By the Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan

October 4, 2020

“In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”* This adage is one of the guiding ideas behind the modern environmental movement and it captures the spirit of much of what I want to say this morning, both in the context of the feast of St. Francis and also in light of today’s readings.

For far too long, our tradition did not help us understand the true nature of the world in which we live. I’m not talking about being anti-science, exactly, although some Christians have certainly waged fierce battles against the theory of evolution and other advances in knowledge. I’m talking about the whole notion put forward by many Christians that God’s Creation is hierarchical, that human beings occupy a position above and apart from the rest of nature.

This has led to some Christians thinking of the planet as just a place where we happen to live, something temporary for us to occupy until we find our true home in heaven. Too much post-Enlightenment preaching and teaching has reinforced this misunderstanding, even though it is antithetical to orthodox Christianity.

Meanwhile, though, others in our tradition, including St. Francis himself, have always known that life is not shaped like a pyramid or a ladder, but rather is more like a web, with everything connected in some mysterious way to everything else, and that human beings are most definitely a part of that intricate web. This understanding is closer to what current science teaches, bringing important disciplines into conversation with one another. It is also an understanding that leads to love and from love to conservation.

Best of all, from the Church’s perspective, this understanding of the cosmos is the one more supported by Scripture. It is implied in our Creation stories and in many of the parables of Jesus, for instance, and it absolutely jumps out in key passages in both the Old and the New Testament, including the opening verses of Psalm 19, which was appointed for today’s service.

“The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork,” the Psalmist begins. Metaphorical language, yes, but metaphors that are deeply revealing. The physical world portrayed here is not some inanimate thing out there; it is not a mere stage upon which people play out our all-important roles in our all-important dramas.

If we are present at all, we’re hardly noticeable when set against the vast scope of the firmament, the stars, the abyss of the deep and the uttermost edge of the heavens; we are not the center of the universe in an account of the world that asserts that everything—everything!—is suffused with God, bristling with life, animated by God’s loving and sustaining presence. Human intellect, even human language, so often thought of as our crowning glory, is absolutely beside the point, irrelevant to the innate ability of Creation to communicate and to praise. It shouts, it declares, it rejoices; its message reaches “to the ends of the world.” In the words of the great poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, it is “charged with the grandeur of God,” oozing with vitality, a glittering reflection of God’s essence that shines out “like shook foil.”

This is how we need to understand Creation if we are going to protect it, love it, and fight for it. This dazzling, precious, irreplaceable web of life is, unapologetically, that which God has made, and we are a part of it, even as it is a part of us. God created everything out of love and with a plan for interconnection and interdependence built into it.

It doesn’t matter how advanced, how sophisticated, or how clever we are, we can’t escape our dependence on God, one another, and the whole web of life. One memorable quote sums up the plight of the human race quite succinctly by declaring, “Despite all our achievements, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”* Yes! And isn’t that miraculous?!

If it is true that understanding leads to love and love leads to conservation, then the world around us shows how badly we have failed both to understand and to love Creation. One way of looking at today’s parable, often called the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, is to think about it in light of how we are stewarding Creation. Are we, like those tenants, taking God’s vineyard and treating it as our own private property to do with as we please, even if it means that people will die as a result of our greed? Are we truly producing good fruits from all that God has given to us —or are we instead producing a society built on consumption, extraction, and competition, heedless of the consequences?

Let us look very briefly at the example of water, a key symbol in the Bible, fraught with multiple meanings and associations, from danger and chaos to creativity and abundance. At the most fundamental level, water is life, as our Indigenous siblings have been saying for forever. And yet our culture today has a twisted and even sinful relationship to water. Clean water is the reserve of the wealthy and privileged, as we have seen in the poisoning of water in Flint, Michigan and other disadvantaged communities. Multinational corporations get rich by taking water that belongs to the public, putting it in plastic bottles and then selling it back to us at exorbitant prices. The water God gave us! In bottles that clog our landfills, poison our oceans, and kill marine life! This is madness and it is, sadly, a madness in which I have been complicit.

There is another way. We really could just stop allowing water to be treated as a resource to be extracted, commodified, and exploited. If this seems too big, we can start at the personal, spiritual level, by pausing over and over again throughout the day to look at water as a gift from God and even a mirror reflecting back God’s love.

This is where encounter becomes understanding and understanding becomes love. I have seen the face of God in the Pacific Ocean when I walked along the beaches of Hawaii as a child. I have seen God’s image shine out at me from the currents of the Big Wood River that runs behind my mother’s home in Idaho. I have never seen the face of God in a bottle of Aquafina. A world where every drop of water is known and appreciated as a reminder that God loves us is, inevitably, a more peaceful, just, and equitable world.

We could make a similar case for every element in the natural world, especially those on which we so fundamentally depend, like air and soil. Learning to understand them as unearned gifts, as miracles even, causes a profound shift in thinking and action. Understanding leads to love and love leads to protection. The Church can and should be helping create this shift in consciousness.

For some of us who have been frustrated by the lack of bold action around climate change for a long time now, this approach might seem like a distraction from the urgency and danger of the present moment, but I’m not so sure. Now, after all, is the only time we have, and time too is a gift which we are asked to use wisely.

I can say it no better than does the great agrarian Wendell Berry, when he writes, “We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”*

Amen.

Footnotes:

*The first quote is from Baba Dioum, in a paper presented in New Delhi in 1968, at the triennial meeting of the General Assembly of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (source: Wikipedia). The quote about topsoil and rain is generally attributed to the Farm Equipment Association of Minnesota and South Dakota. The Wendell Berry quote is from The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays.