Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons
Religion & Spirituality:Christianity
A Good Curse
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC September 15th, 2019, the fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost. “Do Justice!” sermon series.
Texts: Psalm 19; Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28
“It’s poor religion that can’t provide a sufficient curse when needed…” If these words of poet, prophet, and farmer Wendell Berry are correct, then our religion can’t be called “poor.” There are some pretty good curses in the Bible—and today prophet Jeremiah relays these un-minced words: “my people are foolish, they do not know me; they are stupid children, they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good.” (4:22) And so a hot wind—hot and fierce as God’s anger—is promised.
The curses of both Berry and Jeremiah are inspired by the destruction of creation and human culpability. Jeremiah says, “the whole land shall be a desolation.” (4:27) In the same poem that speaks of “a sufficient curse,” Berry relays a litany of curses against those things that wound the creation—against “bank accounts, inflated / by the spent breath of all the earth, / of species forever changed to money.” He curses “legal falsehoods, corpses / incorporated that cannot see / or feel, think or care, that eat / the world and [excrete] money…the alien slop and fume / that spoil the air, the water, and all / the living world, sold, soiled, or burned…”[i] //
A sixteen year-old Swedish prophet in our midst right now, Greta Thunberg, also knows how to speak a sufficiently strong word. The young climate crisis activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee has spurred a youth movement around the world and has been in the news as she’s spoken in protest here in D.C. ahead of next week’s U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York City. In December, 2018, she (then only 15) addressed leaders of the United Nations saying this: “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don't care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the Living Planet. Our civilization is being sacrificed for …a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money. Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few.
The year 2078 I will celebrate my 75th birthday. If I have children maybe they will spend that day with me. Maybe they will ask me about you. Maybe they will ask why you didn’t do anything while there still was time to act. You say you love your children above all else and yet you’re stealing their future in front of their very eyes. Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible there is no hope.”[ii] That is a “sufficient curse.” And a good curse in our faith context is meant to shake people into awareness and action.
Sadly—and it frankly boggles my mind—there are people in the world who still deny that climate change is real. There are people who believe that all the data, scientific reports, and predictions of loss of life and habitat and balance on this planet are nothing more than a politically-motivated conspiracy dreamed up by stubborn, leftist tree-huggers. And even those who recognize that there really are scary consequences for the pollution and mindless destruction that humans have inflicted on creation seem to so often disconnect this painful reality from their lives of faith.
The fact is that our Judeo-Christian faith specifically calls us to a deep and intentional connection with all of creation. Not only are we called to be caretakers of the world, its earth, air, water, and creatures, but we are also reminded that we are, ourselves, part of the creation. In Genesis 1 we see humankind take our place in the lineup of those made by God…we are creatures, the human animal, made in the image of God.
The words from Jeremiah echo those of Genesis 1, but are the antithesis of the creation story. Jeremiah prophesies not just random destruction, but rather a very specific “de-creation” or “uncreation” of creation. In Genesis, the wind moved over the deep waters and brought order and creation out of chaos and nothingness. In Jeremiah, the wind of God isn’t a nurturing, creative force, but blows hot as a judgment and curse. And we find in Jeremiah 4:23 the phrase “waste and void”—in Hebrew, tohu vabohu. This occurs only one other place in all of scripture, in Genesis 1:2, where NRSV translates it “formless void.” Jeremiah’s prophecy parallels Genesis 1 in reverse… there is no light, the earth—once separated from the waters to provide a firm place to stand—now shakes, there are no birds of the air, there is “no one at all,” the fruitful land is laid bare, and communities and cities are rubble.
Our faith story is clear that in the beginning, the human creatures were given the sacred responsibility to tend and care for God’s good creation. And what we have done instead is to participate in the de-creation of creation, we are agents of tohu wabohu…waste and void.
And why? Why do we participate in our own destruction? I don’t believe that most people want to destroy the earth. I believe we’ve been sold a bill of goods to make our lives “easier”—everything from poison-chemical-filled cleaning products to gas-fueled cars to machines made with a short half-life intended to increase re-purchase, to hormone and chemically “enhanced” food and so on. We are entrenched in habits that seem harmless and we even change some behaviors to try to do better. But at this point, things have reached a crisis moment. “Our house is on fire,” as Greta Thunberg says.
