Going Green
Rogation Sunday 29 May 2011
A week ago Saturday, during our Rummage Sale, some of us were aware of thousands of very conservative, fundamentalist Christians in the world, who had listened to a man they thought of as a prophet and were awaiting the Rapture and the beginning of the end of the world. Of course, the day and the hour passed. I think I saw that the so-called prophet has announced another date in the fall. Over the centuries there have been many of these false prophets who have deceived many. What keeps this kind of silliness from being simply an object of wonderment and incredulity, however, is the fact that something similar has infected a large swath of American Christianity. There are many who believe in the rapture and an end to the world that could happen any day now. Aside from the fact that the Bible does not teach such a thing, and that no one in the history of the Church believed such a thing until the 1830’s, there is some reason to think that beliefs such as this are dangerous for Christians to hold. The effect of believing that the world will soon end is to abandon caring for it. If it is going to be destroyed, why worry about it? These tend to be the same people who don’t believe in evolution and the extreme age of our universe. They tend to read Genesis literally (or at least parts of it) and draw the most bizarre conclusions.
For example, “John Shimkus is a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. He has argued that climate change is a myth because God told Noah he would never again destroy Earth by flood (Gen 8:21-22). He is seen on a video as saying, "The earth will end only when God declares it's time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood. . . . I do believe God's word is infallible, unchanging, perfect." (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/global-warming-and-religi_b_864014.html). Of all the bizarre things to take from the story of Noah in that legendary pre-history part of Genesis, this is one of the most bizarre.
This gets us into the heart of what I want to talk about with you today. We depart from the lectionary in order to keep this Sunday as Rogation Sunday—the old English custom of offering our prayers and attention to matters of the earth at the time of the spring planting. One of the most controversial issues having to do with concern for the earth these days, is the warming of the earth as a result of human activity. 95 to 98 percent of climate scientists are in agreement as to the general shape of the problem and its scope—if not entirely in agreement on the effects, because computer models differ. But over the last 8 to 10 years, the numbers of Americans who believe the scientists has dropped. As of 2010, less than half of Americans believed in anthropogenic global warming—that is, warming caused by humans. And the numbers go down in relation to the nature of one’s religion—the most conservative evangelicals coming in at about 34% (http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1194/global-warming-belief-by-religion). There seems to be a correlation between those who deny the evidence of global warming and those who deny the evidence in regard to human evolution. I haven’t seen the statistics for Episcopalians as a group—we are probably too small to show up on a survey—but we did come in for some severe criticism as a group met around the theme of “climate justice” on December 7 – 10, 2010 in San Pedro de Macorís, Dominican Republic, at the Bishop Kellogg Retreat Center, intentionally overlapping with the United Nations’ climate change meeting in Mexico. As one rather bitter critic of the Episcopal Church put it: “These particular Episcopal global warming fear-mongers came from the north and the south and the east and the west, as though in fulfillment of the biblical end times. Or more specifically, they came from South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and the U.S., including the bishops of California, who no doubt would be piously loath to miss any global warming guilt-fest.”
It is probably not wise for me to get entangled in this issue, but wise or not I will be doing so today. To me, as with Brian McLaren, it seems like one part of one of the great issues of our times that Christians must face out of a sense of being faithful to Jesus. McLaren calls it the prosperity crisis or the crisis of the planet, since the way we are pursuing prosperity is unsustainable ecologically. As someone pointed out, about 20 years ago we hit ecological overshoot—and currently consume every year in renewable resources what it takes the earth 18 months to refresh. If everyone in the world lived at the level of Americans, it would take 4.5 earths to provide for them. So this is a matter of something we have talked about for a long time here: stewardship. I remind you that Christian Life Model describes the Christian Life as a balance among the elements of worship, doctrine, and action. The action part of the triad is composed of Evangelization, Service, and Stewardship. There is probably some overlap between service and stewardship, just as there is between evangelism and service, but stewardship is primarily the area out of which a sense of our environmental responsibility issues.
What is stewardship? We could do worse than use a passage out of Eucharistic Prayer D on page 373 of the Prayer Book: “You formed us in your own image, giving the whole world into our care, so that, in obedience to you, our Creator, we might rule and serve all your creatures.”
