At Blackberry Day yesterday we had four kids and two moms, all out in the sun on a beautiful August day. And the kids got to explore, with all their senses, the experience of being out among the thorny vines and the wildflowers. One girl had me listen to the small thud that a berry made as it dropped into her basket. A boy noticed that some vines still had blossoms. The kids watched bees pollinate the yellow tansy and smelled how stinky those flowers were when cut. The kids also noticed whether more of the berries were high and out of reach or low and accessible. And they learned that the firmer berries were likely to be sour, whereas the softer berries were fully ripe and sweet. They plunged their hands into a full basket and stuffed berries into their mouths. Berry juice was all over their faces. They got caught in thorns and used clippers to cut the branches and free each other. they ran through the high grass, shrieking and laughing.
Hold onto these images. Maybe they bring up your own memories and experiences. We're going to take a dip into Christian history now and will circle back to nature shortly.
In her book Church of the Wild, Victoria Loorz writes that, for the first three centuries of Christianity, the Greek word logos in John 1 was translated into Latin as sermo. "In the beginning was the sermo." Sermo is not like the modern word sermon, where on e person stands at a pulpit and talks and everyone else listens, as we are doing right now. Sermo has more the meaning of conversation. So listen to the reading from John again, with that one word swap:
In the beginning was the Conversation, and the Conversation was with God, and the Conversation was God. It
was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through it, and without it not one thing came into being.
What has come into being in it was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness did not overtake it....And the Conversation became flesh and lived among us, and we have
seen its glory, the glory as of a parent's only child, full of grace and truth.
“Word” suggests a command, something we must follow without question if we are faithful: “Word has come down from on high that we are to do xyz.” “Conversation” suggests an invitation to an unfolding relationship where input, questions, and doubts are welcome. “Conversation” suggests mutuality, a back-and-forth-ness, listening, and not just blind following but seeking to understand. It implies creating together. And it applies not just to humans but to all of creation. We are invited to be in Conversation with the Divine through everything in creation.
Mary Oliver picks up on this meaning in her poem “At the River Clarion,” as we heard earlier. As she sits on a rock in the middle of the river, she listens for hours and finally hears this:
Whenever the water struck a stone it had
something to say,
and the water itself, and even the mosses trailing
under the water.
And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me
what they were saying.
Said the river: I am part of holiness.
And I too, said the stone. And I too, whispered
the moss beneath the water.
[Mary Oliver, “At the River Clarion,” in Evidence (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009), 51-54.]
Everything gets to speak, and everything is a part of holiness. It is all one with God.
Of course, the Greek word logos is older than scripture. Loorz writes,
Logos was first used in a cosmological way by Heraclitus of Ephesus, a Greek philosopher in the fifth century BCE. He used the word logos to articulate a kind of intelligent life force embedded in and interconnecting all thins, ‘a divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning.’. . . Logos is the principle or power that shapes and creates all things, immanent and embedded in all that exists. [Heraclitus] saw things not really as things, but as processes. Logos, he intuited, is the relationship between all things, holding them together. Later Greek philosophers would use the word logos to describe this relationship-between as a process of dialogue.” [Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred, (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021),106-07.
In other words, a conversation. So for the first three centuries of Christianity, when this new religion was the faith of the persecuted and the fringe, the Gospel of John was translated such that people understood they were in conversation with God. They were supposed to ask questions, to find their way faithfully through discernment, listening, and dialogue. It was to be a team effort involving every person, every part of creation, and God.
But in the fourth century, the opening of John started to be translated, “In the beginning was the verbum,” meaning Word.
What changed in the fourth century? Why would it matter how logos was translated? And why does it matter to us today?
At the start of the fourth century, Christian communities scattered throughout the Roman Empire wrestled with questions of theology and came up with their own answers. They didn’t all agree. (Kind of like the UCC!) Because they were followers of a religion that did not include Roman gods, and because many Christians refused to pay tribute to those Roman gods, Christians were persecuted and put to death by the thousands.
Then Constantine, the emperor, converted to Christianity in the year 312. He decreed that Christianity was now sanctioned a favored religion of the Roman Empire. But bishops throughout the empire were arguing about theology. So Constantine had 318 of them gather in the year 325 for what became known as the Council of Nicaea to hash things out. And the result was a first draft of what we know as the Nicene Creed. Another result of the Council of Nicaea was that anyone who didn’t agree with this theology was excommunicated and banished.
“In the beginning was the Word.” And the bishops from the Council of Nicaea will tell you what to believe about that Word. If you disagree, you have to leave the empire and burn in hell because the bishops know what’s right and you don’t. And the bishops are now part of the empire.
“In the beginning was the Word.” If you are ruling an empire, you want people to hear the word and obey. You don’t care about conversation. You don’t need to know what the people think. If they disagree, you kill them or banish them or find other ways to make their lives hell. You give them the word. They follow it, or else.
The Roman Empire was interested in acquiring resources. Trees were not to be appreciated or sat under for meditation but to be turned into lumber to build more empire. Rocks were to be excavated, not sat on in the middle of a river. People were to be conquered and used. Relationship was not important, just domination and exploitation. That is still true today.
Perhaps you can see now why “In the beginning was the Conversation” wouldn’t work anymore. There was no longer room for the ordinary faithful to question, wrestle, and generally be in mutual relationship with God. In fact, all of that could be seen as heresy.
Of course, religion as a way of ruling and controlling people does not have anything to do with the message of Jesus, the Conversation incarnate. Jesus, who kept slipping off into the wilderness to discern his path, to confront temptations, to pray—that is, to be in conversation with God. Jesus’ primary conflict was with those who wanted to use religion not to worship God but to control the people under Roman occupation and oppression.
So how can we, as followers of Jesus, practice this Conversation? Victoria Loorz says we can abandon the patriarchal language of empire and hierarchy. We can adopt ecotheologian Sallie McFague’s suggestion of thinking of Earth as God’s body. (Loorz, 123-24.) Loorz talks about Christ as Conversation:
Christ as Conversation says to me that the oak tree and that deer in the meadow are not God. And I’m not God. But we both carry the Christ, the Logos, the Tao, the spark of divine love within us. And the conversation between us: that is the manifestation of the sacred, moving forward the evolving kin-dom of grace. The wild Christ. (Loorz, 124.)
Like the stone in Mary Oliver’s River Clarion, and the water, and the moss, we are all part of holiness. Not to exploit each other, but to be in sacred conversation. To taste the berries, sour and sweet, to run shrieking and laughing through a meadow on an August afternoon, to lean against a cedar tree and feel its strength and softness—or however we experience creation and ourselves in the midst of it.
Mary Oliver experiences God in and through the River Clarion. Notice how, by the end of the poem, the river is now inside her:
7.
And still, pressed deep into my mind, the river
keeps coming, touching me, passing by on its
long journey, its pale, infallible voice
singing.
Victoria Loorz invites us to ask each other, “Tell me about the land who raised you.” The mud pies you made as a kid, the hikes through the mountains, the favorite tree, sunrise on the farm, the blackberries—the Conversation is happening all through our lives and all around us. Be alive to it. Listen. Participate.
In the beginning was the Conversation. And the Conversation was with God, and the Conversation was God. Whether you live into that Conversation through a prayer or meditation practice, or sitting under your favorite tree—or, like Mary Oliver, sitting on a rock in the river and listening to the stone, the water, and the moss tell you that they are part of holiness—be intentional about seeking out the Divine, asking questions, listening for answers, and letting that experience guide your journey. Amen.