Earthly Love and Earth Love

Back This sermon focuses on two mysteries, both of which have the same roots. In between the two mysteries, I will say a bit about earth day concerns, highlighting the role the church has played in dealing with theenvironment. There will not be much of a "doom and gloom" scenario here, because most of you know the dangers of global warming and most of this congregation is united in strong ecological concern. The effort here, then, will be to help us connect our Christian faith and our environmental commitment, even to find hidden resources in our tradition. So, the first mystery involves a place, the second involves the Bible.

Thor Heyerdahl died last week, age 87. Some of you may remember his most famous books, Kon-Tiki and Aku-Aku, which described his personal adventures in what we might call, "wild-man" anthropology. In order to prove that the Polynesian Islands could have been settled by people from South America, he and five friends floated from Peru to near Tahiti on a big balsa log raft, Kon-Tiki. That was in 1947. Then, in 1955-6, Heyerdahl researched the mysteries of Easter Island, the country of the Giant Stone Heads. I was entranced by these books when I was a boy. Heyerdahl challenged the way other people thought about things, and took great personal risks to prove his points. (See New York Times obituary, April 19, 2002, p. A25.)

On Easter Island, great stone heads stick out of the ground, and the people of the island did not even know how they got that way. They simply "walked." So Heyerdahl dived in, making friends with the elders and trying to obtain any archeological material that would help him discover the secrets of the how and why of the stone heads. It was very tough to earn people's confidence, he had to crawl into remote and highly protected caves where there was evidence of cannibalism and the people were still extremely wary. The mystery of how the stone heads got upright was solved partly through experimentation. You could keep putting rocks under the statues until they rose into the air. But part of the mystery of how they got all over the treeless island pointed to another mystery. How could a small, demoralized and degraded population move these enormous heads around-especially when it was found that they did have bodies, sunk into the ground?

It turned out that there had been trees on the island, but they had almost all been cut down to serve as rollers for the enormous statues. Once the trees were cut down, however, the whole ecology of the island began to fail. Animals died off, the soil changed, people began to fight over the very limited resources, chickens became the main source of protein and people fought to defend their stone hen houses. Every cultural gain was sacrificed to survival; people lived in hostility and suspicion. You could imagine why the islanders might have welcomed the first European Christians so warmly-salvation had to come from outside. So the cultural and technological mystery was solved when the ecological devastation was explained: by sacrificing the natural environment to their cultural ideal-bigger and better statues-they destroyed the natural base and fought each other. And the key was what was no longer standing: the trees. In their earthly loves of their own species, they had forgotten to love the earth itself. The obvious question: how much are we on the way to Easter Island-ization, with violence against nature and other humans finally reinforcing itself? How can our faith help us avoid their fate? (Faith Resources for Healing the Earth)

The question for us, as believers in God, is whether our earthly loves are enough to protect the earth-or whether we need to love God now in stronger and newer ways in order to love the earth, even to save the earth? My view is that love of God and love of the earth have always gone together, and that Christianity is not fundamentally anti-nature. This is to challenge some common secular academic beliefs-that our religious tradition going back to the earliest monotheists has dominated and subdued the world. And certainly there is some truth to that, as by singling out humanity as the particular image of God there was a privileging of our species-but it was the set of moral demands in Judaism and Christianity that formed the active individual self in community that reshapes the world-(and environment or climate had its own impacts, too!). Lately the whole enterprise of environmental theology has challenged the interpretation of the Western, especially Protestant and non-sacramental tradition. Yes, there has been the side that with the rise of science and modernity, disenchanted and instrumentalized the world. With God high in the heavens, we could put the earth to whatever use we chose. (The extreme of that separation of God from the world is expressed in doomsday theologies that say you can blow up the world and God can still save whoever he wants. The larger witness of the Bible is that God wants to redeem everything he created, and he has left his marks-beauty and coherence-at every level, seen and unseen.

I would say that it was more our concepts of private ownership/control of land and technology than our lack of "creation theology" that have contributed to natural devastation (-even though the theologies of creation can help us recover the "original blessing"(Matthew Fox's term)). Those of us of Scottish heritage know that the devastation of the Highland clearances drove people off the land as well as trees so that sheep could roam on the land of the lairds-those rugged crags were also the jagged teeth of economic inequality. (See also David Noble's books on the history of technology, David Little's critique of the Lynn White thesis on Christian exploitation of nature).

The Christians who are re-reading our tradition are often scientists themselves, imbued with a love of nature that is both spiritually reverent and intellectually rigorous. They understand what the concept of Sabbath and of land lying fallow means. They read the nature poetry of the Old Testament to see how fertility was maintained, even as fertility gods were disdained. The concept of stewardship (in Torah and wisdom tradition), the awareness of sustainability to the seventh and even seventieth generation, the sense of the integrity of the creation, the Christian instincts for wilderness preservation related to the whole hermit traditions, the preservation of culture and nature in the monasteries, the pioneers of saving natural parks, especially that Presbyterian exile, John Muir, the Christian poets back to Spenser's "weeping trees" to heterodox Blake and Burns to Coleridge and Wordsworth and now to Denise Levertov, William Stafford and Wendell Berry, and we know now how much it is the church that revived and partly created the myth of Chief Seattle, that helped lift up the Native American love of this American land from despair. (Note made to the hippies who also celebrated nature and claimed the Native American heritage, with some of the same drug-laced despair).

One can make too much of a link between repressing our inner natures, including sexuality, and repressing nature itself. Especially in that nature mystic, St. Francis of Assisi, we see that severe personal asceticism often accompanied an approach to nature that was so holy it brought the romantic and even erotic back in. Think again of the monastery gardens (even Mendel's work, long before Darwin's). The full incarnation shines forth in the Book of Revelation's union of the new heaven and the new earth, who are again married as Hosea and Isaiah both proclaimed. The earth itself, not a fertility goddess, is the bride in the cosmic wedding that creates "Beulah land."

