Where to draw the line?

 

Psalm 104: 1-9, 24, 35
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
October 20, 2024

Photo of a shoreline with a zigzag edge of seaweed and a tidal pool between the ocean water and the sandy beach. In the far distance are houses interspersed among the trees. The sky is overcast with baby blue and light lavender clouds and a pale pink sky below near the horizon.

These beginning verses of Psalm 104 sound like praise poem to the waters of the earth, the waters of creation. All life that we know of begins in the cradle of water, whether it be amniotic water or river water, standing water or ocean water. About two-thirds of the human body is water. 71% of the earth’s surface is water. This psalm reminds us that there is a boundary between land and water, but author Rachel Carson teaches us that that boundary is flexible in the tidal zone, which is teeming with life, where the land meets the sea.



From her book The Edge of the Sea: “The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. All through the long history of Earth it has been an area of unrest where waves have broken heavily against the land, where the tides have pressed forward over the continent, receded, and then returned. For no two successive days is the shoreline precisely the same. Not only do the tides advance and retreat in their eternal rhythms, but the level of the sea itself is never at rest. It rises or falls as the glaciers melt or grow, as the floor of the deep ocean basins shifts under its increasing load of sediments, or as the earth’s crust along the continental margins warps up or down in adjustment to strain and tension. Today a little more land may belong to the sea, tomorrow a little less. Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary.”



Which should say to us, don’t mess with it.



The boundary between the land and the sea is less like a line and more like a Venn diagram in which circles overlap, like this one.

Any diagram of the land and sea also includes freshwater, the atmosphere, and of course, human beings. I think it’s interesting that this diagram puts society in the center of land, sea, and freshwater, with the atmosphere in the background as if it doesn’t impact or isn’t as impacted by the others. While society is affected by and impacts all four, its center position reveals human hubris rather than a sense of humility. Depending on our actions we are at the mercy of the land, the sea, freshwater, and the atmosphere, as they are also at the mercy of our actions.



On Friday in New Delhi, India, toxic foam a foot tall floated on the Yamuna River, containing high levels of ammonia and phosphates. Combined with fog and lower temperatures that with air pollution help create smog, the city currently has an overall air quality index of 273 but in some areas it is as high as 334. (We are enjoying an AQI of 57 this morning in Newark.) The government has banned the sale and storage of fireworks ahead of the Diwali festival in two weeks. Every year air pollution is exacerbated in the winter when farmers in surrounding states burn their fields after harvesting.



On the same day, the streets of Catania on the island of Sicily were flooded by heavy rains as well as water flowing from Mount Etna, turning roadways into rivers, much like what we have seen recently in the southeastern states of our own country.



Boundaries are crossed only with consent, but the earth and its climate cannot give it, and so the earth responds in the same way by crossing those same boundaries without our consent. More often than not, it is impoverished communities that experience the worst when this happens. In the enfleshed.com materials I read these words: “We are part of nature. We cannot avoid suffering when nature suffers. We cannot presume that God prioritizes the human experience over the rat experience…”. Instead, we’ve created a rat race for human beings rather than an economy of interdependence and interconnection, opportunities for praise and wonder in living in this world and with each other.



Humanity draws the line, we set limits, but then we continually move the goalpost and turn living into a competition. Author and professor Jason Hickel asks, “[If] our economic system actively destroys the biosphere *and* fails to meet most people's basic needs, then what is actually the point?” Author and systems thinker Dr. Elizabeth Sawin writes, “My secret theory for why growth as the goal of economies has been such a hard concept to shift is because, as soon as you admit that the material and energy throughput can't continue to grow, then the necessity of sharing becomes clear.” And the more we human beings acquire, the more reluctant we are to share.



One of my very favorite illustrations of where to draw the line comes from cartoonist David Hayward:

While everyone else is drawing lines between each other, Jesus is erasing them. I’m not talking about healthy boundaries but about what divides us rather than unites us. But I think we need to go one step further and draw a line that looks like this:

Photo of the Earth from space with a red line drawn around it.

Right now we have people who want to draw one circle around “Christian” and “White supremacy” and “nationalism”. Daily we witness the uber rich drawing one circle hard and fast around themselves. Multiple nations invading others, claiming sovereignty and a right to resources and land, laying waste to cities, culture, thousands of people’s lives. And through it all, there is the spherical earth that will still be here no matter what we do to each other because she always bats last.



Whenever we try to dominate others and this planet, we make ourselves less human, less connected to each other and to the earth. I used to have a bumper sticker that read “One people. One planet. One future.” We are Americans but until we are free of the hate that kills us, we are also citizens of this planet and we need to fight for everyone’s liberation. That’s the line we need to draw. Because everything, everything is on the line.

Benediction – Alina Engibaryan, “We Are”

Composed of stars
(We are)
Of God’s creation
(We are)
From dust to dust
(We are)
In incarnation
(We are)
A single blood
(We are)
In everyone