Easter Day, "Cosmic praise," Psalm 148, April 12, 2020

A Easter Day Psalm 148 BFC 2020

Psalm 148

April 12, 2020

Last week I began my Palm Sunday sermon talking about how the individual agency and collective power of people sprung to life with the 1964 earthquake in Anchorage, Alaska, and the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.  This week the resurrection story begins with women going to the tomb and an earthquake happens.  The earthquake, that calamity and disaster, is a mythological and material symbol that we cannot return to normal.  Normal doesn’t work.  The overt and low-level violence done by the system cannot continue.   The world needs to be overturned. 

Ecologist Carl Safina recently published an article in The Guardian that communicated how animals in the wild communicate culture from generation to generation, in a way that provides knowledge and skills that allow for adaptability as climate change happens faster and faster.  Scientists have discovered this knowledge and these skills are not in the genes of wild animals.  Rather, survival skills are learned from their elders who learned from their elders. 

Fish follow elders to feeding, resting, and breeding areas.  Other animals learn from their elders crucial migration routes and destinations, where to find food, and how to avoid danger.     

As a population of wild animals moves toward extinction, however, their diversity narrows, their special cultural knowledge begins disappearing, and this creates an exponential decline.  “When populations plummet, traditions that helped animals survive and adapt to a place begin to vanish.”

And there is such divine learned wisdom and skill that is passed on from generation to generation, from elders of one generation to the would-be elders of another generation. 

 . . . [P]igeons and sparrows have learned to use motion-sensors to get inside enclosed shopping malls and forage for crumbs. Crows have in some locales learned to drop nuts on the road for cars to crack. In at least one area they do this at intersections, so they can safely walk out and collect their cracked prizes when the light turns red and the cars stop.[1] 

The way these wild animals show wisdom and adaptability, how they teach future generations—it offers praise to their Creator—in the dialect of their local bird song, the call of American and European cod, the social organization of orca.

           I don’t say these things to wax poetic or transcendent.  I say these things because I believe God is involved in the very material bases of our lives.  I don’t buy a religious faith that has me reciting creed or construct to get me into heaven--and that’s all faith is; that’s all God cares about.  I think what the Psalms are trying to teach us is that relationship with God is deep into our doubt and suffering, our pain and lament.  God wants for all of creation a just world where we and trees are resourced . . . and provide fruit in interdependent ways. 

As I have read and dialogued with Christian thinkers over the past few weeks, there seems to be an almost universal understanding that this virus is an apocalypse—as we said in our Revelation study, a revealing of the raw violence of the American economic system and American exceptionalism and how, after it turned its long teeth on the rest of the world how it has turned toward us.  The idea that it wouldn’t affect us, that we were somehow unconnected, not interdependent with the rest of the world, is now killing us.  One of my colleagues posted, “Coronavirus has exposed the lie of American exceptionalism.

The US has more resources than any other nation in the world. We are dead last in the effort to slow the spread of covid-19.”[2]   Others wrote and found written in graffiti on the wall of an American hospital parking lot, “If Covid-19 is the virus, then our economic system, based on competition, destroying the least and the last in pursuit of profit, and a refusal to share resources,  is the pandemic.”  There must be a new normal. 

In the Psalms, it is Creator who flows and winds and bends into creation with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness so that we might believe all deserve meaningful work, to be fed and housed, to have health care, and that, as Psalm 52 says,  we might be like olive trees flourishing in the house of God, trusting in God’s unfailing love.  That’s not for some otherworldly space.  It is for a space in the here and now where we might have rest and share in lying in the green grass, finding joy in a cup that overflows with goodness, and being led beside still waters. 

Bad religion has told us again and again that it is God who has instituted the status quo.

