Land, Palm Oil and Loneliness: Lend Me Your Voice, September 30, 2012

"Land, Palm Oil and Loneliness: Lend Me Your Voice"

Rev. Kathryn Ransdell

St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church

Sept. 30, 2012

This is the final Sunday of our church's observation of Creation Time.  I have mixed feelings about this because these four weeks have touched a part of my heart and soul and has stirred a passion in me.  And I know that the message of Creation Time has touched many of you...I've been accompanying you as pastor in different forms for several years, and this one topic has brought more conversation than anything we've chatted about on Sunday mornings. 

For me, I don't know what will come of that heart touch and I don't know where it will lead.  I do know that I'm open to where God will lead me.  I'm open to listening and being curious...and waiting.  

Today's sermon is going to be a bit of reviewing where we have been, unpacking a bit more of what I said, and daring to look across the horizon to where God might lead us.  If I could give my sermon a second title, it might be, "Land, palm oil and loneliness."

"It's all about the land," was the mantra of Dr. Willie Jennings when he spoke of the situation of Israel and Palestinein 1998, just two years before President Bill Clinton attempted the Camp David peace talks.  Dr. Jennings would then say it is hard for us immigrants, who are not indigenous to any land but rather a product of the fermentation of a melting pot, to understand what land means.  

I will be honest.  I'm still learning what he meant when he said that to us.  Coming from Texas, I have a bit more understanding of what it means for your identity to be tied to the land where you born.  At yesterday's wedding, with half of the party from Texas, one fellah (Texan for fellow) came up to me and said, "Now tell me who your people are and where you-re from."  And I knew exactly what he was asking me.  

Perhaps as products of colonialism, people who have access to global travel and relocation, as people whose identity to this land in North America only dates back 200-400 years, we don't understand the connections people have with their land.  In the country of Liberia in Africa, one farmer said it this way, " “When I was born and opened my eyes, I saw this land..."  

Creation Time has opened for me this new way of relating to land, not a specific land, but the land called Earth.  In last week's sermon, I shared a bit of my learning...that Creation theologians are calling us to do away with our image for steward.   No longer steward, but partner.  

And not just any partner.  As the story tells us, we are a partner who is made in the image and likeness of God, the whole motley group that we are.  Which means when we come to the table of our partnership and there we are sitting at the table and there the land sits too, we must realize that we are also made in the image and likeness of God, that which God is, we are too.  That which God does, we do too.  

Our first Scripture this morning tells us what God does: 

Isaiah 45:18 says (The Message), " God, Creator of the heavens—

    he is, remember, God.

Maker of earth—

   he put it on its foundations, built it from scratch.

God didn’t go to all that trouble

   to just leave it empty, nothing in it.

    God made it to be lived in.  

If this is what God does, this is what we do to.  We don't leave this earth empty with nothing in it because we've gotten ours and now we will leave the problems to our grandchildren, we are to make this earth inhabitable.

We are more than tillers of this earth, as discussed by Dr. John C. Holbert...In the KJV, the translators used the verb "to till" as to the reason why God put us in the garden...it was the best Hebrew word at the time to describe what we know now as "to serve."  We are not tillers. We are servants of this earth.

No longer subduers, tillers and stewards.  We are partners and servants to an Earth that in itself has intrinsic value. 

We are partners with the land.  Which brings me to Palm Oil and Liberia.

This past week, a gentleman came through our Sunday worship and our offices on Wednesday.  He was a Liberian citizen who came to Canada and that's really enough about his story.  Having had that encounter, I paid a bit more attention to an article about Liberia that was published in the Globe and Mail this week: 

"In Liberia, the government has granted about half of the country to investors, usually on long-term leases. Nearly 6 per cent of Liberia’s total land mass has been leased to palm-oil companies alone. More than a million people live on those lands, and 150,000 will be affected in the first five years of the plantations, local activists say.

Palm oil, a vegetable oil used in hundreds of products from margarine to cosmetics, has become highly profitable, with global demand fuelled by the growth of processed food and biofuels. Its world price has tripled in the past decade, and demand is expected to double again by 2020."[1]

It's really hard to comprehend what an article like this is saying to me, one tiny individual who lives a stones throw from the Pacific Ocean.  Half of all of Liberia has been leased to corporations.  The leases are between the corporation and the government, so the people who inhabit that land often don't know that they have been evicted until the bulldozers come.  And the dream of jobs that replace them...well, they are just that...dreams.  

Depending on which side of the issue you are on, you might call this a land grab.  And it's happening all over Africa with pieces of land larger than European countries being taken from the indigenous and given to global conglomerates.  

And for the most part, we sit here in comfortable Vancouver with very little awareness as to what happens for us to have palm oil... [2] and what products utilize palm oil...here's just a few...

