Green Pastures and Still Waters

Easter 4, Year C

Grace Church

April 25, 2010

I’m not at all sure why, but this Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Easter, includes readings about sheep and shepherds in all three years of the lectionary cycle. The gospel reading each year for this day comes from the tenth chapter of John, which begins with Jesus’ familiar saying, “I am the good shepherd.” Each year, too, the psalm for this Sunday is Psalm 23: “The Lord is my Shepherd.” If you’re a long-time church goer, the imagery of the Good Shepherd may be so familiar to you that it has become banal, even meaningless.

This, despite the fact that unlike the cultures in which the biblical texts were written, sheep and shepherds are not the stuff of ordinary experience any more. The only time most of us encounter sheep of any variety is when it appears on our dinner plate. And who among us has ever encountered a real, live shepherd?

Still, the imagery retains its power. Even though there’s only a hint of it in the Gospel, and in the lesson from Revelation, the presence of the 23^rd psalm draws our attention to it and fills our minds with idealized pictures: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, he makes me lie down in green pastures, and leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. His rod and his staff they comfort me.”

This language comforts us in two ways. First, it appeals to our desire for protection; second, the nature imagery beckons us to a simpler time and world, a peaceful sojourn far from the tumult of our daily lives. While it is lovely and powerful for those reasons, such imagery also has its downside. There are many directions one might take with a sermon today. One could avoid the good shepherd imagery altogether and preach on the fascinating story we heard from Acts. We could explore how that good shepherd imagery might continue to resonate in our lives and with our spiritual experience. It might also be fruitful to deconstruct that imagery, to reveal its negative implications—a theme that could draw profoundly on the crisis of authority facing our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters.

But I would like to take it a different direction. The language of Psalm 23 conjures up for us images of the pastoral—a more simple world, where we are surrounded by nature and living in tune with our environment. Given we have just celebrated the 40^th anniversary of Earth Day, it’s appropriate to look more closely at that theme.

I’ve noticed a disconnect at Grace, both on an institutional level and among parishioners. Perhaps my observation has more to do with my expectations coming in than the reality. I lived for fifteen years in the south, the last ten in one of the most conservative parts of the country. I knew that Madison was one of the most progressive places in the United States, that environmental awareness and concern about sustainability was at a very high level. I assumed that such concerns and awareness would be reflected in Grace’s ministry and mission, and in how we went about doing our business.

I was wrong. Don’t misunderstand me. I know that many of you, perhaps most of you, are deeply concerned about the environment and that you live out your environmental values at home, in your places of work, and how you shop and spend your leisure time. But that’s where the disconnect comes in. Those values seem not to be connected to the life of Grace. Perhaps it’s because for most of you, when you think about the environment, you do not connect it to Christianity. But that’s not your fault—that’s a failure of Grace’s leadership over the last decades.

It’s also due to a failure on the part of Christianity. There’s been an awareness for quite some time that some responsibility for the centuries-long degradation of the environment is borne by Christianity itself. There’s a strand in the biblical tradition, going all the way back to the first chapter of Genesis that human beings were created to have dominion over, to rule over God’s creation, and exploit it for our own purposes.

There are other strands in the biblical tradition of course, also present from the early chapters of Genesis, that God created the universe out of God’s love and goodness; that creation is good, and that we are to be responsible stewards of it. Thus, in the laws recorded in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the Sabbath that was created as a day of rest for human beings, extended to all of creation. The Israelites were commanded to let the ground lay fallow every seventh year, so it could restore itself.

I won’t go into the reasons why we have tended over the centuries to emphasize one way of thinking about the world in which we live, rather than the other, but I doubt many of us could imagine an agricultural system that included in it a year of rest for the land (and for animals as well). We pay lip service to the idea that God has created the entire universe, and that, in the end, everything in the universe belongs to God, not us. The words, “all things come of thee O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee” may roll off our lips, but most of us don’t act as if we believe that.

Still, we recycle, want to purchase sustainable products, drive hybrid vehicles, but rarely connect those actions with our religious faith. And so when we come to church, we often leave those values at home.

That needs to end. We need to bring the values of Grace Church into line with the attitudes toward the environment that we express and live out at home and work. We need to imbue both with a deeply Christian worldview that challenges us to see environmentalism not as another religion, as a prominent UW professor called it this week, but as a reflection of the faith that we hold dear and claim to follow. We need to bring our mission and ministry at Grace into line with those values, because they are right, and also because they are another way of reaching out into the community around us.

But none of this is easy to do. It will require hard work—intellectually to think through the myriad problems that face us as a human community, as a congregation, and as individuals. It will require hard questions of ourselves, our tradition, and things we do on a day-to-day basis, and on Sundays. It will require hard work spiritually, to ground what we do not in some romantic notion of the beauty of nature, but in the Christian doctrines of Creation and Incarnation and in our experience of the love of Christ.

But it is work that must be done. The urgency of all this hit me during our vestry meeting Monday. The vestry and finance committees have been batting back and forth the question of socially-responsible investing. That is, the question whether we should invest our funds in ways that reflect our values. It is a difficult and complex question, and it will take us some time to sort it all out, to do the necessary research, and to develop a policy. Often when we face questions of this complexity, and the reality that we can’t completely insulate ourselves or our money from participating in things that we abhor, our tendency is to throw up our hands in despair and refuse to ask the question, on the assumption that ignorance is bliss. And then there’s the reality that we will probably disagree on what “socially responsible” investing means. We may simply want to give up.

At that same vestry meeting, we appointed two people, Jon Augspurger and Ben Farrow, to convene a task force that will look at ways Grace might become more sustainable in all that it does. We have already begun to make progress in this area in our hospitality and coffee hour; we waved Eco-Palms on Palm Sunday this year, but there is a great deal more that could be done. I invite you to contact me, or one of the two of them if you would like to participate in this effort. Later today, some of us will be going to an Interfaith event in honor of Earth Day. There’s information in the bulletin and on the bulletin boards about that if you would like to join us.

People often come to church looking for answers. You have no idea how often I’ve been told by someone that they are in church to hear clear and certain answers to the questions of faith and life (Well, to be truthful, I heard that a lot in South Carolina, not once yet in Madison). As you may have guessed, I think that’s completely wrongheaded. We come to church, not to get the answers, but to learn how to ask the questions and to struggle to answer them, to work together in coming up with faithful responses.

All of that is hard work and it’s more difficult because we have to do it together. We have to ask and examine the questions together. We have to explore the solutions together. And we have to do it in an atmosphere of trust, mutual accountability, and love, remembering always that even when we disagree about this or that tactic or point, we share a common purpose and a common goal, being the body of Christ in this place.