           Way back on the 1^st of March we began this Lenten journey, on the First Sunday of Lent, with Psalm 1.  Read for the first time, without reading any other Psalm, Psalm 1 can appear to be simplistic.  Follow in the way of God, walk in God’s paths, then we shall prosper and succeed.  Ridicule the righteous, sit in the seat of scoffers, and, like all the other wicked, refuse to stand up for justice, that person will wither and perish.  As we have moved through the Psalms through Lent, we have heard Psalm 1 over and over again. We are like trees that choose to be re-planted by a stream.  In Psalm 1, God is our water source, Mni Wiconi, water is truly life, our resource for the tough times, the difficult times when drought comes.  There is a hint in that understanding that life will not always be so easy.

           Also hear in Psalm 1 not only the mythological way that God is our source of life but also the material way water is meant to be our source of life and sustenance and goodness.  In Psalm 148, as that river is healthy and sings its praises to Creator, as all of creation does so, even the traditional parts of creation considered outside God’s reach, the sea and the sea monster, a cosmic symphony is lifted from beneath the earth and above the earth,

All through Lent , in between Psalm 1 and all of these psalms that shout praise and glory and hallelujahs to God at the end of the book, including our reading for today, Psalm 148, we have been reading Psalms which scream out to God in complaint and lament and cries of anger and frustration.  Jesus embodies this broken love as he screamed the words of Psalm 22 from the cross on Good Friday, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

Love is not a victory march.  It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.  That we might know our doubts, our complaints against the way the world and the wicked are treating us, maybe even our cries against God, our struggle with both the absence and presence of God, are part of the faith story found in the Psalms.  We are encouraged, in our spiritual life, not to be naïve or simplistic or lacking in any real life struggle.  No.  We are encouraged to be honest and truthful and real and know that struggle can sometimes be a sign of our faithfulness. 

God . . . can handle our honesty, our truth, and chooses again and again to be in the midst of our struggle.  So that when we are lying on the floor of life, we might know the presence of God, and utter the words of a cold and broken “Hallelujah.”

Bad religion has told us that God does not placed our joy in the interdependent, interconnected cosmic creation so we had better get ours now.  We had better hoard and clutch and grab so that the world might see us as the winners.  Then we can proclaim that God is on our side.  And this bad religion seems to have no fear about repercussions for what this inequality and greed does to our sources of life in the material world, hedging our bets, and hoping that we have enough of a buffer that if things go wrong with the world, we’ll be well enough off to weather the storm in our castle, with our moat, and our wall.   

As the cosmic praise in this ancient psalm teaches though, the world was founded on an interdependence, an awareness that as we break our relationship with the material world, we break our relationship with God. 

Psalm 148 is an antidote to all of that.  The material world, not the angels and archangels in transcendence, but the material world as it functions and moves and adapts and seeks life joins in a cosmic chorus to offer praise to Creator in full relationship. 

In ten days the next Earth Day will be upon us with a 72 hour livestream being shown nationally to help us remember that things cannot return to the way they are.   As this pandemic should be teaching us and as we should know from the 50^th Earth Day, we cannot return to normal.  Returning to normal only leads to more death and destruction.  The first day of the livestream seeks to center indigenous or Native voices.  I believe some of that is because there is a general recognition that Native people have an understanding and theology of the strong interfamilial relationship and interconnection we have with Mother Earth.

More and more environmentalists are recognizing that for us to make any headway with the enormity of the task at hand, like Native people have done historically, we have to develop a deep relationship with the sources life, sustenance, and goodness that in our immediate area.  What might a courageous congregation do that lived in a city where a river runs through it?

 In a material way, in a city that has one of the most famous rivers in the world running through it, how are we caring for the Elk or Yellowstone River? 

In the Environment Montana Research & Policy Center report issued in the fall of 2019, microplastic film and fiber was found at the Elk River as it made its way around Riverfront Park.[3]   What might a congregation do to phase out single use plastics in Billings, encourage reuse through water refilling stations like they have in Whitefish, developing a green infrastructure like Bozeman’s boulevard infiltration system, incentivize businesses away from plastics, and setting goals for all of us to make better purchasing decisions?[4]  How do we become advocates for making sure oil spills are not part of this source of life, sustenance, and goodness reality up or downstream?  So that as the river flows, like our circulatory system through the world, reaching Billings and flowing back, those waters might flow in praise to Creator.  How do we make sure that pesticide and chemical agriculture run-off do not flow into this, our sister?

