Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ

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preached by Winton Boyd on August 2, 2009

It’s sort of funny that we read this text from Paul today, during a week when we have had two high profile efforts with public personalities seeking reconciliation.

• While I watch neither of them, I read that Bill O’Reilly of Fox and Keith Olberman of MSNBC (or more appropriately, their bosses) have called a truce.
• And of course, Budweiser beer was pleased to be the beer of choice when President Obama invited Professor Gates and Sgt. Crowley to the White House for a discussion after a troubled arrest of Gates a couple of weeks ago.

While they weren’t motivated by the Apostle Paul, it may be a good week to consider Paul’s words, and his passage on unity and the diversity of gifts in community.

He begins by writing, With all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love… And it is clear that the appreciation of gifts that follows later in the passage hinges on the unity of Spirit named here.

In writing to the Ephesians, Paul suggests that the “bond” be one of peace. Coupled with his reminder to them that he is prison, he seems to be contrasting this “bond of peace” with the involuntary “binding” of chains and prison. This bond of peace, he suggests, comes through the Spirit. While the early church had its fights, it was their overall unity and care for one another that set them apart in their culture.

While there are periodic verbal gestures towards “working together” or “ecumenism” or “bipartisanship” – in most segments of our culture, staking out one’s position and criticizing the other is the norm. Even while lamenting our argumentative culture, many good people would suggest that unity, such as Paul pleads for, is over-rated, or not really the highest goal.

A few years ago, I was talking with a friend who is an Episcopalian priest. Like many in her denomination, she was deeply troubled by the then growing fracture in the Anglican communion over homosexuality. She said, however, that church unity on this issue was overrated and the attempt to achieve it counterproductive. It is best, she said, that the different strands of that denomination live out their faith in the way they see fit. If unity is full of compromise that just upsets everyone, what has been achieved?

She raises the important question of how do we take principled stands, articulate clearly and passionately what we believe in, promote issues of importance, while maintaining some level of humility, seeking some sort of unity. How do we be unifying progressives in a world increasingly dominated by FOX on the right and MSNBC on the left?

As a person of faith who actually appreciates Paul’s hope, I continually wonder how we can actually move beyond a social strategy based primarily on screaming at each other from across cultural divides. I wonder how we will ever understand the depth of our pain and fear, and how we will move through it. Will we ever be able to soften our jaded hearts? I don’t suggest that we are alone in these needs, but I wonder how Paul’s imperative, how the early church’s life of caring and support across many divides might be restored again? What is our responsibility?

I was recently in a conversation with a friend who has had a very rough time in his relationships for the past 5-10 years. One of his strategies was to get in his car, hook on a tent trailer bought on Craig’s List, and head for the road – visiting National Parks and remote wilderness areas. His journey is both an ancient and current one. His means for discovering how to live peaceably in the world has been to re-learn some of life’s basic truths through reconnecting with the natural world.

He reminds us that journeys beyond ourselves, beyond our human-to-human relationships hold promise as a means to learning – or re-learning the bond of peace.
One way to start is to enlarge the focus of Paul’s words to include all of creation…

I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, 2with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing the world, its lovely creatures, its nagging insects, its enjoyable and frustrating people, its surprises that bring joy and tragedy, in love, 3making every effort to maintain an openness to the lessons creation offers, so that we might feel the unity of the Spirit, in and among us as well as all of God’s creation, in the bond of peace.

We, people and nature alike, are of one body – created from the same atoms, sharing the same earth. Just as we were called to live and breathe and be good stewards or trustees of creation, so also were plants, animals, the wind and fire are endowed with grace according to the measure of God’s gift.

Bruce Sanguin, in his essay, Coming Home to the Cosmos, writes that the word salvation means to ‘make whole, or to heal.” For at least 300 years, he notes, the church has regarded the planet as a kind of background stage upon which the drama of private salvation has been played out. We are obsessed with our sinfulness and with whether we are saved. The vast majority of Christians are so focused on their own “salvation” or on saving others, that they are blind to the deterioration of the very ecosystems that sustain their private dramas. It’s time, Sanguin suggests, that we not only place the salvation (healing) of the planet in the foreground of our mission concerns; it is also time that we consider how the earth teaches us about wholeness, healing, salvation.

Likewise, it is time we infuse our human dramas, our human conflicts, with the mystery and power of this planet. It is time to leave the argument around the table to take a walk outside.

For example, some of you may remember listening to students from The Crossing, the Campus Ministry at the UW we support and work with, after they returned from Costa Rica on an eco spirituality trip. One of the things that made an imprint on them was the incredible diversity of nature all around them. For several reasons, ecological, political, and social, Costa Rica is one of those places that have an immense amount of biological diversity in a small area. The students were inspired to consider what this meant for their personal, spiritual and public lives back here in Wisconsin. They were inspired to think more creatively about the ability of humans to live together in peace.

Others appreciate hiking, walking, birding or gardening because they remind us of the immense interplay of so many small things. Invisible worms burrowing underground, imperceptible birds taking flight in a wooded area, a small and unnoticed stream bringing life to a hidden valley. The contributions of so many small and unheralded factors reminds us that even in our lives, the small details of courage, integrity, hospitality matter and work together to make the world what it is. When we feel small and insignificant, it might be good to step outside to remember that the small and insignificant contributors make for a beautiful whole in nature.

In the midst of our own anxiousness about our work, our future, the fate of our children or parents, the prospects for our career or retirement, we might remember the words of naturalist and spiritual giant, John Muir, who once said, I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

The cynic, of course, would say that nature, while magical, can also be fierce and unforgiving in its destructive power. I’ll never forget the beauty of standing at Vesper Point in the Sierra Mountains near Lake Huntington, CA – a favorite hiking spot when we led church camps for our Fresno church. I’ll never forget the beauty of the overlooking the Central Valley below and the high Sierra’s above.

I will also not forget the sight and smell of that same valley one Labor Day weekend, three months after a forest fire ravaged the whole mountainside. The destructive power was palatable, the sense of doom foreboding. I’ll never forget the shiver of fear that ran through our bodies as we stepped over charred trees, kicked up ash dust and smelled death.

However, even that lesson in death became a lesson in life. By the next summer, resurrection life had taken hold. Green had returned, light restored, birds abounded. It would take a few summers to overcome that fire, but within a short time one could have revisited that forest with the poem, A Timbered Choir, by Wendell Berry, in mind.

Slowly, slowly they return
To the small woodland let alone;
Great trees, outspreading and upright,
Apostles of the living light.

Patient as stars, they build in air
Tier after tier a timbered choir,
Stout beams upholding weightless grace
Of song, a blessing on this place.

They stand in waiting all around,
Uprisings of their native ground,
Downcomings of the distant light;
They are the advent they await.

Receiving sun and giving shade,
Their life’s a benefaction made,
And is a benediction said
Over the living and the dead

O light come down to earth, be praised.

New life, light shining in the darkness, gratitude and praise – they are possible on the recently torched mountainside. Might they be available to our communities as well?

I beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called…making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace…

May we not give up on this goal. In the midst of legitimate struggle, may we trust the Spirit in our midst, and learn from the ground at our feet, the air we breathe and the natural world all around us. In so doing, may all our communities – human and otherwise, prosper and grow, giving praise and thanks. Amen.

Today’s text
Ephesians 4:1-16
I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, 2with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. 4There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, 5one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. 7But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. 8Therefore it is said, “When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.” 9(… 11The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, 12to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, 13until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. 14We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. 15But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.