I want to admit up front that I am preaching to the choir this morning.  I’m also talking about myself, my life, and the contradictions I have lived and still live.  One of my grandsons asked to write about how I got to where I am today theologically from where I was when I went to theological seminary sixty years ago.  I started that but have not fully confessed or finished.  Back then I was liberal Christian, rejecting as my parents had fundamentalism but buying normative, doctrinally oriented mainline protestant Christianity.  This meant using creeds, doctrines of incarnation, trinity, forgiveness of sins through Jesus, and salvation as of this world but also beyond it.  I could make sense of all those things and still can to some degree.  But the real difference between then and now is not nearly so much in doctrine is where the weight of responsibility for being a Christian and part of “The Church” lies.

              Back then and still as a retired clergy, I believe social justice, fairness to all other human beings is paramount.  But now I believe that justice, care for, the entire environment of the earth including all species, including all oceans, rivers, forest, planes, rocks and what we call “dirt” is most important.  It is so important, I believe, that the major energy of the church as institution and individuals should be in work and living for justice to the earth and all creatures great and small.

         I don’t imagine that I am shocking you by this confession.  If I explain further I might.  I live, all of us who live in first world nations, in a state of enormous contradictions.   Why, because Christianity, whatever form of it you choose,  Judaism and much of other religions including Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism as practiced, have bought into the industrial revolution and the “rightness” for Christians and all the above to exploit, dominate, use, misuse, despoil, pollute any part of the earth we want.
 
         AND, we, institutionally and individually, for the most part, have used the Bible to justify our horrendous misuse of the earth!   We have as nations, states, businesses given to ourselves the god-given right to use and use up any natural resource, any natural species and so on.  One of the most unfortunate  words as translated in the King James version of the Bible is  “dominion.”  In Genesis 1, God creates everything, you remember, in six days, and it’s all good, then says to the man and the woman:  “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over…” ….well, everything.  The term “dominion” fits in neatly with the perspective of every prince or king, pharaoh or Lord and probably almost every head of a giant-world encompassing corporation.  But, the additional truth is that most all of us and certainly the church systems as a whole have directly or indirectly bought into that as well.
 
         Let me give you a personal illustration, which may seem a bit of a stretch.  It is from my own family history.  My father was a missionary in Japan.  He later became the head of the Baptist Foreign Missionary Society which had about a thousand missionaries all over the world.  Dad was a liberal, not a racist and cared for justice for all people.  Still he was of the second generation of the world protestant missionary movement which a decade before he became a missionary, held a conference with virtually all Protestant Churches represented, which then proceeded to divide up the world just as the European colonialist had.  The Presbyterians got Thailand, for example, the Episcopalians the south half of India, the Methodists the Malay Peninsula, the Baptists got Burma and it went on and on.  Now, they did a lot of good things:  started schools and hospitals, farms and churches, of course.  However, they were out to convert the whole human population of the earth to Christianity---save them so to speak.  They didn’t exploit everything, but the model was totally colonial. We have the right, they assumed, to do this conversion, and the colonial powers over and over backed the missionaries up with their enormous clout.
 
         An illustration of this is the fact that when English missionaries first went to India back in the 18th century some were so impressed by the spiritualism of Hindu holy men and the simplicity of their lives that they started to live the same way, wear their simple garments, eat their simple food.  And you know what, the British Government, the Anglican Church, and the Bombay Burma Company—an international corporation of that day—had all those missionaries brought back home, sending more Western conforming ones in their place.  What I am underscoring here does not touch more than illustratively, however, on the exploitation of the earth:  the “natives” were, of course, one down, but the earth, all its other creatures and resources were two down.
 
      If I am right—or at least mostly right—what should we as Christians do?  The rest of the sermon is going to be mostly about Wendell Berry.  Some of you may know more than I do about him.  He is a writer, poet, philosopher, teacher, farmer from Kentucky.  And, he would call himself a Christian.  Why?  Because he was brought up that way, just like me and most of you, no doubt.  That is just who we are and we cannot fully escape it.  It is our heritage.  And he has said as I would, that heritage is not all bad.  We just need to make the best of it or take the best of it and let stuff that is not so good or down-right horrible go—like the abysmal record of demeaning women to second class status, children too, and condoning, even justifying slavery and racism, etc.
 