What we learn from Psalm 148 is that all of creation has a sentience, a wisdom, a capacity for praise in relationship with Creator that reminds us of our interdependence.  Psalm 148 completes the circle that began with Psalm 1, reminding us that when we are right and resourced with God’s good earth, we live fully in this interdependence and interconnection. 

Easter begins with an earthquake, with a recognition that we cannot return to business as usual.  There must be a new normal—a new way in which we recognize the life, the sustenance, and goodness all of creation brings to us in interdependence and interconnection.  We are the elders.  We must be the elders who teach to the children the wisdom or skills we have learned in seeking to be a faithful people who live out our lives in joy raising our voice with all of creation in praise—so that we are a source of life, sustenance, and goodness.  So that they will then be the elders of a new generation.  And sometimes we will need to allow the children to teach us how to be in a new and adaptive world. 

Creator has willed and longed for that day.  We may not be pigeon, cod, or orca, but we are a beautiful part of this wondrous planet, teaching that water is life.  Creator has willed and longed for our wisdom and our sentience to recognize that day.  Amen. 

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[1] Carl Safina, " The secret call of the wild: how animals teach each other to survive,” The Guardian, April 9, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/09/the-secret-call-of-the-wild-how-animals-teach-each-other-to-survive-aoe?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

[2] Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove Twitter, @wilsonhartgrove, March 24, 2020.  https://twitter.com/wilsonhartgrove/status/1242543519018950656.

[3] Environment Montana Research & Policy Center, “Microplastic in Montana:  A Study of Fifty River Access Sites,” October 2019.  https://environmentmontana.org/sites/environment/files/reports/Microplastic%20in%20Montana%20%28final%29.pdf

[4] All recommended by the Environment Montana Research & Policy Center.

Palm Sunday, Psalm Series, "God's love endures forever," April 5, 2020

A Lent Palm Psalm 118 BFC 2020

Psalm 118

April 5, 2020

           On Good Friday in 1964, just as the sun was softly setting on the horizon of Anchorage, Alaska, an earthquake with the magnitude of 9.2 shook the city for a full four and a half minutes.  Buildings rocked off their foundations, split in half, or fell into themselves.  Street lights swayed and then flew.  Cars were swallowed and then spit back up.  Two entire blocks in the city’s central downtown area just dropped into a jagged chasm.  A theater marquee came to rest even with the street.  It was almost possible for anyone to imagine it.  One witness said of the downtown area, “It looked like the devil ground his heel into it.”[1]  The question hung in the air, “What will Alaskans do now?”—just five years into statehood, their most modern displays of progress in Anchorage now lying in rubble. 

           Sociologists from the newly formed Disaster Research Center at Ohio State, left for Anchorage expecting to find havoc, chaos, and pandemonium.  What they found instead, 28 hours later, was an amazing amount of cooperation, collaboration, and compassion.  Ordinary citizens found their agency and organized mutual aid for one another.  People began immediately looking for others among the debris.  When the local Presbyterian Hospital filled up with gas, Boy Scouts walked the 22 occupants of the hospital down three or four flights of stairs to an armada of taxis and other drivers waiting to take them to another hospital across town.  All over town, neighbors fed and housed the displaced.  When the local fire department failed to offer anything significant, a local psychology professor organized his mountaineering group who had experience saving people off of ledges and caught in avalanches.   Everybody jumped in to do a little bit of everything. 

Genie Chance, the only female newscaster in Alaska, a working mother who had been passed over for lesser male counterparts at local KENI, became the voice of Alaska, as she learned how to curate the necessary details for the general public.  She was the steady hand in the small of Anchorage’s back shepherding her city with the necessary information they needed to remember their humanity—moved the city away from its loneliness and despair.  Once she knew her own family was safe, she headed to the downtown area.

