sermons
The Way of Jesus In Public Life
Green Jesus, Wild Things, Abundance, and Freedom
Steve Watson
Nov 03, 2024
Friends, Grace and I drove yesterday from Central Pennsylvania to here in Eastern Massachusetts. I was reminded of three things. One, I love my wife. No one else I’d rather road trip with than her. Two, I have a back injury still, so maybe fewer literal road trips. And three, this is of course the election, and this nation is all over the map in terms of what we want. Here we’re worried, many of us in this church, many of us in this nation too.
And I’m wondering as an American, as a follower of Jesus, as a pastor here at Reservoir, when it’s all over, how will we show up in the world together?
- How will we find some center, some peace?
- If things go as we would view poorly, how do we keep moving forward?
- How do we keep the faith?
- What do we do?
Friends, for me at least, my start with those questions is to look to the way of Jesus. To wonder, what does it look like now to participate in his vision for public life, for beloved community? To wonder how do we believe, during this set of circumstances, that God is not far off but is our creator and our mom and dad, that God is good, and that there is more than enough of everything that matters for us all.
Friends, I hope this means we keep showing up together. Obviously, small scale. Call your friends this week. Come next Sunday, so we can be together. But deeper too, I hope we won’t retreat into private withdrawal or fear. That we won’t wait for someone else to do the work. Even if we’re afraid. Even if we’re angry.
Today I want to talk about one inner path toward living this way. Toward peace and grounding, a way of keeping the faith in hard times, so we can be people of love and courage.
Four short scriptures today. Here’s the first.
Luke 3: 21-22 (Common English Bible)
21 When everyone was being baptized, Jesus also was baptized. While he was praying, heaven was opened
22 and the Holy Spirit came down on him in bodily form like a dove. And there was a voice from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness.”
We had a baptism in today’s in person service. One of our congregation’s children claimed our faith, her parent’s faith, as her own, saying: I’m God’s child, and I will follow Jesus. Sarah, we’re all here for you today. I’m so excited! This is God’s word for you too and for all of us at our baptisms. You’re God’s kid. God loves you. You make God – and us – so happy.
Baptism isn’t just for us, though, it’s for God too. Jesus got baptized. And look at what the text says God did.
God became a bird. Seriously, that’s what the text says:
the Holy Spirit came down on him in bodily form like a dove.
OK, I know it says:
like a dove.
It’s a comparison, a simile. We shouldn’t read everything in the Bible so literally, yeah, I teach that. But in this story, I think people actually saw a bird land on Jesus. That’s a noticeable thing, when a bird lands and perches on someone for a minute. And it probably happened to Jesus as he got out of the water, and people were probably like: look, it’s a sign. God is with him.
Mark Wallace has this extraordinary book called: When God Was a Bird because that’s part of how God is present to us all, through the natural world. For Jesus, his first encounter in the Bible with the embodied God happened when God became a bird. Second scripture.
Luke 4:1-2 (Common English Bible)
4 Jesus returned from the Jordan River full of the Holy Spirit, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.
Right after the baptism, Jesus is off to the wilderness.
Jesus didn’t spend most of his life in cities or climate-controlled buildings. He spent it on lakes and in gardens, in open air workshops and breezy dining rooms, walking on dirt paths with his friends, and on retreat in the wilderness.
Friends, people talk about white Jesus. The blue eyed, yellow haired Jesus of the European colonial imagination, the one who still shows up on church walls and Christian art and film and all. White people, claiming the Palestinian Jewish son of God as their own, making him look like them, claiming the faith of Jesus as belonging to their white, Euro, Western civilization and then trying to conquer the earth in his name. One of the great religious scams of the past several hundred years. Nothing wrong with us so-called white people. God loves us too. But white Jesus is a violent scam, it’s gotta go.
So we talk about Black Jesus, and that’s a good corrective. Jesus came from dark haired, dark eyed, olive-skinned peoples, where Africa and Asia meet. He was poor, part of a colonized people, executed by European colonizers. So Black Jesus is infinitely better and closer to reality than White Jesus.
But let’s take a moment today and notice what I’ll call Green Jesus. Jesus lived close to the land. He knew nothing about big cities and modern technology but he knew a lot about growing things and how God could show up in the form of a bird, and how God could teach us through all of creation that surrounds us.
