Hebrew Scriptures – Job 12: 7-101
7 “But
ask the animals, and they will teach you;
the birds of the air,
and they will tell you;
8 ask the plants of the earth,
and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to
you.
9 Who among all these does not know
that the
hand of the LORD has done this?
10 In his hand is the
life of every living thing
and the breath of every human being.
Psalter – Psalm 24: 1-6b2
1 The
earth is the LORD’S and all that is in it,
the world, and those
who live in it;
2 for he has founded it on the
seas,
and established it on the rivers.
3 Who shall
ascend the hill of the LORD?
And who shall stand in his holy
place?
4 Those who have clean hands and pure
hearts,
who do not lift up their souls to what is false,
and
do not swear deceitfully.
5 They will receive blessing
from the LORD,
and vindication from the God of their
salvation.
6 Such is the company of those who seek the
face of…God.
“Ask the Creatures of the Earth, and They Will Teach You.”
Yesterday morning a group of us spent some time along the Napa River collecting garbage. It’s always disturbed me what people almost casually allow to foul our rivers, lakes, bays and oceans – the waters that are the very source of life itself. When have we ever heard the wind, the water, or the earth ask for something in return from us? And yet how often have they been such a gift to us? I suggest that how we imagine and refer to our relationships with the environments in which we live affects them every bit as much as it does us.3
On this Festival of God’s Creation and in the context of Earth Day, a news report of just last week stated that…
The world's beaches and shores are anything but pristine. Volunteers scoured 33,000 miles of shoreline worldwide and found 6 million pounds of debris from cigarette butts and food wrappers to abandoned fishing lines and plastic bags that threaten seabirds and marine mammals.
A report by the Ocean Conservancy…catalogues nearly 7.2 million items that were collected by volunteers on a single day…as they combed beaches and rocky shorelines in 76 countries from Bahrain to Bangladesh and in 45 states from southern California to the rocky coast of Maine.
"This is a snapshot of one day, one moment in time, but it serves as a powerful reminder of our carelessness and how our disparate and random actions actually have a collective and global impact," Vikki Spruill, president of the Ocean Conservancy said in an interview.
The 378,000 volunteers on average collected 182 pounds of trash for every mile of shoreline, both ocean coastlines and beaches on inland lakes and streams, providing a "global snapshot of the ocean trash problem."
The most extensive cleanup was in the United States where 190,000 volunteers covered 10,110 miles — about a third of the worldwide total — and picked up 3.9 million pounds of debris on a single Saturday last September….
That's 390 pounds of trash per mile, among the highest rates of any country, although the high number also reflects the large number of U.S. volunteers who took part, said Spruill. By comparison, volunteers in neighboring Canada collected 74 pounds per mile and those in Mexico, 157 pounds per mile, said the report. About 65 pounds of trash were collected per mile in China and 46 pounds per mile in New Zealand. Volunteers covered one mile in Bahrain and found 300 pounds of trash.
But Spruill said the volume of trash collected tells only part of the story. It's the items that are found that tells us about the behavior of people enjoying the beaches and coastlines of the world.
"It represents a general carelessness we have. ... We're the bad guys. Trash doesn't fall from the sky. It actually falls from our [own] hands," said Spruill.
The debris ranges from the relatively harmless, although annoying and an eyesore, to items that annually result in the death of hundreds of thousands of seabirds and marine mammals caught in abandoned fishing lines and netting.
A third of the items found came from smokers.
The volunteers collected and cataloged nearly 2.3 million cigarette butts, filters and cigar tips. And they found 587,827 bags; more than 1.7 million food wrappers, containers, lids, cups, plates and eating utensils; and nearly 1.2 million bottles and beverage cans.
Divers also scoured waters offshore, collecting about 160,000 pounds of debris from cigarette waste and food containers to more threatening items: abandoned fishing lines, plastic bags, rope, fishing nets and abandoned crab and lobster traps.
The International Coastal Cleanup also focused attention on the damage these items can do….
The volunteers came across 81 birds, 63 fish, 49 invertebrates, 30 mammals and 11 reptiles and one amphibian that all had become entangled in various debris, most often discarded fishing line, rope or plastic bags….
