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| From Nature to Culture with God Acts 16:9-15 When I said, the bee-dance relies on the bee’s sensing the location of the Sun, does that suggest to them or us our life with God. We know, now, that bees need to know “where they stand” in God’s sunlight if they are to find sweet flowers! Have I lead them or us astray by comparing them with bees and comparing God with the sun? Or does it even really make any difference? Now, I’ve been asking people all week if they feel closer to God in nature or in culture, in the country or in the city? Most everyone gravitates to nature. In nature the reality of God can not be hidden or masked, some say. In civilization the forces of evil, like racial prejudice threaten you unfairly. Nature doesn’t hate. So, if God is love, then nature would be more God’s home than culture, society, civilization, where things can be so un-loving. That’s what Taoism is all about: The neutral goodness of nature. To some of us the trees, the woods, rivers and lakes, ocean and sky or just the big brown eyes that cows have can draw us into the sustaining spirit of life. I know trees are important to the City of Rockville! There are rules and laws and ordinances to save the trees. At Yale too! At Yale Divinity School a few years back students chained themselves to a beautiful oak tree nestled in the corner of two red brick colonial buildings. And they held rallies where they played French horns and trombones, all to keep Yale from cutting down the encroaching large tree. Now, spring has always been a good time for seminary students to riot, ask me or Sharon Ringe about our years at Union in New York City! But, we did it so that Columbia University’s new gymnasium wouldn’t take down peoples’ homes and would allow Harlem residents use of the new gym and pool. From people to trees. From people to trees. What is going on here? And where do you find God? Where does the Holy One call you? “Green pastures and still waters” or a city on a hill that is inspired by the new Jerusalem referred to in Revelation? God in the sunset, or the alphabet of Alpha and Omega and the letters of God’s word? There is a lot of freedom to choose nature or
culture for us in our Bible, and our theology. And our personal
history shapes our affinity for certain languages, symbols, and
images. Where we first meet God is important. For example, in today’s
scriptures we have two Sabbath days with water images. One that
can satisfy the nature lover; one, the city dweller. In the story
from the Book of Acts, Paul finds a group of women, outside the
city gates down by a river in prayer. The woman Lydia is baptized
there. I would think the river would mean a lot to her. The water
image in our Sabbath story from Jesus and the invalid at Bethesda
is a healing pool, not a flowing river. While Paul meets the woman
Lydia outside the gates next to the river, Jesus meets the unnamed
lame man near the Sheep Gate in the city of Jerusalem, next to five
porticos and man made pools of water. I would think that such pools
and gates and proximity to the temple itself – where he goes
in a crowd to pray – would mean a lot to him. So where we
first meet God is important. The Bible can speak to you of God’s
habitat for As summer comes I think we tilt more and more towards nature and even a natural theology with al its sacramental promises and it’s pitfalls. Despite the risks to our skin and to our theology, we almost – like the bees – take our cues from the sun, even becoming sun worshippers for a few weeks. And church summer camp for young people can become the beginning place and time for life changing religious experience. But there are pitfalls to a theology based in nature, Natural Theology is only one theology, and it can be used to argue that God is against abortion, for male dominance, against birth control, and even stem cell research. And if we get all our cues about God from nature and its sunsets we could, and lots of new age people do get locked into the sentimental superstitions of a neo-pagan world view. Ultimately there does not need to be God if we are nature worshippers, because nature worshippers ultimately believe in the bumper sticker “nature bats last.” If nature is the last word on life then there is no God in history. And that, at the least, is a faithless, non-Christian, place to be – if not also just a down rite scary place. Nature and bio-mimicry may be a good corrective to some science, some technology, theology, and even to the shopping mall. But as people of Faith in God, and dependent on the Spirit, if nature bats last, if nature rules the world, then we are left with a biological world “where boys will be boys,” and the biggest boy wins not just with the most toys but by the biggest weapons of mass destruction, we’re left with so called manly men who don’t need love, like James Bond, and where women have to be women – meaning the way their supposed nature told them to be. A world of power not love is nature’s final word, because power is the law of nature, but love is the gift of super nature. In nature there is no place of grace, nature is not free and nature is not forgiving, only random places of beauty, still waters, which also, naturally, become raging rivers from time to time. What makes it so hard to turn away from the promises of nature to the promises of God is, however, just what a botch (as the poet Ezra Pound said) we’ve made of civilization. Nature seems like a good retreat. The botch of civilization comes clear and close to us almost daily now. Take our honey bee, our busy buzzing sweetness-making pollinator! 30% or more of our food chain depends on bees. Albert Schwitzer said that without bees the human race has five years left. And of course if the preacher suggests that children, our children, are like bees, then our children are also endangered. As indeed they are! Global warming could do to our children, and to theirs, what is now mysteriously happening to the honey bee population in America. In different states, as many of you know, from the last month’s news on radio, television and the papers, 10% to 50% of honey bee colonies in different states are simply disappearing. Not just dying but disappearing. Worker bees fly out to find sweet flowers, and all the rest, using the sun for direction, and yet they become disoriented, lost, and never return. Other bees go out and suffer the same mysterious fate, leaving the queen bee in the hive with a few attending bees unable to generate and care for the unborn hive. Leave it to science to come up with a medical sounding name to this apocalyptic horror: They