The Land Is Listening

A sermon for Indigenous Peoples Weekend

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Transcript

Sermons from 

Mission Hills UCC

San Diego, California

Rev. Dr. David Bahr

david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org

October 12, 2025

“The Land is Listening”

Luke 17: 21 – First Nations Version of the New Testament

The good road you are looking for will not come in a way you can see with your eyes. People will not be able to say, ‘Look, here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ for the good road is already within you and among you.”

Last week I spoke of our recent civil rights pilgrimage to Alabama. But I want to go back. Long before there was an Alabama, the land was alive with nations: Muscogee Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee. They lived along the river valleys of the Southeast, planting corn and beans, trading across wide distances, telling stories that wove land, water, and spirit into one sacred circle. 

The rivers we crossed once carried their canoes. Then came the United States and its hunger for land. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, clearing Native nations so white planters could grow more cotton. The same roads and rivers that carried the displaced also carried enslaved people to market.

Those who survived the brutal journey, what came to be known as the Trail of Tears, were sent west to a place the government called Indian Territory. Similarly, other nations, like the Osage, had lived for centuries between the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers. But through treaties and violence, they too were pushed westward, first from Missouri, then to Kansas. 

When they were also forced out of Kansas, they moved into what became northern Oklahoma and used the proceeds from selling their Kansas lands to purchase a so-called “reservation” from the Cherokee Nation – a unique situation in that the government did not “grant” it to them. They bought it themselves – the only tribe in America to buy a new homeland.  

The land was rocky and considered worthless, but it was theirs. And in the 1870s, they rebuilt their world once more, raised families, and prayed to the Creator of all lands. Among them were the grandparents of a boy named Tink, born in the 1940s.

George “Tink” Tinker was born to an Osage father and a white mother, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants and a lifelong Lutheran. They married in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl era, a time when some states still outlawed marriages between white and Native people. Though their marriage was not illegal in Oklahoma, it carried the same risk and stigma.  

Theirs was an act of quiet defiance, a bridge between worlds that rarely met as equals and where their home held both a Lutheran hymnbook and an Osage medicine bundle. On Sundays Tink joined his mother to sing the songs of her childhood church. During visits to his grandparents, he learned the songs that carried the wind itself.

At school, he learned what it meant to live in between. Teachers calling him “half-breed” when they were angry or “smart for an Indian boy” when they were pleased. Each year he became more fluent in his mother’s world and a little more distant from his father’s. He longed to make peace between those two worlds, so after college, he made an unlikely choice. He decided to go to seminary. Not to become a pastor; he went to understand.

He wanted to know why the church that preached love had done so much harm, why missionaries built schools that punished his language, why the God of his mother’s hymns seemed to ask for the silence of his father’s people. So, he studied Augustine, Luther, Barth, and Calvin, page after page of white men explaining the world, hoping to hear something that sounded as wise as his grandmother’s prayers. But he never did.

So, imagine walking out of the library one night after reading another dry German theologian and looking up at the same sky he had known as a boy. The stars sharp as flint, the horizon wide and breathing, and remembering that his people had been reading those same stars for ten thousand years. They did not need Europe to tell them about God. They already knew the world was alive with Spirit. 

He became a professor at Iliff School of Theology in Denver – a school I once taught at too.  He lectured and spoke with prophetic urgency, reminding especially progressive Christians that good intentions cannot undo systems built on stolen land. Such a harsh indictment was not meant to silence and shame but to shock and shake loose the comfort that keeps us from repentance.

He is part of a field of study known as decolonizing theology. It begins with truth-telling. Christianity must reckon with its complicity in conquest, in boarding schools, in every act of erasure committed in the name of saving souls. Dr. Tinker’s vocation is not to reconcile two worlds, but to call the church to accountability. 

At the beginning of today’s service, we acknowledged that “Mission Hills United Church of Christ sits on the unceded and ancestral homeland of the Kumeyaay people who have lived in this area for 10,000 years.” That “we honor their ancestors and their descendants, and we confess that this land was taken without consent or treaty.”

Let’s be honest. Most land acknowledgments sound beautiful but ask nothing of us. We name the people, then move on as if the work were done – a performance of good intentions with no repair beneath it. They risk becoming ritual theater, soothing the conscience without changing the story. But Dr. Tinker reminds us: the land does not need our acknowledgment. Without repentance, it is only noise.

