Rev. Virginia Jarocha-Ernst

CENTERING THOUGHT      

Earth's crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

And only he who sees takes off his shoes;

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries. ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

MEDITATION

A Chinook Blessing (adapted)

   Teach us, and show us the way.

We call upon the earth, our planet home, with its beautiful depths and soaring heights, its vitality and abundance of life, and together we ask that it:

   Teach us, and show us the way.

We call upon the mountains, the Cascades, the Olympics, the Rockies, the Appalachians, the high green valleys and meadows filled with wild flowers, the snows that never melt, the summits of intense silence, and we ask that they:

   Teach us, and show us the way.

We call upon the waters that rim the earth, horizon to horizon,

That flow in our rivers and streams, that fall upon our gardens and fields,

And we ask that they:

   Teach us, and show us the way.

We call upon the land that grows our food, the nurturing soil,

The fertile fields, the abundant gardens and orchards, and we ask that they:

   Teach us, and show us the way.

We call upon the forests, the great trees reaching strongly to the sky

With earth in their roots and the heavens in their branches,

The locust and the pine and the maple, and we ask them to:

   Teach us, and show us the way.

We call upon the creatures of the fields and forests and the seas, our brothers and sisters the wolves and deer, the eagle and dove, the great whales and the dolphin, the beautiful orca and salmon, blue fish and trout who share our home, and we ask them to:

   Teach us, and show us the way.

We call upon all those who have lived on this earth, our ancestors and our friends, who dreamed the best for future generations, and upon whose lives our lives are built, and with thanksgiving, we call upon them to:

   Teach us, and show us the way.

And lastly, we call upon all that we hold most sacred, the presence and power of the great spirit of love and truth which flows through all the universe … to be with us to:

   Teach us, and show us the way.

SERMON

For this congregation which gathers every week under the watchful gaze of this earth window, Earth day is a high holy day. Here we are -  the people of the whole earth. Imagine that globe up there spinning to show us, not just North and South America, but all of Asia, Europe, India and Antarctica. Imagine the whole earth turning on its axis, and imagine we are in a spaceship hurtling to the moon, looking back and seeing for the first time that beautiful whole of it. Not just the ground we usually stand on here in Monmouth County, NJ, but all the ground, all the holy ground. Imagine seeing the whole and holiness of it – wrapped in a loose shawl of atmosphere, just a thin layer of air and clouds, with the highest mountains, the deserts and fertile valleys spinning forward once around every 24 hours, day after day, night after night.

Our beautiful stained glass image is just a reminder, art just barely imitating the grandeur, the subtlety of the real thing. (slide show of the earth from space)

All of this is our holy ground. The old stories of ‘holy ground’ are remarkable in that they are found in very different kinds of cultures. The Israelites of the Hebrew bible, Moses and the burning bush, and Native American cultures that are steeped in a sense of reverence for the earth. You might remember the story of Moses. 

In that story, Moses, a shepherd is out on the hillside, tending to his flock, when he spots a burning bush in the distance. He goes to check it out, and as he gets closer he hears a voice coming from the bush. The voice says, “Moses, take off your shoes, you are standing on holy ground!” Moses does as he is told. The voice calls him to come over. Moses knows that this is the voice of God and so he responds, “Here I am.” The story continues as God instructs Moses to lead his people out of slavery in Egypt. Moses agrees but then asks, “Who shall say sent me? Who shall I say you are?” God answers, “I am who I am. Say that ‘I am’ sent you.”

This conversation on holy ground is one that has fascinated me and many others. I have interpreted the conversation to be holy because both God and Moses stood in that ‘I am’ space. This is who I am, this is who you are, and the holy is in the dialog between the two. Calling to each other, naming each other, this is the definition of holy. Martin Buber famously calls this the I/Thou relationship. This relational holy ground is what some call god.  

But this I/Thou relationship is standing on something regarded as holy as well. The ground, the earth itself is an essential element to the conversation. The burning bush itself is holy. The sand between Moses’s toes is holy.  

In the Chinook blessing we contemplated for our meditation, the perspective offered in the refrain, ‘Teach us, and show us the way.’ asks that ‘dust between the toes of Moses’ to teach us something. It asks for guidance and direction. It asks of the earth, the trees, the mountains and all the life sustained on this planet to show us the way forward. What could such ancient holy ground have to tell us today? What does a burning bush, a deer and a fish and a storm have to teach us? 

When I told that story of the Burning Bush last Saturday at our UULMNJ meeting, my friend, Rev. Charlie Ortman, added another interpretation. For some scholars who study the Hebrew, the meaning of ‘I am’ is “I am becoming.”  I love this – that not only is holy ground the space between you and me, I and Thou, it is also moving, learning, becoming. This holy ground is dynamic not static. You and I are who we are, and at the same time, as long as we live, we are becoming. We are living evolutionary beings, held by gravity and air and light and the dirt between our toes to this good earth. All of it spins day into night and night into day, becoming together, becoming holy together. We are so very connected it is hard to see unless we lift ourselves by impossible rockets and improbable flights above the crust of earth which we inhabit, lift ourselves for just a moment and behold what we are a part of, what teaches, holds us and is holy to us. How amazing it is that we can look at the images taken on those flights today and feel inspired, too.

The writer of the Burning Bush story and the author of the Chinook blessing never made such impossible flights above the crust of the earth. I’m not sure they even thought the earth was round. But somehow they understood that this earth has a sacred dimension. And the qualities of that dimension included authenticity, becoming and learning.

