I find it helpful as our awareness of the climate crisis increases and it feels like the window for significant global action to mitigate climate change is closing quickly to reconnect both with the natural world and with the ancient traditions of the church. The former can be bittersweet; listening to a dawn chorus that doesn’t seem as loud and varied as it fifty or even twenty years ago is heartbreaking even as the remaining songs become more precious. Bittersweet though it is, reconnecting with the beauty and wonder of our world gives me comfort even as it makes more real what all is at risk. The latter — reconnecting with the church’s traditions — reminds me of how deeply our spirits are connected with the earth’s seasons and all the creatures with whom we share this planet. Connecting Christian beliefs and calendars with more ancient pagan traditions is sometimes taken as a sort of trick used to increase the number of Christians, but I see it as a recognition that our deepest connections to the earth and our deepest connections to God are different aspects of holiness. Observing days that are key markers for seasons and agriculture helps us connect with God who is the creator and sustainer of all that is.
The parish where I serve has brought back an annual observance of the tradition of Rogation Sunday. What follows is a reflection based on the sermon I preached before we went outside to bless the gardens. It begins with links to the Scripture texts for the sermon.
Last Sunday was not only Mother’s Day on the secular calendar and the Sixth Sunday of Easter on our church calendar, but it was also Rogation Sunday. Today (Wednesday) is the end of the three Rogation Days, the three days preceding Ascension Day.
If you’ve never heard of the Rogation Days, you’re not alone. Many parishes don’t observe them, and those that do almost all that do observe a Rogation Sunday instead of the three weekdays. That’s why at the parish where I serve as one of the deacons, Church of the Resurrection in Omaha, the altar party and congregation left the building at the end of our Sunday morning service and gathered on the lawn near some of our flowerbeds. From there, we made a small procession and walked and blessed our flowerbeds and trees, the vegetable and herb gardens behind neighboring Incarnation Monastery, and the flowerbeds that welcome visitors going up the front walk to the monastery.
The Rogation Days come to us in the Episcopal Church from the English tradition of walking around or “beating” the boundaries of a village’s fields and pastures in a religious procession, stopping along the way to mark important corners or landmarks of the village boundaries and to bless the fields and pastures at the beginning of a new growing season. Along with its religious significance, this practice of marking the boundaries had a practical purpose back when many people were illiterate and observing the boundaries between village fields was important for keeping the peace.
At our parish, our Rogation observance not only serves as a reminder of this piece of Anglican Church history and a reason to gather outdoors on a spring morning, and ask for God’s blessings on our own garden spaces, but also to reflect on other boundaries that are important for our prosperity, our own well-being.
Last year the sermon talked about the nine planetary boundaries that describe the limits on categories like climate change and biodiversity that we must stay within in order to maintain the conditions in which humankind and the diverse network of other living things with which our lives are intertwined and on which our lives depend can at the very least survive and, at our best, thrive and prosper.
This year I preached a sermon that focused more on the necessity of marking and staying within the climate change boundary by limiting our greenhouse gas emissions. This necessity was recently highlighted by the UN climate report that was published on March 20. We are in danger of shooting so far beyond that boundary that there would be no going back. The scientists who wrote the report did so in hopes that the world’s leaders might pay attention and take the lead in making systemic changes in the next seven years that begin pulling us back within the boundary that allows us to continue to survive and, as we pull back further from the boundary, to thrive. But the world’s leaders and the rest of us can’t do that work unless we can see and mark the boundary and understand its meaning enough to make the necessary systemic changes in a fairly short time.
So far, the lack of urgent action from the world’s leaders and the lack of conversation about this in the media and the general public suggests that the existence of this boundary and its meaning for our future need to be made much clearer, or maybe it suggests that people are aware and simply don’t want to talk about it.
And now this morning we learned that the World Meteorological Organization predicts that we have 66% chance of moving past 1.5 degrees C of warming past average pre-industrial global temperatures by 2027. [See the BBC report ‘Global warming set to break key 1.5C limit for first time.] The prediction is for a temporary rise in temperature past what is considered the mark at which climate change becomes catastrophic. The good news buried in this is that the more we can pull down greenhouse gas emissions, the more temporary this rise in temperature would be. It need not be permanent at this point.
The Revised Common Lectionary texts for the Sixth Sunday of Easter from the Gospel of John and the Acts of the Apostles can shed some light on where we find ourselves right now and how we as Christians might think about difficult things that we may be tempted to ignore.
In the Gospel text, Jesus says both “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” and “They who keep my commandments are those who love me.” Loving Jesus and taking what Jesus taught us seriously enough to follow his teachings are two sides of the same coin. We can’t have one without the other! Since Jesus’s primary commandments are to love God and love one another, loving Jesus entails caring for the world that God created out of love and caring about our global neighbors or nearer neighbors who are among the first and worst of those affected adversely by climate change and environmental degradation. This passage reminds us that even if we would be more comfortable not thinking about difficult things, loving Jesus entails doing something when humankind and all of God’s creation is at risk.