Wendell Berry is clear—as is Thunberg and prophets through the ages—that much of what drives the de-creation of creation is greed. Greed—money!—is why in the U.S. more than 80 environmental rules and regulations over the past several years have been rolled back (as reported in The New York Times last week).[iii] Many endangered species are once again, literally, “fair game.” Chemicals can be dumped in waterways again or used in close proximity to creeks and rivers, many emissions controls are gone, and more of all of this is happening in the name of easing the burden on industry, big business, and economic development. Who needs plants and animals and air and water and good earth if the bottom line is healthy? I believe Jeremiah could get behind Berry’s curse against “bank accounts, inflated / by… species forever changed to money.”
Many social and cultural factors have conditioned us these days to miss the breadth and depth of our responsibility to and interconnectedness with one another and all of creation. We have been taught to really believe our lives, our stuff, our planet, our time, the very air we breathe is our own. It’s MINE, we think… and we begin thinking that way at an early age—just check out this list of 10 “toddler property laws”:
While this tends to be the way that not only toddlers, but human beings generally, think—it is up to people of conscience—people of faith—to counter this tendency with wisdom, care and justice. “Our” stuff, “our” land, all of it—belongs to God. We didn’t do anything to deserve the beauty of the earth or the flesh and blood of our lives. They are gifts to us from Creator God.
Our failure as a human race to remember this truth and honor it above the lust for ease and wealth has led to the devastation of habitats, the pollution of waters, the extinction of unique creatures, whole eco-systems being thrown into imbalance and chaos, and the poor of the earth bearing the brunt of the damage. When we lose our sense of being creatures within the created order, our sense of being in a mutual relationship, with the responsibility to care for the planet and its other creatures, we begin to think that it’s our “right” to take, to destroy, to dump, to do the convenient thing instead of the just and loving thing. It’s our “right” to buy products that pollute. It’s “our” land so we can do with it whatever we want. And when the animals who have lost their homes move into “our space” then it’s their fault for complicating or endangering “our” lives.
Prophets are called to wake us up and get us to perceive what’s going on. Four times Jeremiah says, “I looked…and lo”—“lo” meaning “behold.” Look. YOU look! The call is for us to perceive what the prophet is perceiving, to perceive what we don’t really want to perceive, to behold our own culpability for what is happening. As we know full well, it’s only possible to fix a problem if we truly admit that we have a problem. When Greta Thunberg demanded action on climate change by government officials in Sweden, they said, “It doesn’t matter what we do, just look at the U.S.!”[iv] And when I looked at the comments online responding to Thunberg’s U.S. visit, there was comment after comment about how we (the U.S.) really needed to look at China or India… Everyone wants to say it’s someone else’s fault, someone else’s problem. As I said in my sermon at Asbury UMC last week, we point fingers at or look for action from “them” without realizing that it’s all “us”—we are in this life together whether we like it or not and the Kin-dom coming on earth as in heaven requires something not from some nebulous “them” but from all of US. And in the meantime, while we rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic and blame other people, our earth mourns (4:28), the earth weeps. That’s what Jeremiah says…
It’s poor religion that can’t provide a sufficient curse when needed. That is true. It is also true that it’s poor religion that can’t provide a word of hope. That word for us today is that we can do something, we can vote and help register others to vote, we can make concrete changes and choices in our everyday lives to care for creation. We are making concrete changes here at Foundry and will be regularly offering tips, information, and guidance for ways that you can live your faith and do justice in the earth. By the grace of God and for the sake of all we hold dear in this life, I pray we will allow the prophetic “curse” to do some good and lead us to be done with de-creation. Re-creation and mending is our work. So let’s get to it.
[i] Wendell Berry, 2010:VI, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems, Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2013, p. 349.
[ii] https://www.fridaysforfuture.org/greta-speeches#greta_speech_feb21_2019
[iii] “85 Environmental Rules Being Rolled Back Under Trump,” The New York Times, Nadja Popovich, Livia Albeck-Ripka and Kendra Pierre-Louis, September 12, 2019.
[iv] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/13/760538254/greta-thunberg-to-u-s-you-have-a-moral-responsibility-on-climate-change
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