The land is not property. It is our relative. To say the name of a people is not the same as honoring their sovereignty. And yet, when spoken with humility and courage, a land acknowledgment can still be a beginning. A small act of truth-telling. But real acknowledgment does not end with words. It calls us to restore relationship, to live differently on the ground beneath our feet, to let gratitude become justice.

That’s what Isaiah dreamed of when he described a beautiful new heaven and a new earth. He was not describing escape. He was naming restoration:

No one will ever hear the sound of weeping or crying in it again.
 No more will babies live only a few days,
 or the old fail to live out their days.
 The one who dies at a hundred will be like a young person,
 and the one falling short of a hundred will seem cursed.
 They will build houses and live in them;
 they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.

Dr. Tinker’s work is prophetic. There are others, like Sarah Augustine, a Pueblo theologian, who continue that same prophetic work but lean on different emphases. In her book The Land Is Not Empty, she describes how the logic of colonization is not just a thing of the past but still embedded in the church’s laws, mission practices, and theology today. She challenges Christians to go beyond symbolic acts like apologies or land acknowledgments and instead practice real repentance – actively undoing systems of domination, giving back what was stolen, and rebuilding a sacred relationship with the land and the peoples to whom it belongs.

Across the country, a growing number of faith communities are taking tangible steps toward returning land to Indigenous peoples. Presbyterian, Methodist, and Episcopal bodies have all participated in land return ceremonies: in California, the Presbytery of San Gabriel gave ancestral land back to the Tongva; the United Methodist Church in Idaho transferred historic property to the Nez Perce Tribe; and St. Paul’s Episcopal in Louisiana returned the sacred Lemon Tree Mound to the Atakapa-Ishak Tribe.

Within the United Church of Christ, the South Dakota Conference transferred church properties back to the Dakota Association, a coalition of Native UCC congregations. But in Minnesota, when the Conference explored selling its camp, Pilgrim Point, many advocated for a land return. The board decided against it, a choice that caused deep disappointment and debate. These efforts, and the tensions they reveal, show how difficult repair can be. Each decision carries layers of legal, financial, and relational complexity, yet together they mark a slow and imperfect move from acknowledgment to accountability – from words to the hard work of truth-telling and repair.

This work of healing and restoration is not only about land. It is also about language. Across more than twenty nations, Indigenous elders, theologians, and storytellers are reclaiming the sacred stories in their own voices.

The First Nations Version of the New Testament was born from years of listening, prayer, and community discernment. Its translators did not simply convert words. They listened until the stories spoke again in the rhythms of relationship between Creator, people, and creation.

In this version, every name is a relationship. Jesus is Creator Sets Free. The Holy Spirit is Sacred Breath. Mary Magdalene is Tearful One Who Sees. The cross becomes the tree of sorrow and hope. Instead of “heaven,” they speak of the world above. Instead of “the kingdom of God,” they speak of Creator’s Good Road – the way of beauty, balance, and right relationship.

Today’s passage says: “The good road you are looking for will not come in a way you can see with your eyes. People will not be able to say, ‘Look, here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ for the good road is already within you and among you.”

We have called that the Kingdom of God. But this telling turns the image inside out. It is not about hierarchy or power. It is about harmony, about turning back toward balance, about learning again how to walk the Good Road.

The translators intentionally avoided the Western focus on sin as lawbreaking and punishment. Instead, they drew from Native understandings where wrongdoing is breaking harmony rather than violating a rule, and repentance is the act of restoring that harmony by turning back to the Good Road.

Repentance, then, is less about remorse and more about reorientation. It means “turning around,” or “changing your ways and walking the Good Road with Creator.” As the First Nations Version renders Acts 3:19:  “So turn away from your bad hearts and wrongdoings. Return to walk the Good Road with Creator, so that your wrongdoings will be wiped away.”

This is not a different gospel. It is the same truth spoken in the language of relationship – the gospel that was here long before colonizers ever learned to say the word.

As young Tink learned long ago in a house where a Lutheran hymnbook rested beside an Osage medicine bundle, imagine that the Good Road is wherever two worlds meet and dare to listen instead of one silencing the other. To listen until the songs of faith and the songs of the wind sing together once again.

Listening for the sound of a people who no longer confuse faith with comfort. A people widening the circle until truth is spoken, justice takes root, and every patch of sacred ground is restored to love. Yes, the land herself is listening.