It’s a question of discipline,” the little prince told me later on. “When you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet.”

- From The Little Prince

Lighting of the Chalice - To Look, by Steve Shick, read by Dennis Daniel

The doer looks with a focused gaze upon a row of things once made,

or, if of the reformer’s mind, reshapes the things to fit the times.

But the watcher looks in another way and sees the commonplace of day

a radiance on a wilted flower,

a nest in a cathedral tower.

The watcher moves with a deliberate gait and knows the power of the wait

to lift the weariness of time

and show the world as a holy shrine.

May the light of this chalice help remind us that we are called to become watchers as well as doers, so that we too may learn to see the world as a holy shrine so that our doing may be inspired by reverence.

Readings

Joshua 5:13-15:

While Joshua was near Jericho, he raised his eyes and saw one who stood facing him, drawn sword in hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, "Are you one of us or of our enemies?" He replied, "Neither. I am the captain of the host of the LORD and I have just arrived." Then Joshua fell prostrate to the ground in worship, and said to him, "What has my lord to say to his servant?" The captain of the host of the LORD replied to Joshua, "Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy." And Joshua obeyed.

A political poem, by nils peterson:

Three people stand in a shop in Paris looking at an old piano. It might have been played by Beethoven. The veneer is sumptuous, though blistered where separated from the shaping pieces. Inside, no cast-iron frame, but thick, wooden struts. The woman attempts a scale, but many of the notes are missing. “It’s like trying to capture moonlight in a net." The man marvels at the piano’s age and that it had been made entirely by hand. The shopowner tells them, "The trees for the wood were most likely planted in the late sixteenth century. The woodworking guilds of Germany planted trees so their children’s children’s children would have the right kind of wood harvested, sometimes, 250 years later. Then it was cured from 10 to 40 years. Even in the nineteenth century, such wood was rare, but now it is a substance that has gone out of the world we live in."

“Made from the Soil,” by David Suzuki:

The first man of the Bible is named Adam, from the Hebrew adama, meaning “earth,” or “soil.” The first woman, created from Adam’s rib, is Eve, from hava, meaning “living.” Together they make the eternal connections: life comes from the soil; the soil is alive. In other creation stories the fundamental connection of soil and life is expressed in different ways; in some, the first human is fashioned from material produced by the earth––carved from wood, molded out of cornmeal, shaped from seeds, pollen and sap. Sometimes the turtle or the water beetle carries soil up from the bottom of the sea; sometimes humans emerge from the underground womb of the Earth, or rain and sun, sand and seed combine into the shape of our first ancestor. One way or another, we are Earthenware. These stories tell us the truth: the soil is the source of life. Throughout the ages it has been treated as precious, even sacred, because of the gifts it gives us.

Anthem: The Ash Grove

Down yonder green valley, where streamlets meander

Where twilight is fading, I pensively roam

Or at the bright noontide in solitude wander

Amidst the dark shades of the lonely ash grove.

'Tis there where the blackbird is cheerfully singing

Each warbler enchants with his notes from a tree.

Ah then little think I of sorrow or sadness

The ash grove entrancing spells beauty for me

[The ash grove, the ash grove spells...]

All hail to the country where nature discloses

Her charms in each valley and heath-covered hill,

'Mid scenes where the spirit of Beauty reposes

In dell, rock and mountain, lake, river, and rill;

Shall thy children disown thee and leave thee to perish?

Or tarnish the glory that circles thy fame?

No, no, in their hearts thy bright forms they will cherish

And truth and affection will cling to thy name.

Homily: A Hike to Frazier Falls

Journal entry, July 3, 2006.

Today we met Sabrina and her kids for a hike to Frazier Falls. There’s a nice, level paved trail that leads from the parking area to the head of the gorge. A wooden bridge took us across Frazier Creek. The dog jumped in the water and paddled about, then brought an enormous stick with her, back up to the trail where we were waiting. From the bridge we could see the place where the water goes over the lip of the cliff, although from where we stood it was just a placid stream running through the woods and between large rocks.

Continuing beyond the bridge, the trail curves to the left along the edge of the gorge, ending at a place where we could see the falls. An iron fence kept us from falling into the valley – and protected the valley from us, I might add. At that point the falls was several hundred yards away. I got some good pictures, using the long lens on the camera. The water cascades across the face of the cliff and drops onto a pile of rocks as big as automobiles at the bottom. We could see where the stream had worn the cliff back, dislodging great chunks of the mountain as it did so.

