Sunday, April 20, 2008
Orinda Community Church (UCC)
A sermon by the Rev. Frank Baldwin

THE FLAW IN SHANGRI-LA     I Corinthians 13
I.          On a clear windy day, the commercial airline route between Portland, Oregon and San Francisco is one of the most spectacular “short hops” in the world.  During a brief hour and a half in the sky, the traveler is treated to a passing panorama of forested mountains, sparkling lakes, sinuous rivers, fertile valleys, and the soft green hills of California’s Mediterranean spring.  On certain flight paths, your big jet will swing to the west over Sonoma and Marin counties and gradually descend along the coast past Point Reyes and the Golden Gate before circling back to land at one of the Bay Area airports.
This is exquisitely lovely country, but as the pilot begins that final descent north of San Francisco, the sharp-eyed passenger may notice something peculiarly foreboding among the secluded beaches and shadowy canyons of West Marin.  It is the startlingly-straight, deep, ominous rift of the San Andreas Fault, the great-grandmother of California earthquakes, arising here from the ocean floor and cleaving these tender hills like a surgeon’s incision for 600 shuddering miles southward toward Mexico.
We are Californians.  A generation ago people began to call us, admiringly, “the world’s most advanced industrial state.”  We had aerospace, Silicon Valley, agribusiness, petro-chemicals, Hollywood, celebrated multi-universities, academic and political “think tanks,” a booming musical and artistic scene, freeways heading in every direction, Yosemite and Lake Tahoe, big banking, big industry, international trade, commercial hustle, phenomenal natural resources, unparalleled racial, ethnic and spiritual diversity, endless suburbs, limitless imagination, an expansive culture and a thriving counter-culture, all set in this gorgeous environment blessed with the most appealing climate in North America (or almost anywhere else).
Through these last forty years our state has achieved an economic growth rate higher than that of Japan, a foreign trade that accounts for nearly one-fifth of all U.S. overseas commerce, and a population (approaching 40 million) larger than that of all but about 30 countries in the United Nations.  12% of all United States citizens live here; we grow 1/3rd of the nation’s food, and single-handedly account for 13% of the U.S. national product.  California has a gross national product greater than all but five countries in the world, and if we were an independent nation (which indeed, many of us already assume) our per capita income would be surpassed only by the richest of the Arab oil states.  As more than one admiring observer has purred:  “California is the future, and it works.” 
But since 1975 or thereabouts, it has also become increasingly obvious that if California is supposed to be Shangri-La, then somewhere back there we missed our freeway exit.  Beneath all the glamour and glitz, a number of rather serious cracks have shown up.  The high-octane economy sputters along in the rarified atmosphere of boom and bust, periodically leaving millions out of work in high-tech and construction alone.  Prestigious universities have had to scrounge for students and professors find that they can’t afford to live here.  The state budget is in chronic imbalance, and funding for elementary and secondary schools has sunk to someplace like 49th out 50 nationwide.  Agribusiness has stumbled into one environmental and economic disaster after another.  The celebrated counter-culture has hardened into drug-crazed gang violence and criminality.  Our rivers and the bays are loaded with pollutants and the air is not infrequently unfit to breathe.  The mellow hills and fertile valleys are disappearing beneath soul-less subdivisions and “big box” shopping centers; while our towns and cities – so much of which were arguably pretty tacky to begin with – are experiencing the early onset of debilitating physical and spiritual decay.  Health care standards have slipped for the elderly and the new-born, while HIV-AIDS haunts the young.  California supports more people in prison and on welfare than almost any other government in the world; and smoldering concentrations of the old, the young, the immigrants, the refugees, the unemployed, the under-educated, the homeless, and the racial and other minorities remain outside the economic mainstream.
Already 25 years ago, one third of the state’s permanent residents, along with one half of the most recent arrivals, admitted that they would leave California if they had the chance.  Out-of-work skilled laborers, rat-racing Silicon Valley engineers, bankrupt Central Valley ranchers, burned-out teachers, and dazed “Golden Age” retirees all began to talk dreamily about moving to some little place in Oregon or Mexico and starting over in a less stressful, more satisfying and sustainable atmosphere.  Already in the early ‘70s, the British journalist Michael Davie, an astute observer of what was happening in California wrote in “The Vanishing Dream:”

In the very part of the globe where there is the greatest concentration of knowledge and the most power over nature… many people [have] begun to doubt whether knowledge and power really [do] bring worldly happiness.  The economic and technological machine [grinds] on, but fewer and fewer people [think] that its whirrings [are] a prelude to a better future.

