as God’s chariot as God rides on the wings of the wind…I picture a group of high cirrus clouds known as mares’ tales, the whole herd of them galloping off with joy into open fields of sky, the ever-changing clouds being the “the daily bread of the eyes,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson called them, “the ultimate art gallery just above.”
“Speak With the Earth and It Will Teach You,” the title comes from the book of Job—but more than a title, and more than a book, this notion of “Speak with the earth,” I hope, invites us to an orientation and an attitude and an attunement that I believe is being called for at this moment, this “species moment” for us on this planet, as I’ve heard it described, as we are being invited, and urgently so I think, (and this is what’s become clear to me since last we met) to become students again of the earth, to relate to nature as mentor, to be humble enough to see ourselves, as Native wisdom like in the Ojibwe tradition teaches, as the newcomers that we are, humans as the latest arrivals, the newest characters in the Sacred Story, the youngest ones, and as such we are the ones with the most to learn, with the most maturing to do, we are the most directly dependent on the offerings and medicine and teaching of our elders—plants, animals, rocks, clouds…
…they use no words;
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth….
I used to think that nature was ours to protect, that earth was ours to love and to save.
I now see that the earth is not ours, but that we belong to earth…
I now see that it’s not just about trying to love the earth, but it’s about realizing that the earth loves us, it’s about knowing and trusting, and I hope you hear this today, that the earth loves you—
I now see that nature is not ours to save, but that nature saves us, nature saves us when we remember that we belong to the whole, that we are nature, that we are earth, and so the climate fear we feel in our bodies is the fear the forests in California feel as the wildfires approach; the loneliness we feel is the loneliness of the white rhino facing extinction, but so too the joy we feel is the joy of the sun running its daily course, the joy of the finch singing its heart out, the joy of hepatica flowering and greeting again its old friend, the bee…
May these words of my mouth, may they be inspiration, reminder, permission, challenge, blessing this week for you as you “Speak with the earth” in the unique ways that you do, as you turn to earth as mentor and teacher, and when the sacred conversation brings you to a place beyond words, may the meditations of your heart be attuned to the great sermon of life that is forever preaching and forever being preached, because no matter what else is happening, no matter what else is going on, no matter who you are or where you are, it’s always the case—that the heavens are telling the glory of God, and the skies are proclaiming the work of God’s hands.
BENEDICTION –
Iris Murdoch said – “People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”
The sermon that is life itself could express itself in any number of ways, and it does throughout the journey of the year express itself in a wide variety of ways, but for us, here and now, for these few weeks of spring, (before we jump straight from winter to summer as it can sometimes seem) one of the ways it is expressing itself is through flowers. How wonderful. Let’s be mad with joy to have such things about us. Let’s learn from them, let’s listen to the sermon they have to preach.
As Japanese haiku poet Basho put it, “The temple bell stops/ but the sound keeps coming/ out of the flowers.”