February 28, 2010 Sermon
St. Paul’s Cambria
Father Fred Heard
Ezekiel 36:22, 24-36, OT
Luke 12:15-21, Gospel
Revelation 22:1-5, Epistle
Psalm 104
A warning: the sermon this morning can be considered controversial. But you know what? There was a day when it was controversial for the church to oppose slavery and the result was that the Episcopal Church neither opposed nor supported it. We reported southern church members as “in the other room” at national conventions and in that way we avoided splitting our church during the Civil War. One of our southern bishops was a general in the war and would go out and kill during the week and celebrate the Eucharist on Sunday. That probably was not our finest hour. We learned from that experience and years later, we were in the front of the line during the civil rights struggles.
But to paraphrase the old Jack Webb line, “Just the facts Mam, nothing but the facts.” It is very Episcopal for us to come together in extraordinary ways to celebrate the goodness of God’s creation and to highlight our role as good stewards of that creation. We are told that a child born into American society will use 125 times more resources throughout its lifetime than a child who grows up in a developing nation. Regardless of whether you are convinced that there is a problem it is still good stewardship to re-use, re-new, re-cycle, and be prudent with our natural resources. It just makes sense and even if you disagree with the political arguments—re-use, re-new, and re-cycle is just good stewardship.
During these last weeks, we have been engaged in scriptures and sermons highlighting sin. Sometimes, it is difficult to define sin as it relates to our personal relationships with each other—but most assuredly the havoc, the waste, the greed, and the destruction that we create on this planet is nothing more than the deepest and darkest sin.
As your priest, I have challenged you from time to time to demonstrate your love for each other and in this most loving community of Saint Paul’s you have done so again and again.
Now I challenge you to recognize that our earth is a symphony of beauty and color and wonder and order. As Christians during this Lenten season we can demonstrate our love for the Earth and we can find various ways to care for creation and to minimize our harmful impact on this planet.
Our mood should be celebratory and fun when we can—but our close attention to the details of what we are doing to our earth might make us stern and cranky and even radical in some people’s eyes. There is no room for coasting and closed eyes and attitudes of “whatever.”
Different forms of pollution like pesticides, animal waste, construction
materials, litter, agricultural runoff, and oily residue from cars getting flushed into our local streams and rivers do not have to be a part of the expense of living our lives or doing business on this planet. Our work as stewards of this earth is more than a celebration of nature, though it is surely that. Today we must recognize that something has gone wrong in our relationship with the natural world, something that needs fixing—something that we might describe in religious terms as a call to repentance, and even conversion.
As your rector, I have chosen to celebrate Form C of the Eucharist during Lent, 2010. Contained in that Eucharist are the beautiful words that we have all heard so many times: “At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home…From the primal elements you brought forth the human race, and blessed us with memory, reason, and skill. You made us the rulers of creation. But we turned against you, and betrayed your trust; and we turned against one another…” My dear Brothers and Sisters, these few words do not just address the betrayal of Jesus Christ…”betrayed your trust” includes an entire realm of action including care for “our island home.”
Think about it, we have given countenance either by affirmation or benign neglect to how our natural resources shall be used—and some of those natural resources have become so poisonous and so dangerous for God’s children that it would be more humane to take a gun and shoot them.
During my first term in the Oregon State House of Representatives, I received pictures and letters about an industrial waste site that was developing in one of the most remote parts of my district in Lake County. An industrial waste company had purchased land in the county and had begun storing bung barrels filled with poisonous industrial liquid waste out in the open on the bare land. Eventually the rain and snow rusted the barrels and the material started oozing out and sliding into the ground—there was underground water in that location. Farmers were nervous and asked me to intervene and I introduced legislation to stop this practice. Eventually the leader of my party in the Senate contacted me and asked me to back off. He owned a public relations firm and it seemed that the industrial waste company had retained him to fight the legislation after I introduced it. We did prevail—but only with great effort and I still remain disappointed in that very liberal Senate leader who abandoned his principals in that early fight for the sake of the dollar.
Here we do begin to tread on treacherous ground, because acknowledging the depth of the planetary crisis that human beings have created is fraught with danger. I’m not speaking here of political danger so much, or the suppression of ecological truth by political leaders even though that has happened. Rather, I am speaking of emotional and spiritual danger—the danger that recognition of the true magnitude of our ecological crisis will lead to paralysis and to despair.
