Work That Matters
A chapel address by Ed Zahniser, March 13, 2000
On behalf of the Zahniser Institute for Environmental Studies
At Greenville College, Greenville, Illinois

Good morning Greenville College! What a hopeful community of scholars you are. As a working stiff, I envy your potential for unabashed learning. Do you have test-free, pass-fail courses? Consider this chapel a sabbath rest from your academic labors in Professor Pharaoh’s brickyard! Move from slavery to freedom and enjoy a sabbath here. Yes, it’s an honor to be here. I know who you are. I did chapel here three years—but not up here! My last year was up in the balcony.

The order of service is simple. You will catch right on. First we do the altar call. First, not last. Then I read two poems. Then I talk about the preservation of wilderness and the restoration of wildness. That was the passion of my father, Howard Zahniser, “Zahnie” as he was known here at Greenville College in his student days in the 1920s. Zahnie did chapel here five big years. Can you believe that? I’ll explain later, because it’s an important part of your story today.

I will read the poems in honor of five of my professors here in the 1960s: the late Elva MacAllaster and the late Harriette Whiteman, and David O. Dickerson, James W. T. Moody, and Royal Mulholland. I will read the two poems in their honor, but fear not, the poems are for you. They are about rationalistic, consumeristic materialism.

What I say about the preservation of wilderness and the restoration of wildness is the opposite of the poems. Preserving wilderness and restoring wildness—call them together our stewardship of creation— these activities are truly conservative activities. My father died in 1964 and was known professionally as a conservationist. He died in May 1964, and the environmental movement was not invented until 1970, around the first Earth Day—at least that was the first Earth Day for Euro-Americans here on Turtle Island, as North America was known for thousands of years before Columbus bumped into some islands off our mainland.

So that’s the order of service. Now for the altar call. The altar call may sound like a Zen koan or a riddle, but it is not. It is quite straightforward, and it is about you. Yes, you can avoid doing five years of chapel here—if you enact the altar call. Over a lifetime it can save you a million pre-tax, year-2000 dollars in K-Marts, WalMarts, Costco’s, Sam’s Clubs, and Internet e-shopping at kingdom-of-stuff dot com. The altar call is simple. You can take it sitting down. It isn’t even an appeal. It’s simply a fact the way baking powder is a substance. Acted upon it starts a process. Listen. The altar call is this: In preparing the human body for burial, the ancient Egyptians left the heart in the body, but they discarded the brain as not needed for the after life. Listen again. The altar call is this: In preparing the human body for burial, the ancient Egyptians left the heart in the body, but they discarded the brain as not needed for the after life.

You may remain seated for the reading of the poems. [Zahniser here read “Blue-Light Special Blues,” and “Kingdom Going Outta Business, Must Sell.”]

Howard Zahniser arrived on campus here at Greenville College in the early 1920s. He was on crutches. He was a teenager, although teenage-ism wasn’t invented yet then. He was on crutches from a leg operation for a bone disease still considered fifty-percent fatal then. He came to Greenville College not knowing whether he would be alive in four more years. Those were days of rigid curricula, but because he might not live four years, the college let Zahnie take those courses that most interested him. Four years later he was still alive, but he lacked a lot of required courses. He spent a fifth year as an upper-class freshman doing requirements. That’s how he did five years of chapel. By that time his father, my grandfather, pastored this very congregation. My father spent a fifth year as an upper-class freshman taking required courses. He always joked that he had crammed four years of college into five. He loved humor. Accepting the honorary doctor of letters degree from Greenville College here in 1957, he told the convocation he was so far behind in his correspondence that the degree should be called a doctor of post cards . . . . today that would be a doctor of e-mail messages.

Zahnie had a fifty-percent fatal disease, a fifty-fifty chance to live to be graduated. So Zahnie was just like you, exactly like you this morning, a GC student with no assurance of being alive in four more years—except, except, Zahnie was probably more aware of this. He arrived here on crutches but also used a wheelchair to play basketball.