call it “colony collapse disorder.” CCD which would be funny if this silent spring of bees were not so suggestive of a possible natural fate for human kind. From Katrina, to polar bears, to bees, people are seeing messages to humanity from some collision between civilization and nature. The collision between nature and culture is more than a “botch”, and its heading toward something worse. So, our biblical faith in a God in history is crucial to face this unfolding sin – the disfigurement of nature. The Christian biblical faith is not just a theology rooted in the creation of Nature, it is a faith in the transformation of human nature. And human nature will have to change if we are to avoid killing nature with our economics and their wars. Wars support our economies and our economy is killing our planet. Religion, by itself, no longer starts wars if they ever did. No one we know wants to go to the Middle East to fight and die for Jesus Christ. That’s just not what its about. Nor can we overlook the economic, plus social, issues behind a Jihadist, even if they do. And unless you see the face of Jesus Christ in our civilization, and I do not, and unless you feel his side and touch his wounds and receive his love through our civilization, and I do not, then none of our casualties are about Jesus. But our future can be! Our future can be about Jesus Christ. Christianity knows how to change people’s lives and our lives must change, if we are to have any nature left. Paul baptized the wonderful woman Lydia, the worker in purple fabrics. She soon thereafter offered her home and her household to Paul after he got out of jail. This woman, who went out of the city down by the river to pray, did not stay there, she did not worship the river. Rather her new Christian nature showed itself, back in her home, where she housed and cared for two wounded men, Paul and Silas. They had been beaten and jailed because they had liberated a slave girl. She was the organ grinder’s monkey for several men who made money off of her spiritual skills of divination. If that’s not a positive story about Christianity changing men and women, I don’t know what is! And Christianity knows how to change peoples lives because Jesus changed peoples lives, After 38 years of passive agony the invalid man at the pool at Bethesda got up and walked and went to the temple to pray because Jesus put the power of God into him by word. Now, this church is a small colony. Perhaps it’s a small colony of the saved. I’m sure sometimes it thinks of itself that way. But this is just a speck. Coming from my little speck in Chester, Connecticut to this little speck on Linthicum Road, I am deeply impressed with how big and indifferent is the whole world that exists between these two specks! We are like honey bees. The bee makes 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its life. It takes a million flowers to make a pound of honey. Never forget how small and fragile is this church community. Like all church communities, it would take very little, very little indeed, to suffer colony collapse disorder to become disoriented here, or in any church. In fact, we already know that huge percentages of Christian colonies have suffered the eerie silence of emptiness. Workers have flown off, become disoriented, lost, and the colony dies. But Christianity and Christian Church’s do know how to change lives, and with faith in the God of history and nature Christians and Christian Church’s can change. Will change. And the God of both nature and culture will come. At the end of the book of Revelation an angel reveals a river. It is not just a river of water, it is a river of the water of life. It is not just a natural river, it is a super natural river. Before I picture Revelation 22:1-6, I want to say that I found a version of this image (from the strangest book in the bible) in the January 29th copy of Business Week. That special report was on the rising tide of green corporations, reporting on a world where socially responsible and eco-friendly companies also improve their bottom line profits. The magazine picture is: a river, flowing through a city, a man is lifting up a building and underneath he finds the sun. Along the bank of the river are trees. This is a city whose river is changing the city. Nature is renewing culture. There is a river in the Bible. It is bright as a crystal. It is full of light. Why? Because it comes from the Throne of God and The Lamb. Where is it? Right down the middle of the street. It is not just out in the country, its down in the city. It nourishes the tree of life. The Tree of Life produces a new fruit each month, 12 fruits, and its leaves? And its leaves are for the healing of the nations, not for picture post cards of scenic highways, but medicine, good natural medicine for people, who are in the New Jerusalem where they will not even need the sun any more. There will no longer be night time nor lamps, nor sun, because we will all see the face of God and the Lord God will be our light. For the redemption of our coming natural crisis let this then be our supernatural faith! Amen. Prayer As we draw near the end of our Sabbath worship together, lets pause and reflect on our own religious experience: those times when we felt very close to the one we call God, when we were filled with the Spirit: perhaps from being caught up in the wonders of nature, perhaps in a deep awareness of the mutuality of relationship, or maybe in the very ordinary in our lives…moments when the ordinary mysteriously became extraordinary. Teilhard de Chardin wrote that “everything that is, is more than it is.” Sometimes we are blessed to see the “more,” and when our eyes are opened we know that our souls have been touched; we call it grace or insight or love or religious experience. In silence may we treasure such experiences, perhaps even return to the place we have been and know it not for the first time but for a second time of blessing and gratitude, or we might choose to simply turn our minds and hearts to the Holy….Let us pray. Caring God, we pray for all of the mothers and grandmothers in our lives, the great caregivers, co-creators with you of our very lives. Bless them all. We are mindful of the many people who count on our prayer, mindful of those listed in our bulletin that are brought into our congregation by relatives and friends who care. We pray for them. And now, May we leave this sacred space and time apart better prepared to accept our call to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God, as we pray in the words of Jesus, Our Father…
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