"A Sermon Series on the New Creed"
Part IV: With All Respect The importance of caring for this world while looking with hope to the next
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Text: Romans 8:16-25
Shakespeare's great work, As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7 contains a line we hear quoted over and over again, and oftentimes misquoted: “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts...”
The world is a stage - and we are merely players. I thought about those words as I reflected on the line of the New Creed of the United Church that says we are “to live with respect in creation.” It seems to me that we are indeed mortal; merely players on a stage. We walk around this earth and have this life, and we are blessed if we can see a long life through to its inevitable conclusion. But in this life, as players on this stage, we need many blessings to ensure that we get to play it through.
I remember asking my grandmother, who lived until she was in her late 90s, “What is the secret to a long life?”
She said, “Andrew, the secret to a long life is that you must realize that you cannot get to this age without a great deal of love.”
Now, you have got to understand that my grandmother was one crusty old battle-axe! For her to say that love got her to that ripe old age is a statement of immense importance and sincerity.
We get here by love, but it is not just love that sustains us in this life. The very stage on which we walk, play and have our being, is also there for us. Creatures feed us and if they did not exist, we would starve. Many pets give us unconditional grace and love. Other people make this life liveable and sustain us. Plants, oceans and fields are a source of food and life; minerals and metals enable us to develop. Children allow us to continue. Governments provide us with protection. The earth - the stage - is the place on which we stand. Therefore, it seems to me we should treat this world and everything on it with not only a great deal of respect, but also a degree of humility in our hearts. Many of us live as if we are self-sustaining, autonomous beings on this earth. We think we can live independently from this environment; that we are the highest form of creation and therefore we do not need to be humbled before everything else.
It reminds me of a story by Alex Herd that I read in The New York Times a number of years ago. He had discovered a Colorado company that will actually make your twin for you. They will make a life-sized doll! All you need to do is send them a photograph of yourself as an adolescent and give them your general dimensions and, for $180, they will send you a life-sized doll of yourself. People are buying these! Can you imagine? I can't stand looking at myself for 30 seconds. I can't imagine seeing myself for longer than that. This is a sign of the age in which we live. We are almost consumed with ourselves at times, which was Alex Herd's point: We think we are autonomous beings. We do not think we need anyone else; we can stand alone.
How far that is from the biblical concept of who we are. Indeed, the biblical concept is grounded in the understanding that we are dependent creatures: We are dependent on the earth around us, dependent on one another and, most especially, we are dependent on the Almighty, the Creator of the Universe, our Lord and sustainer. That is why, when I reflect on this line of the Creed, “live with respect in creation,” I think it differs from those who say we do not need God, that all we need is ourselves. Is that thinking not exactly the source of so many of the world's problems? Is the belief that we are autonomous creatures who can make up our own ideas not, in fact, the genesis of the destruction of the very stage on which we walk? I think it is. I think it is not just erroneous to say we do not need God, but dangerous, because the stage on which we walk is crumbling.
A couple of weeks ago, I was privileged to attend a performance of Tchaikovsky's magnificent opera, Eugene Onegin. Some of our choir members are in it. What fascinated me about this performance was not just the magnificence of the music, but also that the set was slanted. You could watch the performers moving with some degree of difficulty on it. I thought about how incredibly difficult it is to sing and maintain your part on a slanted stage, where nothing seemed to be horizontal or vertical - it was a stunning set. I thought it was a profound statement not only about the condition of those playing the protagonists in that opera, but also about the world itself.
In his letter to the Romans 2,000 years ago, the Apostle Paul wrote that this world is “groaning.” He probably didn't have environmental sustainability on his mind, but as a classic Jew he understood that there are two eras in Jewish thought. The current era is one of “groaning” and disharmony in which sin has brought down the whole of creation. He makes the case very cogently that creation fell through human sin, but it had no choice. Creation did not have free will - it simply fell from grace as we fell from grace. As a classic Jew, Paul also believed in the world to come, the time of judgment, restoration and renewal.
With that in mind, I was reading an author who said that Paul re-created Christianity and took it away from its Jewish roots. Absolute nonsense! Paul wrote as Jew; he understood this concept of the ages. He understood that wonderful passage in Isaiah 65 and he probably had it in mind as he wrote:
Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The form of things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people a joy. I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people. The sound of weeping and crying will be heard no more. Never again will there be an infant that lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years. He who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere youth. He who fails to reach one hundred will be considered cursed! They will build houses and dwell in them themselves, they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat. The wolf and the lamb will feed together. The lion will eat straw like the ox, but dust will be the serpent's food. They will neither harm nor destroy in all my holy mountain says the Lord.
The vision Paul had in mind was not only of the Israelites returning from the Exile and the return of the people to Jerusalem, but also of a cosmic sense of the renewal of the earth and humanity. He understood that the renewal of this world comes about through Christ.
