Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City
April 22, 2007
The Third Sunday of Easter, Year C
The Reverend Elizabeth G. Maxwell
 Acts 9: 1 - 9a
 Psalm 33
 Revelation 5: 6 - 14
 John 21: 1 - 14

 

     In the name of the risen Christ, Amen.

     As many of you know, last fall I had the wonderful opportunity to make a trip to the Galapagos.  It is as remarkable a place as I had expected it to be, those strange islands off the coast of Ecuador, born out of volcanic activity, looking like a desert except that they are all surrounded by sea, and populated by some of the most amazing creatures anywhere on the globe many of whom live only there.

     The thing about the animals on the Galapagos is that they aren't very disturbed by people, and so they go about their business as you, as a visitor (and very aware that you are a visitor) go about yours.  They wander across the path; they chirp or squawk very near you.  There were iguanas, frigate birds and even giant tortoises.  But the most remarkable experience that I had there had to do with the sea lions.

     We were in the islands just after the sea lions had their young, so there were sea lion pups everywhere on the beaches.  The group that I was with was walking on a particular island one afternoon, and came upon some of these adorable baby sea lions - they are adorable- and so everyone was taking pictures of them.  But my camera battery died- I hadn't planned very well-  so I wandered a little bit away from the group and sat on a rock.  And there, not very far away from me, was a sea lion pup, also sitting on the rock.

     We'd been told not to touch the animals because their mothers may reject them if they have the scent of humans on them, and yet this sea lion pup was no more than three feet away from me, and I looked at him or her, and he or she looked at me.  And we sat.  The eyes were entirely dark and opaque, the little fur wet from being in the water - I could see the different shades of color - of brown.  I saw how the shoulder comes down into the joint of an elbow and then into a flipper.  But the flipper has nails on it as other mammals do; I never knew that about sea lions.  We sat there in time out of time, the baby sea lion and I, and the baby sea lion inched, wiggled closer to me, obviously as curious about me as I was about it.  And, in an almost breathless moment, it came so close that its whiskers brushed my hand.

     I don't know if you've had this kind of experience- encountering a being who is profoundly other, and yet profoundly present - that kind of encounter and connection that is what Martin Buber  called "I and Thou."   It gave me the sense that another was there who was sentient and curious but wild, and of a different kind than my kind - a sense of seeing and being seen that was like looking into mystery but also somehow looking at family.

     Seeing is also one of the themes of our texts today.  In the first lesson that we heard, Saul, the persecutor of the church, is on a mission of destruction.  But on his way to Damascus, where he's going to haul the Christians into jail, he is literally blinded by the light of Jesus, and he's knocked off his horse.  And in his blindness he sees what he could not see before.  He hears a voice that he comes to understand is Jesus: "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?"  He goes into town, and he spends some time fasting in the dark, coming to terms, at least as a beginning, with what has been revealed.  We can imagine what that process was like, but we're not told.

     And then, three days later, he has his sight restored by one of the people I think is a hero in scripture and doesn't really get enough attention, the courageous and faithful Ananias, who has had a revelation of his own.  He responds to God telling him to go and lay his hands on Saul, "Are you sure, Lord?  Do you know who this is?"  But when he goes, he calls Saul "Brother," and it's by his touch that Saul, who will be Paul, receives his sight again.

     Then, in this morning's second reading, from the Revelation to John, we are in the world of vision, almost dream. The seer images Christ as a lamb who has been slaughtered, who is thus identified with and able to save those who have suffered in every tribe and every language and people and nation.  The slaughtered lamb is praised in turn by the songs of every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea.  John has a vision of wholeness, of comprehensiveness, of all beings - the great whales, the earthworms, trees, and birds - all there around the throne of the Holy One, singing praise to the Lamb.

     And then from John's gospel, we have this lovely story of a resurrection appearance in which the unnamed disciple whom Jesus loved, out in a boat with Peter fishing having caught nothing, suddenly recognizes by his voice the Beloved, the Lord, calling to them from the shore.  Peter leaps out of the boat to go to him.  And then the risen Christ, the one who is known but also so strange, is revealed to them when he feeds them breakfast on the beach.  They recognize him when bread is broken and simple nourishment is shared.

     So these texts speak not only of seeing, but with it they speak of conversion, of change.  They image for us a change in awareness and in life direction, a change that is both radical and subtle, dramatic and gradual.  They point to a change in the imagination, an opening up of our understanding of what life is about, and in our ability to envision the future.  And at the heart of this conversion is the presence of the risen Christ, the crucified lamb, Beloved, nurturer, friend, and stranger.  That presence radically shifts our priorities and offers the energy to move in a new direction.