Food: 
Balance Bar
Ben & Jerry's
Check out our "Candy List"
Clif Bar
Enfamil Products
Food Crisps
GeniSoy 
Girl Scout Cookies
Glenny's
Harmony Premium Trail Mix
Harmony Yogurt Flavored Raisin Nut Mix 
Jell-O No Bake Homestyle Cheese Cake Desert
Jewel Chocolate Chip Cookies
Little Debbie
Luna Bar
McDonald's
Mercer Vanilla Waves
Met-Rx
Milk (various products may contain Vitamin A palmitate)
Mrs. Fields
Nissin Noodles / Ramen
Odwalla Soy Milk
Pepperidge Farm
Power Bar
Quaker
Raspberry Danish Fine Baked Goods
Russell Stover 
South Beach Diet foods
Soy Milk (various)
Sun Ridge Farms
Sweet'N Low
Sunshine Cheez-it
Walkers Snacks
Whole Foods brand pie
WorldWide Sport Nutrition
Zone Perfect

Personal Care Products:
Accem Scott
Aloette Cosmetics
Avon
Borghese 
Bumble & Bumble
California Baby
Channoine
Clinique
Cornelia
Cover Girl
Day & Night Minerals
DebLynne Soaps
Dial
Dr. Bronner's
Earth Therapeutics
Ecco Bella Botanical cosmetics
Genome Cosmetique 
Herbal Essences
Hoffmans House of Treasure
Island Soap Company 
Isomers Laboratories (makeup)
Jerome Alexander cosmetics
Juice Beauty
Kiss My Face Big Kiss Organic Palm Oil Soap
Lancome
La Série (beauty products)
Mary Kay
MD Skincare
Mountain Country
Neutrogena
One With Nature
Palmer's
Prai Beauty Products
Protameen
Pür Minerals 
Regena Cell / Anti-Aging Cream
Revlon
Sappo Hill Skin Care Products 
Senna Cosmetics
Sensaria
Sephora
Skin Biology
Skin Scope
Soma Therapy products
South of France
Tasha & Co.
Urban Decay cosmetics
ZENMED

I don't even know what it takes to make palm oil, much less what the implications of a doubling of the global demand of palm oil does to this earth and the people who live on it.  

Perhaps I don't need one more McSandwich sandwich and CoverGirl fresh-n-clean.  Because think of what those things are doing to me...the McFoods...and beauty and advertising...and the appropriation of women's bodies...these things that are conveniences are slowly killing us...

...and their production is stripping people from the only way of life.

The Liberian farmer, in referring to the palm plantation that "sprung up" on his land said,  “It’s such a big area, and we are suffering,” he says. “I feel like hell, because there’s no more land and there’s no place for me to go.”

We are partners to the land.  And things like Palm Oil displace the farmer.  And things like advertising and consumerism and pressures to be like everyone else displaces us.  And the result is loneliness.  

Several of you gave me a copy of the article, "Breaking Vancouver's Lonely Culture" from The Georgia Straight.  (I want to be sure I quote everything appropriately so I don't pull a Margaret Wente.)  

A recent survey has shown that more Vancouver citizens are "distressed by a growing sense of isolation and disconnection."  In the article, a person is quoted, "We don't have public spaces anymore where people come together across class, across age, across all lines.  We have libraries and community centres, and during the Olympics we had some public spaces.  But there's resurgence in this region to want that.  There's a gurgling up of people saying, 'We want more intellectual engagement; we want to exchange ideas and we want a place and a space where we can substantively collect."  The person adds: "This summit is a response to that." 

Church, whatever we must do...confess, repent, say I'm sorry, change the way we say hello, what we wear or when we worship, but we are a public space.  And if we have done something where society considers us private and not public, then let's turn that ship around, take down our sacred walls and be what God meant for us to be...partners with this land.  

I honestly believe loneliness is not solved by one less condo building or one more greenspace.  It may be that trying to solve loneliness in the context of the political lens where things are looked at microscopic time frames rather than a 50-, 100-, or 200-year span, we may not realize that we are lonely because we have disconnected ourselves from the land, the earth, our partner on this journey of life.  

If there is something sacred and deep and a way of being known that we have lost connection to--then no wonder we are lost.  When was the last time you ate a fresh tomato from the garden?  That is the kind of connection we have lost.  You get used to BC-grown cucumbers then someone slips you a genetically-modified cucumber and it tastes like plastic.

And then one day you wake up and everything you eat comes from the center of the grocery store and every thing you ingest in one day as palm oil as an ingredient.  

And our loneliness might be more comfortable than the farmer who literally has no home and no food and no shelter and no concept of future. 

But friend, we share loneliness because we have both lost the land.  

So when Paul speaks of labor pains, that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now...loneliness is a symptom of that groaning.  

"For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God..."   