After about fifteen minutes of looking at the valley and the waterfall, we walked back to the picnic area and had lunch. Brianna was tired, so she got to ride on the scooter with Sydney. The kids appreciated the string cheese and the hummus I had packed. I think the dog ate their sandwiches. After lunch, Corinna got to ride the scooter around the parking lot all by herself, much to her delight.

End of journal entry, beginning of reflections:

The experience was rather like going to the zoo, where the iron fence separates us from the wild things. We could look but not touch – probably just as well for the two year old, who has to touch everything. I almost expected to see a sign telling us “Please do not feed the waterfall.” The Forest Service had made a safe place for families to bring the kids, to experience nature from afar but not deeply. The interesting parts were all at a distance.

I know this isn’t always the case with waterfalls. At Niagara we stood just a few feet from the torrent, and had to shout to hear each other over the noise. If we had wanted, we could have walked behind the curtain of water or taken the Maid of the Mist up close to where the water comes down. At Tahoe you can slide down the face of the waterfall, carried along by the rushing water. At the Great Falls of the Potomac, you can go over the falls in a kayak, if you’re brave enough. But at Frazier Falls, we couldn’t hear the water, couldn’t feel the mist on our faces, couldn’t smell the humidity.

The experience has stayed with me, I have pondered it in my heart. Slowly a meaning has begun for take form. You see, I enjoyed that outing. I was glad to get out into the mountains and stretch my legs and my eyeballs. The grandkids were curious and energetic, and we had fun. The dog had a great time, splashing around in the stream, greeting all the other dogs who were escorting their humans on the path. Sydney was pleased to be able to accompany us on her scooter all the way to the end of the trail. Sunshine, mountain air, exercise, pine trees and wildflowers – and a lovely waterfall, observed through an iron grating. However, the walk, as it turned out, was less about nature than about family. And I think that’s part of the deal we cut with reality. We willingly forego exaltation in exchange for keeping reality tame and manageable and familiar. We live lives of quiet desperation. We don’t allow ourselves to get close enough to life to see it clearly and see it whole. Life without filters is just too threatening. We take our reality in small bits, thank you, the size of the TV screen, an article from the newspaper, the view from the highway at 60 MPH. We play the role of Juliet rather than live it. Where is the savor? Where is the fullness? Why do we keep ourselves from experiencing life entire? How might we change that pattern?

I would like for you all to join me in a bit of singing. Let’s go through Evening Breeze a couple times. The song will lead us.

Evening breeze, spirit song, sings to me when the day is done.

Mother earth awakens me with the heartbeat of the sea.

“Mother Earth wakens me with the heartbeat of the sea...” It’s a lovely idea; would that it were so. How do we open ourselves to the world enough to feel the heartbeat of the sea? Let’s start with trying to feel the heartbeat of the acorns you are each holding in your hands. Take a few moments to get acquainted with your acorn. Feel its textures and its curves. Smell it, taste it. Explore its surfaces with your lips, discovering texture where you thought to find smoothness. Feel the weight of it. Notice the colors, the very subtle changes in shading across its surface. These acorns are seeds, of course, the oak tree’s investment in survival. We humans may not be able to plan for very far into the future, but the oak tree thinks generations ahead. This has been a bountiful year for acorns. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of them have fallen just in Reston. Of all those millions a few hundred may sprout successfully and produce a sapling that will survive the winter and begin to grow into a tree – it is unlikely that many of us will be around when these saplings start producing acorns of their own. This is a process that goes on utterly without us.

The tree brings up minerals from deep in the soil, makes cellulose and proteins from them, creates acorns, and drops them back on the surface. Where the soil is moist, the acorn splits open and sends a rootlet out from its end that arches down and grows into the ground. Once it has established a connection, the acorn sends a shoot up the other way, toward the sky, and a tree has started to take shape. When we realize that this process has been going on for aeons and will go on long after we are here to witness it, we begin to grasp the idea that life is worthy of adoration and wonder, that it is variable beyond description, that it is a phenomenon entirely unto itself. In other words, we begin to understand that life is holy.

