EcoPreacher Cohort

 During the last year I have been engaging in a monthly educational webinar with other pastors called the EcoPreacher Cohort. Through a variety of presenters, reflection, reading assignments, and small group discussions, we have explored how to integrate our concern for the environment with long-standing Christian theological beliefs, liturgical practices, and decisions that affect church life more generally. Before her life took a vastly different turn, Jennifer McCullough was in the cohort also, offering me a great local sounding board after our monthly webinars. It has been a very worthwhile commitment and next month will mark the end of the yearlong Cohort. 

 

The EcoPreacher Cohort is produced by a cooperation between The BTS Center and Creation Justice Ministries (CJM). The BTS Center was formerly a seminary, Bangor Theological Seminary, affiliated with the United Church of Christ, which closed in 2013. While it does not award degrees, the BTS Center provides ongoing Christian education and spiritual formation, like the webinar I took. Creation Justice Ministries was formerly the National Council of Churches Eco-Justice Program, and continues to work across many Christian denominations for racial, economic, and environmental justice. Together, the BTS Center and CJM have provided a marvelous reflective and educational opportunity for me to think and feel more deeply what it means to live responsibly on and in harmony with the earth, within a tradition that begins with a creation story that calls each part of creation “good.” 

 

“Thinking more deeply” about things is what I’m comfortable with, even though education is largely a process of challenging former certainties in order to live into new awareness. “Feeling more deeply” is not as easy for me, but when it comes to the environment is it absolutely essential. It has been widely recognized that “climate anxiety” can be a debilitating condition that people suffer when they look honestly at climate change, rising sea levels, losses of species and habitats, air quality, overstuffed landfills, toxic wastes, and so forth. For millennia, people imagined that the earth was simply capable of absorbing our habits and that there was always somewhere “out there” where we could store our leftovers. To some extent, “climate anxiety” is a step forward from “climate apathy,” which continues that presumption, as well as “climate arrogance,” which assumes that human ingenuity will solve the problem before it becomes too acute. The fragility of the eco-system on which we depend for living, as well as the awareness that other life forms are suffering because human ingenuity is typically anthropocentric, are behind much of our “climate anxiety.” At least “climate anxiety” acknowledges the problems we face and the severity of them.  

 

For the Christian believer, it matters how we encounter “climate anxiety” with, among other things, our doctrine of hope. For that reason, I want to share an opportunity with you that The BTS Center is co-creating. It is called Lament with Earth, five hour-long seasonal events beginning in November and ending in June 2024, each of which is on a Wednesday from 4:30-5:30pm. Drawing on the tradition of lament, these events will enable participants to name the loss and pain of environmental destruction honestly, within a context of hope. These events are hosted by The BTS Center as well as the creative and justice-building music group, The Many. You can find more information by visiting here. 

 

In peace, 

Mark of St. Mark

The Inadequacy of Words

Throughout this week, I have really felt the poverty, inadequacy, and potential emptiness of words. This is coming from someone who "proclaims the Word" for a living! I am sure that each of us have cherished or perhaps begrudgingly accepted silence as we have had occasion to sit with someone who is grieving. The events in Israel and Palestine have been one of those occasions where some of us are required to say something, yet anything we say leaves so much more unsaid. 

-       The PCUSA office of the stated clerk issued one statement - as they are expected to do - and almost immediately it evoked outrage from those who felt that it needed to be more full-throated. Still, it was an attempt to speak truthfully. 

-       Churches for Middle East Peace issued a statement, which some of my friends found too slanted in one direction. Still, it was an attempt to speak truthfully.

-       Presbyterian Peace Fellowship has issued a statement, which I would reckon would receive the same critiques. Still, it was an attempt to speak truthfully.

-       President Biden and others have issued statements, carefully crafted to appease as well as to express. Still, they are attempts to speak truthfully.

As one insightful writer said last weekend, finding a way to address an incident as well as its context is always hard. When there are atrocities involved – and the attacks and hostage-taking by Hamas are atrocious – it becomes pretty near impossible. 

 

One attempt to address the fullness of the context in Palestine and Israel, as well as the depth of horror of the moment, was a Facebook post by Ori Hanan Weisberg, which SueJeanne Koh and Susan Thornton (among others) shared on their page. It is long and it is pointed and nobody can come out of it feeling easy about their involvement in the Middle East. Even so, it could have been twice as long and still would not have addressed all the human nonsense and evil that has contributed to the horrors of this week. Words simply cannot get it done sometimes. 

 

So, for those of you who struggle to offer your condolences, to say your piece, to offer your perspective, to speak truth to power, to proclaim the Word, or even to voice your prayers - it's not you, it's life and death, which is often unspeakable. May you experience a still small voice that lets you know that it's okay if your words seem inadequate to the moment. 

 

I think the most profound text of scripture might be Revelation 8:1, "When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour." The next reference to sound comes when prayers are offered mixed with the smoke of the incense. Perhaps that is the best we can do. 

 

Mark of St. Mark

Isaiah 5:1-7 and Matthew 21:33-46 interwoven reading

Friends, 

The following is an attempt to weave the Song of the Vineyard from Isaiah with the Parable of the Vineyard from Matthew. See if it is helpful to read them side-by-side. I think the first influenced the second, but in any act of imitation/repetition/echoing a text, there is always new content that can bring out the best of both texts. 

 1. Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard:

1. “Listen to another parable.

2. My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it;
2. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower.

 

3. he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes. 

3. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce.  But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.” So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. 

 

4. And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it?
When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes? 

4. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”

 

5. And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down. I will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed, and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns; I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. 

5. They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.” Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’? Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.

 

6. This ends the reading. 

6. Thanks be to God.