Earth Day

Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Second Sunday of Lent, Psalm Series, "Created to be powerful, capable, connected," March 8, 2020


A Lent 2 Psalm 8 BFC 2020
Psalm 8
March 8, 2020

          A little under six years ago, I gave my candidating sermon at Billings First Congregational Church.  In that sermon, I spoke of human-induced climate disruption and quoted environmental activist and Harvard Divinity school graduate, Tim DeChristopher who asked for hard deeds.  I quoted Nobel Peace Prize winner, Wangari Maathai who said, there come times when a necessary change of consciousness is called for and she said, “That time is now.”  It must seem crazy that I would get up in front of a congregation, in a city built by fossil fuels, and preach what we call a “trial sermon” to ask you all to join me in offsetting human caused climate disruption. 
          Trial sermon.  “Take the accused and throw him in the trough of justice!  If he be a witch, he will float on polluted waters.”[1]  Luckily, all you did as a congregation was make me wait outside with my family as you voted.  No troughs of justice.  Whew.
          But I wanted to know.  Could we be courageous together?  I didn’t want to pretend I was this kind and sweet feller from Illinois only for you to realize, “Yeah, he’s kind of a bastard,” a year into my ministry in Billings.  Seriously, I wanted to find a congregation that would join hands with me to draw a line in the sand and say, “This is not who God created us to be.  This is not who we were born to be, to set the world on fire and watch it burn, to destroy and divide in our diversity rather than celebrate it.  And I didn’t want to preach a sermon that made it easy to like me only for you to find out what a bastard I can be.”  Hard deeds.  The time is now. 
          You may say different but I thought the recent movement to place the Welcoming Diversity Ordinance was glorious.  How amazing is it to be part of so many courageous people who stepped forward to represent the beautiful tapestry of Billings, Montana.  In that moment, I became somewhat of a fanboy about Billings, Montana.  I looked around at all these beautifully diverse people and, contrary to what you hear colloquially, Billings is and is becoming this wonderfully colorful, gritty, celebratory people.  I find myself sneering about other cities in Montana who think they are better.  Even with friends in each city, I have prejudices about the people who live there.  Is that healthy?  Am I just getting grouchy in my old age?  Or is Billings just becoming that glorious—as Native people rise, all the women who represent me at City Council or in the legislature seem to be a force of nature, and the 406 Pride in Billings throws the best parades with the best Grand Marshalls?  This is Billings.  And it’s darn glorious.  Right?  Not only is there bone beginning to connect to bone here but spiritual muscle is straining and growing  and exerting itself in very real ways. 
          I share all this remembering that last week I began my sermon referencing about every person I have talked to over the last month sharing with me just how tired they are, how exhausted they are, how exhausted I am.  I want you to hear that I think that exhaustion is intentional.  We are being fed a steady diet of narratives to batter us, wear us down, to keep us off balance in fear, and to make us believe we are powerless.  So last week I wanted you to make plans to be resilient—to make plans to plant yourself near resources that feed you, to keep your heart pliable and tender, and to share your gifts at the right time remembering your interconnection with all of creation. 