Stewardship is taking care of something on behalf of someone else to whom it belongs. Nothing that we are or have actually belongs to us. Sure, we have title to it for the time being. We are entrusted with many things and have the freedom to do with them what we want—up to certain limits. But Christians believe that everything is God’s—including ourselves and our world. He made us and made the whole universe and placed us all within it to develop freely and to care for the world and each other. I don’t think that we can hold to a literal garden of Eden in our thinking, but we can use the image of Eden and Adam and Eve as a symbol of what God meant for this world to be—according to the Scriptures. As Genesis tells us through the poetry of the creation accounts of the first few chapters, God took great care in the development of the place into which he eventually placed his human creatures. In reality this has happened on a scale incredibly more vast than we can imagine. Scientists tell us the universe is around 13.5 billion years old. The age of the earth is somewhere around 4.5 billion years. What this says to me is that God has taken immense and patient care to prepare this earth for us. All of the aeons of creatures and extinctions and ice ages and all—until finally there was enough biological complexity in a primate brain to support human consciousness. Our environment was extremely fine-tuned for the appearance of human life. A bit here or a bit there and we would not be here. But there we were—with a long history ahead of us—and here we are.
And what was to be our relation to this earth that God had so assiduously prepared for us? The story of Eden tells us that God made humans to rule over and care for the place as his intelligent and obedient co-workers. It was as if the world was huge garden and we were the gardeners—the contours of the place were what they were, but there was incredible space for our own creativity. Things have changed a lot since then, of course. We don’t live in Eden any more if ever we really did. But our calling to be stewards of God’s creation still obtains. We don’t belong to ourselves, we belong to God. The world is not ours, it is God’s. Our responsibility is to care for the earth and for the needs of all its creatures in a way that brings glory to God and supplies all that the world’s creatures need to live.
We have done many wonderful things in our history, but we have not done the main thing God wanted from us. We have competed with each other for a larger share of things than we needed and now we have the situation in which a billion of our human family goes to bed without sufficient food every day while our biggest worry is not eating too much so as to be overweight. And we have precipitated the world into an environmental crisis by our dependence on fossil fuels and all the things we have done with them. We didn’t know this was going to happen, when the industrial revolution began, but now we do. This crisis threatens to bring wide-scale suffering to our planet in the not-too-distant future—especially for the poor of the world. So we should, being good stewards, be doing everything we can to change this; instead many of us are in denial.
Many of us are also in a state of exasperation, probably. We have heard of so many crises, so many injustices, so many disasters, that all we can think of doing in response is to make ourselves feel better by going shopping. No, seriously! It is actually too much to deal with, often enough. One feels hopeless as an individual to try to address such massive problems. But that is why we do not face these problems as individuals—we are the Church, the Body of Christ in this place. As such we know, especially in this Eastertide, that Christ’s resurrection from the dead has opened a new phase of human history—the old order of sin and death has been vanquished. God has fulfilled his age-old intention to raise the level of the existence of this universe to the status of full interactivity with the life of heaven. This has already happened—but only in part: Christ the first fruits and the rest of us when he returns. So the Kingdom is coming. But it is also here, as surely as the Spirit of the Resurrected Lord is here, and we are called now to live into this future God is preparing for us by the power of that Spirit. Indeed, the way the Kingdom comes might well have a lot to do with how his people respond to the challenge of living as members of it.
For example, if I decide I am going to live as a good steward of the earth in my personal life, it is not because I think I am going to save the planet, but because I believe that in the world to come, such stewardship will be the normal way to live. For we do not believe that the earth is going to be discarded, thrown away by God, and that his faithful ones are going to be raptured away. We believe, in symbolic language, that the New Jerusalem will come down from heaven to be joined to the earth. God’s Kingdom is going to be here: which means that every bit of environmental damage we cause to this place will eventually have to be undone. It may we be that the tribulation that the fundamentalists imagine will be brought about by our own ways of living—and no one will escape by a rapture. But we live now as good stewards in hope—not despair. God’s ways will eventually triumph and we hope more in God than in our poor efforts. But our poor efforts might well be a witness to others of what God wants, if we engage them faithfully. It is certainly a poor witness if those who do not even believe in the Kingdom are better stewards of the earth than we are.
That is my theology of environmental stewardship in a nutshell. I invite your comments and response. But I also want to give you, as I usually do on this day, some practical ways to live as good stewards. Remember, I am not saying you are going to change the world thereby or save it either. We are looking for a consistent witness. Still, just imagine what Christians in this world could do if they were faithful to the example of Jesus in regard to social justice and in tune with the creator God in regard to care for the earth: it would certainly be a massive public testimony to the heart of God for his creatures and his creation. As our Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams put it in a recent book: “All our worth and solidity comes from the delight that God takes in what he has made. The value of any thing or person is simply that by existing it expresses the joy of God. And we know that this or that passing state of affairs has value in the degree to which it spurs us on our way to that life which God intends, that full share in divine joy and liberty which is the goal of creation itself.”
The page I have included in your bulletin is compiled from several different sources: you can find such things all over. But these seemed fairly compelling and most of them appeared on more than one list. It would be a really great thing, I think, if a group of people here with a passion for the environment and ecological stewardship could gather and keep us all informed and updated about such things and help us all to be in conversation with each other about them. If you are interested, please let me know.