A Father's Day Sermon

A Father’s Day Sermon The Dover Church
June 19, 2011 – Trinity Sunday Scripture: Psalm 8, Genesis 1:1-2:4a


When I was seven years old, my family went on a very special camping trip to Cinnamon Bay National Park in the US Virgin Islands. For one week, my parents, three sisters, and I stayed in a one room cottage, basically a roof with two concrete walls and two screen walls, set in a coconut grove just a hop, skip and a jump from the beach, which is exactly what we did for seven glorious days, hopped, skipped and jumped to the beach and back for lunch, to the beach and back for supper, to the beach and back to bed. It was paradise: swimming in water that I could just jump into…not at all like the beach at my grandmother’s in Plymouth, snorkeling in the bay and out over the reef, seeing the tropical fish and wondrous shells, hibiscus and other amazing flowers everywhere, coconuts quite literally there for the cracking, raucous birds calling out amidst the constant song of other birds, small animals and insects, lizards scuttling through the palm fronds, the blue of the ocean, sudden tropical downpours followed by rainbows, 80 degrees all the time, the sunsets, so vibrant and sudden followed by the amazing stars far from any city. Whenever I think of tropical paradise, of creation largely undisturbed, the Garden of Eden if you will allow me, my memory takes me back to that place and that time.
Twenty five years later, I went to a conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder. On the limo ride from the airport, I gazed out my window for 25 miles in rapt admiration at the most astounding beauty. Rolling grasslands right up to the jagged, copper red and ochre Flatirons, the majestic, snowcapped Rockies rising behind. The buffalo, wolves and grizzly bears were long gone, but otherwise it looked to me like a paradise largely undisturbed since the prehistoric seas had receded millions of years before. Whenever I think of the paradise of the American West, of the vast open spaces of undisturbed creation, my memory takes me back to the primordial beauty of Boulder twenty five years ago.
Everyone I have ever met carries around places of perfection, bounty, beauty, and paradise in their hearts, places they just love, where they feel the holiness if you will allow me, where they feel close to God, if you will indulge me yet again. Take a moment now and bring them to your mind’s eye and write them down on the slip of paper in your bulletin, the places that are just perfect, where God seems very close, to you. Paradise on Earth.
Christians like us do not tend to read the Bible literally, but most of us know in our hearts the Biblical truth of the "very goodness" of Creation. Our places inspire religious experiences in us. There is, for lack of a better word, a tangible "holiness" to creation perfection which moves our hearts. That's what we know in our hearts. In our minds, we know how very fragile, intricate and interconnected these places are, everyplace is. They are not machines with interchangeable parts. They are living organisms, just like us, part of a web of organic life, just like us, which needs all its parts thriving to live and thrive, just like us.
A month ago I was in Haiti, originally very much like the Virgin Islands, but not any more. From the air I could see the clear dividing line down the middle of the island, with Haiti on one side and the Dominican Republic on the other. The Domincan was lush, carpeted with a verdant green, surrounded by bright blue waters and reefs. Haiti was brown, deforested and eroded. Milky rivers gouged their ways down out of the hills, spewing sediment into the ocean, choking the reefs, which were surely there beneath clouds of sediment. Paradise lost.
As luck would have it, I landed a job not many years after that conference in Boulder and I lived in that wonderful mountain bordered grassland for four years. In the seven years between the time I went to that conference and when I finally left Boulder in 2000, the vistas I had marveled at from that limo window, all 25 miles of them, had been replaced with sprawling developments of tract houses sprouting like mushrooms, thousands of them every month. Whenever I would mention to someone that a very good thing was quickly disappearing, the very good thing that had made me want to live in Boulder in the first place, the very good thing that all the locals boasted of in comparison with California and the East Coast which were a mess in their opinion, the locals would always tell me to keep my east coast gone to Berkeley, liberal, big government, regulation loving opinions to myself. People were making real money building those houses. It was jobs and wealth or the environment. There would always be plenty of grasslands left up in Wyoming. More water for the lawns, pools and flushing toilets was sure to be found with another tunnel under the mountains, etc., etc., etc. By the time I left, the only grasslands left were islands of preserved open space, islands surrounded by identical houses with their car noise, sprinklers, Kentucky bluegrass and swimming pools. It sure looked like southern California to me. Paradise lost.