So, what are we becoming today, what are we learning this Earth Day? It has been an unusual winter followed by an unusual spring. The past few years we have experienced wild swings in weather as the planet warms. And you know we have a part to play in these climate changes. Some of us are learning, becoming active in the many ways we can shift our uses of fossil fuels. Some of see the effects of global warming in ever more violent hurricanes and floods and drought and tornadoes. Some of us look at the human migration patterns set in motion because of climate change, the economic crisis it accelerates, and all the human suffering that results from over use and misuse of the planets resources. As a few exploit the planet’s wealth for their own gain, many more fall ever deeper into poverty. Wanting too much oil, we ruin ourselves with wars fought to win it. Generating more and more waste, generating heat, carbon dioxide, generating our own suffering, we are our own agents of terror. Tilting that blue marble further off its center, we collectively have generated the power to create a terrible imbalance. But while the earth is clearly affected by our actions, I believe the earth is a balance-seeking environment. The earth’s systems will correct themselves, that’s nature, but those corrections may not be especially friendly to human life as we know it.

There are very real consequences to human and animal life from this imbalance. While a few prosper from generating energy use and creating a culture of disposable items, many more do not prosper. The overall effect on our planet is a dangerous change in the complex interdependent systems that sustain life as we know it. The wild swings in weather, and wider and wider extremes of wealth and health are signs of an imbalance in the system. This imbalance that is not just us singing the blues, but we are fearing for our very survival.

So I ask my browning April grass and early blooming trees, Teach me, and show me the way.  Earlier this week, I looked around my yard and wondered what this season would yet bring. It is beautiful, but it has been too dry in our corner of the world. The grass is brown already when it should be just enjoying its first fresh greening. We know seasons change and vary, and it is not wise to make catastrophic predictions based on today’s quirky weather. But the browning grass of April feels wrong.

This poem by Paula Gunn Allen (from Songs from This Earth on Turtle's Back, edited by Joseph Bruchac, 1984) exemplifies Allen's spirit-informed view of the universe. She speaks with a Native American, feminist and multicultural perspective:

KOPIS'TAYA (A GATHERING OF SPIRITS)

Because we live in the browning season

the heavy air blocking our breath,

and in this time when living

is only survival, we doubt the voices

that come shadowed on the air,

that weave within our brains

certain thoughts, a motion that is soft,

imperceptible, a twilight rain,

soft feather's fall, a small body

dropping into its nest, rustling, murmuring,

settling in for the night.

Because we live in the hard-edged season,

where plastic brittle and gleaming shines

and in this space that is cornered and angled,

we do not notice wet, moist, the significant

drops falling in perfect spheres

that are the certain measures of our minds;

almost invisible, those tears,

soft as dew, fragile, that cling to leaves,

petals, roots, gentle and sure,

every morning.

We are the women of daylight; of clocks and steel

foundries, of drugstores and streetlights,

of superhighways that slice our days in two.

Wrapped around in glass and steel we ride

our lives; behind dark glasses we hide our eyes,

our thoughts, shaded, seem obscure, smoke

fills our minds, whisky husks our songs,

polyester cuts our bodies from our breath,

our feet from the welcoming stones of earth.

Our dreams are pale memories of themselves,

and nagging doubt is the false measure of our days.

Even so, the spirit voices are singing,

their thoughts are dancing in the dirty air.

Their feet touch the cement, the asphalt

delighting, still they weave dreams upon our

shadowed skulls, if we could listen.

If we could hear.

Let's go then. Let's find them. Let's

listen for the water, the careful gleaming drops

that glisten on the leaves, the flowers. Let's

ride the midnight, the early dawn. Feel the wind

striding through our hair. Let's dance

the dance of feathers, the dance of birds.

Asking for guidance and teaching in this April in New Jersey, I am struck by how much time I spend with machines, cement and steel, and how little I let myself be immersed in the dirt between my toes.

The bad habits creep in so quietly. I’m hooked to electronic devices more than ever. Kindles and cell phones and all the rest, bits of plastic and glass and steel that are wondrous in what they do. But should I travel every minute of my day so connected? You know, I quietly mocked the mother in the grocery store who kept on talking on her cell phone while she loaded the groceries on the ramp, juggled a toddler in her cart, paid the cashier and then piled her bags on top of her fussy child still in the cart, never once pausing to acknowledge the person who was serving her. And continued to talk on the phone as she proceeded out the door. Is that how I am going through life too? More connected to others through devices and less present where ever I really am?

This here and this now is the holy ground we need to reclaim, this holy ground of Lincroft, NJ, the holy ground on Monmouth County. This sky, this bird song, this spring air, this water, today’s rain is holy, too. How can we live into the rebalancing of this earth, countering all that over-consumption and over-dependence on fossil fuels the use of which is poisoning our only home? The answer is right here. 

   Teach me, and show me the way.

The answer is not new, but so easily forgotten. We need a high holy day to remind us.

“You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake. You must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand-heap. You must have so good an appetite as this, else you will live in vain.”

- Henry David Thoreau 

We all live and work and stand on holy ground. This ‘I am’ is a becoming, a turning, a spinning globe revolving, evolving. We must love this crust of ground more than any crust of bread. We must extract nutrients from this sandy shore, we must extract meaning and beauty and love from this fragile blue green ball. Many of you did just that this week as you cleaned and planted and loved our bit of earth here at 1475 West Front Street. Just such love and dirt under your fingernails will make a difference. Writing letters and advocating for better, safer, more balanced laws will do that, too. As will slowing down our consumption of fossil fuels. Will it be enough to stop change? The answer has always been no. Change is part of the nature of this holy ground. But will we leave this earth better than we found it? Will it still be holy for our children’s children? Will this earth be a better home for them? That is my prayer today. May we love this holy ground, this beautiful earth we are blessed to live upon.

Someone thought this message was so important that they created a beautiful stained glass work of art to remind us of what is so deeply holy. Blue and green and full of the blues, it is ours, it is home. We cannot help but love the crust and the heart of all. May this always be so. Amen.