...for people who know it really is all about the land, about being at peace with one another, about being connected to earth so that the wisdom of earth can hold us, simple-minded creatures that we really are.  May we never be fooled to think that we are anything greater than or above are partner in this journey.  The earth.  Somewhere there is a place for us.iii  

[1]  (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/land-rush-leaves-liberias-farmers-in-the-dust/article4570938/)

[2]  http://www.angelfire.com/planet/palmoilproducts/food.html

[3] In choosing the well-known Broadway song, Somewhere, as today's anthem in worship, the intention is theological, with the pronoun "us" meaning creation, human creatures being just one part of the "us."

Nurture Me, Says The Earth, September 23, 2012

"Nurture Me, Says the Earth"

Sept. 23, 2012

Creation Time: Week 3

Rev. Kathryn Ransdell

What is my purpose here on this earth? What on earth am I doing?  

When historians look back on us in 500 years, will the great questions of our day define our shadow side:  that we focused so much on my individual purpose here on this earth that we forgot that if it were not for this earth on which our purpose stood, we would not be?

Will history show that the disconnect between our purpose-driven lives and the Earth caused harm to this planet?

Today, I want you to play with your understanding of your relationship to the Earth.  Where has the relationship been and where is it going?  In dating terms, this is called a "DTR...define the relationship."  Do you have a relationship with the Earth?  (Sounds strange to say and I can just hear those conservative evangelicals get all their knickers  in a twist that those liberal Protestant so-called Christians are asking whether they have a relationship with the Earth rather than with our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.)

You might have a relationship with the Earth that upon examination, is not the relationship you want.  It is good every so often to bring out our deep beliefs about theology--sometimes beliefs we don't know that we hold, we simply inherited them in an embedded, systemic way.  Nineteenth and 20th-century theology around texts in Genesis 1 and 2 have set-up a dynamic in our relationship to the earth that has caused us to act as if our relationship to this Earth is populator, subduer, tiller and keeper.  

1.  "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it." -- Genesis 1:28
from the Hebrew verb "to dominate."  In other uses, same verb is translated as "deal harshly." 
(Lev. 25:35-38, asking Israelites not to deal harshly with those who have fallen into debt slavery.)

2.  "The Lord God put (hu)man in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it." -- Genesis 2:15

3.  Or a nice Christian word that has been given to us to describe our relationship to the earth is that we are to be "stewards" of this earth, and good ones at that, with the earth's many resources.

Our thinking on these texts has already evolved.  We no longer consider Genesis 1 and 2 historical literalism.  Instead, these texts area a way that a certain people had of looking back at the origins of all creation and defining those origins by what they know to be true of the God they now serve.  As one theologian calls it, Genesis 1 and 2 is poetic theology.  And poetry isn't meant to be tied to a chair and have a confession beat out of it as Billy Collins suggests in his poem, "Introduction to Poetry."

In like manner, just as our understanding of the historical nature of these texts has evolved, perhaps some of our readings of these texts needs to evolve.  

If we perhaps could set aside our inherited relationship with the Earth, that of subduer, tiller and steward, I wonder what we might find instead?

Today, I humbly suggest that the Earth whispers, "Nurture Me." 

1.  Let's begin by just going back to the text and looking at some of the things we thought it suggested:
1.  In the beginning the earth was a formless void...primordial chaos.  We have taken from this that God created the earth out of chaos.  We serve a God who takes chaos and orders it.  This is a God of ordering, structuring and designing.  (I had no idea God was a good Presbyterian.)  I admit that I've preached this before because there is something that preaches in this notion that God has control over chaos...the spoken word has the power to rein in chaos and make all things better, setting up a dualistic value on the chaos and what happened when God controlled the chaos.
It goes something like, "Thank goodness that God came in and spoke because what was before was inherently not of value."  Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a chaotic earth like me..."it may be the substance of a very comforting theology, but it might not be what we believe about God.  It ties a bit to that subduer theology...that we are to tame the wildness, do what we have to do to do so that people sit still and keep quiet and raise respectable middle-class families.  
What we know to be true is that God is constantly creating, blessing and covenanting..a God who is consistently and constantly in love with this world.  The love of the rainbow over us.  
Thank goodness voices around the world are calling us to a new theology that acknowledges that the Earth and all its components have intrinsic worth/value.  "The Earth Bible   has been developed by a team of scholars from Adelaide, South Australia. In this significant new series, writers from around the world read the Bible from the perspective of justice for Earth. Ecojustice principles are used as guidelines as they ask questions of the text: Does a given text value or de-value Earth? Is the voice of Earth heard or suppressed? Are humans portrayed as 'rulers' over Earth or kin with Earth? Does Earth suffer unjustly?"  

The Earth's value doesn't come from what it can give us only if we pry it open and dig deep enough.  The earth has value in itself.  In its very being.  Living with this notion changes us...we no longer have to be in a consumer/consumed relationship with the Earth.   We are changed by acknowledging the value of the Earth in the very beginning. 

