April 22, 2007 - Mortal, have you seen this?

Third Sunday of Easter
22 April 2007
Ezekiel 47.1-12
Mortal, have you seen this?
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007

Not too long ago my daughter Paige mentioned in passing that she used to collect her thoughts about the many distresses of adolescence by hiking down through the woods behind our house in Indiana to a special place by a creek that ran along our property line. We lived on just a few acres, but our hillside was so difficult for loggers to access that it was still dense with trees, some of them over two hundred years old. Paige could be alone at the creek with her contemplations, which were complicated in all the usual ways for a teenage girl—and also, of course, complicated in the particular ways that her own life handed to her.

I was so deeply touched by my daughter’s offhand recollection that I often think of it still. There have been such turmoils that I’ve seen my children suffer with that, no matter what I ever thought of to do to ease them, I could not quiet their hearts and make life okay. But there was a reliable presence in our very back yard with which Paige found peace. So I am comforted that she had found a certain place that was nature’s equivalent of Psalm 23, our familiar psalm of comfort.

Nature’s equivalent of Psalm 23. That, of course, gets it the wrong way around. Psalm 23 is the poet’s equivalent of nature. “He leads me beside still waters,” the psalmist has written, “He restores my soul.” The restorative waters of our natural world impart the wordless power of God to cure the sickness and anguish in our soul, and a teenage girl knows the power of these waters intuitively. The author of Psalm 23 recalls of the truth of nature’s gift of still waters, and it would be at least ungrateful, and probably unfaithful, if we were to forget it.

The prophet Ezekiel must have spent his share of days around waters, and so waters began to slosh around in the caverns of his soul. One day, waiting for God to tell him something about the way of life, a vision of waters flowing from below the threshold of the temple came to him. Like his vision of the valley of dry bones that all come together and gradually come to life, Ezekiel’s vision of waters sounds as if it was inspired by a fantasy novel. It all sounds very interesting, but we can’t imagine it ever happening. What it’s high time for us to understand, of course, is that Ezekiel’s vision really is true. It may not be true in the sense that it could have turned up as a video clip on YouTube, but it is true in the sense that Psalm 23 is true. If you think about it long enough—and at a time when you really need a truth for your soul—Ezekiel’s vision will be the truth that reminds you what your faith is, what it’s for, and what to do about it.

Ezekiel sees the water pouring upward from the depths below the temple threshold, where we find God not dominating things from way up high and far away but enlivening things from way inside and very near. In Ezekiel’s vision, God does not send down decrees or plagues or victories in war but rather sends out the vitalizing element of water to sustain entire systems of life. In this vision, in fact, God is more than sustaining the life systems of a place—God is restoring them. Where the waters flow through, and then out of, the Arabah valley, there is the Dead Sea—full of salt, empty of life—but then come the waters that flow from the life-giving river. “Wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live,” Ezekiel’s vision tells him, “once these waters reach there.”

If ever I prayed that a vision in the Bible be literally true, this may be the one I want the most. The little creek that gave my daughter peace runs with lovely, cool water, at least a trickle, all year. That part is like Ezekiel’s vision, the loveliness of the water, but there is another side to it. I would not have let her drink from the creek. There was the potential for sickness from giardia, which is only due to so many animals, but then there was the chemical runoff from lawns that have a bright, big tank truck pull to them up once a month for killing grubs and things. So the creek, with its parasites and chemicals, has become only symbolic of Ezekiel’s vision, having lost the full life-giving quality it had when only God and nature made it what it was.

If that were the worst of it, I suppose I shouldn’t complain. We can treat the water with chlorine to cleanse it of parasites, or we can pump safer water from a well. As middle class Americans, we can still afford safe water, which is better than a lot of people can say. At least my children have had clean air to breathe, not like the air I grew up with in Los Angeles. In those days, the air was so bad during the summer that our lungs hurt when we played outside, and we had come indoors to lie down and recover our breath. Fortunately, back in those days, people believed in the ability of a society to solve problems. So society, through the government my parents elected, did make the air in Los Angeles clean enough that my nieces were able to breathe much more easily growing up there.

But that’s when my parents and their parents were electing the government. Today, we’ve been told so relentlessly that the government we’ve been electing can’t do anything right that so we pretty much leave it up to God to send clean water from under the ground and clean air from out of the heavens—or we’re not going to have any. Not that we couldn’t find a way to clean things up, if we wanted to and would sacrifice to, but it would just cost too much. Well, cost . . . and our moral position that other people in other counties should have to go first.

My parents and their parents lived by the quaint notion that they were moral exemplars, which persuaded them to do selfless things in the belief that their leadership would induce better moral conduct in others. Starting with a lot of people in my generation, the idea of a moral vision has evolved. It is now someone else’s turn to do what we tell them is right. So we’re not going to sign any Kyoto climate treaty or enforce any standards for carbon emissions (unless the Supreme Court makes us) or drive smaller cars or take the occasional train.

It is not our concern, as I read the news from Washington, that virtually all recognized climatologists agree that the atmosphere is warming considerably due to human causes. Our position is that we’re conducting an experiment with the carbon that we admit we’re pumping into the atmosphere at a rate dwarfing anything in history. When someone finally proves that we are irreversibly changing the climate to a condition that will not support life as we know it, fine, we’ll consider changing. Only then will we deem the experiment a success. Until then, the experiment is inconclusive. We expect our children to accept the results of our experiment on the planet we’re leaving to them.

