Grace Cathedral

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“Mysterious God we have lost our home. We are wandering. Help us to hear your call and find ourselves again in you. Amen.”

1. In wild places I have heard the voice of God… From the time beyond human remembering there existed an island called by the first people Limuw. Every spring fantastic cumulous clouds raced over orange and yellow flower-covered mountain slopes. The fast moving streams, canyons, prairies, oak woodlands, cobbled beaches, tidepools and white foamy waters teamed with life. Thousands of birds nested on the cliffs among the waterfalls.¹

But something was missing. And so Hutash, the name for the Spirit of the Earth, planted a new kind of seed. From these, the ground put forth the first people and the island was complete. Thus begins a story perhaps older than human writing told by people known today as the Chumash. You may know this place as Santa Cruz Island. It is the largest island in California and lies in the archipelago off the coast of Santa Barbara.

“The Rainbow Bridge” story goes on. Hutash taught the people how to take care of themselves and their island home. For many years they thrived and multiplied until Limuw became too crowded. Then Kakanupmawa, the mystery behind the sun, conferred with Hutash and they agreed that the people needed a bigger place. So they gathered them on the mountain peak and caused a rainbow to stretch over the sea to a broader land. Some of the people easily crossed over. But others became distracted and dizzied by the waters far below them. They fell from the rainbow bridge into the ocean waters where they were transformed into dolphins.

In wild places I have heard the voice of God. When dolphins join me as I surf at Ocean Beach my heart expands with ecstatic joy. It always feels like such a holy encounter. But not only does the story concern the deep kinship between dolphins and humans, some believe it might even be about sea level changes that are part of the geologic record. At the end of the last ice age when the sea level was about 400 feet lower the four channel islands were joined together. As the seas rose, the population that the four separate islands could support decreased forcing people to move to the mainland.

Rosanna Xia tells this story in her book California Against the Sea because she hopes that the massive rise in the sea level could be an opportunity for human beings to mend their relationship with the ocean and the rest of the earth. During the last one hundred years the sea has risen by nine inches. Before the end of our century in the lifetime of the youngest people here, the sea will probably rise by six to seven feet.²

Human beings caused and continue to produce a catastrophic change in the composition of our atmosphere. Almost one third of the carbon dioxide released by human beings since the Industrial Revolution and more than 90% of the resulting heat has been absorbed by our oceans. Carbon dioxide mixing with ocean water causes a chemical reaction that increases the acidity of the seas. The oceans are absorbing the heat equivalent of seven Hiroshima bombs detonating every second.³ We are the first generation to experience the effects of climate change and the last generation that can make a substantially different course possible.⁴ We know this but don’t really comprehend it. It’s hard to be continuously conscious of such a danger, and of such a grave responsibility.

2. In the face of our situation Jesus gives us very good news. During the last weeks of Easter our readings show us how to live in intimacy with God. Today’s gospel comes from the last meal Jesus shares with his friends before being killed. Imagine the tangible fear in that room as he prepares them for his departure from this world. It must have been like a last meal at San Quentin Prison before a prisoner is executed.

Thomas says, “How can we know the way?” Jesus responds with the last of seven “I am” statements. Earlier in the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “I am…” “the bread of life” (6:35), “the light of the world” (8:12), “the door” (10:7), “the Good Shepherd” (10:11). And today he says, “I am the true vine and my father is the vinegrower” (Jn. 15).⁵

Jesus says, “Abide in me as I abide in you.” He uses the image of the vine, organic and integrally connected, to prepare his friends for his death. “I am the vine and you are the branches,” he says. It is almost as if he is reassuring them, “Death will not separate us. I will not be leaving you. We will become even more intimately connected. Do not be afraid.”⁶

Jesus goes on. “You will see evidence of our connection. Look at your life and the lives of those who follow me and see the richness of this fruit.” I do not read this as a threat. It is not “stay with me or you will wither and perish.” It is the promise that we do not need to worry, that we are in this together. Jesus is saying our companionship will be even closer than we can imagine. We walk side by side today. In the future we will be abide in Jesus and bring good news to the world.

Other examples of this persist in the Bible. In Genesis, God breathes spirit into us and sustains our life. In Galatians, Paul writes, “It is no longer I who live but it is Christ who lives in me.”⁷ The Book of Acts describes God as the one, “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.”⁸

One might even say that the culmination of Jesus’ teaching is about abiding in God. Our goal is not simply to follow Jesus, or to convince others to, or even primarily to obey what he taught. We live in Jesus as he lives in us. This experience of intimacy lies at the heart of my faith and of my understanding of the earth. In wild places I have heard the voice of God.

