BUILDING THE HOUSE
Rev. Dr. Joyce Antila Phipps
Old First Church August 15, 2021
Proverbs 9: 1-6; Mark 7: 31-37
This past week the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued its report in preparation for the UN Climate Summit, known as COP26, scheduled for November 1-12. This will be a time when we in the so-called developed nations must listen to the rest of the world begging us to halt our maddening descent into environmental chaos.
The Report calls some changes irreversible and inevitable. Unless we drastically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, the next generation will curse us for our insensitivity and greed. Consuming less is one of the most important ways we can stop this descent.
Political leaders across the globe have decried the continued use of fossil fuels but when push comes to shove, they back down in the face of the fears of people who know nothing else. Just look at the issue of coal and the politics of winning elections in West Virginia.
Coal mining has always been a dirty business. Who can forget the images in those old Depression photos of coal miners emerging from mines with their faces full of soot? Of course, their lungs were also full of the same soot leading to early deaths from black lung disease.
Trapped by location and the fear of losing all income, coal miners hold a strange kind of political power although mining has been declining for years. In reality, mine owners use this fear to keep workers trapped. What is needed here and in other parts of the country is a new approach to caring for workers in industries that have no future.
Our readings this morning give us some clues as to what we need to do to at least stop the current level of environmental degradation, which is not just about certain animals on an endangered species list but about us. We are the endangered species.
The problem is that many of us are still just as deaf as the man brought to Jesus. We hear that the earth is in crisis but most of us just continue to keep living as we have always lived. I’m no different than anyone else. Oh yes, I recycle, and yes, I even take the water from the dehumidifier and use it on the plants so I don’t waste water. But those activities do not cut into my life because I have food when I am hungry and something cold to drink when I am thirsty.
But there are many people who do not have even the basic amenities of life. Drought has destroyed their ability to raise crops; the waters have dried up so they have a thirst we cannot even imagine. Many of those clamoring at our southern border are climate refugees from Central America and, unfortunately, many of their governments could care less.
Take your pick: There’s Honduras where the brother of the current President now stands convicted of drug trafficking and the President is an unindicted co- conspirator. Then there’s Guatemala where ex-Presidents are awaiting trials on corruption. And we can’t forget El Salvador where aid money seems to only help the rich.
We tch-tch at the corruption, but, honestly, what’s the difference between the blatant corruption we see south of the border and lobbying practices of big oil and not so big coal? Or writers who have decided to throw their lot in with the past rather than the future?
Are we really so deaf? In the Gospel reading from Mark this morning, Jesus unstops the ears of the deaf man. Don’t you wonder what he first heard when he could hear? The sound of a bird, the rush of the wind, the voice of a family member. My deaf mother said she had always wanted to hear her own mother’s voice, which her older hearing sister had told her was soft and gentle.
I think one of the reasons I love music so much is that apart from the blaring of the television I was placed in front of to tell my parents what was going on, I really did not have music in my life until my father got me a radio when I was 12. I plugged it in and was utterly clueless about how to find stations so I turned the dial -- this was a radio from the dark ages – and the first station was WGMS, Washington’s Good Music Station. It was Beethoven. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I had never heard anything so glorious, and my small yellow Stromberg Carlson radio stayed tuned to that station for years.
But even deafness does not keep us from seeing the world all around. The writer of this morning’s reading from Proverbs points out that wisdom must build the house. The writer uses the metaphor of calling the simple to turn and come into a house of wisdom. And how do we enter a house of wisdom?
We are to lay aside immaturity and walk in the way of insight. Nice words, but what does that really mean? For us? In today’s world? Building a house of wisdom takes work, hard work. It means sifting through the flood of stuff – and it is stuff – we have primarily from the internet because that’s where most of us get our connection with the world.
The host of misinformation, disinformation, and just plain junk is utterly overwhelming. And getting sucked into worlds of conspiracy theories and cults can have tragic consequences. Just look at one story from California. The father of two young children, 2 years old and 10 months, said he had been “enlightened” by QAnon and the illuminati that his wife had serpent DNA so shooting his children with a spearfishing gun was the only way to save the world from monsters.
We shudder and think we can brush off such a story as a man who obviously is not right in the head. But he’s not the only one who has fallen victim to such thinking. How do we deal with this?
In a few weeks we will be commemorating the tragedy of 9-11. And there are crazy conspiracy theories about that event as well. Take your pick; there’s everything from Jews being warned to leave the Towers to oil interests and the Saudi government imploding the building, to it being an “inside job.”
Building a house of wisdom takes work and patience, but it’s something we need to do. Simply brushing off outlandish explanations is not enough. We need to develop the tools to hew the wood for the house. That means working with people beyond their inability to accept the complicated and uncertain world we inhabit.
The appeal of conspiracy theories as well as fundamentalism is that those approaches to life create a contained universe where there is no uncertainty. It’s a little like the witchcraft craze that seized Europe as explanations for plague. Not understanding the origin of the plague, women were blamed as witches.
Thankfully, we’ve moved beyond some of that thinking. But think of the deaf man who for the first time heard sound. He had to be shown that a bird song came from a bird and that the sound of leaves rustling in the wind was a result of the wind.
Learning to observe the world is not always a simple thing. For thousands of years people assumed the sun moved, not the earth. Just as it took the work and courage of Copernicus, Tyco Brahe, and Galileo to change he paradigm of thought, so it will take work to change the paradigms that abound among us today.
Wisdom will build the house if we just help her. We need the political will to do that. That applies to conspiracy theories and the climate.
Let us come to Godin prayer: Eternal guardian of our minds, help us to use our minds as well as our hearts for living in this world. In the name of him who calls us to think, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.