As human beings, we can’t separate ourselves from the earth. We are intricately and intimately related to the earth and to all things on the earth. The Bible and science both acknowledge this truth. If the pandemic has done anything positive, it may be that it has made us acutely aware of our interconnectivity. A sermon based on Matt 8:18-27 and the writings of Thomas Berry and Joanna Macy.

Thomas Berry says, “The destiny of humans cannot be separated from the destiny of earth.”

That’s because we, as human beings, can’t separate ourselves from the earth. We are intricately and intimately related to the earth and to all things on the earth. The Bible and science both acknowledge this truth. If the pandemic has done anything positive, it may be that it has made us acutely aware of our interconnectivity.

“If the world is to be healed through human efforts,” says Joanna Macy, “I am convinced it will be by ordinary people. . . People who can open to the web of life that called us into being.”

There’s a BCC special called “My Passion for Trees” with British actress Judi Dench. It’s an exquisite film celebrating the wonder of these great creatures we take for granted. In the movie, Judi Dench walks among the trees on her large rural property in Sussex. At one point she’s with a scientist who uses a special instrument that helps her actually listen to the gurgling, rushing sound of water moving up through the trunk of the tree, nourishing its branches and leaves, a sound the film allows us to hear too.

Ever heard the sound of a tree drawing water up through the veins of its noble body? Probably not. We don’t often pause to listen, really listen to the sound moving through our own veins let alone the sounds of nature. But the earth itself breathes; it has a pulse. I wonder how we would change our presence on the earth if we heard its pulse, if we knew it was alive in the same way as we know we are alive. I know that I was changed the first time I heard the pulse of my child—that thump, thump, thump of the ultrasound—when the pediatrician said, “Well, Dad, that’s your child’s heart.”

Until then, I thought I was separate from my offspring, distant from the mystery inside the womb. But once I heard the heartbeat, the pulse, everything changed. I was connected. And as the child grew, there came the time that I could put my ear to his mother’s growing belly and hear for myself the clear sound of my child’s beating heart.

“The destiny of humans cannot be separated from the destiny of earth.”

I wonder how we humans would change the way we relate to the earth if we knew, really knew, how connected with really are. How connected might we become if we could hear a tree drink water or could feel the pulse of the earth itself or see it all as if it were our own body?

Our reading of sacred scripture this morning is full of pulsing natural things: foxes and birds, water and wind, and human beings in the midst of it all. But when we read the story, most of us pay attention to the human drama. We notice the fear of the disciples who are caught in the storm; for we know what it’s like to be afraid. We feel that tossing of the boat on the waves; for we know what it’s like to be so vulnerable. We identify with their cries, “Save us! We are perishing!” And we wonder at Jesus’ rebuke, “Why are you afraid? You of little faith.”

We pay close attention to the human drama, when all around the human is the dramatic wonder of nature.

We are a human-centric race aren’t we?

The earth is 4.5 billion years old. Homo sapiens, our tribe, have been around for maybe 200,000 of those years—a tiny fraction of earth’s existence. And yet, we assume we’ve always been here and always will be. We haven’t been, and unless we’re wise, we won’t be.

We can’t be human-centric and survive as a species. We’ve got to move from being ego-centric to eco-centric.

I’ll bet you’ve had this experience—being in a group of friends or family members or a small group, chatting enjoyably, listening to each other. But there’s this one person who no matter where the conversation goes always has a way of dominating and bringing the conversation back to themself. We call that narcissism—an excessive interest in oneself and an utter disregard for all others.

The earth is in the predicament it’s in today—and us with it—not because human beings are on the earth, but because most human beings are narcissistic when it comes to their relationship with the earth, with everything else. We have an excessive interest mostly in ourselves. We think the world revolves around us.

If we’re going to survive, we’ve got to move from being ego-centric to being eco-centric, “open” as Joanna Macy puts it, to the marvelous “web of life that’s called us into being.”

