New Old Ways

A sermon by the Rev. David Denoon, delivered February 16, 2014
For audio, listen here 
For the February 16 order of worship, including links to the scriptures described, click here.

The title of this sermon is “New Old Ways,” and in it I have tried to capture how it was that Jesus would take a commandment and reframe it. “You have heard it said... but now I tell you...” He wasn’t rewriting the Law when he did this, he was trying to help people to look anew at things they might be taking for granted. He was saying that you might follow the letter of the law, while missing entirely its spirit.

You cannot take seriously the warning against murder unless you also take seriously the thoughts of cruelty that reside in you. You cannot possibly be taking the prohibition against adultery seriously if you objectify others and exploit them for your own gratification or gain. If you want people to take your word seriously, then be straightforward. Say what you mean and mean what you say.

The Law doesn’t have to do with you, except in as much as it has to do with how you treat others... and, by the way, how you treat the world around you.

Today is the Sunday of the Interfaith Power & Light Environmental Preach-In. For those of you who aren’t acquainted with Interfaith Power and Light, it is a nationwide organization that has been at work for the past few years, encouraging people of faith toward more conscientious
environmental stewardship.

Now, by my taking part in the Preach-In, it may be expected of me – by them or maybe by you – that I should come out espousing some particular issue of the day in order to promote our world’s natural well-being. In fact, I have little doubt, given the emails that I have been receiving from IPL lately, that they would really like for me to find a way to say that scripture warns us against such a project as the Keystone XL Pipeline. And maybe that is what scripture does, but (as you might have guessed, in consideration of our text today that has Jesus saying there’s more to the Law than simply following the Law) there’s more to environmental stewardship than any single environmental issue. You know?

Ignore the argument over environmental impact.  Consider the perceived need for any such pipeline to exist.

Our culture and our economy demand that we be mobile, and that mobility is dependent upon fossil fuel. What can we do personally to diminish that dependency while still being mobile? Use vehicles that are more fuel efficient.

Is a lighter, smaller car the way to go for fuel efficiency, or should it be a hybrid of gas and electric, or should it be electric altogether? Because if it’s the last of those, the fact is that even though you’re not burning fuel with the car itself, either (a) a power plant is burning fuel to generate the electricity from which the batteries are charged, or (b) a hydroelectric plant is damming a river in order to generate the electricity for the batteries. Either of those impacts the environment.

And then there’s the matter of the batteries and the hazardous waste they will create when someday you have to part with that car and relegate it to a slag heap. Then, not only your third option seems rather unattractive, but your second one as well – the hybrid vehicle. So, now you’re back to the matter of fuel efficiency again and trying to optimize your miles per gallon of gas with a strictly internal combustion engine.

Given the performance of most hybrid vehicles, the question arises whether it’s not better to make a car lighter and more aerodynamic. Except that now we’re back in the realm of talking about whether or not the Keystone XL Pipeline is something to do with or without, just like all those oil rigs proposed for public lands and already pumping and shipping oil through our coastal waters. And God knows we don’t want another Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon.

Furthermore, there is already too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; global warming seems mostly to be the result of our consumption of fossil fuels.

Anyway, the sensation often is that we’re certainly damned if we don’t try to change our lives and lifestyles and livelihoods, and that we may be equally as damned if we do nothing about them. How can we choose the life that Moses in Deuteronomy encouraged his people to choose, when it seems as though every choice before us brings death?

It’s time to reframe the question, I think. But I have no idea myself how to do it. I count on scientists to be brilliant and to generate the necessary technology and innovation to make our engagement with the world better.

In the UCC, today is also Science, Faith, and Technology Sunday, so it seems fitting to look at our stewardly predicament from the viewpoint of a couple of scientists.

One scientist considers religion irrelevant to address the problems of the world, anyway, and may challenge therefore my use of his thinking. The other saw the conjunction of faith and science as a beautiful synthesis. But both of them have been possessed of such a respectably visionary pragmatism that I just can’t come up with a better direction to go. The two I am thinking of are George Washington Carver and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Reading an article about Tyson recently, I found myself reminded of Carver.  Neil DeGrasse Tyson grew up in the Bronx, and as a city boy first saw the stars only thanks to a visit to the Hayden Planetarium, of which he is now the executive director. George Washington Carver developed a fascination for fruitful gardening growing up on a farm near Neosho, Missouri. Thus, each knew what he wanted to do, from the time they were boys. And they have done their work, with vision yes but moreover with pragmatism.