 . . . [s]he began working with the police chief, the fire chief, and various officials. As soon as KENI was back on the air with a generator, she began broadcasting the essentials of survival: where to take shelter, how to purify snow for drinking water. She instructed people to limit the use of candles to the bare minimum of necessity — candles were a fire hazard, the city had just evaded a conflagration by what seemed like a miracle, and the water supply system was too savaged to fight a fire outbreak.[2]

Genie Chance became the hub for the human information that was so important to her city.

“A message to Clyde Wythe at Homer: Your daughter is OK.”

“We have received a call from Joe Fernbeck who said that he’d gotten word on his radio from the oil crews at Beluga and Tyonek. They want their families to know that they are all OK.”

“We have a message reporting that an elderly lady at 216 East Eighth Avenue who lives alone. We have no name on her, but we do have a request for somebody in that neighborhood to please check and see if the sweet lady is all right.”

What happens, Rebecca Solnit writes, is that while the powers and principalities that have been promising salvation are often revealed for their empty promises and lack of resources, in disasters or calamities people become aware of their own possibility for personal agency and collective power.  A spontaneous commons arises in such situations.  A new normal can be established.

So it was in the earthquake of 1906 in San Francisco.  Amelia Hoshouser marched out of her home just after the devastation and set up shop in a central area of San Francisco, a little lean-to called “Mizpah Café.” There she fed thousands of people.  She just went out and did it.  It was in her  Meanwhile, throughout the city soup kitchens, shelters, and relief projects emerged from collective human spirit as if spontaneously from the ruins.  It was in that climate that Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, developed an imagination for what people could do collectively and cooperatively from what she witnessed as a child after that 1906 earthquake. Day asked herself why this cooperation and mutual aid could not be who we were all the time.[3]   

Almost all of the Psalms reference the two great stories of the Jewish faith—Exodus and Exile.  Both of those events are about a bondage, constriction, or a captivity of community life.  Psalm 118 references the Exodus and the political danger and public threat the whole community experiences as governments or nations are like bees ready to attack or a fire of thorns that encircle and trap.   Salvation and deliverance are found in verse 5 where the Psalmnist cries out in distress and God answers to set the whole community in a broad place for community life and conduct.  The bondage, constriction, and captivity fall away.  While that threat and distress and attempt to surround and press and push the Psalmnist on all sides with fear may seem ever-present, there is a deeper narrative that is repeated five times for emphasis in Psalm 118, “God’s steadfast love lasts forever.”  Let all of Israel say, let all the religious officials say, let those who fear the Living God say, God is good, let all the people, say, “God’s steadfast love endures forever.” 

God’s steadfast, loyal love will not quit, will show up, and is on the move.  It does not win.  It doesn’t play that game.  God’s love endures.  So when calamity and disaster come, God’s steadfast, loyal love endures.  When disease and death come, God’s steadfast, loyal love endures.  When governments fail us, press us, surround us on all sides with their cruelty, indifference, and falsehoods, God’s steadfast, loyal love[4] endures.

Do not let others tell you that this is a otherworldly, “spiritual” love.  Spiritual or spirituality, Biblically, was not about “otherworldly” but was about something that was more than at the surface or skin-deep.  Spiritual was about core, about depth, about a transcendence that could not be bottled or contained.  The praise for God in this Psalm is about concrete action in the commons, God acting on behalf of the people in a public, political, continuing way deeper than any disaster or domination.

           “This is the day the Living God has made,” the Psalm says, or, better put, “This is the day our God acted!  Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”[5]  Hear what is being said in this Psalm.  This is a collective voice praising God not for all of the beauty and wonder and bounty they see around them.  On the contrary, the Psalmnist is hemmed in on all sides, feels isolated and constrained, and remembers the deep truth that God is acting and that Creator’s sustained, steadfast, loyal love endures forever. 