The drumbeat of the news about environmental degradation and climate change not only evokes fear, but also a deep sadness. If we are really tuned
in, we must sense on some level that the “island home” that we know and enjoy right now will not be the earth that our children and grandchildren inherit.
The signs are everywhere. Headlines scream at us: three-fourths of
the rockfish in the Chesapeake Bay are diseased. The beautiful words that we sing about the Shenandoah River would be different today because it is now listed as one of the top ten most endangered rivers in the nation. We can deny it all we want but glaciers and ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic are melting much faster than expected. Warming temperatures over the next century could turn rich agricultural land into desert, dry out the rainforests, raise sea levels, extinguish countless species, and cause disastrous storms. And so what if the guessing is wrong?...Well, what if it is right on the mark? In fact, most scientists now say that climate change is not something facing us in the future, but is already here. The debate over whether global warming is happening is over. The only question is how bad will it get? Dr. Gustave Speth, Dean of the school of forestry and environmental studies at Yale, was asked recently if environmental damage due to climate change could be prevented. No, he replied, it’s too late for that. But we may still be able to prevent catastrophic damage. He concluded, “This is our
last chance to get it right. We have run out of time.”
Dr. Speth and many other scientists and theologians are speaking a
language that sounds off-key to our modern ears. It’s a language that biblical prophets like Ezekiel and John of Patmos would recognize, however. It is the language of apocalypse—the imagery of the end times and the mysteries of God. The environmental challenges that face us are beginning to look apocalyptic, except now the apocalypse is not a fantasy of fundamentalists, or the stuff of
science fiction, but the edge of an abyss that clear-eyed scientists peer over and tremble at. And the threats we face are not orchestrated by God but self-inflicted.
It’s hard to talk about these things, but we have to break the silence, especially within the churches, because here, above all else, we must speak the truth. As Daniel Maguire, a Catholic theologian, has said bluntly, “If current trends continue, we will not….If religion does not speak to [this], it is an obsolete
distraction.” And so we need to speak about it, and we need to weep about it, because it’s only when we allow ourselves to actually feel what is going on that we will have the capacity to change it. Most assuredly, dear Brothers and Sisters, this is not part of God’s plan for us.
I remember so well my first campaign for the Oregon State Legislature when farmers took me to Oregon’s Lake Ewauna and poked a pole to the bottom of the lake and then threw a match on the water and we watched as fire consumed the methane gas that had formed from the rotting chips at the bottom of the lake and risen to the surface to meet the flame. The farmers reasoned that this couldn’t be good for the wildlife that was in the lake or for their crops that came in contact with that contaminated water. That lake has now been cleaned of the wood chips and industrial waste and no longer is home to the sawmills that once surrounded the water. In their place are homes and businesses that have sprung up in this truly beautiful un-polluted spot in Oregon.
As one theologian has said, “the capacity to weep and then do something is worth everything.” This is the purpose of apocalyptic literature in the Bible and the purpose of the eco-apocalyptic warnings of scientists and environmentalists—not to paralyze us with fear, but to spur us to act, and even, to invest us with hope.
One of the things that attracted me to Saint Paul’s early on was this magnificent campus. Grounds and acreage that have been so lovingly cared for over the years. This continues. And now our Vestry on the recommendation of our Green Commission has voted to become a part of the Quiet Garden Movement. This organization started in 1992 by The Rev. Philip Roderick in England is an ecumenical ministry meeting the needs of local communities throughout the world. It is a ministry of hospitality and prayer. Saint Paul’s is a ministry of hospitality and prayer…as evidenced by the beautiful garden and labyrinth and human love contained within these walls. Our church and campus with the beautiful bell cast in 1796 beckons all God’s children to come to this beautiful place of peace and serenity. Today, worldwide, there are over 300 Quiet Gardens and Saint Paul’s offers one of the few in this magic place called California. Today, our Green Commission established by my call, 13 months ago, is busy promoting Fair Trade Coffee and Tea and promoting other Green friendly activities. Saint Paul’s really is involved in the Green movement…and we are only just beginning. This is a big project and will continue through the balance of our lives—truly there is no ending date—but there must be a beginning date in all of our lives.
