Wild Awe

Psalm 104

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

29 September 2024

            Once again, I asked on Facebook about where and when you have experienced awe in nature, and the list included hiking in the mountains, Niagara Falls, Denali, the Grand Canyon, the turquoise blue of the Aegean Sea, or closer to home like the Nebraska Sandhills or the Ponca Hills north of Omaha.

            Rick Brenneman, still a church member, though he lives in Texas, wrote about two trips to Africa as a zoologist:

I think my moments of greatest awe were on my first two trips to Africa. Early on my first trip we drove through the entrance to Hells Gate National Park and looked down into the valley at many clusters of various species all calmly coexisting. The second was when we first arrived at the Namib Desert, driving to the top of one of the magnificent dunes and seeing miles of dunes before the Skeleton Coast.

            Those sights sound sublime.  But we don’t have to travel around the world, we can find natural awe in our everyday environment, as Jim Harmon reminded us when he wrote about his daily hikes through the Loess Hills where he lives.  He wrote, “I have awe overload from nature.”  If you like to hike, you should definitely arrange to go on one of those walks with Jim. 

            I turned this week to a few writers and their descriptions of wild awe.  For example, the opening lines to William Wordsworth’s The Prelude:

O there is blessing in this gentle breeze,

A visitant that while it fans my cheek

Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings

From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.

Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come

To none more grateful than to me; escaped

From the vast city, where I long had pined

A discontented sojourner: now free,

Free as a bird to settle where I will.

What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale

Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove

Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream

Shall with its murmur lull me into rest?

The earth is all before me. With a heart

Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,

I look about; and should the chosen guide

Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,

I cannot miss my way. I breathe again!

            All it took was a gentle breeze in the countryside to evoke rapture in the poet.

            Closer to home, Nebraska’s own Loren Eiseley wrote beautifully about wild awe in so many of his essays.  Probably his most vivid description is about one time floating in the Platte River:

Then I lay back in the floating position that left my face to the sky, and shoved off.  The sky wheeled over me.  For an instant, as I bobbed into the main channel, I had the sensation of sliding down the vast tilted face of the continent.  It was then that I felt the cold needles of the alpine springs at my fingertips, and the warmth of the Gulf pulling me southward.  Moving with me, leaving its taste upon my mouth and spouting under me in the dancing springs of sand, was the immense body of the continent itself, flowing like the river was flowing, grain by grain, mountain by mountain, down to the sea.  I was streaming over ancient sea beds thrust aloft where giant reptiles had once sported; I was wearing down the face of time and trundling cloud-wreathed ranges into oblivion.

            Such wonder just from floating in a Nebraska river.

            As psychologist Dacher Keltner states in today’s contemporary reading, it’s difficult to imagine anything better you can do for your mind and body than to go outside and delight in nature’s beauty.  Such experiences can reduce inflammation, improve our immune responses, and help to address chronic diseases like depression, anxiety, heart disease, and autoimmune disorders.  It also helps with loneliness and despair.  He writes that awe is pretty much the antithesis to the stressors that affect us.  The stresses of daily life send chemicals through our bodies that lead to inflammation and distress, and moments of natural awe send the opposite chemicals, bringing us calm. 

The affect is so profound, he believes we have a biological need for wild awe.  We have been wired that way.  The clearest evidence is watching a toddler explore the world. 

Also our bodies respond to the signals nature is sending us.  Our vagus nerve activates at the sound of water.  The scents from some plants reduce our blood pressure.  So just being out in your garden can be a healing exercise.  Basil and rosemary, for instance, send signals to our frontal lobes, activating the region where emotions and ethics intersect.

Studies also show that wild awe helps in quieting the ego and promoting sound reasoning.  All around, then, there’s nothing you can so easily do to help heal your body and mind as spending time in nature, paying attention to the beauty around you.

Once again, we arrive at a reminder of the spiritual importance of paying attention. 

One of my favorite, recent nature books was The Forest Unseen  by David George Haskell.  He spent a year observing a one square meter space in the forest, and that resulted in a rich book, filled with details of the seasons and the vast amount of life that made a home in or passed through that small space.  The book is an excellent study in how we don’t need to go to the grand wild places like Yellowstone or the Alps, but how we can find beauty, awe, and wonder in the ordinary, if we only look.

At the close of the book, Gaskell writes, “We create wonderful places by giving them our attention, not by finding ‘pristine’ places that will bring wonder to us.”  Even our urban and suburban backyards can provide us the healing beauty we require.

