For Further Reading:

I just found this rather long article from the New York Times web site mentioned at Rebecca Blood's web site. It's a very interesting read on our relationship to the natural world, specifically regarding the practice of farming and eating animals. -Ben

What Do Baptism And An Ice Storm Have In Common?

The Rev. Benjamin J. Newland

November 28, 2002 (Thanksgiving Day)

Deuteronomy 8:1-3, 6-10
Psalm 65:9-14
James 1:17-18, 21-27
Matthew 6:25-33

Thanksgiving seems to be the time for thinking about nature. All the pictures of Thanksgiving I saw in grade school featured prominently things grown from the earth, and people celebrating outdoors under sunny skies on a carpet of red and yellow leaves.

As I sit at my desk and look out the windows, I would guess that about seventy-five percent of what I can see is concrete, steel, and glass. Another twenty percent is sky, and the last five is trees, although to be fair most of the trees are landscaping artifacts and not free roaming trees. There are two plants on my window sill well confined in their pots. None of this is surprising considering that I work in an urban downtown, and I’m certainly not complaining about the view. The point is that most of us, even those who live in the well planted and landscaped suburbs, are largely unfamiliar with nature.

This is not true of all of us of course. Here in the Midwest many folks are familiar with what it’s like to live in a town that is less significant than the land surrounding it, or on a farm where weather and other bits of nature are the central aspect of life. But for many of us, while our parents or grandparents lived that way, we are now city dwellers, and nature is not as big as it was back then.

It takes something truly impressive to remind us that we are not running the planet alone. Last winter an ice storm reminded us that our cozy winter existence exists at the mercy of poorly timed rainfall and something called a ‘temperature inversion’. At the other extreme of the scale, a vacation can be enough to remind us as well. I spent a weekend this fall sleeping in a tent on a ranch in the middle of the Flint Hills of Kansas, and all night long coyotes and frightened cattle pointed out there’s a lot of room out there, and the rules are different when the ground isn’t all paved.

I think the suburbs have ruined our understanding of nature. They’re just too clean, too organized. The lawn is a uniform height and stops at the right angled sidewalk. Bushes are shaped, flowers are grouped, trees are trimmed and stunted. I grew up in a suburb that bordered a golf course, and my friends are I thought that the grass slope leading down to the water hazard bordered in pussy-willows was wilderness, and that the frogs we scared up were wildlife.

Even devoted watchers of nature programming are misled. Television is too organized, the actors too clean, encounters with nature too prepackaged. I think there’s an idea running around the collective unconscious of us modern, civilized, city-dwellers. It is formed by the orderliness of suburban landscaping, and tree lined city streets. It is fed by climate controlled cars and prepackaged nature shows. We all think, at some level, than nature is nice. We imagine that natural systems are neat, and orderly, and efficient.

The truth is that nature is not nice, neat, orderly, or efficient. Real grass does not grow in squares or stop at the sidewalk. Real grass grows anywhere it can survive, breaks apart rock, and when it meets another grass or plant, does what it can to kill it and steal it’s sunlight and soil. Population controls in natural systems are not orderly. There is no constant number of deer and wolves. There are too many deer, then the wolves show up, rip out their throats and feast on their raw flesh until there are too many wolves, then they starve to death. Rain can be nice and nourishing, but it also causes ice storms, floods, famines, mudslides, and avalanches. The Praying Mantis gives birth to hundreds of baby Mantises at a time. As soon as they are born the baby Mantises begin to devour each other until only the few strongest remain. That is nature’s efficiency.

Of course nature can be beautiful, and inspiring, and nourishing. Assigning values of indifference or willful aggression to nature is no more realistic than making smiling and innocent-sweet cartoon characters out of baby deer. I just think we believe in Bambi more than we believe in nature.

It is this less than idyllic natural world that God calls the Israelites from in Deuteronomy, feeding them with mana. It is this powerful force that the Psalmist praises. It is this realm of survival that the Gospel of Matthew refers to in chastising the disciples for their little faith.

Why worry about your clothing, do not the lilies have beautiful garb? And why worry about your food, do not the birds have enough to eat? Jesus is not suggesting that depending on the natural bounty of God is an easy way out. Neither is he suggesting that the disciples become like birds or lilies instead of human beings. “Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things,” Jesus tells them, “but strive first for the kingdom of God…” It is a shocking reshuffling of priorities that Jesus recommends: put your quest for God first, and the rest will follow.

And speaking of shocking events, baptism is to your spiritual life what an ice storm is to a city’s life. Both jolt you from your usual and routine perception of the world around you, and both make it clear how little there is between you and the powers of nature and God. I am drawing the parallel between the natural world and your spiritual life on purpose. Just as we are lulled into believing that nature is nice, and neat, and orderly, and efficient, so we are lulled into believing that our spiritual lives are peaceful, and joyous, and friendly, and warm. They are those things, of course, hopefully most of the time. But your spiritual life is also a changing and unstable force for change. It is not tame or under your control. It is what connects you to God, and as such can be expected from time to time to jolt you into a new awareness, or force you to reexamine your life.

Two people come before us this morning to make that baptismal leap, and all of us here will then reaffirm our own leaps taken earlier. I hope I haven’t scared any of you away with all this talk of untamed nature. If it makes you feel any better, avoiding your baptismal vows won’t save you from the spiritual life any more than avoiding the countryside will save you from the occasional ice storm. This is where we live, on a planet full of nature in a life full of spirit. Jesus knew it, and recommended that we try to focus on looking for God. Good advice, and in baptism, we can begin to take it.

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