February 10, 2008
Creation Care Sunday
Randy Yale

Extra Super

Let me see.  Last Sunday was Super Bowl Sunday then we had Super Tuesday.  So this past week was a Super week, which makes this week an extra Super week. 

We on your Seeds of Hope committee are excited about Creation Care.   Today we have Creation Care Sunday and next Saturday our Movie That Matters features a family movie—Over the Hedge—that ties in with Creation Care.  In fact, we are asking the members of First Church to dedicate an entire year to issues of Creation Care and eco-justice.

But first, some thoughts about this past week which also began Lent.

On Super Tuesday you probably noticed the next president might be a white woman or an African-American man.  Not too long ago most people would have thought that was impossible.  And during my lifetime many people would have questioned, or outright denied, that women and African-Americans were capable of leading.  But there were some Americans who have been led by women and African-Americans for more than a century.

In 1785 Lemuel Haynes became the first African American ordained in the U.S.  In 1853, Antoinette Brown became the first woman.  The denominations who had ordained Haynes and Brown merged in 1957--and in 1976 that organization became the first integrated religious organization to elect an African American president.  That was Rev. Joseph H. Evans of the United Church of Christ.

We here in Southington can be proud of our own history.  But like the wider UCC, there is room for improvement.  And each of us in our personal lives can improve. 

We face challenges in this first decade of the 21st century that are every bit as daunting as gender and race discrimination, every bit as threatening as the nuclear arms race, and every bit as theologically challenging as abject poverty in a world with great wealth.  There is no better time than the first Sunday of Lent to begin to improve our stewardship of God’s creation and minimize our harmful impact on vulnerable people around the world.

As Jesus said, whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers you do unto me. 

Globalization and scientific advances make it easy to discover what we are “doing” to our brothers and sisters around the world.   And what our choices—lifestyle choices—are doing is destroying the health, the community, and the land of hundreds of millions of God’s children.

Now it is not as simple as saying that any one of us is individually responsible for the suffering others face due to our ecological impact.  And Creation Care is not about guilt.  In fact, your Seeds of Hope group struggled most with how to make this message positive.  But we also want you to understand the urgency—we have run out of land, water, and air to abuse.  If we don’t start caring for Creation, we will not recognize it in 10 years.

The members of Seeds of Hope believe in the name of our group:  our goal is to offer kernels that you in the wider community turn into hopeful action.  There are two reasons for this:  1) We all understand that changing the world is daunting; and none of us will start to make the necessary changes if we become defensive with or angry at the messengers;  2) No one in Seeds of Hope can say he or she is without sin—especially me.   

Those of you who know me know I grew up in North Carolina—in the Bible Belt.  In the 1990s many teenagers and young adults there—and a few not–so-young-adults—wore WWJD bracelets.  Their popularity has waned some.  But the intention behind them is always relevant—especially when asking people to change behavior.

So ask yourself What Would Jesus Do if he read the article by Chris Carroll in the January 2008 National Geographic.  The story tells how discarded televisions, computers, cell phones, and other electronics make their way from the U.S. and Europe to Africa and Asia.  One photo is captioned “Toxic Melt” and states: “In a poor suburb of New Delhi, India, where informal e-waste processing is a common household business, a man pours molten lead smelted from circuit boards.  His family uses the same pots for cooking.”  We create a nationwide uproar when our children’s toys are found to have lead paint yet our toxic trash, discarded because we needed a faster processor or flatter screen, ends up in the food eaten by poor Indian children.

And let us ask each other What Would Jesus Do with the analysis that Laurence C. Smith, professor of geography at UCLA posted on edge.org.  In that analysis, Dr. Smith states, “Over the past three years experts have shifted from 2050, to 2035, to 2013 as plausible dates for an ice-free Arctic Ocean.”  This event will mean catastrophic changes for many species around the world—including humans.

And maybe we should pose the question to our leaders: What Would Jesus Do?  We could direct them to Jared Diamond’s book Collapse—which in my opinion should be required reading for anyone in government and business.  The subtitle of the book could easily be put in question form.  “How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.”

Professor Diamond outlines how past civilizations have collapsed.  “The processes . . . fall into eight categories:  deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems, water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per capita impact of people.”  Every one of these problems has made the news in the past several months.  And while we in this richest and most protected place may not feel the impacts of such processes, each makes life more difficult for the world’s poor.  What are we and those who lead us, whether elected officials or corporate decision makers, doing to the least of Jesus’ brothers?

Now I am not so presumptuous as to tell you what Jesus would do.  But I am willing to take a cue from Reverend Billy.  He was the subject of a semi-satirical documentary this past holiday season.  The title of the movie was What Would Jesus Buy?

In this shopping bag I have several items that any of you can start using and will lessen your impact on our planet and our brothers and sisters who inhabit it.  

