Guest Preacher: The Rev. Brian Petersen, Priest-In-Charge Holy Cross Episcopal Church
When I was invited to preach here this Sunday for “Creation Care Sunday”, I was happy to say yes but then looked with some trepidation at what the Gospel reading would be for the day. I was of course pleasantly surprised to see that it was “Good Shepherd Sunday” – I doesn’t get much more nature-y than that right?
But “Good Shepherd Sunday” can take on a host of different theological and pastoral meanings. What I’d like to focus on today is the aspect of the relationship between the shepherd and the sheep. Jesus presents himself as the “ideal” shepherd, a model for mutual care and reciprocity that provides us with a model for how we might care for the places that we love.
The good shepherd’s relationship is one of trust and self-giving, for the benefit of everyone involved. After all, the shepherd does get something out of the sheep – sheep were an agricultural product in Jesus’ time, and shepherds (who typically weren’t the most highly-regarded members of society) were a necessary part of the economic system. But the relationship that Jesus describes goes beyond just protecting assets. He’s modeling a different way of being in relationship with the world.
I say “different” because in our modern world are two main models of relationship that we might be most familiar with. The first of these we might call the “domination” model, which is that the earth is given to humans to dominate, subdue, perhaps even exploit for the good of human society. Resources are there to be extracted, in the most efficient and profitable way possible. The downfalls of such a model are obvious nowadays – resource depletion, pollution, displacement of native species and native peoples, colonialism, climate change, and more. Most of us “good” Episcopalians know that this isn’t the way.
So we tend toward the second model – we’ll call this the “conservation” model. This model looks for technical solutions to environmental problems – how can we reduce our carbon footprint, etc. It tends to draw a pretty sharp line between “nature” and “humans”, and even though it’s definitely better than the extraction approach, it still misses the mark. That’s because at its heart, it still promotes a subject/object relationship between us and the land – the land is some “other” that we need to protect, a problem that we need to figure out how to deal with.
What’s missing in both of these approaches is the subject to subject relationship that we see in the model of the Good Shepherd. You might even call it “symbiotic”. We see this in our own local bioregion with the Mojave Yucca and the yucca moths that pollenate it. These two life-forms cannot exist without each other – their lives are invariably intertwined.
To be so completely interdependent requires an incredible amount of trust, and knowledge of the other. The Yucca flowers open knowing the female moth will be there to lay her eggs. The moths know just the right amount of eggs to lay to keep the flower healthy and blooming. In the same way, Jesus says that he knows his own and they know him, and trust him to lead them through danger into places of abundance.
This sort of knowing and trust speaks to us today when we need it the most. I feel that we are at a sort of inflection point in the movements for environmental justice in our world. When we take a global perspective, the issues appear much too big to solve. There seems to be a collective inertia that’s almost impossible to overcome. It’s tempting to feel despair.
Our well-beloved Psalm 23 names this despair as tsalMAveth, the “shadow of death”, a word evocative of the visceral sense of impending doom that many of us can relate to. And yet, the Psalmist reminds us that this shadow is just a shadow.
The bigger story we hear in the Psalm is much different – it’s about goodness and mercy, abundance that follows, that pursues us wherever we go. We don’t need to venture far to find it, because everything we need is right here. There’s a saying in many indigenous cultures that whatever you need to heal whatever is ailing you is growing within a one-mile radius of where you are.
But to accept such wisdom requires a radical paradigm shift for many of us in the way that we relate to the natural world. It requires trust, like the sheep have for the shepherd. And it also requires deep, intimate knowledge of the world as an interconnected partner with us. Such knowledge might lead us to something that could only be described as love.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that “the land knows you, even when you are lost.” But if the land has such a love for us, how can we develop a reciprocal love for the land, and where do we begin to do our work for healing and respecting the land? I believe that so much of this question boils down to not any specific set of actions but more of a change of heart.
There’s a well-loved quote in environmentalist circles from the Senegalese conservationist Baba Dioum that goes like this: “in the end we will conserve only what we love, and we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught.” This quote summarizes my own work in trying to connect spirituality to environmental education, which I’ve been doing most recently in the Chaparral Chapel hikes and nature walks that I lead all over the county. When people ask what the goal is for these events, I tell them that I really just want people to find out how amazing our local plants and animals and bugs and even rocks are, and fall in love with them.
By deepening our knowledge of those things we share our lives with, we learn how to love them and care for them. Here in San Diego, we might learn that our native chaparral plant species are so incredibly adapted to our weather patterns here – they have figured out how to store and conserve every last bit of moisture from the (usually) short rainy season, so that in the hot and dry summer they can drop their leaves and go into hibernation like the trees “back east” do during the winter. And that they are far from “dry, dead brush” as they often get described, as an excuse to chop them down and plant pretty green non-native plants that need massive amounts of water to survive. And that they are actually quite well-adapted to both dryness and fire, but the frequency of fires brought on by human populations stresses and even threatens to eradicate their communities.
And it’s simple misconceptions like this that cause a lot of damage, and can be remedied simply by listening, paying attention to, learning about, and falling in love with these species. We’ll then take greater care of them, and they in turn will take care of us by being less flammable and keeping us safer from out-of-control fires. But this takes trust, balance, relationship.
And so it’s this sort of relationship that Jesus, the risen One in whom all the creation is held together, calls us into with the created world. It’s really that simple – in practicing evangelism, we build relationships to share the good news with our neighbors. Our approach to our more-than-human neighbors and neighborhoods is no different.
Wendell Berry writes: “The question that must be addressed is not how to care for the planet, but how to care for each of the planet’s millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious way different from all the others.”
This care for all of the little things around us is the way of the Good Shepherd, who reveals God’s love for the world by his way of self-giving love. And this is the relationship we seek with our places – not one of domination and extraction, not one of fixing and problem-solving, but one of caring for and being cared for. So let us seek that relationship by learning and knowing and loving the places we call home.