And today God is acting.

           Sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins, here is the really good news, that enduring love is in us!  Ready to manifest itself on God’s good earth!  All of creation was woven together on the loom of justice as the fundamental fabric of the universe!  This is the default switch ready to be pulled when all else falls away and calamity and disaster and virus come and we recognize our personal agency and collective power. 

           If there was anything that was central to Jesus’s teaching it was this.  You are not, instinctually, the barbarians the State makes you out to be, recognizing the State’s need for control and domination.  Rather, in the violence and devastation that was First Century Rome, Jesus brought connection and communion to establish a new normal over and against the chaos of his time  You are, collectively, what Jesus told us, you are the Kingdom of God.  And that sustained, loyal, steadfast love is found in your mutual aid and common endeavor!  (pause)

           I know the other side of this too—a system full of practices and policies that is also seeking to maintain an old, dying, death-giving system.  Naomi Klein regularly writes about The Shock Doctrine--how our federal government will use disaster and calamity to push ahead an agenda of violence and war.  Just this week I posted on Facebook a Twitter thread from 350.org co-founder, Jamie Henn, which chronicled the numerous ways the fossil fuel industry and the Trump Administration are seeking to take advantage of the virus to make cuts to funding for environmental protection, push through funding for the fossil fuel industry, undercut the protests of Native leaders defending the environment, and bleed the last bit of money out of a dying industry.  Not only here--another indigenous leader, land protector, Zezico Guajajara, defending the Amazon was assassinated in Brazil this week.[6] 

But this I know.  They will not endure.  This will not endure.  And we must use the knowledge of Creator’s love stirring in us to affirm what will endure going forward toward a more collaborative and cooperative future.

           The week after the 1964 earthquake in Anchorage, Genie Chance’s mother wrote her and encouraged her to fly the children down to Texas for their safety.  Genie Chance wrote back to her mother recognizing that on that Good Friday night, the first, dark cold night, there would be struggles ahead for her community for years to come.  “But,” she wrote, “this was just a fleeting thought in a weary mind.”  Her letter went on:

I would have been ashamed of myself had it not been for the next thought that came so swiftly: We must be together… That night I saw strain, heavy hearts, and fear in people separated from their loved ones by the sudden disaster… As long as we are together, we are confident of the future…

That Good Friday night I knew that we had survived miraculously. And for this reason, there must be a purpose to our lives. Apparently the children must sense this, too. For they have remained calm.  . . . I would not undermine their confidence in the future — in themselves — by sending them away for safety.

What is safety, anyway? How can you predict where or when tragedy will occur? You can only learn to live with it and make the best of it when it happens. These children have learned this — and they are all the better for it. They were in the midst of devastation. And they feel that they are a part of the tremendous task ahead in rebuilding this land we love… The children are not afraid. Their father and I are not afraid. Please, don’t you fear for us.[7]

Jon Mooallem, author of a book about the aftermath of the Anchorage earthquake wrote about what he believed to be the meaning of Genie Chance and her work,

But [Genie Chance] also recognized a way of surviving such a world. It was what Genie had created in Anchorage that weekend by talk- ing on the radio, and what she planned to stay focused on now: not an antidote to that unpredictability, exactly, but at least a strategy for withstanding it, for wringing meaning from a life we know to be unsteady and provisional. The best she and her family could do was to hold on to one another.

Our force for counteracting chaos is connection.[8]

           Calamity, disaster and domination, earthquakes and shock, pestilence and pandemic will come.  There will be imperial rulers that will constrict, push, dominate, lie, and maybe even lead us into captivity.  But God seeks to set a broad space for our community life.  God’s steadfast love endures forever. 

Let that be the message that emanates from Billings First Congregational Church.  That the worst may come to us, but we will counteract chaos with connection to share that God is good and that we are reaching out our arms to our community once again in mutual aid because the steadfast love of God, acting through us, endures.  It endures.  Amen.