The first thing is not actually in the bag.  It is the bag.  Plastic grocery bags may be convenient for us, but they contribute to the deaths of more than 100,000 sea turtles and other marine animals each year.  According to the Worldwatch Institute, Americans throw away 100 billion plastic grocery bags every year.

Some of you may have read the article in last Saturday’s New York Times: “With Irish Tax, Plastic Bags Go the Way of the Snakes.”  While a new tax was used to help people stop using plastic bags, the article states that the key was when “carrying them became socially unacceptable.”  Making actions socially unacceptable that harm our vulnerable brothers and sisters—isn’t that what Jesus did?

A modern Sermon on the Mount might well bless those who reuse. 

These are compact fluorescent light bulbs.  My guess is that many of you already have replaced some or all of your incandescent lights.  We have here at First Church.  The Environmental Defense Fund estimates that if every American home replaced 3 60-watt light bulbs with CFLs it would be equivalent to removing 3.5 million cars from our highways.  Like most of the actions you can take to reduce harm to God’s Creation, using CFLs actually benefit you in the long run by reducing your power bill.

Before I show you what else is in the bag, I want to ask you to consider your role in Creation Care through the lens of this Lenten season.  Reducing your impact is not as painful as you might think.  Take steps in the spirit of revising your priorities rather than feeling you have to make sacrifices.  Many of the actions you/we can take will help our lives while we do the right thing. 

Slow down, buy less, spend more time with your family and friends, walk or bike, and become involved with your church, your community, your world.  You will find that consuming less, throwing away less, having your computer and television turned on less actually add up to more.  More time to talk, laugh, play board games with your children and grandchildren, more quiet time to enjoy birds outside your window, more time to reflect and pray.  Doesn’t it strike you that while he was performing miracles, giving sermons to thousands, and changing history, Jesus found time to be quiet, to surround himself with children, and to break bread with friends.

Speaking of breaking bread, how we eat is a moral choice.  In the January 27, New York Times an article titled “Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler: Livestock’s High Energy Costs” calculated the impact of two calorie-equivalent meals.  One 6-ounce serving of steak required 16 times as much fossil fuel consumption as a meal consisting of 1 cup of broccoli, 4 ounces of cauliflower, 1 cup of eggplant, and 8 ounces of rice.  Maybe for Lent you can replace one serving of meat each week and have a meatless meal.  Again you will lessen your impact on the environment and be doing something to improve your family’s health.

Changing how you use this next item may strike some of you as a sacrifice.  But I think once you hear the facts, you can come to your own prayerful decision.  This is a water bottle.  If you fill it up, you have bottled water.  But not the type most of use without considering our impact on the environment.

Todd Jarvis, a senior researcher at Oregon State University’s Institute for Water and Watersheds, has calculated that we use 72 Billion gallons of water a year to make the empty bottles that are then filled and sold as bottled water.  David de Rothschild who wrote the Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook states that “for every 1 million bottles of water that are manufactured and shipped to consumers, 18.2 tons of carbon dioxide emissions are pumped into the air.”

Jarvis estimates that we in the US consume the equivalent of 50 billion 16 ounce bottles of water every year.  And the recycling rate for the bottles may be as low as 20%.  If you, like me, were raised Catholic and traditionally “give up” something for Lent, then consider giving up bottled water—most of us never used it until 20 years ago. 

Seeds of Hope will be providing tips in each newsletter this year to help us individually and as a community become better stewards of God’s Creation.  And we will be challenging church leaders to commit to improving energy efficiency, increasing our efforts to recycle, reducing what we throw out.  Today we will provide forms for everyone wishing to sign up for the Clean Energy Option—see Sharon Vocke after the service.

First Church should be a visible presence in Southington.  Our fellow citizens should soon think of us as the church with the beautiful steeple and solar panels.  The community that is known for members who volunteer and walk to church. 

Now let me go back to where we began.  Today we would probably agree that it was sinful for some to deny others a place at the table or a leadership role because of their race or gender.  Indeed, there were people at the time who called it sinful. 

What will our children and grandchildren call our choices—or even our inaction—if they inherit a world where droughts and floods, famines and epidemics dominate the news; a world where polar bears exist only in textbooks; where our children go to museums to see trees?

This Lent we should promise to give up being wasteful.  So that 50 years from now—when the world is changed—people will understand that some folks followed Christian truths even when it meant challenging societal norms.

This is Creation Care Sunday and we propose that 2008 be named a year of Creation Care for First Church.  Our goal is to have First Church join the growing Christian Community that understands that eco-justice is the most important human rights challenge of the 21st century.

If we take to heart our call as Christians to care for the earth and each other, then this will be an extra super week and the beginning of an extra super year.