So, here’s an assignment for this week—every day spend some time outside.  You can just pick a spot in your yard, a comfy patio chair maybe, and for five or ten minutes just quietly absorb the sights, sounds, and smells all around you.  Feel the touch of the sunshine or crisp autumn air.  Magical, wonderful, healing, spiritual things can happen.

And we believe that all of this goodness is a result of God’s creative blessings.  God has created a world abundant with beauty.  And God has created us wired to connect with the world around us.  These are God’s gifts to us.  Good, powerful, transformative gifts. 

The Psalmist begins, “Bless the Lord, O my soul.”  The great Walter Brueggemann writes that these words are a “summons to the self to turn fully to” God.  And the way we do that is by observing God’s glories and gifts in creation. 

Brueggemann goes on, “The psalmist is smitten with the beauty, awesomeness, generativity, and ordered coherence of creation as guaranteed by the creator.  Everything is in its place as part of a coherent, life-giving system.”

So we celebrate creation as the work of God’s hands while also meeting God in the wild.  Robert Alter, the great Hebrew scholar, calls this psalm an “ecstatic celebration” and emphasizes how the poem is a “whole chain of present participles.”  From this grammatical observation, Alter concludes, “The poet imagines the presence of divinity in the world as a dynamic series of actions.”  God is present in the world in dynamic, on-going ways.  The creation was not something done once and over but is God’s continuing action.  God’s continuing gifts and glory.

Yet, this weekend we have watched the horrible scenes from the southeast as Hurricane Helene has laid waste to towns, leaving a path of destruction and death over several states.  Our hearts go out to the suffering people who have lost so much.  And I’m sure in the days ahead, we will have opportunities to generously respond to help them recover.

We know that these storms are worsening and setting new records because of the changes wrought to our climate by human industrialization.  We now live in the era that calls for resilience as we face the consequences of our actions and those of previous generations. 

One of the new words to enter our vocabulary in recent years is solastalgia.  Which is defined as “the emotional distress that people experience when their environment changes.”  Particularly our home environments, those we’ve loved, those we’ve drawn sustenance, nurture, delight, and awe from.

The theologian Hannah Malcolm assembled a book to help the church in this new era.  Entitled Words for a Dying World it is filled with essays from Christians around the world helping us to come to terms with the loss and grief of environments we have loved.  According to Malcolm, we must take time to grieve these losses if we are going to be effective in taking the steps necessary to prevent even worse from happening in the future.

As she writes, “if grief is an expression of love, our grief takes on the shape of the places and creatures to whom we intimately belong.  We mourn the death of the world because it is where we come from.” 

Malcolm believes that “the tenderness of caring for the dying is not a despairing act but a courageous one.”  And so operating from that perspective empowers us, but in gentle, tender ways.  She writes, “Adopting an orientation of grief means choosing to invest in things that are small, that are temporary, and celebrating them in the broken, fragile beauty they bear in the eyes of God.  It is soft, cruciform foolishness.”

So, after watching the weekend’s news, we might not be able to sing today’s psalm with as much confidence as its writer—that everything is in order and all of creation is a blessing.  But, we also learn that even in our grief at the losses brought on by a changing climate, we can train our attention to perceive “the fragile beauty” that is God’s gift. 

God has created a world abundant with beauty.  And God has wired us to connect with the world around us in ways that are healing and transformative.  These are God’s gifts to us.  Good, powerful, transformative gifts. 

Even as we grieve the losses of nature, we can pay attention to the glories and gifts of God still abundant in the world around us. (Even by spending just a few minutes in our own yards.)  God is calling us to work together to protect and restore the creation to the way God intended it.

Then let us join with the Psalmist and proclaim, “Bless the Lord, O my soul.  Praise the Lord!”

A Beautiful Life

Matthew 5:1-16

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

22 September 2024

            This week on Facebook I asked, “What is a movie or story that because of something good that happens makes you cry or get the chills?”  The answers were quite varied:

• Old Yeller, wrote Jim Harmon
• Jennifer Forbes-Baily offered The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
• Teague Stanley said A Man Called Otto
• Places in the Heart wrote Becky McNeil
• Krissy wrote of Homeward Bound “I cried as a child and I cried again as an adult showing the movie to Wyatt. They make it home safe and sound!”
• Charlene Wozny recommended A Stoning in Fulham County and Smoke Signals
• And Linda Gabriel wrote that The World’s Fastest Indian is a gem.
• Matt Gutschick added Cast Away and explained, “After all he’s been through. At that big open crossroads right at the end.”

            I feel like there are so many movies and stories where I cry every time because of something good.  What immediately jumped to mind were It’s a Wonderful Life and E. T. 