Something else caught my eye when I came to Cambria for the first time and that was that section of CA 1 which is maintained by Saint Paul’s. That is such a good program and we have certainly learned from that that you don’t just clean the highway once. It does get dirty with human use and it must be done again and again. Good job Saint Paul’s!
The Cambria Unitarian Church called me Thursday of this last week wanting to know what they could do to donate food to the food bank. During the conversation, I complimented them on their project of collecting used electronic equipment and computers for proper “green friendly” disposal. Several weeks ago, we were invited to dispose of any unused electronic equipment by one of the larger California businesses—Qualcomm. We gave them our last electronic typewriter and so truly Saint Paul’s moved into the age of computers…thoroughly and completely and in a very green way!
Ezekiel, writing to exiles, whose homeland had been destroyed, offered a vision of a new day—a dream of the time when they would return to their land and dwell in peace, when the land itself would be restored from its former desolation and bloom as if it were the Garden of Eden. And the people who would dwell there would be different than the people who went into exile, because they would be transformed by their experience. They will return, but not as the same people, for we are told that God has cleansed them from their idols… and so, “a new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh.” Isn’t this what we so desperately need today? To have our hearts of stone removed, and in their place
to receive hearts of flesh that can hear the crying of the earth?
It has been said that we need “nothing less than conversion to the earth, because even our religion needs reformation. For too long, Christianity has been prone to earth-denying tendencies and nurtured fantasies of mastery and control over nature. The new reformation being called for means that “all religious and moral impulses of whatever sort must now be matters of unqualified earthbound loyalty and care. Faith is fidelity to earth and full participation in its ecstasy and agony.”
Can Christianity be converted to the earth? If we are to save our earth, we must recognize that it is not some commodity that we can abuse and then haul off to the land fill—it is the land. We must pay close attention to earth ethics…and again and again we must remember that this planet we would surrender to waste and destruction is our “island home” given to us by our Creator. Society and nature can survive together and they must…and that is God’s plan.
The Bible itself is rich in resources, from its imagery of the Garden of Eden to the new Jerusalem—a new kind of garden—in the Book of Revelation, which holds out a vision of a different way to live. In fact, some people say that apocalyptic literature is more about earth than it is about heaven. Because apocalyptic literature is written to people who are in crisis, who are struggling and
Desperate…people who need hope. Another meaning of the word “apocalypse” is revelation. Apocalypse reveals to us a new vision, not of heaven as in the sky but as heaven on earth. In fact, in the book of Revelation, heaven is not something we are raptured up to, but heaven is raptured down to us! Heaven is on earth, and God dwells on the new restored earth, as poisoned rivers become the river of the water of life. In apocalypse, sometimes we’re taken through hell, but we return to Eden.
So today, why not start reading the Bible backwards? Make Revelation your starting point not the pristine garden in Genesis. But then, reading backwards with the saints of all times and places, we discern the possibility for a new beginning—we reach towards a new Genesis, a new way of living in harmony with the earth, a change of consciousness and a re-rooting of all of our religious traditions in eco-friendly soil. We have this capability to envision a new earth.
With our Baptism, we touch water…clean water. Jesus was Baptized in clean water. We have this opportunity to touch the water—the water of life—
which springs from the earth and truly is a gift from God—we have the chance to allow our consciousness to be transformed, to be converted to God and the earth. We have the opportunity to be born anew, not only as children of God but as children of the earth. We can serve the creation with nurturing love. Let the clean water…the water of your Baptism wash away any indifference you have, any despair you feel, any fear which clouds your vision. As your priest, with any anointing I ever do for you, I will always recall your Baptism…your Baptism with clean water—and this will happen during illness and as you receive the Last Rites of your church on your deathbed and after you have gone home to be with our Heavenly Father.
Let water symbolize the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon a
transformed people. Let it remind us of the thirst of the earth and the thirst of the people in many parts of the world who live parched lives. Let it remind us of the dream of children to dance and bathe and drink clean water. Let it remind us of the promise of scripture that streams will break forth in the desert, and that the river of
the water of death will be replaced by the river of the water of life.