         Actually there is a lot that is good, right on, in the Bible about caring for the earth, for justice to the earth as well as all creatures.  We have noted that creation is called “Good!”  God, according to the story, gives the earth to us to care for as if it were a garden which it really is.  Central to the teaching and example of Jesus is sharing bread, sharing the fruitfulness of the earth with each other.  The Lord’s prayer literally states that we ask God to give us our share, no more, no less of our daily bread.  There is a tradition also in the Bible of the Jubilee Year—something not honored unfortunately, but still there in the Bible.  It calls for every fifty years letting all fields, all the growing earth lie fallow, giving it a year off to regenerate itself—a beautiful concept.  In the ten commandments there is one about honoring your father and mother “that your life may be long in the land that I have given you.”  There is the story of the children of Israel in the desert for forty years and the manna given, and how everyone lived in that simple, hard time without their feet getting sore.
 
        There are hundreds of illusions or references to the beauty and wonder of creation and how we are to care for it and enjoy it in the Bible.  These need to be honored and brought to the fore. There are as well all kinds of earth wisdom, earth honoring practices, from other traditions, from native Americans and other indigenous peoples who knew and practiced care for the earth, not taking more of the rich harvest of the earth than was needed and not despoiling forests, rivers, lakes and oceans.  All of that earth wisdom we need to learn and recover now and put into practice.
 
         Some of this wisdom is found in the work of Wendell Berry.  I am going to pass out now his TEN COMMANDMENTS.
   Let me read these now, slowly and you think about them.  Which ones jump out at you, strike you as worthy or problematic?    

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        I am struck by all of them.  I would like to write them somehow into the liturgy and life of the Christian Church, especially the emphasis on the limits of our human intelligence, the justice of nature, the importance of being humble enough to think small, to be genuinely neighborly, to see how dependant we are on the earth, thus for example changing, honor your father and mother that your life may be long in the land that I have given you, to honor the land that I have given you so that your father and mother’s life, and your life may be long.
 
        In a small village called Gaviotas quite apart from any cities in the eastern savannahs of Columbia, S.A., the community there has for the last three decades been about building a sustainable, imaginative life.  Because the soil, though arid, was acid, they planted thousands of pine trees, but they also planted other kinds of trees with them.  Over time the shade helped recover the soil and other trees from seeds long dormant grew up helping to create hundreds of species of native plants and animals.  They found that they could harvest pine resin and palm oil for making varnish, paints, adhesives and palm oil with pine-turpentine for fuels for motorcycles and tractors.  They used  sustainably harvested wood for fuel, built schools and hospitals, improved the diet of all the children and people in the community, and so on.
 
        And all the while they decided as a community what to do next and what to do when some problem emerged.  They even incorporated failure into their communal process—what may we learn from mistakes, how can we improve.  “Gaviotas demonstrated to the world how effective it is to involve ordinary people in creating their own technologies and solving their own problems.  Their founder, Paolo Lugari, isn’t trying to tell us what to do so much as show that it is possible to live sustainably by drawing on local resources and, as he says, “living within the ‘economy of the near.’”
 
        That is very much what Wendell Berry is saying to me in his version of the Ten Commandments.  Where does that leave me or us this morning?  I haven’t even mentioned the lesson from the Gospel of Matthew, but I will now:  “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow….”  (Do you remember that wonderful movie, “Lilies of  the Field” with Sidney Poitier?—really the same theme of my talk.)  “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink or about your body, what you will wear…..So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.  Today’s trouble is enough for today.”
 
        How beautiful but also at the same time, finely impossible.  How can we not worry about tomorrow?  The oil spill is only one and not nearly the biggest worry facing the world and in some measure each one of us.  What do we have to go on?  That brings me back to the contradictions I began with.  We know the earth and the oceans will renew themselves if given a chance.  We know we have an immense amount of undoing to do, undoing of the way we live and exploit.  We know we have a great deal to learn about living locally and being truly a community with people and with the earth and sky.  We know that there are immense resources for good within the human heart and mind. 
 
   T.S. Eliot wrote in his poem, Ash Wednesday:
 
         This is the time of tension between dying and birth
         The place of solitude where three dreams cross
         Between blue rocks
         But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
         Let the other yew be shaken and reply.
 
         Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit
         of the garden,
         Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
         Teach us to care and not to care
         Teach us to sit still
         Even among these rocks,
         Our peace in His will
         And even among these rocks
         Sister, mother
         And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
         Suffer me not to be separated
 
         And let my cry come unto Thee.
 
   I am left with the need “to care and not to care” as I sit among these rocks.  I am old and will not have to face what my children and grandchildren will have to face, so I don’t want to be glib about any of this.  I know, whatever, as I am sure you know, that we cannot give up caring either in the sense of concern about what we, our culture, our way of living as a society, have done and still are doing to the earth our home, or in the sense of caring enough here and now, locally to do what we can to restore the earth and our communities.  But I also know I have to be courageous enough to trust, to let go, to believe that it is not all up to me, that love, God’s love, is on the side of earth and of you and me, that the earth is good and so are we.