“I Call You Friends” Part 4: Earth, Our Friend

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“I Call You Friends” Part 4: Earth, Our Friend

by Rev. Eric Elnes, Ph.D.

Countryside Community Church (UCC)

November 13, 2016

Last week I was listening to a commentator on NPR who was talking about the decline in

close friendships in American society. According to the commentator, in the 1960s and 70s,

people tended to have 5-6 close friends. Yet today the number is just 1-2. Many report that

they have no close friends at all. The commentator surprised me even more with her next

comment in which she drew a correlation between the decline in close friendships and this

year’s presidential candidates.

She noted how, for all their differences, a common trait exists between Hillary Clinton and

Donald Trump: It’s hard to picture either candidate having a group of pals they regularly

hang out with just to shoot the breeze or have fun. They both tend to project an image to

the world of a powerful professional who has many colleagues and public relationships but

few close or intimate friends. In other words, our candidates are a reflection of us!

This decline in close friendships in our society might help explain why the two political

parties are currently so polarized. We’re just not talking to each other anymore. And

because we’re not talking, we’re not hearing what is on each other’s hearts or empathizing.

Deep understanding has been replaced by media sound bites and Facebook and Twitter

posts.

Given that one of the central premises of our current series is that a primary way we

experience God is through our friendships, then the decline in close friendships in our

country is indicative not only of a failure to communicate but a deep spiritual vacuum.

Whether we have understood the love that we experience through our friends as God’s

love or not is beside the point. If the scriptures are right, that God is love, then any love,

given or received, is a God experience whether or not we are aware of it. While close

friendships aren’t the only means by which we experience the Divine, they are a central way.

Are you starting to pick up on why we place so much emphasis on joining a Journey Group

at Countryside? Journey Groups may gather to study a particular subject but they are,

above all else, friendship incubators. It is through the friendships that are formed, not just

the knowledge that is gained, that God is experienced by the group participants. If God has

seemed quite distant from your life for awhile, one of the best things you can do is join a

Journey Group.

Another thing you can do is get out in Nature. As a society, we don’t get out in nature

nearly as much as we used to, do we? For many of us “older folks,” our childhoods were

filled with nature experiences. Our moms would kick us out of the house on a Saturday

morning ordering us not to come back until dinner. Yet in just a couple of generations this

all vanished. Vanishing, too, are the Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops that focus their

activities around outdoor life, and many people’s idea of camping is to stay in an Econo

Lodge rather than a Hilton.

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Even so, if you ask most people about a significant experience they have of God in their lives,

chances are, it took place in Nature. Indeed, throughout human history, Nature has been a

primary context in which human beings have encountered the Divine. Native Americans

went on vision quests, Jesus and other Jewish and later Christian mystics would retreat to

the wilderness, Gautama Siddhartha (the Buddha) would sit under a Bodi tree.

On Friday, I took a stroll through Lauritzen Gardens as I was contemplating this sermon. As

I passed through the rose garden, as I have done many times, it dawned on me that the

roses didn’t look or smell any differently now, post-election, than they did pre-election. And

the wild turkeys pecking at the ground beside my path had no better idea of who had been

elected President than the trees swaying in the breeze or the prairie grasses. I was surprised

at my own surprise over this realization. I had been so focused on the election that part of

me expected all of Creation to be hunkered down in contemplation over our nation’s future.

The fact of the matter is that none of God’s non-human Creation has the faintest notion of

what is going on politically, and couldn’t care in the slightest. I thought I heard a “still, small

voice” of God in this reminder. We human beings are so quick to place ourselves in the

center of everything! Sometimes the best thing we can do is remember that if the world

were a three-ring circus, we human beings wouldn’t be in any of the three rings, at least if

based on proportional representation. Even the flies outnumber and – believe it or not –

outweigh us. Humans would be more like the circus clowns entertaining the crowds off to

the side.

What would be going on in those three rings? The scriptures suggest that worship is what

would be going on. Did you hear the references to Nature worshipping in our Psalm 148

reading?

Praise God, sun and moon; praise God, all you shining stars!

Praise God, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens!

Let them praise the name of the Lord, for God commanded and they were created.

God established them forever and ever; God fixed their bounds, which cannot be passed.