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[1] Jon Mooallem, “This is how you live when the world falls apart,” The New York Times, March 12, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-disaster-response.html; Maria Popova, “This Is Chance: The Story of the 1964 Alaska Earthquake and the Remarkable Woman Who Magnetized People into Falling Together as Their World Fell Apart,” Brain Pickings, March 30, 2020, https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/03/30/this-is-chance-genie-chance-jon-mooallem/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+brainpickings%2Frss+%28Brain+Pickings%29/

[2] Popova, “This is Chance.”

[3] Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell:  The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (New York:  Penguin Books, 2009)

[4] In fact, the Greek word for faith in the New Testament, pistis, is a word which literally means political loyalty.

[5] Amanda Benckhuysen, “Commentary on Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24,” Preaching This Week, March 27, 2016.

[6] Democracy Now!  April 3, 2020, https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/3/headlines/indigenous_land_defender_zezico_guajajara_assassinated_in_brazil

[7] Popova, “This is chance.”

[8] Ibid.

Fourth Sunday of Lent, Psalm Series, "Prophets of a future not our own," March 22, 2020.

A Lent 4 Psalm 90 BFC 2020

Psalm 90

March 22, 2020

          Several years ago, you may remember seeing the “Pass It On” billboards about Randy Pausch.  They read, “Wrote book on living while dying.  Motivation.  Pass it on.”  I had no knowledge of Pausch before I saw those billboards.  Randy Pausch was a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University who contracted pancreatic cancer that then spread into his liver. In August of 2007, he was given a terminal diagnosis with three to six months to live. 

He became most well-known for a lecture, after that terminal diagnosis, traditionally given at Carnegie-Mellon, hypothetically titled, “The Last Lecture.”  “The Last Lecture” was so named because professors were asked to speak at the university as if it were the last lecture before they died.  In a stirring speech titled, “How to Achieve Your Childhood Dreams,” that lasted well over an hour, Pausch’s last lecture was not so hypothetical. 

In “How to Achieve Your Childhood Dreams,” he spoke of walls being put in our way not to prevent us from getting something but to determine how much we want whatever that something is.  Pausch referenced his parents and the great childhood he had had because they were people who believed in fun and wonder no matter what their age. He showed slides of his dad on a roller coaster in his 80s and his mother lapping him on a go-cart track. 

He spoke of how his mother and father carried with them a sense of humility.   After his father’s death, Pausch’s mother discovered, in going through his father’s things, that he had earned the bronze star for valor in the Battle of the Bulge.  She discovered this after 50 years of marriage.  His mom encouraged that kind of humility every time Randy Pausch would remark how hard his Ph.D. work was, “Yes, honey, we know how you feel.  At your age, your dad was fighting the Nazis.” 

Here are the other lessons Pausch shared:  Care more about your child’s creativity rather than proper place and fastidious cleanliness.

 His parents also taught him to value people over things. 

How to achieve your childhood dreams.  Work and play well with others and have integrity.  Help others.  Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you. Loyalty is a two-way street.

You can’t get there alone. 

In order to get others to help you, you must carry these things with you.  Tell the truth.  Be earnest.  Apologize well.  Show gratitude.  Focus on others.  Get a feedback loop and listen to it.

Work hard.  Be good at something--it makes you valuable.  Be prepared.

What he repeated throughout his lecture was to have fun.  Have fun even while you are dying. 

If you are going to do anything that is pioneering, Pausch said, you will take arrows in the back.  Expect it.  Act like it doesn’t matter.  He owned a vest with arrows in the back of it to remind him of that truth.

You have to decide whether you will be a Tigger or an Eeyore, he said.  You can spend time complaining or playing the game hard.[1] 

Pausch died less than a year later in July 2008.