Each oak tree and every other tree, plant, and beast, can be for us a warrior in the host of the Lord, standing in our path, just as in the story of Joshua, reminding us to remove our shoes from off our feet because the ground we walk upon is holy. Joshua had need of that message on the night before his forces attacked Jericho, just as the children of Israel had need of reminding that the land they were about to seize and inhabit was not theirs to do with as they wished but was rather being entrusted to them because of the special relationship they had with their God. The land was holy, all of it, not just the spot where Joshua stood in front of the angel, but the entire expanse of Canaan from Dan to Beersheba. The Israelites were to respect the land as the place where God walked – and he or one of his messengers could pop up at any moment to call them back to awareness.

And so also for us. Messengers from the realm of the holy abound. Most of the time, I’m afraid, we fail to notice them, just as Balaam failed to see the angel the first two times it appeared to him. But they are there, reminding us at every step that the ground we walk upon is holy, even though we may have covered it with concrete and houses. The land will be here long after we are gone. We cannot really claim to own it. We are merely its temporary stewards. One takes off one’s shoes, not to avoid defiling the soil, but to assure that one is in touch with what really matters, to experience reality without filters. Let’s put that into the first person – we must take off our shoes to assure that we are in touch with what really matters. For us in 2006, what separates us from reality may not be a physical barrier like footwear or fences, but rather a psychological barrier – we haven’t enough tears for all the world’s woes, so we draw back from awareness and connection. We curb our compassion. Or an attitudinal barrier may separate us from reality – we get caught up in thinking of ourselves as somehow more special that others, more logical, more virtuous, more charitable, more intelligent and alert. We buy into us and them thinking and deny the reality of all the people who are not us.

Or, we become so preoccupied with what other people may think about us or so afraid of rejection that we deny our own reality, afraid to take risks because we know that while God may forgive, people seldom do. Or, we forget that we are who we are because thousands of people have created the world in which we have taken shape. We think it’s me and mine against the world (or in Maine, me, my dog, and my pick-up against the world), when in fact we are like the acorns, only capable of self-fulfillment when and if we put down roots and tap into the common source. We forget that salvation is collective. We forget that we are made of the same soil as everyone else all over the world. As David Suzuki reminded us, in the book of Genesis, the Hebrew text uses a play on words to get that idea across: Adam (the first human being) was made from adamah (the soil); humans were made from humus, if you will. That fact should instill in us a certain humility as well as bonding us to all other humans and all other forms of life.

Let’s sing again – Evening Breeze

Evening breeze, spirit song, sings to me when the day is done.

Mother earth awakens me with the heartbeat of the sea.

Do I need to develop the idea that we are all to some extent asleep? I’d much rather ask how Mother Earth might help us wake up. Jane Goodall describes taking a nap on the ground near a dozing family of chimpanzees. Suddenly she was aware that one of them was touching her hand. The chimp was awake to her presence, and she was awake to his. When I envision this scene it takes on a Sistine Chapel quality – the touch that brings life. Mother Earth awakens me.

Here’s the rub – we can’t make it happen, all we can do is prepare ourselves for when it does. A member of my congregation in Maine liked to walk out into the woods to a clearing where he could sit quietly for long stretches of time. If he stayed alert, he saw birds and insects and squirrels, foxes and moose and bear. He learned to live in the expectation that we would have all sorts of visitors. Birds and squirrels ate from his hand. Deer came up close to check him out. Racoons searched his pockets for something edible. But the wild things didn’t waken him. The expectation of their visit kept him awake. He had to be alert to his own actions as well as to his surroundings. No sudden moves. No coughs or sneezes. No startling awake when an animal came close. He had to be ready at all times. Expectation kept him alert, awake and ready to flow harmoniously with the situation when it presented itself.

Mother Earth is another name we use to describe reality, and we all know that reality can suddenly jar us awake with unexpected violence. What if, instead of visiting reality in the zoo, we learned to live in the expectation that gifts and visitations would come our way at any random time, living as Thoreau suggested, with infinite expectation of the dawn? What if we opened the door of our heart to all possibility, rather than trying to limit possibility to what we already know we can handle? What if we were able, Thoreau again, to suck all the marrow out of life so that when we come to the end of it we will know that we have live?. I suspect that we would discover that we were awake all the time, and we would feel more vital that ever before.

Let’s sing Evening Breeze again, one more time.

Evening breeze, spirit song, sings to me when the day is done.

Mother earth awakens me with the heartbeat of the sea.