          Today I want to go a step further with this passage I have preached from twice before.  In my trial sermon, the one where I was found not to be a witch (so they say), I preached about our created-to-be connection with Creator’s universe.  In the second sermon, I spoke of the balance the Jewish creation stories put before us—we are created both out of the humus, the fertile soil, literally Children of the Earth, as a humble people full of potential, and created to be a little less than the Divine Artist, crowned with glory and honor.  All that stuff about original sin is just so much fertile topsoil.  Seriously.  This is what the Jewish creation story says and what Psalm 8 says.  
Today I want to emphasize that second statement made by the Jewish creation stories and repeated by Psalm 8.  We are capable.  We are powerful. 
          Recent research by sociologist, Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Yale University, says that we are wired for goodness.  “We come to social goodness as naturally as our more bloody inclinations.”[2]  It is not true, Christakis believes, that we are born for cruelty, selfishness, and fearful of our own diversity.  There is great proof that in our very social DNA is written cooperation, friendship, love, and teaching.  Below the surface, these are tectonic forces we are choosing again and again.  On the whole, we are kind to strangers, we cooperate with one another, and we teach each other things.  We do it, in contrast to much of the animal world, across genetically unrelated individuals.  It is encoded within us to learn from each other, to imitate one another.  Christakis does not discount that each age comes with its horrors of what humankind does to one another and to this good earth.  But he wants us to be aware that we are not naturally just a bloodthirsty, colonialist, and violent lot.[3]  We have built into us what Christakis references as a great social suite that shows our capacity and capability for amazing social goodness.
          We need to be reminded of that great capacity and capability as we turn to the challenges that face us.  Again, at the Welcoming Diversity Ordinance conversation at City Council I was just reminded how intersectional, interconnected all of those challenges are by a speaker who did not support the WDO and said that the City Council should invest their time and dollars in the things that made Billings great as a city—our history in fossil fuel extraction economies which threatens to destroy all of us.[4]  I thought to myself how this gentleman’s speech reflected a weird kind of indigenous wisdom which knows the despoiling of the earth as the first injustice.  For that history not only reflects our present despoiling of the land but it also is a reminder of the historic racism perpetuated against Native people for profit, power, and to perpetuate the lie that white folk are somehow chosen, through manifest destiny, to take as they see fit—all three-power, profit, and to take as we see fit-eerily similar to the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness.  Now this gentleman was confirming that the first injustice also required the dehumanization of the LGBTQ+ community. 
So let’s say it straight out.  We were not born broken with the need to extract and exploit and profit at another’s expense to be human.  This violence does not make us human.  This is a lie.  And I say to you, sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins, we have the capacity and we are capable.  It is God-given.  It is in us. 
          I say this but I also know the reality is grim.  Since that candidating sermon almost six years ago, our historical usage of extractive economies, our unwillingness to see ourselves as made of land and water, is actively leading to cataclysmic results.  The insanely warm winter we are having in Billings and the Corona virus pandemic are indicators.  The World Heath Organization shares that climate change will affect infectious disease occurrence.[5]  In August 2019, Greenland lost 11 billion tons of surface ice to the ocean in one day.  That is the equivalent to 4.4 million Olympic size swimming pools.[6] 
          Our capacity and capability does need to be measured by a humility to remember our connection.  It was Mark Twain who said of glaciers,

