Nov 1, 2015
Texts:
Genesis 1: 20-25
John 11: 40 – 42
Revelations 21: 1 – 6a
(Full texts of scripture below)
I want to thank Dottie for inviting me to speak to you today. I also want to thank Marja & David Hilfiker whose financial and emotional support helped me visit the Svalbard archipelago of Norway in June. These are some of the photos I took in Norway. The others are from my trip to Churchill, Manitoba, Canada in 2010. Today is the beginning of International Polar Bear Week! The Arctic, where polar bears reside, is warming more quickly than any other part of our planet. Preserving the Arctic, and more specifically polar bears and other Arctic wildlife, is my passion and what I believe to be my Call.
But following call is difficult. Even knowing what call to follow is challenging. Suzanne Farnham writes, “Even when a need exists and we are well qualified to meet it, we are not necessarily called to respond to it. Something may be logical for us to do, but that does not mean that God calls us to it….To be doing what is good can be the greatest obstacle to doing something better.”
For those of you who don’t know me well, I have been at 8th Day since Super Bowl Sunday, 1984. Kent Beduhn and I met in graduate school at Catholic University and he invited me to attend 8th Day. Initially I wasn’t a frequent worshiper, but I started taking classes at the School of Christian Living, and I began to form close relationships with some of the people at 8th Day. Carol Fitch, Susan Koziol, Marcia Harrington, and David Hilfiker all nurtured my faith and tended my dimmed inner light. Putting down my roots in the rich soil of Church of the Saviour and 8th Day has changed my life in ways I could never have imagined. Growing up with an alcoholic mother, whose love was as overwhelming as it was cold and rejecting, taught me that my worth was measured by how well I could please others. The idea that my life had a purpose or that God would call me for an important task was completely outside my experience. But I did pray as a child. Talking to God helped ease my fear and anxiety. Despite the rejection I sometimes felt from my mother, somehow I believed what I was told in Sunday school: “God loves you.” Today, I am convinced if I had not had God to cling to, I might not have survived my early years.
How do we discern our call, and, once we believe we have heard “the still small voice” of God lighting our path, what must we do to follow our call? Elizabeth O’Connor, who wrote eloquently about the early days of the Church of the Saviour, said call is something you can’t ignore. You may try to avoid God’s urging, but it will return again and again. She also said real call will appear to be impossible. A task no sane person would endeavor to undertake. But when we join with others who are also called, the task becomes possible. Call is not something we can do alone. Call not only allows us to accomplish what seems impossible, but it also draws us into community. When Kayla visited us in October, she quoted Frank Honeycut who urges us to “Keep Jesus Weird”! In community, we join a group of people who are also attempting to follow Jesus – keeping it weird!
Marjory Bankson wrote in Creative Aging “the spiral of call resounds throughout our lives, calling us to consciousness and creativity, again and again….I see it more broadly, as the inner voice that tells us that we are part of the ongoing creation story. Call invites us to wake up, to know our lives matter and our decisions make a difference to the vibrant network of life on this planet.” In my world, animals have great value. When I went to Canada, to photograph the polar bears, I was consumed with joy. I was so engrossed in taking pictures and watching these magnificent creatures, time stood still. All of creation belongs to God and to us. As described in Genesis, God created “sea-monsters and wild animals of all kinds.” We do not have to give less to people or value people any less to give attention, support, and compassion to animals. If we can preserve our Earth for ourselves, we also preserve habitat for animals. Catholic Christian ethicist Charles Camosy talks about justice for animals as well as people in his book, For Love of Animals. While I don’t agree with all of his views, I wholeheartedly agree with him when he says, “Christians have a moral duty to be protectors – not only for fellow human beings, but for all creation.”
In community our gifts and our calls can be recognized and supported. Personally, I can tell you more about how NOT TO FOLLOW YOUR CALL than how to fulfill your call successfully. It took me more than twenty years of attending 8th Day to finally join a mission group. Participation in a mission group is one of the ways people accomplished great things in the early days of Church of the Saviour. A group of people hear God’s call on their lives and come together to pursue a unique journey. FLOC (For Love of Children/Fred Taylor) grew out of a mission group and is now one of the leading children’s service organizations in Washington DC. In 8th Day there are several mission groups currently.