Dr. Tyson has consistently endeavored to make hay while the sun has been shining, promoting the sciences – especially his own field of astrophysics – as means by which new discoveries may be made which will have effects for making our lives better.

Along the way, he’s been invited to try and inspire our government to sponsor an expedition to Mars. His reply has been to ask, Why should we go? And the answer has come, of course, We’re a species of explorers; that’s what we do.  We want to find out new things. We go for the sake of science.  But Dr. Tyson knows that this is not the reason why most people would want to go to Mars, not if it’s going to be something more than a stunt.  A mission to Mars has to be a good financial investment. If an expedition to Mars is not a sound investment then the reasons for going probably aren’t so well-advised. Because we’ll stop. We need to have a persistent, vested interest in going, if we are going at all.

Brilliant.

Dr. Carver recognized the need to restore the soils of the South which had been depleted through plantation farming – a single crop set in the same soil year after year.  People were exploiting other people and exploiting the earth in ways that were killing both. Seeing that cotton could not continue to be grown as it had been, Dr. Carver promoted yam and peanut farming. He famously came up with a whole host of uses for the peanut, but less famously came up with new means of cultivation and crop rotation for the sake of replenishing the soil. He promoted farms with a variety of crops instead of plantations and one-crop farming.

One author suggests that Carver was promoting principles at the turn of the 20th Century that were developed by another researcher in the 1940s into procedures that would eventually form the basis of organic farming.  And he did all of this with an intensely Christian orientation:

[In speeches he would argue] that the principle of unkindness as injustice and of kindness as trying “to assist you in every way that I can… to do my very best for you” applied “with equal force to the soil. The farmer,” he explained, “whose soil produces less every year, is unkind to it;… a soil robber,… robbing it of some substance it must have.” (The Carver Story: The Agriculturist)

You shall not murder.

You shall not commit adultery.

You shall not bear false witness.

These commandments instruct us, according to Jesus, not only that doing these things is against what God would have us do. They tell us that they are neither in our nor in the other person’s interest, against whom we commit the sin.

God’s Law provides a warning against being sociopaths, against treating another individual as a means to an end, against practicing powers that ought to belong to God alone. Any one of these things is an abuse of another or an abuse of society’s established order. So, Jesus takes the commandments to their logical extreme, saying effectively, Don’t just abide by the letter of the Law. Seek to comprehend its Spirit. As Moses said far more simply of the Law, Choose life. These are the ways of Life.

As few others have done, in the examples of Drs. Tyson and Carver there is no denying that they have elected to be directed not by the demands of others, not by cultural expectations, but by the paths they have seen which will encourage others to embrace life as fully as possible. Neil DeGrasse Tyson regularly seeks to blow the minds of his audiences, and to help young people to imagine grander possibilities for themselves. He is the only astrophysicist I know who can Moonwalk, and that is a discipline he jokingly insists that other astrophysicists need to learn, to be true to themselves and their calling...

George Washington Carver practically reinvented farming and along the way sought to reorient a religion which had diminished itself into a narrow-minded myth factory – defending its surrounding culture and the hatred inherent to it. For hatred will justify murder and adultery and false witness, unkindness of all kinds.

If we are to be for the world what is needed by the world, if we are to be the stewards that we are called to be, then we know what there is to do: to imagine new ways to practice our stewardship of the world and responsibility to each other, new ways that will have long-term effects and commitments.  We need to choose life for ourselves and to treat one another with respect, indicating that we have reverence for all people, for ourselves, and for the earth.

And all of that may have something to do with pipelines and too much carbon in the atmosphere and acidifying oceans and reducing fossil fuel consumption. But I’ll admit that mostly it has to do with adjusting our focus and inviting others to do so as well. So that old ways may be renewed... and old hearts renewed... and old minds refreshed... and old lives reborn.

Amen.