JUNE 9, 2024, What only you can do

Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

     

 

What Only You Can Do

Homily for St. John’s Episcopal Church by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

given June 9, 2024

The Third Sunday after Pentecost: Mark 3:20-35

 

I’m going to begin by saying three words that describe different categories of people, and I’d like to invite you to think about how you feel about each group: Strangers. Friends. Family.

 

If you’re like me, the word family brings up lots of complicated feelings. Family can bring out our worst and our best. Sometimes we are wounded so deeply in family that we have to cut ties completely. But for the most part, we offer family more care and forgiveness than the rest of the world. My parents and I are very different politically and theologically, and it’s doubtful we are going to change each others’ opinions. But we love each other and enjoy spending time with each other, and we also know and applaud important things about each other. At our best sometimes we even learn from each other. In the current cultural climate in our country, it is difficult to do that beyond family—but this ability is more important than ever.

 

I’m discussing family because this issue came up in today’s gospel reading. Jesus’ mother and siblings come wanting to speak with him privately. But he responds by speaking about who he sees as family. He just gestures at everyone around him and says, “You are my family.” He also says that anyone who does the will of God is his family. I suspect most of us skipped right past the gesture to those around him, describing everyone around as his family, and went straight to the conditional definition of family – those who do the will of God. But that’s not where he started. His starting place was to say that every one of them is related to him. I think Jesus saw everyone and everything as family. As connected. As kin. And whether or not we see others and the natural world as family, as kin, deeply impacts how we treat them.

 

Octavia Butler was an African American author who wrote dystopian and science fiction novels, of which her most famous book was called Kindred. The main character is a Black woman named Dana living in the 1970s, who finds herself inexplicably transported 150 years earlier to a slave plantation in Maryland in the year 1819, where she sees a white child drowning. She immediately saves the child, a boy named Rufus. The boy’s father sees her doing CPR on the boy and thinks she is hurting him, so he points his rifle at her—and she finds herself immediately whisked back to the present day. Six additional times she finds herself back at the plantation, where she is in terrible danger because she is Black. Each time she returns she sees Rufus, the boy she had rescued, in older and older ages, into middle adulthood—and each time he is in danger of dying. At first she automatically tries to save him because that’s just what she does when she sees a person in danger. But as Rufus becomes an adult his behavior toward her and other Black people becomes more violent and distorted. She spends months at the plantation, being forced to work as a slave, is beaten and tortured, and is only able to return to her own time when her life is truly threatened.

 

Eventually she realizes that Rufus is going to become her own ancestor by fathering a child through one of the slaves in the plantation. And so if she does not save him when she is called back to the plantation, her own family will not exist. So she is forced to live in this terrible conundrum, recognizing him as her family although he will never see her in that way. There is a glimmer of hope toward the end of the novel, in that she is able to convince him to begin to shift how he sees his Black offspring—from seeing them as profit-producing property to seeing them as his children.

 

The book is a deep look at the complicated, painful and often violent ways in which Black and White American are kin to each other, whether or not we recognize this. But it is the recognition of kinship that I believe is an essential first step in the transformation needed today. We who follow Jesus’ Way of Love, who are seeking to love our neighbors as ourselves, sometimes need a transformation in the way we see those neighbors, especially given the intensely polarized nature of our country right now. And the Wild Church movement is seeking to extend the command to love our neighbors even further, to our more-than-human kin in the natural world.

 

But just how do we make this shift? And is it enough? Will we really treat people and trees better if we genuinely see them as our kin? We know that to follow Jesus means learning to embody love. We love and feel connected with those we know are in our community, those whose destinies are caught up with our own. We know too that the legacy of colonialism, and patriarchy, and racism run so deeply in our nation’s culture that like Rufus, it can be hard to see others as subjects in their own right and not only in terms of how they make me feel, what they do for me. And yet Jesus insists that we are kin. Indigenous people all over the world are insisting urgently that we need to recover this deep sense of kinship and interconnection with all life, human and otherwise, in order to avoid destroying ourselves and this planet.

 

So what helps?

 

In Krista Tippett’s most recent On Being podcast this week, she interviews two women who are experts in an emerging field called “biomimicry.” Biomimicry is based on the premise that the natural world has precise guidance and teaching for humanity in how to live well, how to recover from trauma, how to operate together in a collaborative and generative way. For example, in the natural world plants use light for food, everything is recycled, and “everything works together to relentlessly create the conditions that are conducive to life.”[1] In particular, in this podcast I was struck how they talked about learning to feel and function as if we are an ecosystem instead of a lot of siloed private projects.[2] In an ecosystem, each organism has a particular role in the healing and thriving of the whole community. One of the scientists in this podcast, Azita Walton, said that after a natural trauma like a clearcut or a volcanic eruption or a landslide, each organism drops whatever it’s doing, goes to the site of the wound, and effectively operates as if it were asking itself the question: “What is the best and highest use of what only I can do?” Not just for my personal good, but so that this place and its ecosystem can thrive?

 

Perhaps learning to operate as an ecosystem could teach us truly what it means to be family, to be kin. Perhaps this question—what is the best and highest use of what only I can do?—can give us a refreshing new look at what it means to love. We can learn about our innate giftedness, and then use that giftedness generously, for the good of all. We can honor the roles our systems give us, and operate in the best and highest way we can for the good of the community given that role, knowing that in the welfare of the community we also find our welfare.

 

I believe we come into this world with a soul purpose, uniquely our own, with a being and personality and gifts that are irreplaceable, that have never existed before and never will again. What is your soul’s purpose? How can you be most authentically and uniquely yourself in a way that is healing and generative for the community around you? How could St. John’s do this for our family in Linden Hills and Lake Harriet and the ecosystems of which we are a part? Today we are baptizing three beautiful children—Frederick, Kiara and Joaquin—and like each of you, they are shining beautiful humans who we can help to love and nurture in part by helping them to recognize and cultivate their own soul’s purpose.

 

In such a time as this, when very little in the culture around us teaches us how to love well, and when the religious inheritance we have received is beautiful but also has some baggage in it, I encourage us all to mimic Jesus and John the Baptist and the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and head to the wilderness, to learn what Mother Nature has to teach us about relationships and loving and generativity. I’ll give you a very brief story to illustrate some of what I mean by this. This weekend I spent some time at our family’s cabin, with relatives including my cousin. My cousin, like my parents, has very different political views than I do, and yesterday the topic came up in conversation. I managed to speak what I see as the truth in love, but I internally I had such big feelings that I felt less inclined to spend time with my cousin.

 

However, we were sitting outside on the deck when this conversation occurred. It just so happened that above the sliding glass door was a swallow’s nest with eggs in it. As the group of us were sitting on the deck, fairly close to the nest, we noticed a swallow flying all over the place, fairly close to us, but not going to the nest. It seemed to us that our presence was making her nervous. What is interesting is that it was my cousin and I who both suggested that we all move over to give more space to the swallow and her babies. My cousin and I are mothers, and we really wanted to honor this other mother, the swallow. We had that deeply in common. And remembering that softens my perspective toward my cousin.

 

The Earth can teach us what we need to know to heal this earth. And each of us has a role in it, and gifts to offer. You are beautiful. You have unique gifts. You belong and are needed in this your family. What is the best and highest use of what only you can do? God bless you. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] See Krista Tippett, “On Nature’s Wisdom for Humanity,” in On Being With Krista Tippett, original air date June 6, 2024, accessed at https://onbeing.org/programs/janine-benyus-and-azita-ardakani-walton-on-natures-wisdom-for-humanity/ on June 8, 2024.

[2] See Janine Benyus and Azita Ardakani Walton, ibid.

10am Service