In the meantime, the earth “groans.” The stage is uneven and the evidence of that groaning is all around us. For example, by the year 2032 it is believed that three billion people will be short of the water needed to exist on this earth. Right now, 15 per cent of all the arable soil has already been destroyed and cannot be reclaimed. Every year, two billion people are exposed to malaria and two million people die of the disease. The carbon dioxide numbers will have doubled by the year 2050. One billion people live in slums today; they are being forced off land that is no longer able to produce food and into the cities. Twelve per cent of all bird species and 15-25 per cent of mammals are nearing extinction. Do not tell me, my friends, that the earth isn't groaning - it is! We can see signs and witness moments of it. That is why the line in the Creed is prophetic. There is a need to live with respect in creation and, I would even go further, to live with humility in creation. For when the stage crumbles, those who walk upon it can crumble with it.
Sometimes, people live with misery and darkness. But is there no hope for the stage? Is it all dark, gloomy, awful and dreadful? No. There are great things that come our way in our life, things for which we need to give thanks - things that give us joy. I watched as people brought their animals forward this morning, and I could see their smiles and the joy and the laughter on the faces of the children and adults alike as they came along hugging their pets. I thought, “There is such great joy on this earth!”
I get great joy from books and I was reading one recently by one of our own members, Terry Fallis. It's a fantastic book that just won the Leacock Prize for humour. As I read it, smiling and laughing, the joy it gave me was tremendous - a gift from someone else. I think of the joy that music, the beauty of creation and the magnificence around us give to us. There is so much that is beautiful and wonderful in this world. How tragic it would be to see the stage collapse!
Some have suggested that we need a complete change in our thinking, particularly our thinking about God, in order to address the earth's problems and preserve these good things. For example, Thomas Berry, an eminent theologian, says that what we need is a cosmocentric theology to understand how the world operates. He believes that the universe is the supreme revelation of the divine mystery, and if only we could look at the earth and preserve it, we could see God. He quotes from Psalm 19:1, “The heavens declare the glory of the Lord.” The only problem, as Harold Wells, a United Church theologian from Emmanuel College points out, is that if we see the earth as all that is needed and, in a sense, just worship it, where do we find redemption? When the earth itself is crumbling and groaning, where do we find a source of grace and hope? Wells argues that it is only in the history of God, the transcendent God, caring for the earth that we actually see a God who is gracious and redemptive. If God is the earth, how can the earth save itself when it is being destroyed?
Wells has a good point. Others, like Sally McVeigh, argue that what we need is an ecocentric theology, one that sees the ecology in the world around us as being of paramount importance. She says we see its importance in the life of Jesus. Jesus said to love our neighbour, and maybe we need to broaden our definition of “neighbour” to include the whole of the earth and all the animals in it. It is a nice point, but it forgets the ultimate thing: What is needed is a Christocentric understanding, and this is where we come back to Paul. Paul believed that when God came to earth in his Son, Jesus, he re-affirmed the central place of the flesh, earth and creation. By coming and living among us, God was imminent; God was present in creation. But Jesus died and rose again in a bodily form, and not just humanity, those who believe, but the whole of creation, says Paul, will be restored and redeemed. In other words, the death and resurrection of Jesus were God's way of having a cosmic effect of redeeming us. But Paul says that for this, we have to wait. We have to wait for the age to come in which Christ will redeem all in all and, as the Book of Revelation says, quoting from Isaiah, “There will be a new heaven and there will be a new earth for which we wait.”
Some people, though, interpret this to mean that what we do on this earth doesn't really matter. We are waiting for a new heaven and a new earth, so we can let what we have here rot! Do you think that is what Jesus would say? I don't. Between where we are and where God wants us to be, Christ is calling us (and McVeigh is right in one sense) to love and care for the stage. If we don't love and care for the stage, how can we say that we love and care for others? If we do not take care of the stage, how can we take care of the generations to come? If we burn it all up for our own amusement and self-concern, what kind of cinders do we leave behind for future generations to walk on?
It seems to me that if we are going to take the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ seriously, we need to live with respect in creation. But we also need to understand that this creation is not all and it is not God; there is still more to come from God. There is the life to come - the Life Everlasting - the new heaven and the new earth.
Jean-Paul Sartre, the great existentialist philosopher, wrote a play titled, No Exit. In this story of three people confined together in a room in hell with occasional visits from a Valet, there is no hope. In fact, one character, Ines, has a famous line near the end of the play: “Hell is - other people.” You have probably heard that quote. So look around you, folks! If that's true, then you are sitting next to hell! No exit - we are just here on this earth. There is nothing redemptive, no hope, just death. That's it, folks. There are some people who live with that conviction, who live with that dark cloud hanging over their heads. There is no hope, so they look at the creation around them and say it doesn't matter.
If there is no hope, then we are to be pitied. But for the Apostle Paul, there is hope. The hope is a new heaven and a new earth, the grace and power of Christ and, as I said last Sunday, the power to love and care for others. That actually means living with respect in creation now, for all the world is a stage and that stage is crumbling. All men and women are merely players and we have our exits and our entrances; at different times we play different parts. But if the stage is destroyed, then the players are destroyed with it. It seems to me, if you really love this earth, the place to see and affirm it is in Christ. Amen.