The Earth doesn't need a subduer.  

2.  Othertimes it is not what we thought the text suggested, it's that we overlooked part of what the text is saying.  This comes from a rabbi friend of mine.  When she told me this interpretation of the creation story, it affected--for the better--how I go to sleep at night.  
1.  Right after we get past this chaos-order stuff, God creates light and darkness.  
God: "Whew! I just created a 24 hour period of alternating light and darkness on Earth." 
Angel: "What are you going to do now?" 
God: "I'm tired, let's just call it a day."
As many times as I had read Genesis 1, the definition of a day never caught my attention:  evening first, and day second.  If we believe this, our day begins by going to sleep.  Our day begins by entering into a deep trusting relationship that the God of Israel neither sleeps nor slumbers.  "I lift up my eyes to the mountains--where does my help come from? ... 
"The Lord watches over you—
  the Lord is your shade at your right hand;
the sun will not harm you by day,
    nor the moon by night."
For all the "days" of my life when I have woken up and thought this is it, I'm beginning my day, I will set the agenda and do what I'm going to do, and I will be a good steward of the time God has given me.   This whole notion of my day "starting" half-way through God's day, that I'm in effect waking to join God as a partner in this work of creating, blessing and covenanting, that I'm serving alongside God rather than serving my ego-agenda of what I think my day should hold...this whole notion of evening, then morning and that is a day...The world does not revolve around us our needs but around God.  This change in relationship to the day digs up the roots of my me-ology...and anything that can dig up those roots, I'm all for. 

No longer steward, but partner.  And not just any partner.  As the story tells us, we are a partner made in the image and likeness of God, the whole motley group that we are.  We are a partner in being in the likeness of God, that which God is, we are too.  That which God does, we do too.  

Isaiah 45:18 says (The Message),
                " God, Creator of the heavens—
    he is, remember, God.
Maker of earth—
   he put it on its foundations, built it from scratch.
He didn’t go to all that trouble
   to just leave it empty, nothing in it.
    He made it to be lived in.

If this is what God does, this is what we do to.  We don't leave this earth empty with nothing in it because we've gotten ours and now we will leave the problems to our grandchildren, we are to make this earth to be lived in.

We are more than tillers of this earth, as God told them in the "King James English" because "to till" was the best English verb to describe the Hebrew word that is better understood as "to serve."ii  We are servants of this earth.

No longer subduers, tillers and stewards.  We are partners and servants to an Earth that in itself has intrinsic value. 

My friend who wrote the book on Preaching Creation says it this way, "to change the way we speak about ourselves and nature we must change the way we speak and this will be nothing less than complete conversion."

To change our relationship to this Earth, we must change the way we speak about this Earth. It won't happen instantaneously; it happens slowly, just as a seed is planted, takes root and is nurtured by the soil and sun and rain.  

When entering new territory like this, how do we even understand how it begins?  I give thanks for a time in my life when I can clearly see my language change--evolve--as I was being confronted daily with a very real change in my life.  I was pregnant with Ethan...first pregnancy...it's so lovely and beautiful and idealistic...you have no idea what's waiting for you...

In my first trimester, I journaled on this phrase, "I am pregnant."  My relationship was to my changing body, sick every single day, shifting and expanding.  It was about me.    

In the second trimester, I journaled on this phrase, "I'm having a baby."  A baby...a tiny little creature who will be dependent on me to show him or her the ways of this world.  But it was still about me...what I'm doing...what I'm having...

In my third trimester, I journaled, "I'm a mother and this is my child."  Relationship.  Of course at this point in pregnancy, almost anything can make you cry, the mother and child, both with intrinsic value, both with something to teach and share with the other, both called to the role of nurture for as we all know, the one who was nurtured, one day, becomes the nurturer. 

For me, this was a process of evolving from me-ology to living in relationship.  Which brings me back to my beginning ask of you...have you had a DTR--define the relationship--with the Earth?   

No longer subduer, tiller or steward 

I am a partner with God and Earth.
I am a servant to God and to this Earth.
Both Earth and me have been granted intrinsic worth, not because we've earned it.   No, God looked on both of us, Earth and Me, Earth and You, and called us good.  

The church's task in this world is to nurture this goodness.

What is my purpose with this earth? What with earth am I doing?  

i Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

 from The Apple that Astonished Paris, 1996, University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, Ark.
Permissions information.  Copyright 1988 by Billy Collins.   All rights reserved.   Reproduced with permission.
ii John C. Holbert.   Preaching Creation.

