How Do We Love This World?
Genesis 1: 1-5, 31a and Acts 2:43-47
Epiphany Quote: Mary Oliver: "There is only one question: how to love this world?” from her poem Spring.
During this season of Epiphany, this season of seeing God revealed, I decided to let my sermons spring from inspirational quotes. Last week I referred to a quote from Desmond Tutu in which he said that the church that does not suffer is not the church of Jesus Christ. I reflected on the phenomena that sometimes the location of discomfort or tension is also the location of some new insight, mission, or epiphany waiting to be noticed.
This week the quote that caught my eye is from Mary Oliver’s poem, Spring. She ends the poem with: “There is only one question: how to love this world?” As we consider the specifics of Comox United’s mission, as we look for an undertaking or direction that will animate the life of the congregation, perhaps‘how to love this world’ is a way of orienting our thinking.
Let me make an aside here before I go any further. Most of you know that the congregation is in the process of looking for realistic goals that can animate your life and involve you in the work of loving and mending God’s creation. We are wondering about how specifically you can live your faith. I know some people are tired of visioning work: you may have participated in a couple of these undertakings already over the last few years. But, frankly, if in those processes you had been grabbed by something that set you on fire, we wouldn’t be here now, looking for what does get your heart pumping. So – we’re digging deeper.
And some of you might think ‘we don’t need to do this, everything is fine’. But, spoiler alert – it’s not fine. You are looking down the barrel of a significant budget short fall. You don’t know who is still with you and who has drifted off. Until Joanne stepped in you didn’t have a fixed chair of Council for a year. The chairs of Ministry and Personnel are stepping down at the end of June and there are no replacements. Cathie Talbot is the chair of Social Justice because no one else would do it. Robin has been labouring away as Treasurer forever. Things. Are. Not. Fine. No matter how comfortable you are. Actually, being comfortable isn’t high on God’s list of criteria for serving the world. So, buckle up, you/we still have work to do, to figure out, not to put it too simply how to love the world and live your faith.
We know from the first words of the Bible that indeed our world is worth loving. It is after all God’s creation, and God was pleased with her work, declaring it good, very good. In her book Models of God, ecofeminist theologian Dr. Sallie McFague, suggests new metaphors for God, new, more contemporary ways of imagining God. The one that has informed my thinking over the years is to imagine that the world is the body of God. God is not limited to the world, but the world is God and God is of the world. McFague went further, writing; “We, all of us, are being called to do something unprecedented. We are being called to think about ‘everything that is,’ for we now know that everything is interrelated and that the well-being of each is connected to the well-being of the whole. This suggests a "planetary agenda" for all the religions, all the various fields of expertise.”
So when we ask ourselves ‘how do we love the world’ we don’t make a distinction between loving creation and loving humanity, between nation states, or religions. There is no hierarchy of what part of God’s creation is most important. “…the well-being of each is connected to the well-being of the whole,” and so how we care for one part impacts ultimately how every other part is cared for. How very tenderly we personally would like to be loved and cared for, is how all creation is to be loved and cared for. And when we care for creation, we are caring for the body of God.
To love the world in this way calls for an emptying of ourselves, and a giving over to the wellness of God’s creation, to the common good. This giving over is called kenosis, self-emptying, and Jesus was the very model of kenotic love – of giving all of himself to show the way of God, to give witness to another way of living.
In the reading from Acts today we hear about the early lives of the disciples post-Jesus, about how they organized themselves in the wake of the death and resurrection of the one they came to recognize, through an epiphany, as the presence of God among them. “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” (Acts 2:43-47)
That early religious community was a living witness to what the kindom of God looks like, to what self-giving looks like. People didn’t need to look skyward to see a distant god, but only into the kitchen window of the home these followers shared. People didn’t need to make great sacrifices to be welcomed into the temple of a distant god’s love, but only enter into the house and take a seat at the table. There was enough food for everyone because all goods were shared in common. The early church was not a means to an end, but foretaste of God’s reign, right on earth.