The encounter in the Acts passage between St. Paul and some men in Athens in ancient Greece points the way to getting clear about how to act wisely and faithfully in the months and years ahead. Paul, who earlier in this chapter of Acts has been taken aback by the number of temples and shrines dedicated to the many and various gods that the ancient Greeks believed in, begins talking to a group of Athenians about an altar with the inscription “To an unknown God”. Paul tells the Greeks that he is there to proclaim this God they do not know. This is the Living God, a god who doesn’t live in shrines made by humans. This God needs nothing from us because this God made us and everything else that exists. God gives us life and breath and sets people down in finite times and spaces, fixing, says Paul, “the boundaries of the places where they would live”, the boundaries of our lands.
In other words, Paul is saying that we have things backwards. We act as if God is bound or limited, capable of being kept in a shrine or a box, when in fact the Living God, the God that is completely different from an idol made of wood or metal and kept in a special place, is in fact both in all times and all places and beyond all times and spaces. We mortals, on the other hand, have been created by God to live in specific times and places. None of us is in all things; rather, in God we “live and move and have our being”. God is close to us, closer to us than our own breath, but God is also much greater than anything of which we can conceive. God has no limits while we have definite limits.
The ancient Greeks, of course, weren’t alone in this confusion. While their professed belief in many gods brought the confusion out into the open, we are more subtle. We don’t often label our false idols as actual gods. However, we continue to live as if we ourselves were gods with no limits living on a planet with no boundaries, while we too often think of God — the actual, Living God — as somehow confined to our designated religious spaces and to certain times — Sundays, Christmas, Easter, personal emergencies — and conveniently locked up the rest of the time. Worshiping God and following Jesus’s teachings don’t interfere with our consumption of goods and services and entertainment if we confine consideration of God to select days, locations, or issues. But in fact, there are boundaries for us; there are no boundaries for God.
We now face the greatest global crisis in human history because of our failure to respect the very real boundaries of the laws of physics. Along with often failing to recognize the very real planetary and moral boundaries that are an essential part of being human, the Church and the wider society have a history of sinning grievously in putting artificial boundaries on people that we pigeon-hole into categories based on race, gender, disability, economic status, or culture. We have disregarded true boundaries while sinning in the name of false boundaries.
The Gospel text speaks to our confusion between what is true and what is false. Jesus promises the disciples that after he has left and they no longer have him there to teach them and guide them, he will send an Advocate. The Greek word is paraclete, meaning someone who walks beside us. Jesus says this is the Spirit of truth. When we invoke the Holy Spirit in prayer, oftentimes a piece of what we are seeking is help in discerning truth from falsehood, in finding our way out of moral, intellectual, or emotional confusion into the assurance that no matter how difficult a place we find ourselves in, we are grounded in God’s love and following Jesus’s way as best we can. Listening with open minds and hearts for the whispers and waiting for the nudges of the Holy Spirit can lead us from falsehood into truth.
We know from the hard work the Episcopal Church has undertaken in the past fifty years that it takes courage to recognize the mistakes we have made in putting false boundaries where they do not belong and failing to recognize boundaries that are real. Whenever the church has said that people with certain characteristics are somehow lesser children of God, barred from receiving all the sacraments of the Church, ineligible for ordination to Holy Orders, not able to serve as Deputies to General Convention or diocesan councils, kept from serving on vestries or serving as acolytes, we have made what philosophers call category mistakes. We’ve sorted people into a category labeled “not quite holy enough” who didn’t belong there at all because, I suspect, first, in Jesus’s eyes nobody is too far gone to belong in that category, and then especially not those who already loved Jesus and simply wanted to serve him and worship him and be part of a Christian community.
Even though the work isn’t finished, those of us who are older rejoice in how far we have gone in leaving that thinking behind, while younger adults sometimes have trouble even imagining the nonsense of that world. And it was ridiculously hard work getting to this point. People clung to those old artificial boundaries as if they were actual physical laws of the universe, even as we glibly ignored the laws of physics themselves, helped along by false assurances from a couple of the major fossil fuel companies who hid the truth about carbon dioxide emissions and global warming from us.
People clung to those old false boundaries of prejudice because recognizing the truth meant having to change how we lived, and that can scare people. In the same way, we continue to avoid recognizing the truth of our planetary boundaries because recognizing them requires us to do the hard work of making big, systemic changes in the way we live, and that can be scary. But as we know from the other changes we have made, change that looks difficult and scary before it’s begun more often than not opens up wonderful possibilities that we could not even have imagined before. Our lives become richer, not bleaker, and our faith, far from suffering from change, becomes deeper and more real.
This year during the Rogation Days, as we consider all sorts of boundaries and pray for blessings, we can remember that this quaint English tradition is meant to keep us honest about our boundaries. Clearness about the difference between the Living God and the small gods created by human beings makes it easier to discern the difference between real boundaries and false boundaries and open the way to abundant life.
The Collect for the Sixth Sunday of Easter says that God’s promises “exceed all that we can desire”; God’s blessings for us are not bound by our limited intellect or imagination. Letting go of our fear of change and our false perceptions and opening ourselves to the guidance of the Holy Spirit can bring blessings that we can’t even imagine.
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The Collect for the Sixth Sunday of Easter from The Book of Common Prayer: O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.