The story that really gets me every time though is Les Mis, usually listening to the soundtrack of the Broadway Musical.  And in more than one place—when the young students’ lives are sacrificed for freedom, when Valjean offers Javier mercy and Javier cannot take it, when Fantine dies thinking of Cossette, but the most impactful moment of all is when the Bishop defends Valjean and offers him forgiveness and new life after Valjean has stolen from him.  That act of Chrisitan charity has always felt so overwhelmingly good and so outside the norm of human behavior, that I’m overcome every, single, time.

            When the psychologist Dacher Keltner and his colleagues did a big, global study of awe, they discovered that across cultures, the one thing that most inspires our awe isn’t nature, spirituality, or music—it is other people.  Particularly “other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming.”  This result, as the most common experience of awe, surprised them.  So this is the first of eight wonders of life in Keltner’s taxonomy of awe, that we’ll be exploring the next two months.  He writes, “Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty.”

            What a thrilling result!  And I love that phrase too, “moral beauty.”  It perfectly captures the experience he’s trying to describe.  When goodness is on display, when we actually see it, and we find it beautiful.

            That we find awe in one another is one of the reasons that Keltner believes we can find awe in our everyday experiences.  We don’t need to be able to afford travel to sublime locations or a visit the great art museums.  We can meet this “basic human need” everyday in our encounters with people.

            One of the ways other people inspire our awe isn’t about moral goodness but about rare talents.  We’ve just watched the summer Olympics and there we witnessed so many awe-inspiring moments like the new world record in the 100 meter dash or the incredible heights achieved in pole vaulting. 

            But far more common experiences of awe occur when we witness people being kind to others, when we see people overcoming obstacles in their own lives to live well, and, by far the most likely human action to inspire awe—courageous actions taken on behalf of other people.

            Think about some of the people whose moral beauty—through kindness, strength, sacrifice, or courage—inspires you.  Some of the names that come to mind immediately for me—Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, the passengers on board United Flight 93. 

            When we encounter moral beauty, Dacher Keltner writes, we can be taken aback.  Such moments “have the power of an epiphany,” a moment of illumination.  He writes, “The experience is imbued with a sense of light, clarity, truth, and the sharpened recognition of what really matters.”

            Yeah, that’s exactly how I feel every time I listen to the Bishop forgive Valjean.  An important lesson is being taught about grace.

            There’s even a physical explanation of what happens when we have these moments of awe.  Here’s Keltner’s description:

Witnessing others’ acts of courage, kindness, strength, and overcoming activates . . . [the] cortical regions where our emotions translate to ethical action.  These encounters lead to the release of oxytocin and activation of the vagus nerve.  We often sense tears and goose bumps, our body’s signals that we are part of a community appreciating what unites us.  When moved by the wonders of others, the soul in our bodies is awakened, and acts of reverence often quickly follow.

            So these moments of awe are felt deeply in our bodies, and they are likely to lead us into action.  We will be moved to reverence, gratitude, and appreciation.  Which can then prompt us into our own actions of kindness and courage. 

These very human moments of connection are what we consider sacred.  Over time we’ve turned acts of reverence and appreciation into our cultural and religious practices.  And those rituals can now themselves inspire our reverence and awe. 

Christian worship, for instance, is rooted in the experiences of awe that Jesus inspired in those who witnessed him.  Here, for example, is a description of the Sermon on the Mount, of which today’s Gospel reading is a part, by the German pastor Helmut Thielicke:

Then Jesus opened his mouth and something completely unexpected happened, something that drove these people to an astonishment bordering upon terror, something that held them spellbound long after he ceased speaking and would not let them rest.  Jesus said to the people gathered around him, people who were harried by suffering, misery, and guilt: “Blessed are you; blessed are you.”  The Sermon on the Mount closes with the remark that the crowds were astonished and frightened, even though it was a sermon on grace.  But this is what always happens when God unveils his great goodness.  It is so immense, so far beyond and contrary to all human dimensions and conceptions that at first one simply cannot understand it and we stand there in utter helpless bewilderment.

            Which is a pretty apt description of awe as a response to moral beauty.

            Today we aren’t exploring the entirety of the Sermon on the Mount or even going into all the rich details of the Beatitudes, but let me say a few things about what’s going on in this teaching of Jesus.

            The New Testament scholar Dale Allison writes about how this sermon is intended to inspire the moral imagination.  The beatitudes, he says, were originally intended to startle their audience because they were a reversal of ordinary values.  The folks normally on the bottom or the fringes of human society are identified as blessed and made happy by God. 

            Jesus’s teaching is a revelation of the very heart of God and a glimpse at what God intends for the human future.  This is what God’s kingdom is supposed to look like.  So, here we have an “exercise of the imagination” in what “human experience of the fullness of God’s presence” can be. 