What interests me about this story in the Bible today is the question the disciples ask after Jesus has calmed the winds and the waves: “What sort of human being is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?”

Surely, the story intends to teach us that Jesus is a remarkable human being. It wants to convey that God is present with him and in him in a remarkable way, and that we should pay attention to him.

And that is true.

Today, we’re exploring the theme of earth care and what it means to cooperate with nature in cultivating the garden of the earth, and we have deep intentions about this at DCC—for many reasons, we are a certified “Earthcare congregation.” What interests me in this tale is not that Jesus somehow has power over the dangerous and frightening elements of nature, but that Jesus is in dynamic and intimate relationship with them. Jesus is not separate from them or above them. Jesus is not an ego-centric human being who sees nature as an enemy of human life that needs to be tamed, dominated, subdued, and used by humans. Rather, Jesus is the paradigm of what it means to be truly eco-centric; Jesus is the sign of a humanity living not competitively but cooperatively, not dominating nature but participating with all of nature.

Jesus knew how to do this because Jesus knew how to hear the heartbeat of the earth; Jesus knew how to feel the earth breathe, to feel its pulse. Jesus didn’t command the wind and the waves; he knew how to work cooperatively with them. And as disciples, we are urged to follow Jesus, to be like him.

The earth is in crisis today largely because of the ego-centric presence of human beings who do not understand or value the larger web of life. We think we’re It. We assume the earth and all that’s on it is for us—our enjoyment, our benefit, our use. And there’s a reading of the Bible that, unfortunately, has supported this ego-centric vision of human life—a vision that is, ironically, jeopardizing our lives. It’s so terribly short-sighted.

In the first chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, we read the words: “So God created humankind in the divine image, in the image of the divine, God created them; male and female God created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’”

“Fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over it.”

These words are part of the first creation story in the Bible, words that, planted in the minds of a species that tends toward narcissism, become dangerous ideas. But just a few verses later is an image that ought to chasten any one who wants to take them out of context and use them as a pretext for an ego-centric way of life on the planet.

In the second chapter of Genesis, the Bible gives us a softer vision for human life on the planet: “In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, and when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground—a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground—then the Lord God formed a human being from the dust of the ground, and breathed into their nostrils the breath of life; and the person became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there God put the human being whom God had formed.”

There’s nothing here that would allow us as human beings, newcomers to the Earth, to live ego-centrically, that is, narcissistically. Instead, it gives us a vision for how to live eco-centrically. We, like the trees and flowers and plants, the birds and bees and foxes and fish, are all planted together in this garden.

Look, for four and a half billion years there was no human presence on the planet. And if we’re not careful, the earth will keep spinning on without a human presence, and in its vast timeline, humanity’s presence will barely be a blip. If we’re not careful, if we continue to live ego-centrically, the Earth will have to go on without us because we are not It; we are part of It, which is so gloriously bigger than we are.

But there are signs that many of us are shifting from ego to eco, from narcissism to altruism, from a preoccupation with ourselves that could render us extinct one day, to a participation with every other created thing that will help to cultivate this grand garden of God—a planet that, for all we know, is the only one like it in all the universe, surely worth loving, protecting, and enjoying.

“The destiny of humans,” writes Thomas Berry, “cannot be separated from the destiny of earth.”

I wonder how our relationship with the earth might shift if we could see, really see and, therefore, know, how connected we really are with the rest of nature, with the whole of matter itself.

Do you know that our word, “matter,” comes from the Latin word, “mater,” which means “mother”? Matter, the earth itself, the stuff of the universe itself, is what we all come from. The Earth is, therefore, our mother—an animate Being giving birth to all manner of beings.

Both the Bible and science know this. But do we?

How connected might we become, how compassionate, how careful with the health of the earth might we be if we could all hear a tree drink water or if we would stop and learn to feel the pulse of the earth itself—if we would learn to stop and hear Her breathe and cherish all of Her as the wondrous living Being the Earth actually is?