Among other items that entangle animals and birds were balloon ribbons and strings, building material, vehicle tires, wire, and [plastic] beverage six-pack holders.
In all, 57 percent of the trash was related to shoreline recreational activities, 33 percent from smoking-related activities, 6.3 percent from fishing or waterway activities, 2 percent from dumping and less than 1 percent from medical and personal hygiene activities….4
That’s just a report on what’s happening to our coastal waterways. The troubling news continues as we move farther inland. In one report earlier this year it was noted that…
The fallout of industrialization has been detected [throughout] the forests of the western United States, where some of the country's most pristine sanctuaries are apparently coated with dangerous levels of toxic chemicals.
A federal study released [just] this week found surprisingly high concentrations of 70 [different] contaminants, including mercury and a wide variety of pesticides. The pollution was found in the air, snow, lakes, on plants and in the fish at 20 [of our] national parks and monuments, including Yosemite.
The six-year, $6 million study by the National Park Service, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and several other federal agencies was the first attempt to measure the affect of airborne contaminants on the ecosystem of national forests.
The mostly man-made toxic substances were apparently spewed into the atmosphere and wafted down like gas into the wild forests of Alaska, remote portions of the Rockies and [all throughout] the redwoods [here in] California.
"It's a fundamental law of nature that what goes up comes down," said Colleen Flanagan, an ecologist for the National Park Service Air Resources Division, who admitted that she and the other scientists did not expect to find the amount of contaminants [that] they found.
"The sky isn't falling, but it's a wake-up call."
Three California parks were included in the study: Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon and Mount Lassen Volcanic national parks.
Of the eight key parks that were the primary focus of the study, Sequoia and Kings Canyon was one of the three worst in terms of the amount of toxic chemicals found within its boundaries. Contaminants were also found in lichens and conifer needles at Yosemite and Lassen, which were among 12 secondary parks that underwent a less-rigorous review.
The most disturbing part of the study, known as the Western Airborne Contaminants Assessment Project, was the discovery of mercury, apparently from coal-fired power plants, PCBs from industrial plants and the banned insecticides dieldrin and DDT….
All of those substances have been linked to health problems in humans, including nervous, immune system and reproductive failures. [These] chemicals also have the ability to bio-accumulate, meaning their health effects intensify as they move up the food chain.
Fish at Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Mount Rainier, Olympic, Glacier, Rocky Mountain, Gates of the Arctic and Denali national parks and Alaska's Noatak National Preserve exceeded human-consumption thresholds set by the EPA for the various contaminants, which are described in the report as "semi-volatile organic compounds," or SOCs.
Mercury levels in fish at all eight parks and DDT levels at Glacier and Sequoia and Kings Canyon exceeded health thresholds set for wildlife that eat the fish.
"We found some of the highest concentrations of mercury in the Alaska fish," said Dixon Landers, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency specialist who was the project's scientific director.
Landers explained that the large watershed lands in Alaska actually assist the dispersal of mercury. But, he said, the most polluted sites were in the contiguous United States.
"Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Glacier and Rocky Mountain tended to have the highest overall concentrations of SOCs," he said.
The contaminants actually caused some male trout to develop female organs in Rocky Mountain and Glacier national parks…. And…the study tended to show that cold, remote, high-elevation sites were at higher risk of being sprinkled with toxic chemicals.
There is no way of knowing exactly where the contaminants came from, but the highest concentrations of pesticides were found in parks closest to agriculture. Conversely, contaminants like mercury were more prevalent in parks that were downwind from coal-burning plants.
"What we found was that contaminants tended to come from local or regional sources rather than transpacific sources, like Asia," Flanagan said.
The obvious solution, according to the researchers, is to curb emissions from coal-burning plants, tighten regulations on pesticide use and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That may be easier said than done, especially when some of the pollution is coming from overseas. …the contaminants in Alaska probably came from Asia and Europe, where they mingled with the clouds, traveled across the ocean and dropped down with the rain and snow.