Serve Me, Says The Earth, September 16, 2012

Rev. Kathryn Ransdell

St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church

Serve Me, Says the Earth

Sept. 16, 2012

A reading from the Wisdom of Solomon, found in the Apocrypha:

15 May God grant me to speak with judgment, and to have thoughts worthy of what I have received; for he is the guide even of wisdom and the corrector of the wise.  
For both we and our words are in his hand, as are all understanding and skill in crafts.  
For it is he who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements; the beginning and end and middle of times, the alternations of the solstices and the changes of the seasons, the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars, the natures of animals and the tempers of wild animals, the powers of spirits and the thoughts of human beings, the varieties of plants and the virtues of roots; 
I learned both what is secret and what is manifest, for wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me. There is in her a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent, pure, and altogether subtle. 
For wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things. 
For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. 
For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness. 
Although she is but one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets; 
for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom. 
She is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars. Compared with the light she is found to be superior, for it is succeeded by the night, but against wisdom evil does not prevail.
She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well.  

At the end of last Sunday's service, I asked Latash Nahanee if he would offer our benediction.  Being the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant that I am, of course, in my mind, I pictured him saying a few words and offering a blessing, just like me.  I like to call this me-ology, which is the study and focus on all things me.  And as I've told you before, every so often me-ology needs to be reined in with my mantra, "Get over your cheap self." 

Latash is a member of the Coast Salish Nation, specifically the Squamish nation. I met Latash when he came and gave a presentation on First Nations spirituality.  There was something about him that connected with me, and our paths have overlapped the past couple of years.  Latash always has this ability to show-up at just the right times on Sunday mornings.  And when he is here, I sense in him something unique, and deep and powerful.  I attribute it to his spirituality founded in his First Nations culture as well as he might just be an old soul.  I like being with old souls.   

As he sang last Sunday morning, what was true for me was the experience, that the singing is not just for itself, that instead, something happens because of the singing.  It's a similar experience for  me when I attend Taize, like we offer on the 4th Sunday of the month.  The singing is a transcendental experience, almost like a portal to something greater.  

When I experienced Latash's singing, there is some deep nudge in my soul that asks me to see the world around me in a way that I have yet to see it.  It raises in me questions that have no easy answers and leads me to wonder whether I am any different from those philosophers who lived in the 1st century, who Luke records in the book of Acts, "spend(ing) their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new."  This idea of whether we are spending our time in nothing slapped me across the face this week when I was watching a news show and a couple from the Bachelor was being interviewed and the focus was the plastic surgery she endured so that her body would be back to what it was pre-baby.  This was being celebrated and of course, her husband was asked what he thought of it, and of course, he liked it.  What are we telling little boys and little girls when we manufacture the body in such a way that only one standard is perfect?  

Sometimes I wonder if what we are doing is really living at all.  The isolation, the consumption, the waste.  TS Eliot said it like this in 1934, just a year after this sanctuary was built:  

O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!

The endless cycle of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to God.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries

Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

(T. S. Eliot, Choruses  from the Rock, 1934)

I really wonder sometimes about this...Where is the Life that we have lost in living?  Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Today, we sit with this word, "wisdom."  In our first text, Paul engages the philosophers of Athens, a character-type we would normally classify as wise.  And one might say it is a wise decision to make an idol to almost everything, but just in case you forgot one, it wouldn't hurt to make an idol to the unknown god.  It's always good to cover your bases when it comes to gods. 

But Paul announces that he knows this unknown God and that this unknown God is known and knowable:

"From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us."

This is one of my favorite poetic lines of Scripture:  "so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for God and find God--through indeed God is not far from each one of us."  

For "In God we live and move and have our being'; as even some of your own poets have said, "For we too are God's  offspring.'"

I don't want a theology where we have ceased searching for God.  To me, that is what it is all about...the search for God.  And there are times when I feel closer to God, but that doesn't mean God has moved (again me-ology)...God is not far from each one of us.  

And our second text is from the Wisdom material that is found in the Old Testament books of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and some of the Psalms.  It is also found in two books from the Apocrypha, which represents the 5th-1st centuries BCE of the Jewish story, when it lived in the Hellenistic culture.  For most of you, this is probably new to be reading from the Apocrypha, and, you will have to find within yourself what authority you give it in the same ways that you must decide the authority you give the Old Testament, New Testament or any other sacred writing.

Although we don't know much about the person speaking, we know that the person has gained exceptional life experience, intelligence and understanding in his or her life.  And it is the embodied Wisdom that gives him these insights, one of my favorites being "the beginning and end and middle of times."  

The middle times are when we put into place the things that will shape our lives, build or destroy relationships, connect or disengage us from others...it is the middle times where the decisions we make, and the decisions we don't make, and the context in which we were born define this journey we will take on life.  

And who gave this person these insights, intellegences, and understandings?

Wisdom.  This mysterious being that we spend very little time with in organized religion.  We don't really know where to place this being that is touched on and hinted at throughout Scripture. Even Jesus refers to her:  19 "The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Behold, a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners !' Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds."