My friends, please don’t dismiss me as the typical tree hugging liberal that I am. I am not some mossbacked Yankee who has his foot in our lovely town and now wants things to remain exactly the same. Nor am I a utopian revisionist who thinks that life has been going downhill since humans left the hunter-gather or basic agrarian stages. This is Biblical and it's about salvation. I am a serious Christian who takes what God is saying to us in the Bible with absolute seriousness. I am a highly educated, modern person who reads scientific journals. I am also, perhaps most motivationally, a parent of two small boys. My point is simple, twofold, and you’ve heard it all before. First, we all know how very beautiful, wonderful, astoundingly bountiful, fragile, and, because this is Church after all, holy, Creation is. The rolling, hymnic praises of Genesis are absolutely true. And God saw it was good. “Yes!” And God saw it was good. “Yes!” And God saw it was very good indeed. “Amen and Amen!” Which is just the Hebrew words for saying Yes and Yes. I know. We know. Can I get an Amen on that?
And second, we know exactly what the problem is: there are too many human beings and our way of life is literally killing the very source of our livelihood. We have gone from being what God intended us to be, caretakers of Creation, to being deadly parasites. It is truly our misfortune to be the generation that has to face the consequences of three solid centuries of disregard for the holiness of Creation. The second thing the Lord our God said out of the fire on Sinai was “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments” (Exodus 20:4-6). While we may balk at this judgmental God who punishes iniquity, saying to ourselves that’s not our God, the proof is in the pudding. You and I, we are the third generation who are faced with the consequences of the iniquitous ignorance and idolatry of past generations. And even more importantly from my perspective, our children are the fourth. Yet even more importantly, if we continue on as we are, our great grandchildren will be yet another fourth generation, still being visited by judgment for our present idolatrous iniquity.
On this Father’s Day, I want to pose a few simple questions to all you parents, not just fathers. If you knew that something you were doing was nearly certain to negatively impact, perhaps catastrophically, the spiritual, emotional, social, economic, political and physical future of your child, what would you do? What would you try to do? If you knew that something that everyone just accepted as the easiest, most profitable and most convenient way of doing something was nearly certain to negatively impact, perhaps catastrophically, the spiritual, emotional, social, economic, political and physical future of your child, what would you do? What would you try to do? Even if you couldn’t see the evidence, because at the moment it was only happening far away to people you didn’t know? Even if the threat seemed so temporally distant as to not bear worrying about right now with bills to pay, jobs to do and games to play, what would you do? What would you try to do? Even if a million things might happen in the meantime? Even if you felt that there wasn’t much you could do yourself, that this was something for the big players, what would you do? What would you try to do?
Every single massive problem we as a global community face, war and conflict, poverty and un- or underemployment, starvation and malnutrition, drought and weather related hardships, systemic injustice, every one of these calamitous quagmires, daunting and seemingly hopeless in and of themselves, are really just noxious symptoms of the underlying environmental cancer which the last three centuries bequeathed to us and we are not treating. If we choose to ignore them because of our own present prosperity and our misguided sense of disconnect, if we lack the political will to do what needs to be done, preferring to play political pattacake with the symptoms, these problems will be the norm for our children and, God help them, our children’s children. Just so you don’t think this is something utopian and theoretical and therefore beyond our agency to do something about, our church creates 20,000 lbs. of global warming contributing carbon dust every year just from the energy it takes to give us electricity. That’s not even including the oil heat we use. 20,000 lbs! If were to sweep that up rather than just let it off into the air as we do, we would have a pile of grey, dirty carbon dust larger than our Meetinghouse, every year, all piled up in one place rather than just floating around out there where we can’t see it and don’t have to think about it. Every year. Just our church. Just the electricity. All of you know exactly what Betty Brady would say if we had a dirty pile even one hundredth that size messing up our house and grounds: "we have to spend the money to get this fixed." Our Saviour died and rose again so that we who live in him might be the New Creation. I think that it is high time that we who have the knowledge and financial means to do what can be done start living our faith in this place at this time, you and me, all of us together, the New Creation, for Christ’s sake and the sake of our children. What would you do? What would you try to do?