            But we don’t have to wait for some expected fulfillment in the future—we can, and should, begin living this way now.  To live according to God’s dream for humanity will help to address the current human condition with all its griefs and pains.  So the beatitudes become imperatives of what a good and beautiful human life looks like.

            In the Middle Ages, Christian writers taught that the Beatitudes were “disciplines, cultivated habits of the heart” [David Lyle Jeffrey]. 

            So, if we are going to cultivate moral beauty in ourselves, as followers of Jesus, living as Jesus taught us here in the Sermon on the Mount, is the primary way to do that.

            Earlier we heard an excerpt of David Brooks’s book The Road to Character.  Brooks is critical of the narcissism he believes dominates our current culture.  Too often human achievement is now judged through professional success and competition, ambition, self-preservation, and cunning become the preeminent values.  He longs instead for the “aesthetically beautiful” persons of humble character who radiate joy. 

Such character, he writes, is built over time, beginning with an awareness of our own flaws and struggling against our own weaknesses.  We don’t build our character alone, but with the help and support of others in community.  We develop our self-respect through inner triumphs.  He writes, “It is earned by being better than you used to be, by being dependable in times of testing, straight in times of temptation.”

The book is a rich exploration of various people who he believes exhibit this depths of character.  Like Frances Perkins, the New Deal Era Secretary of Labor or General George Marshall or Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham or Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin. 

At the close of the book, he presents what he calls “The Humility Code,” which he describes as “a coherent image of what to live for and how to love.”  The first proposition of the code, which he says “defines the goal of life” is this:

We don’t live for happiness, we live for holiness.  Day to day we seek out pleasure, but deep down, human beings are endowed with moral imagination.  All human beings seek to lead lives not just of pleasure, but of purpose, righteousness, and virtue. . . .  The best life is oriented around the increasing excellence of the soul and is nourished by moral joy, the quiet sense of gratitude and tranquility that comes as a byproduct of successful moral struggle. . . . Life is essentially a moral drama . . . .

            And our Christian vision of that beautiful life was exhibited for us by Jesus of Nazareth and how he taught us to live.  In places like today’s passage from the Gospel of Matthew.  And lives of such character and moral beauty inspire us with awe.

            Nothing inspires us more than beautiful people.  Not physically beautiful, but morally beautiful.  People of character who are kind, generous, gracious, and courageous, who overcome their struggles. 

            Let us not only admire such people, but aspire to be such people.  For that is the good life God dreams for you and all of God’s children.

Sharing in God’s Life

1 Samuel 25:14-19, 23-25, 32-34, 42-43

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

1 September 2024

               As I said, Wilda Gafney hopscotches through this story, only highlighting some of the details.  So, let me fill in the blanks a little.

            At this point in the larger story of David’s rise to power, he has fled from the court of King Saul after Saul threatened his life, because David had become too popular and powerful.  David then operates as the leader of a band of warriors, living in the wilderness, and occasionally hiring out to one town or another for protection or to fight on their behalf. 

            When the Bible first introduces us to Nabal, we are told that he is surly and mean and that Abigail his wife is beautiful and clever.  One feast day David sends some of his men to Nabal seeking hospitality, but they are insulted and turned away.  In ancient cultures not granting hospitality was an ethical violation.  Eugene Peterson, in his commentary, points out that sheepshearing time was traditionally a period of festivity and generosity. 

            David finds out about the insult and, enraged, decides to attack Nabal. 

            But Abigail hears from one of the servant boys what has happened and she takes action.  She doesn’t tell Nabal what she’s going to do. She takes gifts to David and falls down in front of him, imploring him to save her husband and household.  In her speech she declares that God’s favor is upon David and he is going to rise to power.  And that if he destroys Nabal, he will damage his own reputation and bring blood-guilt upon himself.

            David, apparently struck by the beauty and power of this woman, grants her wish and sets aside his rage.

            Abigail returns home to find Nabal drunk at his feast.  She waits until the next day, when he’s probably suffering from quite the hangover, to tell him what she’s done.  Which, of course, is an insult to his honor.  Nabal appears to immediately have a stroke and lingers a few days before he dies.  And then Abigail seeks after David, who makes her his wife.

            Of this story, the Bible scholar David Jobling writes, “The more I read it the more I dislike it.”  He finds it a distasteful story in which nobody behaves well.  Even Abigail he dislikes.

Wilda Gafney says that David is a “thug” and Nabal a mean-spirited man and “abusive husband.”  Unlike Jobling, she takes a different perspective on Abigail.  She thinks Abigail is a survivor who has learned how to deal with and survive these toxic men.  Doing the best she can in this scary situation to save the day, spare the community violence, and create a future for herself.