From the first time I visited Dayspring, I felt at “home.” Being on retreat was always a rich and nurturing experience. For years I wanted to join the Retreat Mission Group. In 2004 that dream came true. From the beginning, I felt out of place. The group had been meeting together for a long time and it was hard to fit in. While I was in the mission group, the Dayspring Church decided to begin the process to allow deer hunting on Dayspring land. They believed the deer were “killing the forest” and felt led by God to change the “no hunting” rule that had been in place since the church purchased the farm “on the road to Damascus” in 1953. According to Elizabeth O’Connor in Call To Commitment “It was to be a place where the lives of everybody who touched it could become more deeply rooted in the life of God.” I was appalled that the deer, which were quite tame and habituated to people after years of safety on the farm, would be shot. I contacted a wildlife biologist at the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), Dr John Hadidian, and asked him to meet me at Dayspring and give his opinion about the health of the forest and the deer’s impact on the trees. Dr Hadidian did not believe the deer were harming the forest at Dayspring, and he wrote a letter giving his professional opinion about the deer and their effect on the forest. I spoke to the members of 8th Day, as well as the Ecumenical Council, stressing my view, and that of Dr Hadidian, that shooting the deer at Dayspring was not necessary to preserve the health of the forest. The decision was finally reached to allow deer hunting on Dayspring land after all the sister communities unanimously voted “yes” on the proposal. The day of the first hunt, in February 2006, I was the only protester standing on the road into Dayspring holding a sign that said “Hunting is Violence.” I was terrified but I believed then, as I do today, that hunting at Dayspring is wrong and unnecessary. The Retreat mission group, and some other people in Church of the Saviour, responded to my actions very negatively. I received telephone calls and emails criticizing me and one person in the mission group attacked me verbally, stating I had “no right to bring someone onto Dayspring land.” That may have been true, but I knew no matter what the reaction, I had to speak out against the violence being proposed against living, breathing members of our community. It was my first action to save animals. Being in community and following call can be messy and difficult, but it can also bring us closer to God and each other.
Prayer is another important part of following call. We have to remain connected to the Source. Through prayer, we can hear God’s calling and it gives us the opportunity to talk to God about our fears, hopes, and dreams. I have experienced miracles through prayer. I almost died in 2003, following what was supposed to be a routine surgery. Waking up early one morning in the hospital, I felt as if I was leaving my body and I began to pray. God “relit my pilot light” that day. When I was a member of a mission group, one of our disciplines was at least an hour a day of prayer. That became a struggle for me. It seemed like all I did was talk to God and cry. Eventually I decided I couldn’t do it anymore and left the Banyan Tree Mission Group because I couldn’t maintain the disciplines I had agreed to fulfill. I was sick of crying. But eventually I returned to prayer. Just try to stop praying! Lord have mercy! passes my lips at least once a day. In our fear, our frustration, our grief, and our joy, we include God in our daily conversations. Ask God for what you need. She will always hear your prayers. Jesus knew God was listening “Father, I thank you for hearing my prayer, I myself knew that you hear me always.” Your “answer” may be delayed and the need can be fulfilled in ways you can’t imagine. God wants your intention, attention, and trust. Communication is vital to all relationships. And I’m not talking about communicating through a computer device! In the quiet, God is ready and waiting for us.
In Revelations 21: it says “Look, here God lives among human beings. He will make his home among them; they will be his people, and he will be their God, God-With-Them. He will wipe away all tears from their eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness or pain. The world of the past has gone.” I fear, as the Earth warms, the world will be very different than the one we have known. But God-With-Them means through community, prayer, and following our calls, it will be a planet worth saving. May we each hear God’s Call in our hearts and have the courage to follow whereever She leads us.
Genesis 1: 20-25: God said ‘Let the waters be alive with a swarm of living creatures, and let birds wing their way above the earth across the vault of heaven’. And so it was. God created great sea-monsters and all the creatures that glide and teem in the waters in their own species, and winged birds in their own species. God saw that it was good. God blessed them saying, ‘Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the waters of the seas; and let the birds multiply on land.’ Evening came and morning came: the fifth day. God said, ‘Let the earth produce every kind of living creature in its own species: cattle, creeping things and wild animals of all kinds.’ And so it was. God made wild animals in their own species, and cattle in theirs, and every creature that crawls along the earth in its own species. God saw that it was good.
John 11: 40 – 42: Jesus replied, ‘Have I not told you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?’ So they took the stone away. Then Jesus lifted up his eyes and said:
Father, I thank you for hearing my prayer. I myself knew that you hear me always, but I speak for the sake of all these who are standing around me, so that they may believe it was you who sent me.
Revelations 21: 1 – 6a: Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, the first heaven and first earth had disappeared now, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride dressed for her husband. Then I heard a loud voice call from the throne, ‘Look, here God lives among human beings. He will make his home among them; they will be his people, and he will be their God, God-With-them. He will wipe away all tears from their eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness or pain. The world of the past has gone. Then the One sitting on the throne spoke. ‘Look, I am making the whole of creation new. Write this, “What I am saying is trustworthy and will come true.” Then he said to me, ‘It has already happened. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.’