October 26, 10:30am (Sare Gordy)
Loving God is the incredibly courageous and bold act of staying in relationship with difficult people who challenge our way of thinking and who are like a stone in our shoe.
Download
Full Text
Sermons @ Trinity
October 26, 2008: Proper 25, Year A
“The 3rd Principle of Stewardship”
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
***
Good morning.
This is the third in a series of stewardship sermons that do not solicit you for any money.
In this time of financial crisis and extreme uncertainty, it makes a whole lot more sense for us to make some space for discernment: deep personal and communal discernment about who we are and whose we are. So that is what we are doing…discerning…reflecting…together and, I hope, individually and prayerfully.
Fifteen hundred years ago, a group of Polynesians set sail for a new home and traveled over 1000 miles of ocean until they reached what we call today Easter Island. While Easter Island was thickly forested and held fresh water it did not have a barrier reef which meant less abundant fishing than they were used to; nor was the soil as fertile as the islands from which they had migrated. In order to survive they would have to develop new skills and new strategies to add to the repertoire they had brought with them. And to some extent they did adapt.
One thing they learned was stone carving and they built huge stone figures to honor the gods and a vibrant religion thrived among them as the centerpiece of their culture.
For 1000 years they developed and prospered. In addition to the cut and burn agricultural methods they had brought with them, they adapted some new and more sustainable methods of agriculture as well…but not enough. Their population expanded past their adaptive methods and soon the cut and burn agriculture meant fewer and fewer trees.
In response to a looming crisis the Easter Islanders built bigger stone figures
in hopes of appeasing the gods who would fix the problem. When nothing else seemed to work they took to human sacrifice and cannibalism. Then war broke out between the two major villages. Even before a Dutch ship discovered them on Easter Day 1722, there were very few remaining Islanders and they became easy pickings for European domination and exceptionally vulnerable to the slave trade.*
*The description of Easter Island is adapted from “Leadership without Easy Answers” by Ronald Heifetz
I mention Easter Island because adaptation is a critical ingredient of good stewardship.
Here is another example, one from the biological process of adaptation for which social, religious or personal adaptation is simply a parallel. Most of us would be hard pressed to recognize the difference between a Bobcat and a Lynx. They are similar in size, shape, coloring and hunting acumen. The Lynx has pointy ears but I have seen them near each other in a zoo and they look remarkably similar.
The Bobcat is thriving while the Lynx is endangered. The reason is that the Bobcat will feast on many things including human garbage, while the Lynx is quite finicky and will only live off the jackrabbit. That means the Lynx’s destiny is linked inextricably to the jackrabbit and the jackrabbit’s habitat is diminishing.
Whatever the biological shift that has allowed the bobcat to adapt has not taken place for the Lynx. I suspect there is a biological component to how well some human beings adapt compared to others…In other words, some biologically-rooted personality quirk, the absence of which causes some people to be particularly brittle in terms of adaptation, while allowing others to be quick studies that thrive under the stress of adaptation.
But being human, and having a mind with the capacity to reason, all of us have the capability to adapt to new circumstances by adding new skills and strategies to our repertoire. Some may do it more easily or better than others,
but almost all of us have some capacity to learn to adapt to changing circumstances and changing environments.
This capacity to look at ourselves and reflect upon the consequences of our behavior, be it good or bad, also allows us to see and comprehend our imprint upon the situation at hand. It allows us to see and comprehend our involvement in the changes being rendered as well as imagining a set of responses to those changes.
This capacity has allowed human beings to live in every imaginable kind of habitat and environment on the globe, from windswept polar icecaps to bone dry and blistering deserts. Adaption has a biological component a social component and an individual and personal component to it. The biological is easy to see and understand and it is a perfect reflection of the social and personal.
For example, on a hot summer day we sweat – some of us more than others. Sweat is the body’s mechanism for cooling itself so that we do not have a heat stroke. That’s why I am so much cooler than most people. Sweat is the body’s method of adapting to temperature change.
Homeostasis is the word for the physiological process I am referring to and it comes from the Greek meaning, “to stand equally.” If the human body is infected by bacteria the biological system responds to fight off the infection and restore health – the body literally seeks equilibrium. And the body is pretty good at it…and quite powerful.
But the same can be true in the social and personal arenas. We seek harmony…we like to be able to live without threat, fear, vulnerability or a sense of dis-ease. We segregate ourselves into neighborhoods of people who we think look like us, act like us, share the same values as us. Gated Communities are the ultimate embodiment of the thirst for equilibrium. People who have choices usually go to clubs and schools and churches where they think they will be with people who are like them or will accept them. This desire for balance and harmony is a basic human yearning.
As individuals we seek friendships partnerships and associations with people who make us comfortable. We tend to avoid people who put us on edge, who believe things that we disagree with and who trouble us in some way – even if only because they remind us of someone else we didn’t like.
We engage in activities that we tend to be good at, or have been recognized for, or reward us in some way. We tend to avoid those activities that we sense might end with failure or that we simply are not good at or have to work at strenuously just to get by. Now you are likely listening to all this
and thinking “Well Dah!”
