February 14, 2010
The Last Sunday after Epiphany
Holy Trinity Parish, Decatur, Georgia
The Reverend Woody Bartlett


You Are Not of the Mall

I’m the Rev. Woody Bartlett, a retired priest in the Diocese of Atlanta and a very enthusiastic member of Holy Trinity. My wife, Carol, and I have been attending since the late spring of last year and find ourselves getting more and more caught up in the life-giving energy of this congregation.

There’s something else you need to know about us. We are deeply involved in working out the many ways that we humans are involved, both spiritually and practically, in the Creation. In fact, just about seven years ago we co-founded Georgia Interfaith Power & Light, an organization that seeks to engage faith communities across the state in the stewardship of creation, particularly in the ways we generate and use power. It has been a compelling journey.

I want to start by telling you about a friend of ours – Francie. She is a single mom with four grown and almost grown children. Everyone in the family is quite dramatic and quite artistic. It’s a pretty remarkable group. One day in the fall several years ago, her two youngest daughters, both high school aged, came to her and said, “Mom. We don’t have any winter clothes to wear to school. Can you take us to Gwinnett Mall so we can shop?” Francie said sure and they set a date. On the appointed day, Francie drove them out there and dropped them off at the entrance. She told them that she just couldn’t bear to be in the Mall on such a beautiful day and that she would come back and pick them up at an appointed time.

That time arrived and Francie picked them up and told them that she wanted to take them to a special place she had discovered while they were in the Mall. They drove to a nearby wooded area, parked the car and walked into the woods. Presently, they came to an open glade and Francie asked them to lie down on their backs and look up. It was a beautiful day, with a warm sun above and cool breezes flowing, leaves starting to turn,. After a while, Francie said to them, “Remember, my children, finally, you are not of the Mall. You are of the Earth.” By that she meant that their primary and deepest relationship was to the community of all of life – the community of wild flowers and honey bees, of deer and chickadees, of earthworms and grubs, of oak trees and green vegetables. It is all one big interactive and interdependent community. And we humans of it and from it and part of it.

As you must realize, we have a crisis on the Earth, largely because way too many of us humans are ‘Of the Mall.’ Human activity is straining way too many of the Earth’s natural systems. Pollution, heedless development, sprawling urban centers, polluting transportation systems and energy systems and our individual life styles are all putting incredible stress on the creation.

There are a number of web sites where you can describe your living patterns and generate your carbon footprint to see how heavy you tromp on the earth. It will tell you how many earths there would have to be if everyone on the planet today lived with your life style. It turns out that even the most eco-friendly of us, living in this country, still need about four earths to support us. Can you imagine the strain if even half the earth’s population gets to our standard of living?

Surely we will need some broad technological changes – more efficiency, new energy sources, new transportation and power systems. But we will also need a far deeper change that puts the issue right into the lap of the church, among other places. We need to answer the following question in thought and action, “Does the earth belong to us? Or do we belong to the earth? Are we of the Mall, or are we of the earth? Can we do whatever we want to do with the earth? Or do the limits of the earth place some real limits on us and our activities? And what might those limits be?

In the Gospel this morning, we heard the story of the Transfiguration where Peter, James and john were up on a mountain with Jesus and they saw him glowing as he prayed. And they saw Moses and Elijah with him. They were pretty stunned. It would be like you were with your favorite politician and they glowed and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were with them. Pretty stunning. But then a voice came from heaven and said, “This is my Son, my Chosen. Listen to him.”

Listen to him. Follow his actions and his teachings. Listen to him, for he is the example of how humans should get along with one another. Listen to him, for he is the answer to how human communities should work. Listen to him, for he is also the key to how we humans should fit into this great earth community, of which we are such an important part. We started on that exploration during the Rector’s Forum this morning. We need to find other ways to explore that relationship. It is becoming the central issue of our day.

Let me tell you what happened to me that started to open my eyes to my part in this great earth community. A friend of mine, Ed, and I decided to take a hike to the Jacks River Falls up in the northern end of the Cohutta Wilderness in north Georgia. We had seen a picture of it in a brochure. Anyone here been there?

Well we had to hike for a couple of hours just to get to the Jacks River. Getting there and checking our map, we saw that we had to cross the river and then go a short way up stream to get to the falls. We did that and arrived on a large rock outcropping at the top of the falls. We were alone. We sat down on the rock and drank in the scene. A large gush of water was surging down through a cleft in the rocks, sending spray up all around us, watering the incredibly green vegetation and filtering the warm sun that beat down. It was transfiguring. In fact, the rock beneath us seemed to be shaking from the pounding of the water. Or maybe that was just our shaky legs from hiking.

Anyway, after a moment, Ed said, “Look up.” And I did and there were about a dozen large birds, circling, dancing above us, round and round, in and out. Ed said, “Those are eagles.” Now Ed was a nature sort of guy. And he worked with, even danced with Native American Indians. So he knew something about the subject. I’d never even seen an eagle before but I sure could tell that they weren’t hawks or buzzards.

Then Ed said, “Let me get a better look.” And he reached into his knapsack and pulled out a small set of binoculars and looked up at the dancing eagles. Immediately, they turned tail and headed out behind the nearest mountain and disappeared. Pretty soon, we also left.

A couple of weeks later, I was telling the story to another nature guy friend of mine. He said, “Sure, they were there to see you. You know, they can see a field mouse at a mile, so when you looked at them with the binoculars, they left because they just didn’t trust your intentions.” Unwittingly, we had broken the bit of a relationship that we had with those eagles. Ever since, that event has been for me a symbol of the fractured earth community in which we live. And I have looked to what Jesus taught and did as possible guides for our actions. I am convinced that he is the way, the truth and the life for us in this ecological crisis.

Tomorrow, some installers will start putting a solar photovoltaic array on the south roof of Tisdale Hall here at Holy Trinity. That one small system will not do much to heal the crisis in creation in which we find ourselves. But it can be a powerful symbol that we know that we belong to the earth and that we must generate our power from sources that do not destroy the earth as they serve us. It can also be an early step in our determination to spread our concern to other parts of the church, to our homes, to our communities and to our businesses. Can we step out in that direction?

But it is far from just a local problem. There are, as we all know, some huge problems with the larger systems in which we live. Leadership at that systems level must involve governments and those larger institutions. But we are not powerless. So on this Valentine’s Day, let me suggest that we all send a love letter to our senators and representative, urging them to express our love for the Earth, our island home, in some significant legislation.

Finally, we find ourselves with the disciples, standing before the transfigured Christ, coming to terms with the fact that in the end it is painfully clear that we are not of the Mall. We are of the earth.