I conclude with a poem by a great eco-poet Wendell Berry, who talks about how he deals with his despair and his fear and how he experiences grace: When despair for the world grows within me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great
heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. AMEN
--
St. Paul’s Cambria
Father Fred Heard
Ezekiel 36:22, 24-36, OT
Luke 12:15-21, Gospel
Revelation 22:1-5, Epistle
Psalm 104
A warning: the sermon this morning can be considered controversial. But you know what? There was a day when it was controversial for the church to oppose slavery and the result was that the Episcopal Church neither opposed nor supported it. We reported southern church members as “in the other room” at national conventions and in that way we avoided splitting our church during the Civil War. One of our southern bishops was a general in the war and would go out and kill during the week and celebrate the Eucharist on Sunday. That probably was not our finest hour. We learned from that experience and years later, we were in the front of the line during the civil rights struggles.
But to paraphrase the old Jack Webb line, “Just the facts Mam, nothing but the facts.” It is very Episcopal for us to come together in extraordinary ways to celebrate the goodness of God’s creation and to highlight our role as good stewards of that creation. We are told that a child born into American society will use 125 times more resources throughout its lifetime than a child who grows up in a developing nation. Regardless of whether you are convinced that there is a problem it is still good stewardship to re-use, re-new, re-cycle, and be prudent with our natural resources. It just makes sense and even if you disagree with the political arguments—re-use, re-new, and re-cycle is just good stewardship.
During these last weeks, we have been engaged in scriptures and sermons highlighting sin. Sometimes, it is difficult to define sin as it relates to our personal relationships with each other—but most assuredly the havoc, the waste, the greed, and the destruction that we create on this planet is nothing more than the deepest and darkest sin.
As your priest, I have challenged you from time to time to demonstrate your love for each other and in this most loving community of Saint Paul’s you have done so again and again.
Now I challenge you to recognize that our earth is a symphony of beauty and color and wonder and order. As Christians during this Lenten season we can demonstrate our love for the Earth and we can find various ways to care for creation and to minimize our harmful impact on this planet.
Our mood should be celebratory and fun when we can—but our close attention to the details of what we are doing to our earth might make us stern and cranky and even radical in some people’s eyes. There is no room for coasting and closed eyes and attitudes of “whatever.”
Different forms of pollution like pesticides, animal waste, construction
materials, litter, agricultural runoff, and oily residue from cars getting flushed into our local streams and rivers do not have to be a part of the expense of living our lives or doing business on this planet. Our work as stewards of this earth is more than a celebration of nature, though it is surely that. Today we must recognize that something has gone wrong in our relationship with the natural world, something that needs fixing—something that we might describe in religious terms as a call to repentance, and even conversion.
As your rector, I have chosen to celebrate Form C of the Eucharist during Lent, 2010. Contained in that Eucharist are the beautiful words that we have all heard so many times: “At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home…From the primal elements you brought forth the human race, and blessed us with memory, reason, and skill. You made us the rulers of creation. But we turned against you, and betrayed your trust; and we turned against one another…” My dear Brothers and Sisters, these few words do not just address the betrayal of Jesus Christ…”betrayed your trust” includes an entire realm of action including care for “our island home.”
Think about it, we have given countenance either by affirmation or benign neglect to how our natural resources shall be used—and some of those natural resources have become so poisonous and so dangerous for God’s children that it would be more humane to take a gun and shoot them.
During my first term in the Oregon State House of Representatives, I received pictures and letters about an industrial waste site that was developing in one of the most remote parts of my district in Lake County. An industrial waste company had purchased land in the county and had begun storing bung barrels filled with poisonous industrial liquid waste out in the open on the bare land. Eventually the rain and snow rusted the barrels and the material started oozing out and sliding into the ground—there was underground water in that location. Farmers were nervous and asked me to intervene and I introduced legislation to stop this practice. Eventually the leader of my party in the Senate contacted me and asked me to back off. He owned a public relations firm and it seemed that the industrial waste company had retained him to fight the legislation after I introduced it. We did prevail—but only with great effort and I still remain disappointed in that very liberal Senate leader who abandoned his principals in that early fight for the sake of the dollar.
Here we do begin to tread on treacherous ground, because acknowledging the depth of the planetary crisis that human beings have created is fraught with danger. I’m not speaking here of political danger so much, or the suppression of ecological truth by political leaders even though that has happened. Rather, I am speaking of emotional and spiritual danger—the danger that recognition of the true magnitude of our ecological crisis will lead to paralysis and to despair.