Now, as St. Paul—the Apostle Formerly Known As Saul—as St. Paul says in Ephesians, “Sleeper, awake!” What does that mean? Or as the anthropologist Carlos Casteneda has Don Juan say, always carry your Death right above your left shoulder. What does that mean? Well, do we think we are Methuselah? Do we think we are Enoch? Do we think we are Elijah, who the Bible suggests did not die?

My brother Matt Zahniser taught here several years. Matt used to say “Life is a terminal illness. Few get out alive.” What does that mean? The Apostle Paul said, “Use your time wisely, as though you had to buy it.” What does that mean? It means, if you hear the bone specialist’s prognosis; it means, if you hear the seer’s advice; it means, if you hear the Old Testament story; it means, if you hear my brother Matt, and if you hear St. Paul, it means you want work that matters. If you hear, you want work that matters, work that matters.

So I want to suggest to you this morning, on behalf of the Zahniser Institute for Environmental Studies here in your midst on campus, I want to suggest to you that if you want work that matters, work at making creation matter. If you want work that matters, work at making creation matter. Working at making creation matter is a truly radical conservatism. Working at making creation matter is rooted in a conservative ethic. That’s the root meaning of radical, as in radish, the plant we describe for its root, or radicle.

That’s what I meant—that Zahnie, who died in 1964, was known as a conservationist. Today, doing the same work, he would be known by many environmentalists as a preservationist. Why? Because Zahnie advocated preserving wilderness as wilderness, not setting it aside until we found a use for it. And the legislation he largely authored and lobbied hard for—which became the 1964 Wilderness Act—created on our federal public lands, which belong equally to each American citizen here today . . . the Wilderness Act created the National Wilderness Preservation System that today preserves 104 million acres of federal public lands as wilderness. It preserves that wilderness in perpetuity. Congress intends that the wilderness be preserved forever as wilderness.

But here in this house of worship where the life of Jesus is professed, and where we recognize both New and Old testaments as normative for our life of faith, we can suggest another word for the environment. That word is creation.

I understand that your chapel series this semester has the theme of suffering and evil, but that you also are continuing a Judaism-and-Christianity series. So you are probably aware that in Judaism, even in the Judaism in which Jesus and St. Paul were bar-mitzvahed, there was no dualistic paradigm of the separation between humans and nature, between humans and the more-than-human world. In keeping with your Judaism-and-Christianity theme, it is interesting that the writings of St. Paul are being reinterpreted now as coming from the Judaism of his day. The idea that Paul was shaping the message and meaning of Jesus the Christ from Hellenistic frameworks is being questioned. Theologian N.T. Wright lays this out in his book What St. Paul Really Said. I recommend the book. It is accessible theology and fascinating.

This new look at Paul’s stance re-asserts that Christ is King of the cosmos and us. Christ is King of the cosmos and the creation is to be set free. And God will complete the work he had begun both in the cosmos and in the individual believer. You can read about this in Romans 8, in First Corinthians 15, and in Philippians One.

As N.T. Wright says, “But Paul was no dualist . . . . at the heart of his polemical engagement with paganism was a radical and deep-rooted affirmation of the goodness of the created world . . .”

Wright shows how in Romans 8, “. . . Paul affirms the goodness of the created world, and locates himself and his hearers with the resurrection of Jesus behind them and the liberation of all creation ahead of them.”

That should be good news for the environment, good news for creation. It’s also good news for you if you want work that matters. At the heart of Paul’s argument, N.T. Wright says, “was a radical and deep-rooted affirmation.” Radical and deep-rooted: that’s why I offer to you this morning—on behalf of the Zahniser Institute for Environmental Studies—that working for creation is a true conservatism, and that working for creation is work that matters. Why then should you care about wilderness and wildness? Let’s look at the word wilderness to make this more clear. The wilderness theme figures strongly in the Old Testament, particularly the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses, in our Genesis creation story and in the nation-forming story of the Hebrew people’s Exodus. There the word wilderness means something somewhat different than it does today in North America. In the Bible wilderness generally means a desert landscape, waste place, or isolated place.