In the West, the Trinity is neatly tied with a bow on top so when we are confronted with this idea of some being poured out before all creation and that creation delighting with God and in God and with creation, well, it is more mystical than intellectual.  

My friends who came through Vancouver last week, Dr. John and Rev. Diana Holbert, could not have come through Vancouver at a better time.  Dr. Holbert is a retired Old Testament and preaching professor.  After the services he gave me two books, "Delete: What  not to say in a sermon" and the other, "Preaching Creation: The Environment and the Pulpit." From Dr. John Holbert's writing comes this translation describing Wisdom's beginnings, found in the book of Proverbs:
"I was beside God as a confidant; I was a daily delight, rejoining before God always,
rejoicing in the whole creation and delighting in the human race."  

Before anything else was created, wisdom is poured out, birthed, by God.  We cannot rush too quickly to ascribe Wisdom to the role of the Holy Spirit?  But I'm not interested in a philosophical discussion about Wisdom this morning.  We just stay with Wisdom, walking her path and learning what she has to teach us.  

Dr. Holbert shares another scholar's definition of Wisdom:  "Wisdom is an inexact term that is commonly used to refer to knowledge regarding life that God has built into the infrastructure of the natural and social worlds, the search for those understandings in everyday experiences, and the transmission of the results of that search."  (-- Fretheim, God and World, from Holbert, Preaching Creation.)

Wisdom is not ahistorical suggestions for how to live a happy life; wisdom is directly connected to the infrastructure of the natural and social worlds.  What he is suggesting is radical...that the infrastructure in the natural world is wisdom and there is something for us educated, intelligent, control-freak humans to learn.  

Isaiah captures Wisdom found in the natural and social world:

23 Listen, and hear my voice;

   Pay attention, and hear my speech. 

24 Do those who plough for sowing plough continually?

   Do they continually open and harrow their ground? 

25 When they have levelled its surface,

   do they not scatter dill, sow cummin,

and plant wheat in rows

   and barley in its proper place,

   and spelt as the border? 

26 For they are well instructed;

   their God teaches them. 

27 Dill is not threshed with a threshing-sledge,

   nor is a cartwheel rolled over cummin;

but dill is beaten out with a stick,

   and cummin with a rod. 

28 Grain is crushed for bread,

   but one does not thresh it for ever;

one drives the cartwheel and horses over it,

   but does not pulverize it. 

29 This also comes from the Lord of hosts;

   he is wonderful in counsel,

   and excellent in wisdom.

This is a Scripture about how to plant a field.  There is a natural order by which things work, and, this illustrates the beautiful interdependence of wisdom and nature, of wisdom and creation.  

I will be the first to admit that we are no longer an agriculturally-based society.  Metaphors of farm life really don't connect with us.  But that doesn't mean we dismiss them as antiquated.  Instead, it is a plumbline to see how far we have gone askew. 

We gain wisdom from engaging this created world.  And to engage the created world, we must get out of our heads this idea that we have been given this world to dominate and subdue it, which is the interpretation of the creation story that has undergirded human action and industrial revolution for some time now.  

Ethan has a children's book about the story of Creation.  And when it comes to the description of the creation of humans, the narrator interprets what God did and said as this, "People are more important than anything else God created." 

May God forgive us for all the times we have believed in this me-ology, in centuries past and in in the present. 

Wisdom shapes us to be equals among creation, to find our connection again to this created order and find our places in the cycle of birth, vitality, decline and death, rather than running to get plastic surgery when nursing a child deflates your breasts. 

I believe that in this 21st century Christianity is going to a deeper level of consciousness, that maybe after 21 centuries we are finally getting over our me-ology and focusing on the rest of creation.  Maybe, just maybe we will begin reading our most famous bumper sticker scripture, "For God so loved this world that God gave his only Son so that we may not perish but have eternal life."  

It doesn't so, "For God so loved me..."

It says, "For God so loved this world..."  This cosmos.  

As my friend, Dr. Holbert, said as we took a late ferry ride home after being on Bowen for a beautiful walk through the old-growth rainforest, maybe there is a different way to read the Scripture that would lead us to a different way of being in this world.  

He wrote, "Under the teaching of WomanWisdom we can learn to live with the natural world rather than strive to dominate it.  Under her call to delight and joy, we can delight in the natural world rather than see it only as means for an ends.  She still has much to teach us."   

I don't know the last time you delighted in the natural world.  If you are like me, this past week, you have rushed to work, done your wash, cooked some meals at home and had some take-out, pushed your way through your day with an extra cup of coffee.  The world for most of us is a means for an end.  The world--the created order--is here to serve me.  

Maybe that's changing.  

Serve me, says the Earth.  When Latash sings, this is the unspoken word that tugs at my soul.  