A [person] who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by and by.  The Alps and the glaciers together are able to take every bit of conceit out of a [person] and reduce [their] self-importance to zero if [they] will only remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enough to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work.[7]

And you may know better than me that the snow in Glacier National Park is now on the ground an average of thirty days fewer than it used to be, meaning that trees grow earlier in the season, grow larger, and use up more water.  Thus, the size of forest fires grows.  To compound this great loss, Dr. Dan Fagre, the United States Geological Survey’s research ecologist and director of the Climate Change in Mountain Ecosystems Project says of the glacier ice at Glacier National Park, “Ice is not just melting, it is collapsing.”[8]
            Once again, the intersectional nature of justice issues has almost all climate action groups centering the voices of indigenous people around the globe.  Noam Chomsky, the celebrated, almost 90 year-old linguistic professor, peace activist, and social critic said back in 2016 that indigenous people are taking the lead in so may struggles to try to save us all.  Even back then he related the great stands indigenous people were taking at threat to their own safety from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  “The commons is under attack,” Chomsky said, there are those who are trying to take the global environment away and sell it off to the highest bidder.[9]  Indigenous people around the world  are making courageous stands to save us.  Chomsky saw that in 2016 with a struggle in Canada which has been heightened all the more by the courageous stands taken by the Wetʼsuwetʼen First Nations people.[10]
            Not surprisingly and sadly, at Standing Rock, all the predictions the Native elders made about what would happen with the pipeline have come to fruition.  Nick Estes, writer of the great book, Our History Is Our Future:  Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long History of Indigenous Resistance  shared that the leaders of the protest were often from the Two Spirit community.   All intersectional.  All tied together.  All connected. 
Stan Rushworth, a Cherokee Elder, and teacher shared that the Elders he invites into his classroom have known what is happening and spend hours speaking to his classes about the recognizable signs.  When asked by the class what they can do, the Elders almost always respond by reminding the students of their capability and capacity.  “What can we do?” Arapaho Elder Henry Tyler was asked.  He would take a finger and point to his head, say nothing in a long pause, and then answer, “Use this,” and smile.[11]
            As our creation stories teach us, we are called to be the shadows of the divine in the world.   Psalm 8, that ancient hymn, remembers these great Jewish creation stories that tell us we are a little less than God or the angels, people of great capacity, capability--and what I know of this incredible congregation, people of great courage.   Think I’m kidding?  When news broke on Facebook of someone with a gun at our church, some feared it was because of our courageous stands in the community.  Who was our most ardent defender?  It was Adrian Jawort, a profound and wise Two Spirit Native writer, who was asked to speak at our church last year for Our Whole Lives Sunday and spoke at the Climate Strike in September.  He spoke in deep and loving ways about how we had embraced him. 
There are some ways that Billings was a great city already.  But what is happening now is that Billings is changing in such profound ways that opponents of the WDO have to ship pastors in from Laurel to tell us how we should run things in our fair city.  People from the LGBTQ community led us out.  Who were the prolific city leader allies who did the blue-collar work?  Who brought up the WDO?  Penny Ronning.  Who helped to organize from the faith community?  Lisa Harmon.  Who organized the speakers?  Carmelita Dominguez and Kiely Lammers.   And this congregation already knows about what great leadership we have in the Montana legislature with Margie MacDonald and Emma Kerr Carpenter.  And, of course, many of us have first-hand knowledge of the rising of the Native community in Billings.
But the challenge is before us.  For our own salvation, Billings must become more than its fossil fuel history to be crowned in glory and honor.  In a month, the week around Earth Day is being hailed as hopefully the largest climate strike ever around the world.  We have the capacity.  We have the capability.  We have the courage.  How shall we use this as an opportunity to sing of the great truths shared in Psalm 8 and make it a point of departure for even greater work in our beautiful city.   Because we are Billings.  We are Billings’ first church.  Powerful.  Capable.  Courageous.  Amen. 



[1] Please . . . you don’t remember?  Steve Martin as Theodoric of York from Saturday Night Live.  See.  When you have to explain a joke . . .
[2] Nicholas Christakis interview with Krista Tippett, “How We’re Wired for Goodness,” OnBeing, March 5, 2020, https://onbeing.org/programs/nicholas-christakis-how-were-wired-for-goodness/. 
[3] Ibid.
[4] The Scottish American naturalist, author, philosopher, and early wilderness-preservation advocate John Muir who knew a different set of values, “I am losing precious days.  I am degenerating into a machine for making money.  I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men.  I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn news.”  Dahr Jamail, The End of Ice:  Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, (New York:  The New Press, 2019), p. 8.
[5] World Health Organization, “Climate change and human health - risks and responses. Summary,” https://www.who.int/globalchange/summary/en/index5.html.
[6] Mark Tutton, “Greenland's ice sheet just lost 11 billion tons of ice -- in one day,” CNN World, August 15, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/02/world/greenland-ice-sheet-11-billion-intl/index.html.
[7]Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (Leipzig, 1880), p. 158.
[8] Dahr Jamail, The End of Ice:  Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, (New York:  The New Press, 2019), pp. 36-39.
[9] Michael Keefer, “Noam Chomsky: Indigenous people “are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us,” Real People’s Media, December 22, 2016, https://realpeoples.media/noam-chomsky-indigenous-people-are-the-ones-taking-the-lead-in-trying-to-protect-all-of-us/?fbclid=IwAR0JQFtb6EuIGgwEmC5tCbpALrSsd3N2-l1zasY-1BcJsPRLckQCMeMtexw.
[11] Jamail, “The End,” pp. 220-224.

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