            We’ve talked a lot this summer already as we’ve read these stories about toxic masculinity and the clever ways the women of these stories try to survive and thrive and shape the world.  So we want explore those topics today.  Instead, I want to follow what Wilda Gafney thinks is a core theme of the story—generosity and hospitality.  She writes, “While some biblical passages equate wealth with blessing uncritically, these lessons look more deeply at what one does with one’s wealth as a measure of character.”

            Of course this is Labor Day weekend, a good time to reflect upon such issues.

            In her book Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism the Yale Divinity School theologian Kathryn Tanner writes that our current finance-dominated capitalism “is incompatible with fundamental Christian commitments.”  She adds, “there is surprisingly little reason to think Christianity has direct interest in developing a work ethic at all.”

            Christianity teaches us to trust in the grace of God.  And, as Tanner writes, “the fulsome character of grace” means that “one has all one needs now to meet the present challenge.”  Which works against the scarcity mindset, competition, and conspicuous consumption prevalent in our current economic system.

            The world’s value is also not created through human labor.  The things of this world have intrinsic, non-purposive value as part of God’s creative activity.  God created the things of this world to be reflections of God’s glory.  Kathryn Tanner writes, “God simply wants to share God’s life, so that the fullness of that life is reflected” in us and the world.

            Value then is not established by the market, the invisible hand, or even human labor.  Our focus on use and consumption of earthy goods has robbed us of the spiritual practice of attending carefully to what God has given us.  Attention teaches us to appreciate and honor the ways the things of the world share in the glory of God.

            Rather than use and consumption, we are instead invited by God to enjoy God’s gifts.  And to participate with God as co-creators.  The abundance of the earth is for sharing, so that all might flourish.

            That such deeply traditional Christian ideas sound so radical in contrast with current global economics, is because our imaginations have been malformed.  We struggle to imagine how we might live any other way than what we are used to, except with maybe small improvements.  The biblical scholar Ellen Davis calls this malformation of the imagination “idolatry.”  We worship idols and aren’t even aware we are doing it.

            Our enjoyment of God’s gifts does involve work.  The meaning and purpose of our labor is different though from what the market teaches.  We are connected to God through our creativity and making.  This is part of the divine image in us.  Our labor should share in God’s glory.

The artist Makoto Fujimura has reflected deeply and theologically upon human creativity and making and they ways they connect us with God.  Fujimura writes that the goals of our making are to mend what is broken in ourselves and in the world and to cultivate beauty and mercy.  In our making, we should be collaborating with one another, with compassion, empathy, and care.  Our labor is glorious when it moves with the Spirit in these ways.

Earlier we read an excerpt from Kevin Hector’s Christianity as a Way of Life in which he writes about the practices we need to engage in if we are to learn how to love as Christ wants us too.  Points relevant to our collaborative labor as God’s people.  Our spiritual practices train us to see beyond ourselves and our own interests, and instead to see the worth and value of others, to attend to their particularity and see them as images of God.  We learn to offer them our beneficence, generosity, and hospitality.  And to set aside vengeance and forgive one another, seeking reconciliation when we are wronged.  When we do these things, by faith and grace over time, they grow our ability to love and transform us.  And our work shares in God’s work.

Hopefully highlighting these Christian ideas sparks your imagination, curiosity, and reflection.  Because these concepts merit deeper and fuller consideration.  If we are to share more fully in the life of God, how will that change the things we do?  Including our work and how we spend and manage our money.

I’m still learning and growing in these areas myself.  It’s difficult to break out of the ways we’ve done things in the past and make all things new.  Difficult to reform the imagination.

The story in First Samuel provides a glimpse of some of the harms that can be done when we don’t live according to the simple maxim that God wants to share God’s life with all of us.  The failure to be hospitable, generous, and welcome, almost leads to violence.  Grace is required to set vengeance aside and do something different.  Thankfully, Abigail imagined another way.

So, let’s do better. 

We can work at cultivating some basic virtues.  To live more simply and sustainably.  To practice generosity and hospitality.  As kids remind us, “sharing is caring.”  To spend and invest with an eye toward justice and doing the most good.

We can also renew our spiritual practices, particularly the spiritual practice of attending to other people and things in their particularity.  To see the ways they share in God’s life and glory.  And how the world is given for our enjoyment, not use.

Finally, our financial decisions and our workplaces should center grace and mercy.  Our labor, our work, our making should create beauty and mend what is broken. 

When we do all of these things, together, then we will share in God’s life and all of us can flourish.