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(I would like to give significant credit for this sermon to Dr. John C. Holbert for what he taught me this week, in-person and through his newly-published book regarding preaching and creation.  John C. Holbert, Preaching Creation: The Environment and the Pulpit.  Cascade Books, Eugene, Oregon.  2011.  I am grateful for the teachers who cross our paths at just the right time.)

Speak For Me, September 9, 2012

 Rev. Kathryn Ransdell Sept. 9, 2012

Mark 7:24-37 St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church

Speak for Me!

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum (do-mor-to-is nihl-nissi-bonum)  (“Of the dead, nothing unless good”).  This idea has been hanging around our collective psyche since 600 BC when one of the Seven Sages of Greece first coined the phrase:  τὸν τεθνηκóτα μὴ κακολογεῖν    (Don’t badmouth a dead man).  Consider that...600 BC, Judah was in the process of complete and total devastation, deportation and exile to Babylon.  Probably better that they didn't have CNN back then.  

I wonder how this cultural guideline affects how we prepare for funerals.  Ever been to a funeral and the eulogy didn't sound like the person you knew?  The speaker paints a picture of someone who seems to have ascended into heaven and now sits at the right hand of God and you knew them to be, well, not so angelic.  It's such an interesting process for families to come and sit with a minister and begin speaking of their loved one.  Everyone begins to speak in such glowing terms that an hour can go by and you might think this person has done nothing wrong, not one mistake.  Ever.  In their entire life.  

This establishes a norm in the room that we can use fancy language and call it the hegemonic discourse.  (I have loved this phrase since I first encountered it in feminist and liberation theologies.)  A very basic definition of a hegemonic discourse is that it makes things that ought to be said unsayable.  For funerals, cultural expectation is that everything will be okay as long as we plaster on that smile one last time and all nod quietly to one another and put him in the ground and with that last scoop of sand, and along with the dead body, let us bury our emotions and feelings. 

Then one person in the room goes quiet, turns inward and then you invite them to tell a story.  He could get quite angry.  She drank a lot.  He left us when we were 4.  Either the room will embrace this outside voice and move towards accepting this person for what they were and what they weren't, or the room will go awkwardly quiet, will silence this person out of their own fear, waiting to return to happy, happy, joy, joy.  What I have found is that when the room embrances this still small voice in an appreciative, non-judgemental stance, the room has the ability to enter into spaces of deep healing, which is what funerals should be about, healing for the living.  

There are two great emotions that will dictate our lives:  either fear or love.  

Fear will keep things that ought to be said unsayable.  Love speaks the truth. 
Fear will make you sick.  Love will heal.
Fear will take your life.  Love will give you life.

And sometimes the difference between living in fear and living in love is being willing to listen to that one small voice from the outside.  That one voice in the room that dares to speak her truth.  That outsider who looks in, notices, and observes, who has the perspective of being on the outside to see on the inside, but as the poem on the back of our bulletin cover says so clearly, that still small voice is often on the wrong side of race, religion, gender, class and history.  

In this morning's Scripture, that still small voice belongs to a Syrophoenician woman.  At the time of Jesus, the area of southern Turkey, parts of northern Palestine/Israel and Syria were all the Roman province of Syria, and the southern part of the province of Syria was referred to as Phoenician Syria.  Phoenicia flourished from 1550 BC to 300 BC (highpoint is 1200-800).  It was known for its maritime trading, for its trading in luxurious purple gleaned from shells off the coast of Tyre, and even for spreading their alphabet from which all other phonetic alphabets derived themselves.  

By the time we get to today's stories, what the two characters have in common is that they are under the rule, and oppression of the Roman empire.  What keeps them distant...well, her religion was wrong--She was a Greek lumped into that category called Gentile; Jesus was a Jew.

Her race was wrong-- She was Phoenician.

And her anatomy was wrong.  She was a woman.  Jesus was a man.  And women and men did not speak to one another.  In fact, women weren't considered fully human.  We were property, best used as a pawn in men's schemes.    

Everything about this made it wrong for her to speak to Jesus, much less expect him to do anything for her.  You might say she spoke to him because she knew the odds, and she had nothing to lose.  True, and,  she is a mom.  And that mothering instinct, wherever it comes from, will drive mothers to the farthest extremes, not to mention pre-dawn hockey-practices, for their child.  Mother's will trade their lives for their childs, so it doesn't surprise me one bit what she asks:  "Will you cast the demons out of daughter?|"  

Jesus replies, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." 

These are the best kind of insults.  There is no cursing or swearing or raising of voices, just cold, calm piercing with the intention of putting you in your place and silencing you. 

Not really the warm, fuzzy Jesus we sing about..."Jesus, Jesus how I trust him..."  