The Zahniser Institute for Environmental Studies sponsors a colloquium this afternoon at 3:30. Please come and help us explore this ancient wilderness story in Exodus and its thematic role in Mark’s gospel. Please do come. We want this to become a dialog.

When we talk about wilderness as part of creation here in North America, here on Turtle Island, we mean a landscape where the forces of nature have free reign to operate as God created them to operate if free of human technological influence. Henry David Thoreau liked to make up etymologies for his favorite words. Thoreau etymologized the word wilderness as “self-willed-ness.” In Thoreau’s vocabulary wilderness is where nature operates without regard to human will. From a Christian viewpoint in North America, wilderness exemplifies what God intended for creation here on Turtle Island. That’s why I say that working to preserve wilderness is work that matters. In preserving wilderness, we make sure we always have the inspiration and instruction of creation as it was intended by God to be, without our technology. And our technological capability today is beyond the wildest imagining of those who fled the slavery in Pharaoh’s brickyard in ancient Egypt through the Sinai wilderness 3,200 years ago.

Because wilderness at least theoretically preserves creation in the absence of human will and technology, wilderness today is also a landscape of a healthy human humility. My father wrote often about how in wilderness we can most readily experience dependence and interdependence, obligation and responsibility, and feel ourselves as a part of the whole community of life on Earth. Isn’t that a human step toward “setting creation free,” in St. Paul’s words? Again, that’s why I call working for creation work that matters. That’s why I call working to preserve wilderness, and to restore wildness, work that matters.

To me, wildness can be that unfettered sense of the more-than-human creation that persists right where we live. Even in Deuteronymy you find lawful protections for wildness — for the continuing reproductive success of wildlife, for example. Concern for wildness is not a modern invention.

You may have expected an environmentalist this morning who would tell you all the ways that modern life has creation headed to Hell in a hand basket. Well, we do need to repent of our treatment of the more-than-human world — and American Indians and African and Asian and Hispanic Americans and women, and even children — as we have built our world-changing economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, Standard and Poor’s Index, and the NASDAQ are certainly our golden calves for sure.

We have a couple minutes left so let’s experience an old, old biblical sense of repentance. Please stand up now. Keep looking forward at this chapel service. Stand up. Okay. Keep looking forward. Now verbalize to yourself what this chapel service is about. What is this chapel service about as you look to the front here? What is this chapel service about? Okay, hold that thought in your mind.

At its root, repentance means “to turn.” So turn 90 degrees to your right. That’s right, to your military right! Now that you are all facing one direction, ask yourself, “What is this chapel service about now?” “What is this chapel service about now?” If you’re not on the far right pew seats, isn’t this chapel service suddenly about your neighbor? Because you turned, in our mass repentance exercise, hasn’t this chapel service suddenly changed? It’s no longer about some balding, 1960s alumni ranting about creation up front. Because you turned, isn’t this chapel service now about your neighbor?

Okay, please be seated. . . . Don’t worry if you felt that this chapel was suddenly about only the back of your neighbor! Remember Moses on the mountain. It was only when Moses turned to see God that God decided to communicate with Moses. And even then, like you with your chapel neighbor, Moses saw only YHWH’s backside. . . . Thank you for helping with our impromptu repentance! That’s great.

If you hear. . . if you hear, and you want good work, work that matters, see, I have put before you this day, work for creation as work that matters. Because work for creation is about being a neighbor to creation. That’s in the second of Christ’s Two Commandments: First, Love God. . . Second, love your neighbor as you love yourself. Work for creation. Creation remains the source of our physical life just as it was in the Garden of Eden. Food, clothing, shelter, fuel . . . they come to us—even if indirectly now—from creation, the environment. Working for creation is neighboring creation with all your heart.

That’s what I had in mind with our altar call: “In preparing the human body for burial, the ancient Egyptians left the heart in the body, but they discarded the brain as not needed for the after life.” And so, again, I am inviting you to choose to work for creation this morning, as work that matters. I invite you to choose to work for creation as work with a heart, your heart. Go forth, do good, tell the stories. Neighbor all creation with all your heart and all your mind. For this is life, now. You need both. So does creation, if it, too, is to be set free.