     All of these stories, really, are resurrection stories, and they don't say what will happen next.  But they capture a crucial experience of revelation, and so they challenge us and point a way, and give us hope and courage and comfort.

     My friends, we need those thing - hope and courage and comfort.

     This third Sunday of Easter, with its themes of seeing and conversion, is also Earth Day.  Earth Day is not a liturgical feast, and that may be part of the problem.  It may speak to exactly what needs to be converted.  Our tradition does have in it resources for understanding our relationship to the creation, but so often Christian theology has been part of the problem in our relationship to the biosphere, to the creatures who share the world with us.  So often, Christians have viewed the earth as something to be dominated; we've seen ourselves as separate from the environment, as if it's out there and we're here - as if, on one hand, we could exploit it indefinitely, and on the other hand, as if to be saved is to escape from it.

     Many of us in the last year have had an experience rather like Saul's, being hit over the head, knocked off our metaphorical horse and called to change directions radically.  Our awareness of global warming, which we might better call global heating or global cooking, has really leapt into consciousness full-blown in the last year, from Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" to the Time magazine cover to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's statements that now no reputable scientists to speak of dispute the facts of global climate change.

     Somehow we've come to the realization that we could, indeed, destroy "this fragile earth, our island home" ( as the prayer says) if we continue on our current path.  Here are just a few of the harrowing statistics you probably already know: if we do continue on the path that we are going on, the estimation is that 25% of species- and perhaps all large mammals- will go extinct in the next thirty years.  All the tropical forests will be exhausted, and all the ocean's fisheries, in the next forty years.  If seas rise because of polar melt, a conservative estimate is that 100 million refugees will be created.  Perhaps in the last week, those of us who have seen, or even more, experienced the kind of flooding that has happened in the northeast may have a new appreciation of what that might mean.

     In short, we are looking at a massive disruption of the biosphere, and we in the United States are implicated perhaps more than anyone else, because we emit 30% of the greenhouse gases that are causing the warming, but we have only 6% of the earth's population.

     What, then, does it mean to be converted away from the path that we are on?  First of all, I think it involves seeing: seeing the consequences of what we are doing- much as Saul heard the voice say, "Why?  Why are you persecuting me?"  Conversion means turning away from unsustainable consumption, and on a deeper level, it means getting a vision of our relationship to the earth that is "I-Thou" rather than "I-It," that is about awe and caring for rather than using up, plundering.  It is overcoming our sense of separateness from the rest of creation.  Also I believe (as Al Gore reminds us) that we need to be converted away from the despair that so quickly come upon us when our denial is broken.

     What are we called to be converted to, in this moment of what Joanna Macy  calls the "great turning"?  To a sense of interconnection.  To an understanding of the sacredness, the sacramentality of the physical world.  To understand that we are part of nature- what Thomas Berry calls the "universe reflecting on itself."  We need also to be converted away from the unsustainable greed for ever more stuff; we need to learn what is enough, and how to live with enough.

     I believe we are called to a conversion of recognizing Christ in all things, and out of that, to a courageous sense of community, to hopeful participation, to collaboration and sharing, to using our awesome powers of imagination and communication to envision and point to and act on new possibilities for human life on earth - ways that serve nature and the brothers and sisters who share it with us.  For the fruit of conversion is action; it is living based on what we have been allowed to see, and that living will lead to further conversion, to seeing the next steps on the way.

     And there are signs of hope in the midst of this immense challenge that we find ourselves in.  I think of our own parish light bulb project, just a few months ago, in which everyone had the opportunity to get a fluorescent light bulb and begin changing their homes over.  On a larger scale, I think of the project that African Anglicans are undertaking in Uganda to plant thousands and thousands and thousands of trees.  I think of the speakers at the Step It Up rally last week, the most encouraging of whom were students from a middle school.  These young ones so clearly understood that we must change, and they called us- especially our elected leaders- to cut carbon emissions eighty percent by 2050 so that they will have a sustainable world to live in when they grow up.

     For me, this kind of conversion is a continuing process.  I forget, and I am reminded and I learn by baby steps, really, how to imagine and how to be accountable to a baby sea lion that I will probably never see again, to the river running down Manhattan's west side, to the songbird who startled me as I was walking home the other evening, to the soil that holds us and from which our food comes, to the human and the more-than-human community of creation.

     This is the great challenge for all of us living on earth at this moment in history.  The Easter message - the promise of today's gospel in particular- is that there is food to sustain us and that we are not alone.  For the beloved stranger and friend, the risen Christ, reveals himself in a thousand surprising acts of kindness and creative action - here at this Eucharistic table, for sure- but everywhere, everywhere that nourishment and life are broken open when we need them for our journey.

      Amen.