Of course, this is the point where my sense of my own character feels shaky to me. I don’t have the kind of nerve to gamble confidently enough to expect to win a poker game like this. I think about my daughter and her sister and brothers, and my grandchildren, and I start wanting to fold my hand. I’m too afraid of what’ll happen if I lose. Not that I think my children would ever stop loving me, even if I ruined the planet for them. They’re too good for that. But I do think about how disappointed they will be in me. I’ve protected them, guided them and raised them with care, for which they’ll be grateful, but I’m afraid that if the planet I gambled with to pay for my lifestyle turns brown and dies, they will come to wonder if I ever really loved them.

My grandchildren are so sweet and innocent, these days, and some day they will find out what I did and why it caused their life to be whatever I caused it to be. I have every reason to expect to see them graduate from high school and even from college—I’m that young!—but even by then it could feel awfully uncomfortable to listen to the graduation speeches about how it may still be possible to prevent the global catastrophe so many are already describing.

But hopefully we won’t have to face that. Some people think that climate change may be the way God always intended to end history, so we could be happy about it all. Others are sure that God will just make the problems go away—with a miracle—because God always provides. There are not a few who are so confident in human ingenuity that they fully expect inventions to appear that will solve everything.

There are countless reasons for us to accept no responsibility for the conditions we’re creating on the planet. So why am I so troubled?

Hard to say. You could argue that I’m not smart enough to be troubled, which may be true. Among the people who think climate change is God’s strategy for the end times are some authentic geniuses, as there are also geniuses who are sure either that God will save the planet or that human ingenuity will. People way smarter than I am are not troubled, so why should I be troubled?

I am troubled, because when I read my Bible, I feel something deep in my bones. When I read that God sends water from below the threshold of the temple to feed rivers and freshen the seas, something deep within me stirs with wonder. When I read that every living creature swarms wherever the river of this water goes, my soul thrills with joy. When I read that “people will stand fishing beside the sea” spreading nets to gather the “great many kinds” of fish, my heart swells with gratitude. When I read that there will be swamps and marshes that shall not become fresh, that they be “left for salt,” I bow to the balance between purity and taint, between stream and bog, between the fruitful and the barren.

When I read Ezekiel in my Bible and then look at the planet as we are remaking it, I am troubled. In Ezekiel’s vision I see God restoring Paradise to earth, not humanity preparing earth for the Apocalypse. I see in Ezekiel’s vision a natural order with human beings playing a glad and humble role, not arrogantly rolling of the dice. I see in Ezekiel’s vision the submission of human invention to the glory God’s artistry, not the glorification of human genius over the delicacy of God’s balance. When Ezekiel’s guide to his vision asks, “Mortal, have you seen this?” I have to admit with the prophet that, yes, I have seen it. I have seen it all very clearly; I know. So when I also see too much human action clash with Ezekiel’s divine vision, I am troubled.

Now there are, these days, people who have watched all that our culture and technology has been harming our planet with, and their moral faculties are surfacing in ways that bring them together and rouse them to action. One day, Sue Everdyke sent an email to several people she thought might share a common sense of responsibility, as people of faith, for not only doing better in their personal life, but also for leading better in their religious and social life.

People met, and the work of what became the Green Team took on a life of its own. Rick Walton agreed to chair the team, but what you also see is a self-motivated group of people with a sixth sense for collaboration. The result has been the very significant program for Earth Day out of Park Presbyterian Church which reminds Newark of the long-standing leadership our community has come to expect from this congregation. The world will be just a little more beautiful for what we are accomplishing as a church, and our contribution to the life-saving work of environmental responsibility also yields life-giving energy for the congregation. Ezekiel would be pleased. God will be pleased.

We may be participating in a transformation in our society from passivity in the face of a global crisis to the rallying of humanity’s best moral, personal and intellectual resources. Even if we are for a time a prophetic voice crying in the wilderness, the integrity of our resolve will make us more whole, more clear, more resolute and more faithful. We will remember the unifying power of such integrity as Christ afforded to his disciples since his days with them in Galilee. We will look forward in the hope of redemption for the broken life around us and within is.

In the course of creating our present day comforts and pleasures we have been un-creating the atmosphere and the conditions of our oceans. To do that we have to consider our current generation the most important generation in history, the only generation that will really matter, after this. I just don’t believe anyone here thinks that.

I suspect we must of us think like Annie Dillard. “Our life,” she wrote, “is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.” Though some people may feel insulted at this suggestion, it is really a great honor to be a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. It’s like being those people fishing on the banks of Ezekiel’s river. They’re not the whole picture, but they love the part of it they inhabit. They inhabit it responsibly and with gratitude. So they take great enjoyment in the trees growing on the river’s banks, bearing fruit in every month—enough for everyone, enough for all of history. “Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail,” for the fact of which the people take comfort.

I like the idea that we all of us, hungry in spirit and sick in our soul, as carelessness has sometimes made us, may trust this about the trees by the waters of the river: “Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.” Amen.