The drumbeat of the news about environmental degradation and climate change not only evokes fear, but also a deep sadness. If we are really tuned
in, we must sense on some level that the “island home” that we know and enjoy right now will not be the earth that our children and grandchildren inherit.
The signs are everywhere. Headlines scream at us: three-fourths of
the rockfish in the Chesapeake Bay are diseased. The beautiful words that we sing about the Shenandoah River would be different today because it is now listed as one of the top ten most endangered rivers in the nation. We can deny it all we want but glaciers and ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic are melting much faster than expected. Warming temperatures over the next century could turn rich agricultural land into desert, dry out the rainforests, raise sea levels, extinguish countless species, and cause disastrous storms. And so what if the guessing is wrong?...Well, what if it is right on the mark? In fact, most scientists now say that climate change is not something facing us in the future, but is already here. The debate over whether global warming is happening is over. The only question is how bad will it get? Dr. Gustave Speth, Dean of the school of forestry and environmental studies at Yale, was asked recently if environmental damage due to climate change could be prevented. No, he replied, it’s too late for that. But we may still be able to prevent catastrophic damage. He concluded, “This is our
last chance to get it right. We have run out of time.”
Dr. Speth and many other scientists and theologians are speaking a
language that sounds off-key to our modern ears. It’s a language that biblical prophets like Ezekiel and John of Patmos would recognize, however. It is the language of apocalypse—the imagery of the end times and the mysteries of God. The environmental challenges that face us are beginning to look apocalyptic, except now the apocalypse is not a fantasy of fundamentalists, or the stuff of
science fiction, but the edge of an abyss that clear-eyed scientists peer over and tremble at. And the threats we face are not orchestrated by God but self-inflicted.
It’s hard to talk about these things, but we have to break the silence, especially within the churches, because here, above all else, we must speak the truth. As Daniel Maguire, a Catholic theologian, has said bluntly, “If current trends continue, we will not….If religion does not speak to [this], it is an obsolete
distraction.” And so we need to speak about it, and we need to weep about it, because it’s only when we allow ourselves to actually feel what is going on that we will have the capacity to change it. Most assuredly, dear Brothers and Sisters, this is not part of God’s plan for us.
I remember so well my first campaign for the Oregon State Legislature when farmers took me to Oregon’s Lake Ewauna and poked a pole to the bottom of the lake and then threw a match on the water and we watched as fire consumed the methane gas that had formed from the rotting chips at the bottom of the lake and risen to the surface to meet the flame. The farmers reasoned that this couldn’t be good for the wildlife that was in the lake or for their crops that came in contact with that contaminated water. That lake has now been cleaned of the wood chips and industrial waste and no longer is home to the sawmills that once surrounded the water. In their place are homes and businesses that have sprung up in this truly beautiful un-polluted spot in Oregon.
As one theologian has said, “the capacity to weep and then do something is worth everything.” This is the purpose of apocalyptic literature in the Bible and the purpose of the eco-apocalyptic warnings of scientists and environmentalists—not to paralyze us with fear, but to spur us to act, and even, to invest us with hope.
One of the things that attracted me to Saint Paul’s early on was this magnificent campus. Grounds and acreage that have been so lovingly cared for over the years. This continues. And now our Vestry on the recommendation of our Green Commission has voted to become a part of the Quiet Garden Movement. This organization started in 1992 by The Rev. Philip Roderick in England is an ecumenical ministry meeting the needs of local communities throughout the world. It is a ministry of hospitality and prayer. Saint Paul’s is a ministry of hospitality and prayer…as evidenced by the beautiful garden and labyrinth and human love contained within these walls. Our church and campus with the beautiful bell cast in 1796 beckons all God’s children to come to this beautiful place of peace and serenity. Today, worldwide, there are over 300 Quiet Gardens and Saint Paul’s offers one of the few in this magic place called California. Today, our Green Commission established by my call, 13 months ago, is busy promoting Fair Trade Coffee and Tea and promoting other Green friendly activities. Saint Paul’s really is involved in the Green movement…and we are only just beginning. This is a big project and will continue through the balance of our lives—truly there is no ending date—but there must be a beginning date in all of our lives.