Third scripture:
Luke 6:43-44 (Common English Bible)
43 “A good tree doesn’t produce bad fruit, nor does a bad tree produce good fruit.
44 Each tree is known by its own fruit. People don’t gather figs from thorny plants, nor do they pick grapes from prickly bushes.
Green Jesus was a teacher of trees and fruit and grapes and vines and dirt and figs. When Jesus wants to convince us of our possibilities for peace and abundance in a stressful world, he says – look at how the lilies grow.
Jesus believed that nature is our teacher. Like the Franciscan tradition in the Catholic church, which says that nature is God’s footprint. Or like the Franciscan priest St. Bonaventure, who taught that the natural world is the first book by which God is revealed.
Friends, how do we find God in hard times? How do we find peace? How do we live less of a scarcity mindset, withdrawn, afraid, alone, leaving others holding the bag because we’re not showing up for each other.
One way is we read the first book. We get out and join Jesus among the trees and gardens and wild things.
Ninety year old Wendell Berry, one of the great naturalists and Christian writers of our time, wrote about this in his poem The Peace of Wild Things. It goes like this:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
-Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things
When despair grew in me as a kid, long before I’d heard this poem, I spent a lot of time walking alone in the woods. I remember the woods as a lonely place, it can still make me sad. But I remember it as a peaceful place too, a place of escape, a place where I was free.
A friend of mine, a Christian leader in West Virginia, has started an order of Appalachian followers in the Way of Jesus, and one of the things they’re doing is wilderness retreats, maintaining contact with the particular land they steward and honor as a place where God is with us.
I do this still. One morning this past week, when I was thinking about something sad in my life, I took twenty minutes to walk in a small park, where I could look at the leaves and the sky, and touch trees with my hands, trees younger than me but already so strong, trees older than me that will still be here long after I’m gone. And it didn’t take the sad away, but it steadied me.
There are a lot of reasons why this works. Beauty moves us. Walking and sitting and breathing among natural environments, even looking at pictures of them, steadies us. We didn’t make any of this, nature and time and God did. But it feeds our bodies and souls, makes the oxygen we breathe. It’s a sign of the great abundance of God, that there is more than enough for us if we don’t screw it up.
So friends, this election week, when despair for the world grows in you, and you wake in the night at the smallest sound, in fear of what your life and your children’s lives might be, look at the leaves and sky. Touch a tree for a while. Take your shoes off and let your feet touch the ground.
I didn’t make this up of course. The Japanese art of forest bathing (shinrin-yoku) is on trend. The media titan Charlamagne tha God has been talking and writing about mental health and the value of walking barefoot. It’s called grounding or earthing, letting your bare feet touch the earth again.
And friends, this is not just for ancient people like Jesus, or rural people or suburban people with yards and forest reserves nearby. It’s for all of us. Quite a few of our members here work in environmental protection and stewardship in different ways.
I think of Nate Proctor and your political advocacy for abundance mindsets and environmental stewardship. I think of Mike Orr, running Cambridge’s recycling program. And on this point, I think particularly of Mardi Fuller, who’s now on the Board of the Appalachian Mountain Club and has been doing amazing work as an advocate and activist in equitable access to natural environments. Insisting that connection to the earth in the US is not just for white people either, even though white people have regularly claimed greater access to and ownership of our mountains and beaches and forests.
This peace and grounding and God-soaked presence among the wild things is for all of us. And so friends, even if the tree you’re touching is one on a tiny strip of earth between a sidewalk and a busy street, even if the way you get your feet on the dirt or the grass is for three minutes in an urban park, where you’ve checked carefully first to make sure there’s no broken glass, God’s creation is our birthright, all of ours. Touch it this week, ask God to fill you with peace and a spirit of abundance, that you can keep showing up for a fuller life and a fuller community and a better world.
The other invitation I want to make, this one more of a long-term one, is to live on the earth as a steward, not a master.
Live on the earth as a steward, not a master.
Final scripture:
Genesis 1:28 (The Message)
God blessed them:
“Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Earth! Take charge!
Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air,
for every living thing that moves on the face of Earth.”
I co-lead a Saturday morning Bible study, and we’ve been reading parts of Genesis this fall. When we read this line from the first creation story there, it inspired us but it also troubled us. Because that phrase “be responsible” and “take charge” is often translated as dominion.