3. As a student of religion I carefully studied the connection between the spirit of God and the natural world.⁹ Many of us here have experienced a kind of transcendence in nature, a moment when everything changes, when the cosmos seems clear. These encounters show that our picture of God is too small. When we begin to glimpse how interrelated all life is, we cannot go back to pretending that one individual, or group, or nation, or species can thrive alone. Religion stops being another form of tribalism and becomes an opening in our hearts to wonder and gratitude and love. Let me talk about two people whose lives were changed in this way by meeting God in nature.

As a young man Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) served as the minister of the Second Church of Boston (Unitarian). It was founded in 1650, almost exactly 200 years before Grace Cathedral. He would make pastoral visits to Revolutionary War veterans and just did not know what to say. The prospect of writing a sermon every week for the rest of his life scared him. Philosophically he was not sure what it meant to consecrate bread and wine during communion services. Then the wife who he simply adored died at the age of twenty from tuberculosis and his life fell apart. He was inconsolable. He resigned his pastorate, sold all his household furniture and departed on Christmas Day across the gray expanse of the North Atlantic with the hope that he might find himself.

In 1836 Emerson published what he discovered in a short book called Nature. Feeling confined and limited by tradition and the past, Emerson stopped believing in them. He gave up faith in the promise that we could learn about what really matters from someone else. Instead he believed that we should experience God firsthand and that “Nature is a symbol of spirit.¹⁰ He writes, “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear… In the woods, we return to reason and faith… all mean egotism vanishes… the currents of Universal Being circulate though me; I am part or parcel of God.”_¹¹

Later he writes, “behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present… the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old.”¹² Emerson encouraged his young friend Henry David Thoreau to begin keeping a journal and later allowed him to build a cabin on his land by the shore of Walden Pond.

Generations later in 1975 a 29 year old woman after finishing her master’s thesis on Thoreau won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in a book recording her own encounter of nature and spirit. Her name was Annie Dillard and the memoir about living along a creek in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains was called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Without flinching Dillard sees the frightening vastness of the void, the uncountable number of swarming insects. She writes about the water bug injecting poison that liquifies its prey.

Quoting Pascal and Einstein, Annie Dillard wonders if our modern understanding of God has spread, “as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way that we can only feel blindly of its hem.”¹³

In this theological and liturgical book (it follows the Christian year into Advent), Dillard regards the great beauty of this world as grace, as a gift from God. At the end she concludes, “Do you think you will keep your life, or anything else you love? But no… You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked… You see the creatures die, and you know that you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life… I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door… Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret and holy and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.”¹⁴

The seas are rising. How can we know the way? God speaks to us through nature – often in ways that we do not expect, sometimes in ways that are not altogether comfortable for us. But we will not hear if we do not listen. Let us mend our relation to the earth, and build a bridge to a more humane civilization.

Jesus, the true vine, reminds us that at the core of every being is the power to love. We will never be truly isolated or alone. He will always abide in us. In wild places I have heard the voice of God.

¹ Rosanna Xia, California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline (Berkeley, California: Heydey Books, 2023) 1-3.

² By the time a child born today retires, the low tide will be higher than the highest high tide we have ever seen. Cities and even whole countries will be washed away.

³ Ibid., 17.

⁴ Jay Inslee and then quoted by Barak Obama, Ibid., 294.

⁵ Also “the resurrection and the life” (Jn. 11:25), “the way, the truth and the life” (Jn. 14:6). The Greek word for vineyard and vine (ampelos) are the same – sometimes I wonder how it might feel different to think of Jesus as the true vineyard.

⁶ Matthew Boulton, “Abide in Me: SALT’s Commentary for Easter 5), SALT, 22 April 2022. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/lectionary-commentary-for-easter-5

⁷ “and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (NRSV, Galatians 2:20).

⁸ “For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring’” (NRSV, Acts. 17:28).

⁹ Malcolm Clemens Young, “The Natural World,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought (NY: Oxford University Press, 2017) 374ff.

¹⁰ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957) 31.

¹¹ “In the presence of nature a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, — he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,— all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.” Ibid., 24.

¹² “But when, following the invisible steps of thought, we come to inquire, Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man; that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws at his need inexhaustible power. Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man?” Ibid., 50.

¹³ “In the Koran, Allah asks, “The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?” It’s a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an un-thinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator’s, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey? “God is subtle,” Einstein said, “but not malicious.” Again, Einstein said that “nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning.” It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God “set bars and doors” and said, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.” But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat? Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.” Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (NY: Harper & Row, 1974) 7.

¹⁴ “Did you think, before you were caught, that you needed, say, life? Do you think you will keep your life, or anything else you love? But no. Your needs are all met. But not as the world giveth. You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked, and you have learned that the outrageous guarantee holds. You see the creatures die, and you know you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you’re gone. You have finally understood that you’re dealing with a maniac.
I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks. Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part.” Ibid., 268.