Something else caught my eye when I came to Cambria for the first time and that was that section of CA 1 which is maintained by Saint Paul’s. That is such a good program and we have certainly learned from that that you don’t just clean the highway once. It does get dirty with human use and it must be done again and again. Good job Saint Paul’s!
The Cambria Unitarian Church called me Thursday of this last week wanting to know what they could do to donate food to the food bank. During the conversation, I complimented them on their project of collecting used electronic equipment and computers for proper “green friendly” disposal. Several weeks ago, we were invited to dispose of any unused electronic equipment by one of the larger California businesses—Qualcomm. We gave them our last electronic typewriter and so truly Saint Paul’s moved into the age of computers…thoroughly and completely and in a very green way!
Ezekiel, writing to exiles, whose homeland had been destroyed, offered a vision of a new day—a dream of the time when they would return to their land and dwell in peace, when the land itself would be restored from its former desolation and bloom as if it were the Garden of Eden. And the people who would dwell there would be different than the people who went into exile, because they would be transformed by their experience. They will return, but not as the same people, for we are told that God has cleansed them from their idols… and so, “a new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh.” Isn’t this what we so desperately need today? To have our hearts of stone removed, and in their place
to receive hearts of flesh that can hear the crying of the earth?
It has been said that we need “nothing less than conversion to the earth, because even our religion needs reformation. For too long, Christianity has been prone to earth-denying tendencies and nurtured fantasies of mastery and control over nature. The new reformation being called for means that “all religious and moral impulses of whatever sort must now be matters of unqualified earthbound loyalty and care. Faith is fidelity to earth and full participation in its ecstasy and agony.”
Can Christianity be converted to the earth? If we are to save our earth, we must recognize that it is not some commodity that we can abuse and then haul off to the land fill—it is the land. We must pay close attention to earth ethics…and again and again we must remember that this planet we would surrender to waste and destruction is our “island home” given to us by our Creator. Society and nature can survive together and they must…and that is God’s plan.
The Bible itself is rich in resources, from its imagery of the Garden of Eden to the new Jerusalem—a new kind of garden—in the Book of Revelation, which holds out a vision of a different way to live. In fact, some people say that apocalyptic literature is more about earth than it is about heaven. Because apocalyptic literature is written to people who are in crisis, who are struggling and
Desperate…people who need hope. Another meaning of the word “apocalypse” is revelation. Apocalypse reveals to us a new vision, not of heaven as in the sky but as heaven on earth. In fact, in the book of Revelation, heaven is not something we are raptured up to, but heaven is raptured down to us! Heaven is on earth, and God dwells on the new restored earth, as poisoned rivers become the river of the water of life. In apocalypse, sometimes we’re taken through hell, but we return to Eden.
So today, why not start reading the Bible backwards? Make Revelation your starting point not the pristine garden in Genesis. But then, reading backwards with the saints of all times and places, we discern the possibility for a new beginning—we reach towards a new Genesis, a new way of living in harmony with the earth, a change of consciousness and a re-rooting of all of our religious traditions in eco-friendly soil. We have this capability to envision a new earth.
With our Baptism, we touch water…clean water. Jesus was Baptized in clean water. We have this opportunity to touch the water—the water of life—
which springs from the earth and truly is a gift from God—we have the chance to allow our consciousness to be transformed, to be converted to God and the earth. We have the opportunity to be born anew, not only as children of God but as children of the earth. We can serve the creation with nurturing love. Let the clean water…the water of your Baptism wash away any indifference you have, any despair you feel, any fear which clouds your vision. As your priest, with any anointing I ever do for you, I will always recall your Baptism…your Baptism with clean water—and this will happen during illness and as you receive the Last Rites of your church on your deathbed and after you have gone home to be with our Heavenly Father.
Let water symbolize the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon a
transformed people. Let it remind us of the thirst of the earth and the thirst of the people in many parts of the world who live parched lives. Let it remind us of the dream of children to dance and bathe and drink clean water. Let it remind us of the promise of scripture that streams will break forth in the desert, and that the river of
the water of death will be replaced by the river of the water of life.
I conclude with a poem by a great eco-poet Wendell Berry, who talks about how he deals with his despair and his fear and how he experiences grace: When despair for the world grows within me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great
heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. AMEN
--