And so our Christian ancestors read this as a charge to master the earth. Take charge, bend it to your will. And our economic ancestors have read it as an invitation to dominion. Take charge of the earth, and take everything you want from it. Use it up, burn it down, extract what you can. Because one, it doesn’t matter. People are what God cares about, not the rest of creation. And two, you can get away with it. Kill off the buffalo. They’re fun to stuff and show off, and there seem like there are plenty of them. Burn that gas, and drill, baby, drill, because we need that energy.
But this is wrong. Because the earth matters. God didn’t only make people. God doesn’t only care about people. God cares about trees and terrains and figs and fish and buffalo and bugs and all of it, because God lives here too and nature is ours in a sense, but it is ours to learn from and to take care of and to take responsibility for, that we can preserve it for the generations to comes.
This isn’t ownership or dominion, it is stewardship.
A steward is not above something but a part of something
A steward doesn’t claim possession but takes care of something for its rightful owners.
A steward doesn’t use and extract but enjoys and preserves.
Friends, I believe it’s a timely and critical aspect of the Way of Jesus for all of us to actively participate in the environmental justice movement, to join Green Jesus in honoring and preserving the health of the natural world for future generations.
Please vote like this matters. Please consume like this matters. Please lead and advocate like this matters.
It’s critical to our call as a species, to steward creation with God.
And it’s critical to our spiritual well-being as well.
I’ve read the author and critic Andy Crouch write that one of the great spiritual crises of our age is our general lack of access to truly dark night skies.
Kind of a weird comment to read at first for an urban person, until you get way, way out of the city and look up on a clear night, and it takes your breath away.
One of our kids is going to college in rural New England, and we were together recently, and we’d been talking about some heavy things, and we were driving where he lives right now, on a rural road with no streetlights or house lights around, and I said:
hey, let’s stop for a minute.
And we pulled over and got out of the car, and just looked up together for a few minutes.
And man, did it take our breath away.
Neither of us knew what we were doing. We couldn’t name all the stars and constellations and all. We could barely sort out the light of a plane passing by miles above, from the hundreds of stars we could see.
But those hundreds of stars, shining their light we could see across trillions of miles and years of times. Zeke was like:
Wow, if something happened on one of those stars right now, we wouldn’t see it for years and years, if ever.
That’s perspective for you.
Two men, father in son, each walking around with our burdens and fears, but here, arms on each other’s shoulders, showing up together in this beautiful universe
Willie James Jennings writes:
God is everywhere waiting for us to arrive.
We often wonder: where has God gone? Why is this happening? And fair questions. Life is hard.
But the beautiful truth is that God is everyone waiting for us to arrive.
Friends, I gave this sermon to bless your participation and our church’s participation in the environmental stewardship and justice movement. Green work is God’s work, since we’re stewards of this earth, called by God to responsibility and care, not dominion.
And I gave it because I want you to touch the earth and look at and learn from the natural world this election week. Anxious times are going to drive us to scarcity mindsets – to fear, to withdrawal, to greed and resentment and separation. When what we most need are abundant mindsets. To show up for ourselves and each other. To show up for the world together, trusting that a good God is showing up for us still, here everywhere, waiting for us to arrive.
So I want to end on a small moment of beauty and artistry. Several years ago, our own Kaiti Jones wrote and recorded a song inspired by this Wendell Berry poem. A few of our kids sang backup for her on this album. So we’ll end with her song.
“Wild Things” by Kaiti Jones
I’ve never been too good at letting go
I keep letters that you wrote me in a box under my window
And I sometimes read them in the dim light of the evening
Wonder what it was that made you feel like leaving for the wild things
I’ve got a neighbor she is 85
She said honey I don’t feel like I am living life
I’m just existing
Waiting on the next big snow covered morning
I said Barbara don’t you lean into despair
I have come in through the garden and there’s signs of life out there
among the wild things
I’ve never been too good at growing old
Every turning of the year feels like it creeps in with the cold
But you remind me that there’s beauty in expanse
Will I remember how to free my legs to dance
among the wild things
And when I’m old and when I’m grey
When I’ve all my days behind me and I’ve all my words to say
Would you lay me down to rest among the meadows
Watch me smile as I leave you and I’m headed for the wild things
And when the darkness comes
Tell me where I’m from
And how I might return to the peace
of the wild things
And when my body’s in the land
And my soul has burst wide open with its unfettered plans
I will know I was somebody that was loved
And I’ll rest easy knowing I have seen enough
of the wild things