(We also must remember that even before the relatively easy birth control methods of the late 20th Century, it was mainline Protestant Christians who worried about over-population in the world. Even today, we desperately need Protestant Christian lobbyists in international trade and aid forums to fight the Catholic and Muslim interests who oppose all birth control. This Bush administration, like the Reagan and Bush administrations before it, is entirely captive to conservative Christian and Catholic interests when it comes to global population planning.)

I will only touch briefly on the controversy over shutting down the Indian Point "energy center," as it is now being disguised. (Whether or not there will soon be published lists of hundreds of Westchester ministers opposing the plants continued operation,) it is clear that very few corporate interests on their own will ever back off profit in favor of the environment or human safety. Government regulation and fair taxation for clean-up are essential for the common good. And of investor groups in this country, only the churches used their portfolio power to fight for corporate social responsibilty in environmental affairs. (Not preached in this form, but indirectly: While I do think nuclear power, because of its link to nuclear waste and nuclear weapons (and now terrorism), is a special extreme of the environmental "hard path," we saw an example of self-interested economic and political forces kill improved fuel standards for motor vehicles just two weeks ago-though we can celebrate that the Arctic Natural Wilderness Refuge was protected this past week.) My point could get controversial, but the reality is that Christian values are environmental values and we need to fight for them. God gave us this world, and God holds us accountable for it. Think of rising cancer, asthma rates, if you think the age of the plagues is over..

This leads me now to a second mystery, the one in the Bible, that I take to illustrate the hidden resources of our tradition: the mystery of the Asherah. Many of you are familiar with the fact that the early Israelites gradually separated themselves out from the other Canaanite peoples. One group, led by Moses, escaped Egypt, but other groups escaped local Canaanite kings and joined an early Israel that, if you read all those laws in Deuteronomy and Exodus, was a remarkable free and egalitarian group compared to the empires of the time with their thousands and thousands of slaves and serfs. You may also know that the golden calf Moses destroyed was a fertility god, and that the prophets of Israel were continuously fighting the people falling back into their polytheistic, nature worshipping ways, especially when some foreign queen, like Jezebel (Jeze-Baal), would bring all her idols into the Temple. It is very clear that periodic reforms in Israel's history involved destroying idols and who knows what kinds of practices on the hilltops and perhaps in sacred groves. Even the local shrines of Israel were shut down by the centralizing royal/Temple establishment in Jerusalem, which opposed places like Shiloh and Gilgal and Bethel ("come to Bethel and transgress," says one prophet), where the pagan stuff was still mixed in.

Thus the texts I had John (Codman) read present a mystery. On one hand we have the marriage of God with the whole earth in Hosea-here is the first Earth Love, and it is the Creator's love for the earth that wants to redeem it. It is not the love of a sky god for an earth goddess, because Yahweh, the Hebrew God, has no consort anywhere in scripture. But it is the section in Second Kings that is very revealing. Unlike what we are taught about the Temple having no graven images that could prompt idolatry, apparently a sculpture of a bronze snake that went back to Moses was still in the Temple until King Josiah had it destroyed. More interesting, there are figures in the Temple and other shrines and in the homes of the period-which we would call the early iron age-that are called Asherah. For those who believe there was a matriarchal period in human history, these are immediately linked to the goddesses of Canaan and Babylon and Ugarit, especially Astarte. Astarte was, after all, Baal's chief wife, and can't we just see the later editorial cover-up in the Bible of the people's natural worship of the female, nurturing, earth-mothering force? The problem is, that even when Baal's prophets are destroyed by Elijah, the Asherah are not destroyed. They stay in Israel's shrines and the temple for perhaps 300 years, until a much later king, almost on the eve of the Babylonian captivity, "cuts them down."

So what are these Asherah, if they are not goddesses? Archeology gives us examples of a kind of semi-human figure, always female, with no male accompaniment. The figure often has her hands in the air, long hair, breasts, and what appeared to be a long dress that went right to the ground. This wide dress base made it easy for the figures to stand upright. But by now some of you are figuring it out: These were female tree figures. Those dresses were trunks that became roots in the ground. And even as polytheistic practices were being up-rooted in Israel, these rooted figures-without divine headdresses or religious symbols like goddesses would have in Canaan-these figures were still in the sanctuaries and shrines. Even Tikva Frymer-Kensky, a Jewish scholar who debunks much of the matriarchal period goddess thinking, acknowleges that it would have been hard for the Israelite priests to hold the line totally on the view that the earth's fertility-the productivity of their economy-was only based on their moral obedience to an invisible God. People, as Larry Rasmussen says as he lifts up the symbol, always look to trees for green wisdom, for regenerating capacity, as signs of stability, and the force of nature (See Earth Community, Earth Ethics: Maryknoll/Orbis, 1996), which greatly inspired this sermon). As people sometimes used to pray in the ancient world, lifting up their hands, so these figures showed nature reaching to connect heaven and earth.

The answer to both mysteries was trees-the lost trees of Easter Island, the forgotten mothering trees of the Asherah. We need to plant trees every day on earth-like the Green Belt movement does in Kenya (whose founder, Wangari Mathai, is speaking tomorrow night at Bridges to Community's 10th Anniversary celebration). We have an opportunity in the Capital Campaign to give to a cloister concept that would be built on the North side of this sanctuary, forming an inner garden for intimacy with God, but also showing the holiness of nature in a new form of sacred space. But finally we need not only to plant and re-acknowledge trees-we need to become trees, rooted and grounded in love and soil, sheltering the sources of our creativity and fertility, standing tall for future generations. Amen.
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