"It can stay in the air for a year or two," Landers said. "You can't point to one particular source as being the major contributor, although we do know that China has become the number one user of coal in the world."
Ultimately, he said, it means that even the Earth's most pristine wilderness is not safe from the bombardment of pollution caused by [human beings].
"The most stunning thing about the report is that there are just so many chemicals in some of the most pristine places we have in the United States," said Mark Wenzler, the director of clean air and climate programs for the National Parks Conservation Association. "This report conclusively shows that activities many miles away can have major impacts and that what we put up today will continue to fall in our national parks decades into the future. If we truly value our national parks, we have to protect beyond their borders."5
My own love of nature has been shaped by books that I have read over my lifetime. One that immediately came to mind in the light of today’s celebration, though, first came to print when I was just a year old. Written by an anthropologist named Loren Eiseley, it’s entitled The Immense Journey. I first read this book when I was a teenager and dreaming of becoming a marine biologist. I recall being enraptured by this scientist’s sacred view of creation – his prose reading like poetry – for he writes:
The story of Eden is a greater allegory than [human beings have] ever guessed. For it was truly [a human] who, walking memoryless through bars of sunlight and shade in the morning of the world, sat down and passed a wondering hand across his heavy forehead. Time and darkness, knowledge of good and evil, have walked with him ever since. It is the destiny struck by the clock in the body in that brief space between the beginning of the first ice and that of the second. In just that interval a new world of terror and loneliness appears to have been created in the soul of [humanity].
For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness the whisper of the wind in the night reeds. Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the chill waters, that he had before him an immense journey. Perhaps that same foreboding still troubles the hearts of those who walk out of a crowded room and stare with relief into the abyss of space so long as there is a star to be seen twinkling across those miles of emptiness.6
Speaking of stars, this profoundly wise man used to go to the ocean, as I do, to engage in some of his deepest moments of contemplation. And while I do this from the seat of my kayak, Eiseley had a habit of walking along the beach before he began writing. An encounter that he, himself, first wrote about has, since then, become something of a legend (You’ll have to read Eiseley’s account of the actual encounter – which is much more compelling than the legend, I think – in the final footnote of my sermon.). In many different guises the story goes something like this:
One day, as a man was walking along the beach, he looked down the shoreline and saw a human figure moving like a dancer.
As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing really wasn’t dancing at all. He was reaching down at the edge of where the surf met the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean. Coming closer still the man called out to the other, “Good morning! May I ask what it is that you’re doing?”
The young man paused, looked up, and replied “Throwing starfish into the ocean.”
To which the other responded, “I must ask you, why?” To this, the young man replied, “Well, as you see, the sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don't throw them in, they'll die.”
Upon hearing this, the other man commented, “But, young man, don’t you realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can't possibly make a difference!”
At this, the younger man simply bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he turned and said, “It made a difference for that one.” 7
Ask the creatures of the earth, and they will tell you how to make a difference. To simply have a vision of a better world, and yet never act upon it, means that it will merely remain a pipe dream. On the other hand to act without any real vision at all means that we just will be filling up our days with emptiness. But to have a vision of a better world – as one star thrower did – and then to act upon it, has the power to transform our world into a far, far better place.
* * *
1 While the dialogue between Job and God in this book was first put forward to supply an answer to the injustice of human suffering, it actually reveals much more of its author’s point of view than it does about God. In these four particular verses – so suitable for our celebration today – we’re reminded of both the grandeur and the mystery of a god that could create such beauty as we find in nature that we would be far better off simply to embrace it than to try to explain it.
2 In this psalmist’s song of tribute to creation – and its Creator – the very active nature of God means that creation and history aren’t just the objects of our pious contemplation (in that sense humanity would only be spectators). They are first and foremost the places where God’s claim upon humanity may be found – or, all too often, ignored, as the case may be. If we’re paying attention to this Creator God, we will know the demands that are being made of us. The presence of God, powerfully revealed in nature and in history, calls precisely on us all at this very moment to make a decision: will we choose blessing or curses? It’s up to us.
