Sermon preached by The Rev’d Neil Fernyhough, 2nd Sunday After Pentecost (May 25, 2008 )
Readings: Isa 49:8-16a; Ps 131; 1 Cor 4:15; Mt 6:24-34
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life.” – Mt 6:25
One of the things I looked forward to when I moved to the Sunshine Coast was enjoying the natural beauty of this place. I love to be outdoors – to hike, bike, kayak, and camp in the summer, and to cross-country ski and snowshoe in the winter. We are truly fortunate to find ourselves in such an outstanding location, where so much of the environment has been preserved or restored. A place in which the air, earth, and water are relatively clean, and where people seem genuinely to care about the upkeep of the natural neighbourhood in which God has placed them.
But each of us knows that our local success story is not universally shared – indeed, it’s getting rarer by the day – and that the relatively comfortable lifestyle we enjoy requires a lot of degradation of the natural environment in order to be maintained. Every year, for example, about thirteen million hectares of forest is lost, releasing as much carbon dioxide as eight million people flying from London to Toronto. Moreover, humans consume about three and a half billion litres of oil every single day, which has contributed to carbon dioxide levels which are higher now than at any time in the past seven hundred and fifty thousand years. Indeed, two hundred and fifty-six billion tons of carbon have been released in just the past two centuries. These are a few sobering statistics plucked from many that I uncovered as I prepared for the five part series on stewardship and sustainability we undertook this past Lent, called “Tokens of Love.”
My hope was that the series would focus our attention on how we steward the many gifts bestowed on us and on Creation by God. In today’s reading from his letter to the church in Corinth, Paul speaks of ministry as involving stewardship of God’s mysteries – a role requiring trustworthiness above all other things. And so I wanted to spend a month in our worship incorporating environmental themes, with the intent of implicitly getting us to ask ourselves whether or not we are indeed trustworthy stewards of God’s mysteries, as they are manifested in the gifts of Creation; the environment. Today we conclude that theme in our worship, with three readings which pointedly direct our gaze onto our responsibilities as ministers of God’s reconciling grace.
First, we have a passage from the Prophet Isaiah, who speaks on God’s behalf to the exiles preparing to return to Israel from Babylon. Using the imagery of a mother nursing her child, God assures Israel that God cannot help but practice care, nurture, and compassion for God’s people. Significantly, this is manifested in the context of the land: The “desolate heritages” abandoned through exile will be restored to fruitfulness, the bare heights will be transformed into pastures for grazing, and springs of water will relieve the exiles from the scorching wind and sun.
It should perhaps come as no surprise to us that God employs the land as a sign of God’s care for this agrarian people. But we need to recall that the land, its creatures, and its produce is always used as the medium of covenantal promise in the Hebrew Bible. Fruitfulness and verdancy is a sign of God’s favour, a metaphor for life and well-being. Indeed, for a people for whom famine and want were real and present dangers, how could it be otherwise? But the subtext for them, and for us, is plain: Without utter reliance on the mercy of God made tangible in the basic stuff of creation – the air, water, and soil which makes life possible – abandonment and death is the only alternative. In other words, the care and compassion of God implies an obligation to respond, as a nursing child responds to its mother.
It is up to Jesus to make explicit what Isaiah implies. In the extraordinarily moving passage we heard this morning, Jesus contrasts human concern for material values with concern for the values of God and God’s care. In an effort to uncover for his listeners the spiritual core animating all existence, Jesus uses the word “worry” no less than five times in his brief instruction. He challenges his hearers to put worry aside and instead embrace the cycles of life that God has mysteriously and wondrously put into operation. Consider the nonhuman animals which seem to so easily and ably fall into the niches God has created for them, Jesus says. They know instinctively to rely on the utter mercy of their Creator, and they accept the necessities of life uncomplainingly, without taking more than they need to survive, and so without worrying that those necessities will fail.
Humans, on the other hand, worry and hoard and manipulate and stray into all sorts of false allegiances. At best, they find it hard to trust God, or they see God’s mercy as provisional. At worst, they consider the universe to be totally devoid of God, and thus devoid of love – a cold place in which gifts are nothing more than resources to be extracted; and people and creatures have no intrinsic value, being only good for what they can do for your own comfortable survival. In this homily from Matthew’s gospel, Jesus – the proto-hippie, if you will – is basically calling on his listeners to live in accord with nature, to take and give no more than what is needed, and so to repose with tranquillity on God’s nursing bosom.
Preaching about the environment is a difficult challenge, since it can so frequently stir up a toxic mixture of guilt and hopelessness. This cannot help but create paralysis that leaves us spiritually and emotionally numb and unable to act. As a result, we spiral into despair, feeling nothing can be done to save us. But as people of faith, we must claim the power of repentance and reconciliation as an antidote to guilt; and, more importantly, as a portal into hope. As I explained to the children, there are many things we can do – and the small things can and do build up into mighty change.
My hope and prayer is that, to paraphrase our reading from Isaiah, we will inscribe Jesus’ words on the palms of our hands as we build up a healthy and whole community of faith. We cannot serve two masters. And so, let us actively find ways, talking and working and praying with one another, to make St. Hilda’s a beacon of environmental stewardship for all of Sechelt – not only by what we say, but by how we live. It’s up to you to take the leadership in making a difference as individuals and as a spiritual community. Let the conclusion of our month long focus on the environment not be an ending, but a beginning of transformation – a transformation to repentance, reconciliation, and hope. Amen.
© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2008.
