The Rev. Noah Van Niel
The Chapel of the Cross
October 18th, 2021
Proper 24 (B): Job 38:1-7, 34-41; Psalm 104: 1-9, 25, 37b; Hebrews 5:1-10; Mark 10:35-45
You may have noticed that in the last month or so, there has been a theme within many of our liturgies and programs having to do with God’s relationship to the natural world. This is in keeping with the ecumenical “Season of Creation” that has been established for these early fall months in churches across Christendom. With an increasing awareness of the ways in which human actions detrimentally impact the environment, people of faith have been asked by their leaders to take on this issue and, based on the courage of their convictions, start saving the world.
Here at The Chapel of the Cross, we reach something of a climax to this Season of Creation next week with an Adult Forum presentation on faith-based, sustainable farming by Little Way Farm in the morning, an interfaith climate walk in downtown Chapel Hill in the afternoon, and a special Celtic Eucharist suffused with natural imagery and language in the evening. We hope you will join us for any or all of those offerings. But today we don’t have to go looking to any special programs or activities to mark God’s relationship with the natural world. It comes to us, loud and clear, in our Old Testament readings from the book of Job and the Psalms. Both selections are trying to represent the power and glory of God. And where better to turn when one wants to convey the majesty and might of the Divine than to that which inspires most often in us feelings of awe and wonder: the heavens, the earth, the sea, the land, plants, animals, all of which get memorably drawn in across these verses.
These passages are some of the most sophisticated poetry in the entire Bible and provide us with some stunning images of God’s interaction with creation. But they are also prime examples of the paradox that afflicts the way people of faith are asked to understand God’s relationship with the world. Since both the book of Job and the Psalms are works of poetry, they employ copious amounts of what your middle school English teacher would have called “figurative language.” Another name for it is “analogical speech.” This is language that uses metaphor, simile, and analogy to conjure new meanings and images which enlighten our minds and enliven our hearts. It can be highly effective, but it is based in abstraction, not concrete representations of reality. We know God is not a cosmic contractor laying the foundations of the earth, taking its measurements, sinking in the cornerstones. Nor does he summon the weather with a word or feed the animals like a celestial zookeeper. These are compelling images. But they are clearly metaphorical, anthropomorphized, and scientifically inaccurate. The same goes for the God of Genesis creating the world in 6 days. We appreciate the story, but to take it literally would be a mistake. Not just because we know more science than they did then, but because these works were always meant to be understood as analogical representations of God’s relationship with the world. However, since figurative language decouples words from their concrete meanings, the new meanings they create can leave us at a loss for how exactly to equate such abstractions with reality.
Which reminds me of a story. When I was in Divinity School I had a class with a woman named Dana. Dana was about twice the age of the rest of us. Every year the school admitted a few “special” students like her who came to the study of religion later in life, without the usual credentials or career goals, but whose perspective and contributions they thought would enrich the classroom conversations. She didn’t talk much, so I never got Dana’s whole story. But one day she said something I will always remember. We were in the middle of some esoteric theological discussion where we kept arguing theories no one outside of those walls would find remotely interesting, when she spoke up and said “You know, a long time ago, I used to work on a paving crew.” She had our attention. “We would spend hours working on the roads, tamping down steaming pavement, spraying asphalt, letting it cure. It was awful work. But you know, as I sit here listening to this discussion, I can’t help but ask, ‘Where is the asphalt?”
Now I realize an anecdote about asphalt may be problematic in a sermon on creation care. But it speaks to the challenge we face when it comes to how to understand God’s relationship with the world. There needs to be a point at which our abstract language about God becomes the actuality of God. By bringing us all back down to earth, Dana reminded us that the true measure of our great ideas, the value of those imaginative images, is not to be found in the theoretical realm. They need asphalt. God must reach reality. Otherwise, God remains just an idea; an abstraction with no actual impact.
You see, if the only way in which we talk about God’s relationship with the natural world is analogical, how then should we conceive of God’s actual interaction with planet Earth, such that our belief in that God would compel us to save it? We need a more sophisticated understanding of God’s relationship with the world than passages like Job 38 or Psalm 104 or Genesis 1 give us. And while no single theory can account for the complete reality of God, there are places we can look. Some physicists have convincingly argued that God exists in the quantum realm. Other people see evidence of God in the fact of our consciousness; still others in our notions of goodness, fairness, and love, that do not appear to be concurrent with a strictly scientific understanding of how living beings should behave. Some find evidence of God in the very simple but undeniable reality that there is life at all, and it is not static, it is in motion, it is always becoming. Some have experienced miraculous events or visions. And many have had moments of deep awareness of something at work within them and in the world around them that are hard to explain but even harder to ignore. These are just some of ways in which people have come to understand and experience the presence of God in this world, and have come to believe in that force, that being, that has set the universe on the course of existence rather than non-existence and whose power reaches not just across our planet, but across the universe, and all the way into our hearts.
So what about you? How do you know God is real? Because ultimately it is up to each of us to reckon with the reality of God, to lay down our own asphalt; to wrestle with the question, “Where does the idea of God meet the actuality of God?” We need to do this for personal reasons, but also for the sake of the world. Because a religious response to the climate crisis is predicated upon a conviction that God is real, like really real, in this world, and cares about what happens here. There are lots of good reasons for us to care about the Earth. But a faith based one is dependent upon God caring about it. And if God is real, like really real, in this world, then it’s hard to imagine something more important for people of faith to be addressing. Because if God is real, like really real, then violating the earth and exploiting it is not just a sin against the trees and the flowers and the animals, it’s not even just a form of terrorizing our fellow human beings, but it is actively counteracting the motivation of the One who brought all things into being. If God is real, like really real, then what we are doing to our planet is not poetic but literal desecration. A squandering of a gift that, so far as we know, is singular in the cosmos. We are consciously driving ourselves and much of this world to extinction, and we know it. But for reasons of selfishness or short-sightedness or sinfulness we fail to act at the scale of the catastrophe. This is a failure of nerve and of knowledge, of policy and of politics, but it also seems to be a failure of belief on the part of people of faith. Because if we believe in a God who is more than a metaphor, a Theos who is not just theoretical, an Almighty who is not just an abstraction; if we know that God is present in this world and cares about it, we need to get to work. At the most fundamental level you can imagine, we are wired for existence. If we are to honor the God that so wired us, then we need to be on the side of existence not extinction. Because life, in all its forms, is a beautiful gift. This world is a beautiful gift. The presence and availability of God to us through this creation is a beautiful gift. But the life of faith cannot subsist on metaphors alone. If God is real, then our belief in God must have real consequences. Otherwise, God’s relationship with the natural world is just a nice idea, with no impact or import. “Oh Lord, how manifold are your works.” Save us from knowing you only abstractly and analogically. Help us to reckon with your reality and to believe that because you are, we are. May it continue to be so. Amen.