3 Throughout much of the worship service this day, I projected portions of a DVD movie called Baraka. This is some of the information about it and explains, to some extent, why I used it on this day:
Baraka is an incredible nonverbal film containing images of 24 countries from 6 continents. The film has no plot, contains no actors and has no script. Instead, high quality 70mm images show some of the best, and worse, parts of nature and human life. Time-lapse photography is used to show everyday life from a different perspective.
Baraka is an ancient Sufi word, which can be translated as "a blessing, or as the breath, or essence of life from which the evolutionary process unfolds." For many people Baraka is the definitive film in this style. Breathtaking shots from around the world show the beauty and destruction of nature and humans. It is evidence of a huge global project fueled by a personal passion for the world and visual art. Working on a reported $4 million budget, Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson, with a three-person crew, swept through 24 countries in 14 months to make this stunning film.
Some people find the lack of context in Baraka occasionally frustrating, not knowing where a section was filmed, or the meaning of the ritual taking place. However, the cinematographer Ron Fricke explains that the effect was intentional. "It's not where you are that's important, it's what's there."
4 This is from a recent news article entitled “Group finds 6 million pounds of trash on world's beaches in single day on 33,000 miles of shoreline” and was reported by H. Josef Hebert of the Associated Press, April 15, 2008.
5 And this is from another article whose headline announced: “Parks less than pristine: Dangerous levels of toxics imperil humans, wildlife.” It was written by Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer, San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, February 28, 2008. To view the Western Airborne Contaminants Assessment Project report go to:
6 Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (Random House, New York, 1957), pp. 125-126.
7 The story is actually told by Eiseley in so much more of a compellingly profound and poetic way, in his book The Unexpected Universe, that I feel moved to share as much of it here as I can in this somewhat lengthy final footnote:
Once, in a dingy restaurant in the town, I had heard a woman say: "My father reads a goose bone for the weather." A modern primitive, I had thought, a diviner, using a method older than Stonehenge, as old as old as the arctic forests.
"And where does he do that?" the woman's companion had asked amusedly.
"In Costabel," she answered complacently, "in Costabel." The voice came back and buzzed faintly for a moment in the dark under the revolving eye. It did not make sense, but nothing in Costabel made sense. Perhaps that was why I had finally found myself in Costabel. Perhaps all men are destined at some time to arrive there as I did.
I had come by quite ordinary means, but…I concealed myself beneath a fisherman's cap and sunglasses, so that I looked like everyone else on the beach. This is the way things are managed in Costabel….
The beaches of Costabel are littered with the debris of life. Shells are cast up in windrows; a hermit crab, fumbling for a new home in the depths, is tossed naked ashore, where the waiting gulls cut him to pieces. Along the strip of wet sand that marks the ebbing and flowing of the tide, death walks hugely and in many forms. Even the torn fragments of green sponge yield bits of scrambling life striving to return to the great mother that has nourished and protected them.
In the end the sea rejects its offspring. They cannot fight their way home through the surf which casts them repeatedly back upon the shore. The tiny breathing pores of starfish are stuffed with sand. The rising sun shrivels the mucilaginous bodies of the unprotected. The seabeach and its endless war are soundless. Nothing screams but the gulls.
In the night, particularly in the tourist season, or during great storms, one can observe another vulturine activity. One can see in the hour before dawn on the ebb tide, electric torches bobbing like fireflies along the beach. It is the sign of the professional shellers seeking to outrun and anticipate their less aggressive neighbors. A kind of greedy madness sweeps over the competing collectors. After a storm one can see them hurrying along with bundles of gathered starfish, or, toppling and overburdened, clutching bags of living shells whose hidden occupants will be slowly cooked and dissolved in the outdoor kettles provided by the resort hotels for the cleaning of specimens. Following one such episode I met the star thrower.
As soon as the ebb was flowing, as soon as I could make out in my sleeplessness the flashlights on the beach, I arose and dressed in the dark. As I came down the steps to the shore I could hear the deeper rumble of the surf. A gaping hole filled with churning sand had cut sharply into the breakwater. Flying sand as light as powder coated every exposed object like snow. I made my way around the altered edges of the cove and proceeded on my morning walk up the shore. Now and then a stooping figure moved in the gloom or a rain squall swept past me with light pattering steps. There was a faint sense of coming light somewhere behind me in the east.