Praise the Lord from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps,

fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling God’s command!

Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars!

Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds!

(Psalm 148:3-10)

I used to think that psalms like this were simply metaphorical. I didn’t believe that nature

really worships God but that nature inspires us to worship and therefore we metaphorically

conceive of Nature worshipping God as well. But I am less certain that all this talk of whales,

fruit trees, and cedars singing praises is a metaphor. And I am more skeptical of the cultural

inheritance I received from René Descartes.

All of us in the West are heirs of René Descartes, actually. Do you remember him? He’s

the one who coined the expression “I think, therefore I am.” Every time you hear this

expression you should shout, “Boo! Hiss! Nay!” For, this simple statement, “I think,

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therefore I am,” became the central assumption by which human thought was privileged over

everything else when it came to assigning value and “being” in our world.

Stated simply: If it doesn’t think like a human being thinks, then it is essentially a

sophisticated machine, responding to bio-chemical signals in an unconscious way.

Thankfully, this overly mechanistic view is changing somewhat today in light of more careful

observations of the natural world. Animals from dolphins to whales to octopi to elephants

have demonstrated surprisingly sophisticated, sensitive, and empathetic ways of

communicating and relating with one another, all of which implies a certain consciousness.

Even plants have been found to communicate in ways we never dreamed were possible

before. When certain plants are being ravaged by herbivores, for instance, they release

volatile chemicals that can be detected by nearby plants thereby allowing the others to shore

up their defenses. Forest trees have been shown to send out nutrients to other trees when

needed through their vast, interconnected root systems – which some have dubbed the

“wood-wide web.”

It’s not that plants and animals think like human beings or have the same form of

consciousness as ours. Surely, their consciousness is as different from ours as ours is

different from God’s. Yet despite their difference in consciousness, the scriptures claim that

whatever consciousness may be accorded to Nature, that consciousness manifests itself as

worship.

From a quantum perspective, worship makes a certain amount of sense. We know, for

instance, that energy precedes matter. If the energy that precedes matter is the energy of

God, and God is love, then all matter is an expression of God’s love. And since love cannot

exist outside of relationship, and if God’s love preceded matter, then God has an ongoing

relationship with all matter that God formed, whether we can see, measure, quantify or

comprehend the nature of the relationship or not.

I cannot tell you with certainty that Nature continually worships God like the Bible says, of

course, but I can say this: When you and I get out in Nature regularly – especially when we

get out specifically to appreciate and enjoy Nature – it is tremendously difficult not to feel

uplifted in some way; it is tremendously difficult not to feel some degree of reverence; it is

tremendously difficult not to come back feeling like you have worshipped in some way as a

tiny part of a much larger congregation. In other words, time spent in the midst of Nature

frequently translates into direct experience of God.

So a few of you were wondering what I would have to say about the presidential election

this morning. Besides what I have said already, I would ask you to consider the following

statement and question: Given that two of the primary ways we experience God in this

world are (a) through our friendships, and (b) though nature, is it any wonder that both

parties act a lot more like ravenous wolves than blessings to the nation? Our country is

experiencing an enormous spiritual vacuum – enormous even among those who are part of

religious communities. For, even if one is intentional about developing one’s inward and

spiritual relationship with God, that’s only one leg of a three-legged stool.

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My antidote for the future, therefore, looks very different from anything I have heard from

the pundits. If we are to move forward as a nation, we must find ways to encourage

relationships that build into true friendships, and we must get people out of doors and into

Nature. And, for those who are open to it, getting people into a church, synagogue, mosque,

or temple that encourages their members to establish a robust and vital relationship with a

circle of friends, and an equally robust relationship with Nature would really get the spiritual

energy of our country buzzing (and steer us in a less dangerous direction).

Will my plan ever materialize on a grand enough scale to save our nation from spiritual

starvation and infighting? Well, I believe that we can build this kind of community right here

in this church. We have already been working hard at it for some time. In light of our

national traumas, why don’t we take all this to the next level through establishing more

Journey Groups, offering more chances to interact with Nature, and more ways to develop

an inner, personal relationship with God? In this way, we may just find Countryside

Community Church being not just a leader in our community, but a lifeboat.