But here is the punch line: It is in courting that very uncomfortable place of disequilibrium that serves as the basis of truly good stewardship. While the body seeks a return to balance it is the sources of imbalance or disequilibrium that trigger its response toward recovery.
Or to put it another way, if there had been people within the culture of the Eastern Islanders who recognized that more and bigger religion was not working, and that they needed to change their agricultural methods, they might have had a chance to adapt and survive.
There is no doubt that anyone who would have who challenged the efficacy of building bigger stone statues to the gods would have been treated poorly, but if there were enough of them and they were persistent enough over time,
it may have radically changed the outcome.
The late historian Margaret Tuckman, wrote a wonderful historical survey entitled, “The March of Folly” in which she catalogued the ruinous and self-defeating decisions that governments have made in history – all the way from Troy to the Renaissance Popes to Vietnam.
In addition to describing in detail the stupendously self-destructive decisions
that leaders made, she also provided evidence that, in every case, there were people present who warned about the decision and who provided information that, if listened to, would have saved them from folly.
It is so easy to see our present tragedy in Iraq as a decision pushed forward by ideology and personal passions and to hell with the cautions and warnings of those who offered different perspectives.
Good stewardship…good stewardship requires that we create and nurture and sustain relationships and sources of dissonance so that our own capacities for denial are always being rattled and shaken. You and I have an astoundingly brilliant capacity for denial. No really, every single one of us is fantastic at denying what we do not want to hear and what we do not want to see and especially what we do not want to feel. And the moment we feel most vulnerable and our reserves are the most brittle and our resilience at low ebb is precisely the moment at which our denial moves into a higher gear.
I wish I knew why we were like that and I wish I knew how to change that component of the human mind, but for most of us the best we can do is acknowledge it and then compensate for it. When we do we are being good stewards.
We like to think that being a good steward has to do with how much we love nature; or how close we feel to the earth; or how much solidarity we sense with the poor and the oppressed; or what we think about global warming; or what we believe about God or Jesus or Salvation.
But being a good steward has very little if anything to do with how we feel or what think or what we believe. Let me use the Gospel we heard this morning to explain. In order to understand what Jesus is talking about when he commends to us the ancient Jewish wisdom to Love God and Love neighbor and love self, we have to peel back the French Romanic ideal that love has to do with how we feel.
To those of you who are dating, about to be married or are newlyweds, this is a little bit like trash-talking Santa on Christmas Eve, so I apologize.
In our world love is all about feelings…all about emotion. M. Scott Peck wrote about falling in love as the disappearance of personal boundaries when two people yearn to feel as one. But, he added, that the real work of relationship does not and cannot be engaged until those boundaries snap back into place, and we see that we are two very different people with different, and very often opposing, needs, desires and values.
The work of relationship, he said, is not about obliterating those differences but in allowing them to work on us so that we adapt and grow and change from the experience of being in conflict with one another.
Love is not about how we feel toward one another…Love has very little to do with how gooshy our affections are at the moment, or how passionate our desires…Rather, the love that Jesus is talking about has to do with what we do. Love has to do with how we act – it’s a verb.
That’s why I can’t stand those sickly sweet love songs to Jesus that dominates so much Christian music – we’ve taken that French Romantic myth of love and sucked Jesus and God right into it as if Loving God was like a pre-teen crush. But Loving God is a bruising act of will that places us in front of the tribe where we tell them it’s our heedless consumption that is the problem not how religious we are or how big we make our statues.
Loving God is an act of tough love when we struggle to find the right way to tell someone we think they are in denial about their behavior – or about their tolerating someone else’s behavior toward them.
Loving God is the incredibly courageous and bold act of staying in relationship with difficult people who challenge our way of thinking and who are like a stone in our shoe.
Loving God is the brilliance of mind to intentionally seek out diversity in our friendships, in our living environment, in our work relationships, in our spirituality and religious practice, and in our knowledge and embrace of the culture. Loving God is the one-step-in-front of the other, tedious act of hoeing justice and peace and never, never, never giving up or succumbing to cynicism.
And the fact is, and I think this is what Jesus was saying, that in fact, there is absolutely no difference between Loving God and Loving Neighbor and Loving Self. It is all the same and done through the same actions. To love one is to love the others because the Creation is seamless.
So, as I am sure you recognize, when we are talking about love as a verb we are talking about the act of stewardship. For what is stewardship if not the act of loving?
The third principle of stewardship is that love is a verb, and that the act of loving that for which we have been given stewardship, will inevitably require us to adapt and to be the guides and architects of adaptation. Let me repeat that, because I recognize this is not a down and dirty easy to repeat 1, 2, 3.
The third principle of stewardship
is that love is a verb;
and that the act of loving
that for which we have been given stewardship,
will inevitably require us to adapt
and to be the guides and architects of adaptation.
So as we come forward to light candles today, I invite us to bring with us a prayer for clarity, a prayer for courage, and a prayer for strength, that we may listen to and hear the voices around us and within us, calling for us to adapt our behavior…calling for us to love with our actions…calling for us to do justice, to be kindness to act with humility.