Psalm 90 begins with an attribution to Moses.  Not that the psalm is authored by Moses, but implied within it is an encouragement to see the world from Moses’s point of view.  Within the psalm are those overtures which make it clear why the name of Moses would have been invoked.  Moses was the intercessor before God, who, when God’s anger and wrath were kindled against the people, stepped in, told God to take the long view, to take a step back, and remember that if these people are killed in the wilderness, the Egyptians will laugh.  “Look,” they will say, Moses entreated the Almighty, “their God took them out to a hard and bitter land and then offed them.  Who really wants to worship a God like that?”  And so, the story goes, God relented. 

           In Psalm 90, the psalmnist recognizes the anger and wrath of God and how this leads to the transience of life.  We are turned back to the adamah, the dust, the fertile topsoil.  God’s anger and wrath undoes creation.  We only have so many days. 

           Recognizing that reality, the plea is not to avoid the human condition.  Rather, we are to count the days.  It is to know that even Moses runs out of time.  He never gets to the promised land.  For what is the stretch of human life, like grass that will soon be swept away?  We have 70 years, the psalmnist says, 80 if we are strong and hardy.  Human time is not God’s time.   So because your days are counted in trust with the everlasting purposes of God, they have meaning. 

           Verse 12, according to the New Revised Standard Version translation, reads, “So teach us to count our days so that we may have a wise heart.”  Probably a better paraphrase of the Hebrew would be, “God, teach us to make each day count, to reflect on the fact that we must die, and so become wise.”  Or another paraphrase, “Teach us to live day by day” or “one day at a time.”  “In short, to receive our allotted time as a gift from God and to live our lives to the fullest every single day is what a ‘wise heart’ is all about.”[2]

           Clearly, from the deep resonance people experienced with Randy Pausch’s last lecture, he had developed a wise heart.  During his lecture, he even referred to the educational work he had done and said that he was much like Moses, the fruition of his work in virtual worlds as something he would not see in his lifetime.  He would never get to see the completion of the work he had started.

           That, in the end, is the major point of Psalm 90.  In recognizing the transience of life, we gain a wisdom that allows us to make each day count.  We invest in everlasting things, the things that God values, the things that cannot be accomplished in one lifetime.  In so doing, we pray as Psalm 90 ends, that God would prosper, make last, the work of our hands.  There is that word again from Psalm 1, “prosper”, to be about shalom—wholeness, connectedness, and peace.

Randy Pausch ends his lecture by saying the lecture was not really about how to achieve your dreams.  That was a head fake.   The lecture was about how to lead your life.  It really wasn’t for his students.  It was for his three children.  His “last lecture” was about investing in something that was beyond the span of his short life. 

My hope and prayer is that here and in your homes and in your community that is the church called Billings First Congregational Church, you have heard me saying again and again, “What’s your five year plan?” as a way of encouraging all of us to invest in a wider vision, an everlasting vision, that we might not just limp along surviving but thrive for years to come.  In keeping with Randy Pausch, I share a prayer written by Ken Untener written to commemorate the life of Oscar Romero, the martyred archbishop of El Salvador, one of my heroes in faith:

It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view.  The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision. 

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.

Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us . . .

This is what we are about. 

We plant the seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. 

We lay foundations that will need further development. 

We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities. 

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.

This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. 

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest. 

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. 

We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future that is not our own.[3]

May we plant ourselves, like a tree, by streams of God’s goodness, kindness, and justice.  May God prosper the work of Billings First Congregational Church, even beyond each of our lives, from everlasting to everlasting.  May we take the long view—so that we shall not be moved.  Amen.

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[1] Randy Pausch, “Last Lecture:  Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” TED Talk, September 18, 2007, http://www.ted.com/talks/randy_pausch_really_achieving_your_childhood_dreams. 

[2] J. Clinton McCann, Jr., Great Psalms of the Bible (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), p. 108.

[3] Bishop Ken Untener, Saginaw, Michigan, November 1979, http://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/prayers/archbishop_romero_prayer.cfm

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. 

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[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.

[10] https://www.democracynow.org/2020/2/13/wet_suwet_en_territory_pipeline_opposition. 

[11] Jamail, “The End,” pp. 220-224.