This same story is told in Matthew, who takes this oral tradition and gives us a bit more understanding to explain away Jesus' actions.  Jesus was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel and not to those outside the house, the Gentiles.  This leaves us to decide that either he shouldn't be wasting his time or the Gentiles don't deserve his time.

And this woman knows this.  She knows the traditions of the Jewish people, the clean and the unclean.  Even in the chapter prior to this one, we are confronted with the Pharisees criticizing Jesus because his disciples aren't adhering to the Jewish custom of washing their hands before they eat, therefore what they are eating is defiling them.  They ask him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?"  

Based upon how he answered this Syrophoenician woman, you might think he would have politely looked at the Pharisees and said, "You're right.  Chop-chop disciples.  Off you go to wash your hands.  Don't forget soap." 

No...he blasts the Pharisees..."You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep tradition!"  

And what is the commandment: Love the Lord you God and love your neighbor as yourself. 

It would seem in the span of one chapter Jesus is inconsistent with his liberation theology.  It would seem that he got it right in the first scenario and wrong in the second.  It would seem that he wasn't perfect.  Oh my...for all those WASPy white-Anglo-saxon-Protestants, this isn't the kind of Jesus we have painted to be true.  

It would seem that in the mystery and vastness and wideness and depth and breadth of God, the woman with a daughter possessed by demons, the woman who was Gentile and Syrophoenician, the outsider, was placed at that very moment, for that very time, to change the course of humanity. 

And it was up to her to speak up.  

It was up to her to be so clever and quick in her comeback so very present in her strength and so very connected to her truth (which is that mommas love their babies) that she could speak from her soul: Even the dogs eat the crumbs from the children's tables.

It wasn't from the head.  It wasn't polished rhetoric.  It was simple.  Plain.  True.  Powerful.  

And all she had to do was speak up.  All she had to do was speak the truth given to her at that very moment.  She didn't have to arrange a campaign.  All she had to do was speak the truth that she knew at that very moment.  You know...you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free?  

If we speak up...
we can effect change.
If we listen,
we can be changed.

I believe moments happen often in life when we are called to live with this kind of intentionality.  I also believe that we get numbed from the pain of life and anesthetized by the consumerist worldview that we don't even realize when we are called to speak or listen in these kind of life-transforming ways.  Because of this, I believe when these moments of transformation come, they often get met by fear, and the opportunity for love or healing that was well within grasp, becomes, well delayed, but not impossible. 

But I also believe that is  not the end of the story.  God doesn't finish with us that easily.  I believe this story at this time in history teaches us that we haven't quite got the God thing figured out.  Even Jesus missed the mark.  We will too.   We keep being led to these times and these places where we practice speaking up and deep listening and each time we lean a little bit more into love rather than fall into fear.  

And this brings me back to creation...the best cure for me when I feel like I'm falling into fear is the beach.  When everything else is going wrong, the beach can soothe my soul even with 2-year-old twin toddlers throwing sand in each other's hair.  I'm reminded that although a picture of serenity, everything is changing at every moment, the grains of sand shifting, the tide pushing and pulling.  But somehow it all stays in balance.  If things feel too boxed in, then the beach reminds me that we serve a God whose love is as wide and deep as the ocean.  

The past couple of times when I've gone to the beach, I must confess that in the background of my mind chatter is this whole on-going discussion around a pipeline coming across British Columbia and increased tanker traffic along the coast.  As I look out on the ocean, I can't imagine this beautiful coastline being affected by an oil spill.  I've often wondered how to think on this issue.  I grew up with a landscape littered with pumper jacks and a hometown that was based on the success and expansion of oil.  Good people took care of their families because of the jobs provided by the oil fields.  

But today, I want to look at this issue by going into that deep space within us, that space that mixes with the Divine, and simply wonder, "What is Creation Saying to Us?" 

Our orange banners hang today to remind us that we enter this church time within a season, a growing movement within Christianity to carve a liturgical space known as Creation Time.  Over the next 4 weeks leading up to the celebration of Thanksgiving, we will bring Creation into our time together as if she were a conversation partner who has come for a cup of tea.  

Creation demands that we live life with intentionality, that we be willing to wake-up and risk speaking up, or be so daring to listen deeply.  We may be exploring Mars, but right now, we only have this one earth.  

* How does creation need us to speak up? 
* Where is creation calling us to listen deeply? 
* Who among us has been tapped at this very time in this very place to be the one who speaks the truth and opens us to unimaginable possibilities in the vastness of God's love?  

Creation needs that kind of love to speak up.  

Called To Work, September 2, 2012

"Called To Work"

The Right Rev. Dr. Gary Paterson

Sunday, September 2, 2012

This is Gary's last Sermon before he leaves his home congregation of St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church in Vancouver BC, to take up the position of Moderator for the United Church of Canada.

Please click on the link below to hear his Sermon.

"Called To Work"