How could this be?
II.        Well, it may have to do with the San Andreas Fault, that massive, grinding, restless, unstable interface of planetary surface plates and its vast network of adjoining earthquake faults, rifts, sinks and synclines undermining our state.  None of us in California can dare forget that this magnificent “Eden on Earth” of ours straddles some hidden but highly dangerous flaws not far under the skin.  Beneath these glittering cities, these greening hills, these granite mountains, these productive valleys, these delightful lakes and bays, these stimulating universities, these ever-expanding shopping centers and subdivisions, this cosmopolitan culture, this hard-driving power-wealth-and knowledge machine, the ground is shifty and treacherous.  Indeed, this past week, on the 102nd anniversary of the terrible San Francisco earthquake and fire, geologists predicted with near 100% certainty a similarly devastating quake on the San Andreas or Hayward faults within the next 30 years.
But I think there is a spiritual fault line as dangerous and unstable as the geological faults that underlie California.  Lovelessness is the great San Andreas Fault of the spirit with a capacity to shake apart our sense of security, overturn the precarious balance of our lives, and devastate both our happiness and our confidence in the future.  An absence of compassion is the ever-tightening San Andreas Fault threatening the foundations of our commonwealth, our communities, our culture and those vital social relationships of trust and reliability that make for enduring happiness, growth and prosperity.  Self-centeredness and a care-less disregard for others is the fatal moral flaw in our California culture, seeming to justify that all-too-familiar insatiable craving for more than you need, that unambiguous willingness to do anything it takes to get what you want, and that characteristic sense of entitlement to withdraw from the common resources of life whatever you can get away with, leaving nothing in return for others.
This fundamental lack of love and respect for one another is an unacknowledged but serious problem for us here in the Golden State, well hidden underfoot, but revealing itself in everything from corporate thievery in Santa Clara to senseless vandalism in Yosemite Park to foot-dragging in cleaning-up toxic waste dumps and septic waterways, to the chronic ineffectiveness of political leaders in Sacramento, to a spreading insensitivity to the plight of the hungry, the homeless, the mentally ill, the immigrant, the “other-than-us,” to the mind-numbing incidences of crime and mayhem in Oakland and Richmond, to the mile-deep blanket of industrial and agricultural pollutants hanging over the Central Valley all summer, to the shock and despair of thousands of homeowners who are currently discovering that their mortgage indebtedness exceeds the value of their house, to the unacceptable and unsustainable levels of stress and domestic violence in a good town like Orinda. 
Lovelessness, a lack of compassion, and a self-centered disregard for others are not unique to California, of course, but they go a long way toward explaining how in a place as beautiful, rich, powerful, and smart as this, our community and cultural life, our educational and ecological systems, our economic and political infrastructures, and even our basic inter-racial, inter-faith and interpersonal relationships seem to be so continuously in upheaval.  Without ever having heard of California per se, the Bible also struggles to describe and comprehend our San Andreas Fault of the spirit.  From the tragic rift of the brothers Cain and Abel in the Book of Genesis to the desperate battle of the Roman Empire with the Kingdom of God in the Book of Revelation, scripture gazes deep into the human heart and perceives the flaws:  that fateful realities of arrogance and self-righteousness, the painful failures to give and receive love, the resort to bigotry and violence in place of understanding and compassion, the inability or unwillingness to turn to the great healing and redeeming gifts of forgiveness, generosity, solidarity, and peace.
What can be done?
III.       COMPASSION
The remedy of our faith is astonishingly straightforward:  if lovelessness is the problem, then go find love; if an absence of compassion is tearing you apart, then learn how to be compassionate; if being full of yourself and disrespecting others is undermining your relationships and alienating you from community, then get beyond it by offering a little self-less service and joining with others who are working together for the common good.  And whenever we want to be reminded of what it is we seek (or what it is we may be missing), the Apostle Paul’s magnificent words in I Corinthians 13 represent a highpoint of biblical wisdom on the subject of love:
Love is patient love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.  It does not insist on its way; it is not irritable or resentful.  It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends…

This past week the experts, while delivering their dire warnings about future California earthquakes, also left us with a bit of excellent advice:  There’s nothing we can do to stoop earthquakes in California, they said, but once we accept the fact that earthquakes are coming, there’s plenty we can do to be ready.  Accept the facts, and prepare:  that sounds to me like a sensible and practical way of living with the geological San Andreas Fault beneath our feet in California, but as well the spiritual San Andreas Fault that rends the soul of California.
Until we recognize the dangerous realities of lovelessness, disrespect and self-centeredness, we will remain both naïve and highly vulnerable.  But once we do recognize how tragically such rifts of the heart of our community divide us from ourselves, jeopardize the future, and separate us from all the possibilities that emanate from love, compassion, forgiveness, generosity, inclusion, self-control, grace and hope, then we can begin mobilize the powerful resources of our faith to help each other, our communities and our commonwealth to be prepared.  We’ll be able to strengthen ourselves to deal with the flaw in Shangri-La:  seeking simpler, happier, more satisfying life-styles, regaining some of the lost spiritual balance between our true needs and the life-sustaining capacities of this very special corner of God’s creation known as California.
The San Andreas Fault:  we know it’s down there, in the ground and in our souls; and we will feel it rumbling around and shaking things up from time to time.  But it doesn’t have to destroy us.  So, set aside that emergency food and water and get your neighbors together to draw up an earthquake escape plan.  And for your soul:  store up treasure in heaven; say yes to love, and all that your heart can truly desire, God will provide.