Soon I began to make out objects, upended timbers, conch shells, sea wrack wrenched from the far out kelp forests. A pink-clawed crab encased in a green cup of sponge lay sprawling where the waves had tossed him. Long-limbed starfish were strewn everywhere, as though the night sky had showered down. I paused once briefly. A small octopus, its beautiful dark-lensed eyes bleared with sand, gazed up at me from a ragged bundle of tentacles. I hesitated, and touched it briefly with my foot. It was dead. I paced on once more before the spreading whitecaps of the surf.
The shore grew steeper, the sound of the sea heavier and more menacing, as I rounded a bluff into the full blast of the offshore wind. I was away from the shellers now and strode more rapidly over the wet sand that effaced my footprints. Around the next point there might be a refuge from the wind. The sun behind me was pressing upward at the horizon's rim ~ an ominous red glare amidst the tumbling blackness of the clouds. Ahead of me, over the projecting point, a gigantic rainbow of incredible perfection had sprung shimmering into existence. Somewhere toward its foot I discerned a human figure standing, as it seemed to me, within the rainbow, though unconscious of his position. He was gazing fixedly at something in the sand.
Eventually he stooped and flung the object beyond the breaking surf. I labored toward him over half a mile of uncertain footing. By the time I reached him the rainbow had receded ahead of us, but something of its color still ran hastily in many changing lights across his features. He was starting to kneel again.
In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud.
"It's still alive," I ventured.
"Yes," he said, and with a quick yet gentle movement he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea. It sank in a burst of spume, and the waters roared once more.
"It may live," he said, "if the offshore pull is strong enough." He spoke gently, and across his bronzed worn face the light still came and went in subtly altering colors.
"There are not many come this far," I said, groping in a sudden embarrassment for words. "Do you collect?"
"Only like this," he said softly, gesturing amidst the wreckage of the shore. "And only for the living." He stooped again, oblivious of my curiosity, and skipped another star neatly across the water.
"The stars," he said, "throw well. One can help them."
He looked full at me with a faint question kindling in his eyes, which seemed to take on the far depths of the sea.
"I do not collect," I said uncomfortably, the wind beating at my garments. "Neither the living nor the dead. I gave it up a long time ago. Death is the only successful collector." … I nodded and walked away, leaving him there upon the dune with the great rainbow ranging up the sky behind him.
I turned as I neared a bend in the coast and saw him toss another star, skimming it skillfully far out over the ravening and tumultuous water. For a moment, in the changing light, the sower appeared magnified, as though casting larger stars upon some greater sea. He had, at any rate, the posture of a god.
But again the eye, the cold world-shriveling eye, began its inevitable circling in my skull. He is a man, I considered sharply, bringing my thought to rest. The star thrower is a man, and death is running more fleet than he along every seabeach in the world.
I adjusted the dark lens of my glasses and, thus disguised, I paced slowly back to the starfish gatherers, past the shell collectors, with their vulgar little spades and the stick-length shelling pincers that eased their elderly backs while they snatched at treasures in the sand. I chose to look full at the steaming kettles in which beautiful voiceless things were being boiled alive. Behind my sunglasses a kind of litany began and refused to die down. "As I came through the desert thus it was, as I came through the desert."
In the darkness of my room I lay quiet with the sunglasses removed, but the eye turned and turned. In the desert, an old monk had once advised a traveler, the voices of God and the Devil are scarcely distinguishable. Costabel was a desert. I lay quiet, but my restless hand at the bedside fingered the edge of an invisible abyss, "Certain coasts," the remark of a perceptive writer came back to me, "are set apart for shipwreck." With unerring persistence I had made my way thither. …
I had walked away from the star thrower in the hardened indifference of maturity. But thought mediated by the eye is one of nature's infinite disguises. Belatedly, I arose with a solitary mission. I set forth in an effort to find the star thrower. …
Man is himself, like the universe he inhabits, like the demonical stirrings of the ooze from which he sprang, a tale of desolations. He walks in his mind from birth to death the long resounding shores of endless disillusionment. Finally the commitment to life departs or turns to bitterness. But out of such desolation emerges the awesome freedom to choose ~ to choose beyond the narrowly circumscribed circle that delimits the animal being. In that widening ring of human choice, chaos and order renew their symbolic struggle in the role of titans. They contend for the destiny of a world.
