Ecosystem of Blessings

Jeremiah 17:5-10, Luke 6:17-26

February 11, 2007

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

So Hillary has announced and Barack has announced and Rudy and 2 Johns of different parties and Tom and Bill and more, and we are still more than 18 months from the next Presidential election! It seems to be starting earlier and earlier, or is it just my imagination? In addition to the endless TV commercials, what we are in for until November 2008 is a relentless conversation about “American values.” Actually, if it were a conversation, I’d be pretty excited, but what it always turns out to be are pronouncements of increasing righteousness on all sides which shed more heat and less light as the election season goes on.

Well, today you will be pleased to know that I am NOT forming an exploratory committee, nor am I announcing my candidacy for President of anything. But today I do want to take the occasion of these two wonderful and deeply related passages from Jeremiah and Luke to lift up some metaphors by which we might frame a discussion about American values a little differently than it usually happens on our Sunday morning competition of Meet The Press.

You see, contrary to my more fundamentalist brothers and sisters, I do not think that the values that will bring down American civilization have to do with the gender of our sexual partners or the immigration status of those who work and go to school here. Using the metaphor of Jeremiah, who evokes the difference between the ecosystem of the dry wilderness and the ecosystem of the green river valley, and I have begun to frame this conversation by looking at what kind of ecosystem we want to create in our society by the choices we make as individuals and as private and government agencies and legislatures. Let me explain this ecosystem metaphor.

With all the discussion on global warming, we’ve been reading a lot about ecosystems lately. When I read, I keep finding words like interdependent, symbiotic, different elements working together, relationships. In any ecosystem, the members can benefit from living in balance and participating in each other’s lives or, in the case of an unhealthy ecosystem, any action which harms any part of the system has some harmful effect on all other parts of the system, as in the reality that increased levels of greenhouse gasses melt polar ice caps that change the breeding and feeding habits of ocean fish that impacts the living of New England fisherfolk and may someday mean that my property in Hamden will be nearer to a beach than I ever imagined!

You get the idea. What Jeremiah in his discussion of trust and Jesus in his dichotomy of blessed and troubled are saying is that we have some choices about what ecosystem we choose to create, what ecosystem we choose to nurture in these four children we baptized today, in all our children here, and in ourselves. That choice has life or death consequences for us.

What I’m calling this morning the “ecosystem of woe” as described by both Jeremiah and Jesus can seem deceptively desirable at first. In that system, we participate freely in the rewards (or punishments) of trusting more in the world we can see than in God whom we cannot, of trusting more in the rewards we can get quickly than in the longer term rewards we have to wait for and may not even see in this lifetime. In this system, each of us as individuals is more important than any other individual or group. If our goals are merely to get what we can as much as we can as fast as we can, to get rich by whatever means we can find, to fill our bellies to overflowing with no thought for those who have no food, to laugh as we say “let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” to do whatever it takes to get ahead and win the praise of influential people, even if it means making some compromises with our ethical ideals or telling our consciences to go away like Jiminy Cricket, then we are creating a certain kind of ecosystem in our lives and among our relationships with both God and other people. That kind of system indeed brings with it considerable rewards, at least temporarily. It also brings with it the possibility of deep troubles when the people we have relied on to give us our prosperity and our praise turn on us or let us down out of their own self interest.

That’s the kind of relationship created by systems as diverse as drug gangs, the entertainment industry, politics, and some parts of corporate America. It’s a “what have you done for me lately?” kind of world, in which we are not valued for who we are, but only for what we can do today for someone else. The teenager who is recruited into a gang comes in thinking that perhaps finally here are people who will protect and care for him or her, as too often their families have not. What they discover all too quickly is their value to the gang is based on how many drugs they can sell or will consume, how much money they can bring in, how many others they can recruit. When things are good, they are very good. When things go wrong, when you are arrested or get sick or pregnant or fail to produce as expected, it is as Jeremiah said, like being a shrub in the desert with no relief in sight. You hear similar stories from folk in the music business or in professional sports or sad cases like Ken Lay and the Enron debacle.

But there is another kind of system, an ecosystem of blessing, a system where we do not have to respond to people using the values of the street or capitalism or “politics as usual” or the Darwinism of the entertainment industry. This is a system that calls first for the growth of deep roots and of planting ourselves in an environment that nurtures instead of exploits, an environment where we see our dependence on one another not as exploitative, but as life-giving. You see the ecosystem of blessing takes the long view. In this system we tend carefully our rootedness in God. We connect tightly with the one who values us just because we are and who will not throw us out if we go through dry spells in our lives. In addition, we understand an ecosystem as just that, a system, a reality where we are all interconnected, where we need to depend on each other. This is a system where not just we are blessed, but where all people, indeed the earth itself is blessed. We seek to create people who can withstand trouble and difficulty by holding each other and by trusting in the power of God to overcome evil with good, even as Jesus overcame death in resurrection. We hope to nurture each other so we may overcome fear and bear fruit that gives life, and life abundant, not measured in bling or smiley-face happiness, but in the deep joy of loving life and being bringers of life to a death dealing world. In this system we also seek to relate to the rest of creation in the same way. It is a system where we participate with God in blessing the poor, the hungry, the despairing, the excluded and where we are not afraid to stand up for those whom God blesses, even at risk to our own reputations or wealth.

In an era when the “heroes” of our children are often those with the most bling, it’s hard to create this kind of ecosystem, because those who would have us follow the money rather than Jesus are very powerful and influential indeed, and very deceptive. There are even churches who proclaim loudly that if you are truly a faithful Christian, you will be very prosperous, powerful and people will speak well of you. This is the gospel of prosperity, articulated beautifully in a recent interview with the singer Mary J. Blige in which she said: “My God is a God who wants me to have things. He wants me to bling. He wants me to be the hottest thing on the block. I don’t know what kind of God the rest of y’all are serving, but the God I serve says, ‘Mary, you need to be the hottest thing this year, and I’m gonna make sure you’re doing that.’” (Soul and Spirit; The Gospel of Prosperity, http//blackvoices.aol.com) Yet, as the scholar Michael Eric Dyson said in response, if being the hottest thing on the block and having lots of bling is the desire of God, then “Jesus was the greatest failure we’ve ever seen.”

Friends, I believe the church has a critical mission in ecosystem creation, among people of all ages in our midst, a critical role in a national and international conversation about how human beings relate to one another and to the earth. The values that threaten an ecosystem of blessing most come from a self-centeredness, a self-righteousness, a shallowness, a short-sightedness, the incapability of seeing the big picture or taking the long view, the belief that wealth and popularity are to be more desired than anything else, the belief that change is always negative. These are the values that imperil our biological ecosystems as well as the mental and spiritual and physical health of children and adults in this nation on a daily basis. And it’s not just about making personal choices about who you and I individually will follow, Jesus or the “world;” it’s about creating whole systems based in blessing rather than woe, in joy rather than in fear. In our baptismal vow to Briana, Gregory, Mareaux and Khalil today, I think we promised to work with them to nurture them in an ecosystem of blessing, to be the gardeners that nurture their roots and seek to lead them to be planted by the waters where they will not be moved. Part of that happens in what we do here, what we plant and nurture to growth within them in their rootedness to God, but part of it also happens in how we influence the world in which they will spend the vast majority of their time, outside these walls, even in this interminable Presidential election season, because the next President will have a large part in the formation of the kind of society in which they will grow to adulthood.

So let’s talk about values in the public square, in our homes and in our church, and let’s not stop doing so when the election is over. It’s a conversation as old as Jeremiah and Jesus and as critical now as ever before. Let’s talk, but while we talk, let’s be working on our ecosystems here and out there. Amen.