(Rev. Dr. Jason McKinney,
https://www.facebook.com/groups/UnitedChurchCda/permalink/10165841989015401/
Recently I listened to a lecture by Toronto Anglican priest Rev. Dr. Jason McKinney about how the church today can do this same thing, to offer an example, a foretaste of the realm of God. McKinney makes a distinction between two spiritual postures, that of having and that of holding. In a posture of having, we grasp a ‘thing’ like land, which is perceived to be inert, mappable, and exchangeable. In this posture the land is, unlike what Sallie McFague and many First Nations would argue, separate from us, not at all connected to the overall wellness or thriving of the shared creation. In contrast, the spiritual posture of ‘holding’ includes a spirit of caring for something like land within a network of ‘reciprocal relation and obligations.’ (Glen Coulthard, see McKinney’s lecture) I imagine the spiritual posture of having being one of clutching to our chest those things that we think we own. Our precious! The spiritual posture of holding is open, offering to share for the mutual benefit for all.
If we think about our church land and building in this way, to have the building is to mean we have dominion over it, and ultimately, we can consider it private property and determine who is able to enter and use the space and who is not. An 18th Century jurist, William Blackstone has said of the property paradigm, ‘one person claims and exercises [dominion] over the external things of the world, in the total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.’ It’s ours, and anyone else is lucky to use it. In a commons paradigm, when we understand that all that we ‘have’ is a gift from God, created by God, and that all that is, is related and connected, then the key word is not dominion but relation. The purpose is not exclusion but sharing. When we are holding, we are thinking in a relational process…of negotiating access, use, benefit, care, and responsibility.
I hope this sounds vaguely familiar to you – that you recall Rev. Jenny Carter’s words about how First United Church in Salmon Arm holds their building as commons space, and how they negotiate with others who share the same dreams for creation for use of the space and collaborate to fulfill God’s dreams for creation. Their church has become a hub where small groups that share the same values are located and together increase the impact on local community and government. Jenny is very clear that what works for Salmon Arm won’t work somewhere else, we all serve in unique contexts – but her story about the transformation of the congregation I hope opens our imagination to new possibilities for our own mission.
In my work with churches I often refer to the commons, it is a passion for me. The commons is a concept that used to be much more well known. It is usually about land, about space, which is to be shared with everyone. People are most familiar with the Boston Commons, where any farmer in Boston used to be able to pasture their cows, as a matter of fact they still can. In North Vancouver there is a spectacular example of commons – The Shipyard Commons is by the docks at the foot of Lonsdale Ave. and it offers space for anyone in the community to gather. In the summer there are Adirondack chairs and basketball hoops, a skateboard area, and a water park. In the winter more chairs and fire pits and a skating rink. In another area there are picnic benches where people can eat their meals, and, imagine, have a glass of wine or beer. In public. Legally. It’s reminiscent of the piazzas of Europe, spaces where anyone and everyone can
come together for community.
Although the Shipyard Commons were designed and being installed before the pandemic, the concept has been expanded as during the pandemic people needed places outside to gather. I never fail to be moved close to tears when I visit the area – to see families and workers and single tired homeless people, all have a safe space to sit, and visit, and get warm, or cool, depending on the season. This, I think, is the kindom of God at the foot of Lonsdale Avenue.
Maybe as church it’s helpful for us to shift from thinking of commons as a noun, to embracing the concept of commoning as a verb, as a way of living. Of holding not only our building and our lands but also our faith and our lives lightly, and practice living as if everyone and everything is related and that we don’t have the building, we don’t have our faith, but we hold it all for the glory of God to be made known. Indeed we don’t have our bodies and our lives, but hold them in service to God’s dreams for creation. There is mutuality in this posture, we do not only give, but we receive. We receive the care of the community in our undertakings, the wisdom of other religions and groups working towards a better world, and, not to put too fine a point on it, the capacity to get public funding to help in a way that churches cannot.
Here is another quote from Sallie McFague: “We meet God in and through the world, if we are ever to meet God. God is not out there or back there or yet to be, but hidden in the most ordinary things of our ordinary lives. If we cannot find the transcendent in the world, in its beauty and its suffering, then for us bodily, earthy creatures it is probably not to be found at all.” (Sallie McFague A New Climate for Theology)
How do we love the world? We remember it is of God, and it is God. We remember it is God’s creation and is the recipient of God’s pride and pleasure. We remember that the world is offered to us through God’s self-giving, self-emptying love, made real for Christians in the life and teaching and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We remember that we can’t own or have what is inextricably linked to everything else. We can only hold it, treat it as common ground to be used for the common good. To be used in a way that makes manifest the goodness of God. To be used in a way that every time someone driving on Comox Ave passes by this building and catches a glimpse of an epiphany, an insight into what the kindom of God on earth might look like.
How do we love the world? We hold lightly what has been entrusted to us, and we trust that in our connection to God and so all things, we will be held lightly and lovingly in turn.
May it be so. Amen