Somewhere far up the coast wandered the star thrower beneath his rainbow. Our exchange had been brief because upon that coast I had learned that men who ventured out at dawn resented others in the greediness of their compulsive collection. I had also been abrupt because I had, in the terms of my profession and experience, nothing to say. The star thrower was mad, and his particular acts were a folly with which I had not chosen to associate myself. I was an observer and a scientist. Nevertheless, I had seen the rainbow attempting to attach itself to earth.
On a point of land, as though projecting into a domain beyond us, I found the star thrower. In the sweet rain-swept morning, that great many-hued rainbow still lurked and wavered tentatively beyond him. Silently I sought and picked up a still-living star, spinning it far out into the waves. I spoke once briefly. "I understand," I said. "Call me another thrower." Only then I allowed myself to think, he is not alone any longer. After us there will be others.
We were part of the rainbow ~ an unexplained projection into the natural. As I went down the beach I could feel the drawing of a circle in men's minds, like that lowering, shifting realm of color in which the thrower labored. It was a visible model of something toward which man's mind had striven, the circle of perception.
I picked and flung another star. Perhaps far outward on the rim of space a genuine star was similarly seized and flung. I could feel the movement in my body. It was like a sowing ~ the sowing of life on an infinitely gigantic scale. I looked back across my shoulder. Small and dark against the receding rainbow, the star thrower stooped and flung once more. I never looked again. The task we had assumed was too immense for gazing. I flung and flung again while all about us roared the insatiable waters of death.
But we, pale and alone and small in that immensity, hurled back the living stars. Somewhere far off, across bottomless abysses, I felt as though another world was flung more joyfully. I could have thrown in a frenzy of joy, but I set my shoulders and cast, as the thrower in the rainbow cast, slowly, deliberately, and well. The task was not to be assumed lightly, for it was men as well as starfish that we sought to save. For a moment, we cast on an infinite beach together beside an unknown hurler of suns. It was, unsought, the destiny of my kind since the rituals of the ice age hunters, when life in the Northern Hemisphere had come close to vanishing. We had lost our way, I thought, but we had kept, some of us, the memory of the perfect circle of compassion from life to death and back again to life ~ the completion of the rainbow of existence. Even the hunters in the snow, making obeisance to the souls of the hunted, had known the cycle. The legend had come down and lingered that he who gained the gratitude of animals gained help in need from the dark wood.
I cast again with an increasingly remembered sowing motion and went my lone way up the beaches. Somewhere, I felt, in a great atavistic surge of feeling, somewhere the Thrower knew. Perhaps he smiled and cast once more into the boundless pit of darkness. Perhaps he, too, was lonely, and the end toward which he labored remained hidden ~ even as with ourselves.
I picked up a star whose tube feet ventured timidly among my fingers while, like a true star, it cried soundlessly for life. I saw it with an unaccustomed clarity and cast far out. With it, I flung myself as forfeit, for the first time, into some unknown dimension of existence. From Darwin's tangled bank of unceasing struggle, selfishness, and death, had risen, incomprehensibly, the thrower who loved not man, but life. It was the subtle cleft in nature before which biological thinking had faltered. We had reached the last shore of an invisible island ~ yet, strangely, also a shore that the primitives had always known. …
In the night the gas flames under the shelling kettles would continue to glow. I set my clock accordingly. Tomorrow I would walk in the storm. I would walk against the shell collectors and the flames. I would walk remembering Bacon's forgotten words: "for the uses of life." I would walk with the knowledge of the discontinuities of the unexpected universe. I would walk knowing of the rift revealed by the thrower, a hint that there looms, inexplicably, in nature something above the role men give her. I knew it from the man at the foot of the rainbow, the starfish thrower on the beaches of Costabel.