There’s a line of scripture that has been rattling around my consciousness the past few weeks. It’s not even one of the lines in our lessons today, though I think there are echoes.
In the first chapter of Genesis, in the moment God creates humankind in all of our gendered diversity in Gods image, what is the first thing God says to us? “Fill the earth.” The question comes, with what? With what do we fill the earth? So far, the answer has been mostly, “with us.”
Scientists today have a new name for the time in which we’re living. The name is “the Anthropocene.” It means that human beings have filled the earth. We have subdued it, which is the next command God gives us. The Anthropocene names that have filled the earth so thoroughly that humans are the primary factor affecting life on this planet. We have filled the earth, with us, with our willpower, with our needs and wants. We have filled the earth. And, my friends, the results are less than spectacular.
Climate change is caused by humans. The extinction of thousands of species, that’s on us. The future of bees, and polar bears, and rivers themselves depends on us. We human beings have filled a mighty big place on this planet.
The Anthropocene, the moment we are in now, aware about the impact we are having is new. But it has been building for a long time. In Jesus’ time too, there was a sense of crowding.
As Jesus listens to the man living with disability in John’s Gospel, you can feel the jostling around the pool at Bethesda. This pool was a place of healing. Periodically the waters would bubble or churn, and the sick, the injured, the disabled would rush to the pool. There was a belief that angels disturbed the water, and whoever entered the pool first after the water was stirred up might be healed. We learn this poor man has been waiting 38 years for such a miracle.
It is one of the moments when we can glimpse the life of ancient Jerusalem. There were so many people in the city looking for God, so many streamed into the holy sites. In that sense, it is not unlike the Holy Land we know today. Israel/Palestine is a constant fight over water, and land for more settlements. The earth in the land of the Holy One feels full today.
But the fullness, for the man Jesus heals, has a particular sting.
Disability and the Addiction to Speed
The Scottish theologian of disability John Swinton would argue that this disabled man faces what disabled people too often face. Swinton says that one of the ways we fail to be inclusive in our society, the primary way marginalize disabled people, is through our addiction to speed. Swinton believes that most profound intellectual and physical disability would not be a bar to participation in community for a person, if the community around the disabled person was willing to go a little slower. Swinton particularly invites the church to learn to slow down, to include people whose bodies and brains need a little more time.
The man at the Bethesda pool says to Jesus, “I have no one to help me.” For 38 years, no one was has been willing to slow down enough to help this man down into the water. John Swinton refuses to talk about disabled people and able-bodied people. “No” he says, “we have disabled people and temporarily able-bodied people.” Give all of us enough time…
In all the rush, in all the busyness, as the press of people in the holy city shoves the disabled man aside again and again, Jesus slows down. Jesus does not let the pressure of religious obligation, the sabbath, become more important than the person in front of him. Jesus sees him. Jesus loves him. And Jesus heals.
When people ask me, why are you a Christian, and when I can move past my defensiveness, I realize it is moments like this one that make me want to be a follower of Jesus. Jesus saw people. Jesus made time. When I say, I believe Jesus was love incarnate, it is because he is so different than the life we humans have settled for. In Jesus, I see a spark of what the divine life could be. I don’t know what you have been through. I will never know what goes on in your mind in your heart, not fully. But I believe Jesus does, and he sees you. And loves you to healing. Jesus takes all the time required.
In our own day, we brag about how quickly we made it from point A to point B. We rush through to deadlines. I am guilty of this particular sin more often than I wish. You should know, often when I am preaching against a certain pattern of behavior, it is because I recognize the pattern in myself all too well. We hurry so much. But we have to ask that what God wanted for us, is that how we were meant to fill the earth? With busyness?
Moving too Fast and the Earth
In recent days, I’ve been watching my world take some ugly turns in the name of speed. Both here, and in El Salvador, a country I have been traveling to for a couple decades, the governments are ready to sweep away time-consuming things like habeas corpus and due process. I get worried when a government gets too much of a sense of urgency for anything but disaster relief. Civl Rights, Human Rights, get ignored.