And now, let us be in an attitude of meditation.

Breathe deeply, paying attention to your breath as you inhale and exhale.

Close your eyes, if that helps you concentrate.

As your lungs fill, let your stomach push out.

Fill the upper lobes of your lungs with each breathe, feel the stretching

pay attention to what is around you

the feel of the chair against your back and thighs

the shoes on your feet

can you hear your neighbor’s breathing?

can you hear your heart beating?

We are standing at the bottom of a canyon, near a stream that flows along a rocky bed. In the distance we see a waterfall. We move upstream, scrambling over rocks and around boulders. In some places the going is so rough, we have to carry the toddler, although she squirms. She wants to walk by herself. The soil is damp here. We smell the mud. We smell the pines and the wet rocks. Our fingers feel the roughness of the granite. As we move along the stream, frogs leap from the shore into the water, afraid of our shadow. The two-year old laughs. We cherish a child’s laughter. We see the footprints of a racoon in the mud. The stream is calm here, flowing quietly, making little sound, but in the distance we hear water striking rocks. As we round a bend, we feel the air become more humid. Our skin relaxes, taking in the moisture. The air is cooler here. The child shivers.

Moving forward, we see the jumble of rocks at the bottom of the waterfall. Mist tingles our faces. The sound has become a roar. A pool surrounds the rocks. We take off our shoes and enter the water, moving toward the cascade. The rocks are slippery and we have to be alert to keep our balance. We help each other scramble up the face of a large rock and stand beneath the water. It’s so cold we reflexively utter the name of that child born in Bethlehem. The water falls hard on us, making it difficult to keep our balance. We turn our faces upward and drink. Life doesn’t get any better than this.

We slide off the rock and wade back to the edge of the pool, tired and invigorated. We lie on the warm rocks, waiting for our clothing to dry.

A small dragonfly hovers nearby. You can see it, can you hear it? You know that sooner or later it is going to check you out. Welcome it, invite the dragonfly to come to you and learn who you are.– you want the experience of this dragonfly.

Feel it land on your arm. It’s so light you have to turn your tactile sensors up to max. Feel the dragonfly as it walks along your arm. If it tickles, don’t do anything that would frighten the dragonfly away. Tell the two-year old not to touch it. The dragonfly is your reality training for today. This is a wholly new experience. The dragonfly stops to rub its legs together. There are sense organs in its legs and it is savoring the experience of you, learning what it can about the being it has landed on. Can you feel the motion of its tiny legs? Notice the iridescence of its eyes – blues and greens and reds. Notice the veining in its wings. Experience the dragonfly as it experiences you. Now let the dragonfly go and bid it farewell.

Pay attention to your breathing once again. Prepare yourself for another visitation.Breathe in welcome. Feel that welcome in your lungs and throughout your body. Breathe in welcome and breathe out thanksgiving. Feel the gratitude in your body as it releases the air that has nourished it. Breathe in welcome, breathe out gratitude. Feel the door in your heart standing open. Breathe in welcome, breathe out gratitude. Continue paying attention to your breathing as we sit together in silence for a few moments. If a guest arrives, welcome whoever or whatever it is.

May we live in infinite expectation, open to whatever experience the universe offers us, without preconceptions and without hesitancy, as though we were stepping into the original dawn of the world.

Stewardship Story (The Cuff Links) and Offertory

The computer company, where the wife of a friend works, distributed a corporate-clothing catalogue that included a pair of cuff links. One of the links was inscribed Ctrl (Control) and the other Esc (Escape), just as they look on a computer keyboard.

"They would make a good present for any man," the woman commented to a colleague, "if only to remind him of the two things he can never have."

To remind us all of the two things any of us can never have, for that matter. Try as we might, we can control very little in our lives. And try as we might, we can never escape ourselves. Wherever we go, that’s where we are. These are profound truths.

So what we need to learn, I think, is willingness to live on the edge, accepting the challenge of not having control and not letting that fact paralyze us. And we need to learn to accept who we are, with our fears, our hesitancies, our shadows, our hungers, and our egos. For these learnings the church can be helpful, through sermons, covenant groups, training programs, opportunities to try new skills and to develop neglected gifts. Our goal is to develop healthy people within healthy congregations, working to improve the health of the larger community.

For this reason, we must continue our support of the institution and its programs.