I’m worried about the speed with which we could lose our public lands. I’m worried about all of the oil that we’re pumping so fast out of Southeastern New Mexico. Now I’m conflicted, because I love that in New Mexico, we’re putting much the money from that oil into preschools like the one here at St. Michael’s. But that oil took millions of years to form. It is a finite resource. So are the trees that will burn in New Mexico this summer, more of them than in years past. We’re in a drought this summer. It’s hotter. We may have filled the earth, we may have influenced the whole planet, but is this what God had in mind for us?
The writer John Green, an Episcopalian, puts our human predicament this way. “A species that has only ever found its way to more, must now find its way to less.” We must find our way to less. That’s why I’m grateful for all of the donations to our solar panel project. At St. Michael’s we’ll be cutting the church’s reliance on the oil we can’t replace. We’ll be putting power into the grid that doesn’t cost so much.
John’s Vision for Healing
This week, I got thinking about Genesis, and God’s invitation to “fill the earth” because of the book of Revelation. The last book in the Bible drew me back to the first. I’ve noticed, we’ve been reading Revelation for the last few weeks, and none of my colleagues have chosen to preach on it.
I joke; and there’s a grain of truth. The visions in Revelation are unique in Scripture. Rational Episcopalians often shy away from the book. The revelation to John, which makes you wonder what sort of mushrooms might John have been ingesting on Patmos.
Whether John’s text was influenced by psychotropics, I don’t know. But there are pieces of his vision which, irrational as they may be, invite us to engage. There is one line in John’s vision that really caught my attention. You see, the tree of life is there. Whether this is the same tree that Adam and Eve pilfered from, we don’t know, but it seems an obvious echo to me. There is fruit in every season, and then comes the line I most needed to hear.
“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” The healing of the nations.
That line said to me, this week, yes, the earth has been filled. And frankly, human beings, you’ve filled it with all sorts of things that don’t belong: pain, sorrow, warfare, hatred, discrimination, suffering, extinction. You human beings inhabit a wounded world, and in many ways, you are the wound.
And yet, and yet, there is still healing. There is still hope. There is still a balm in Gilead.
We can learn to slow down, to use less. We can learn to pay attention, to our neighbors in need, to our human and our non-human neighbors. We can learn to live more gently. We can find healing.
Simone and I were talking a few weeks ago, and she mentioned that the Apache were often considered “less advanced” by European settlers, because, unlike the Pueblo peoples, they were nomadic. They continued to move around. They didn’t dig as many gardens in neat settled rows, which the Europeans thought of as more civilized.
But, the Apache practiced a form of agriculture Europeans simply missed. The Apache gathered certain foods from the wild, but as they moved through a certain ecosystem, they also intentionally cultivated particularly helpful plants. They made sure more seeds ended up in the soil. They diverted streams a bit to encourage more water to go where it was needed, moved less helpful plants that were blocking sunshine and nutrients, so that there would be more of a particular crop the next time a group came through. In this way, they had an effect on whole ecosystems.
Imagine an agricultural mind wide enough to work gently with the land, to encourage it to naturally produce the food you need. Imagine treating the earth not as ground to always be dug up and conquered, but as a sibling you can nurture into fruitfulness.
The most important work you do for this planet may simply be learning to pay more attention to your attention, to listen for the sounds of God’s spirit whispering through the leaves of the tree, that are for the healing of nations.
As much as God invited us to fill the earth at the beginning of creation, God is still inviting us now. To slow down. To pay attention. To walk gently on the soil. To listen to one another and our siblings on this planet, who desperately need us to pay closer attention.
In a world so busy, so rushed, always doing doing doing, so full of human endeavor for greatness, in a world so full, the invitation from God is often to simply slow down. To notice. Who is left waiting for some help?
Amen.
Mike Angell 