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A Earth Day Sermon preached at St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Oak Park, IL
on Rogation Sunday, April 27, 2008
by Ms. Barbara Foster

Scriptures: Jeremiah 14:1-9, Romans 8:18-25, Mark 4:26-32

I am Barbara Foster, and though I haven't had the chance to meet many of you I have deeply appreciated sharing worship service with you the past year and a half.

This Sunday on the church's Earth Day I want to share with you my sense of urgency about global warming and how this issue seems to belong not outside, but within our churches today. I accepted Paris' invitation to speak this Sunday partly because I had already accepted some inner invitation to explore the darkening realities of our rapidly warming planet. I seem to have launched upon a journey I mostly do not understand, except for its very clear beginnings rooted firmly in my childhood.

As children, one of the greatest gifts my parents gave me and my four siblings was a deep love of God's creation. Every summer my parents would spirit us away to the woods and lake of our own small Eden in Michigan. The day school got out they would pile us into the Ford station wagon with a few clothes, and boxes and boxes of books, and drive up to a little cottage where my brother, sisters and I shared one bedroom, and lived together the next three months without heat or phone. All summer long we built villages in the woods, and transformed into seals in the lake. And by the end of every summer the sand was so embedded in our scalp we would still be washing it out through September. We were of the woods and sand and water, and they were of us, and our love for this place was so deep and sharp that it bound us to the sacred before we knew the word.

Our Eden, however, proved to close to Chicago. In the 90's, people wanting to purchase paradise began hauling in wagon loads of money. They built second homes double the size of first homes, cut trees to spread long rivers of asphalt for private drives, and buried the living dunes beneath suburban lawns and swimming pools. Then they cooled themselves with great loud air conditioners behind plate glass picture-windows which froze their view like a post card. The soles of their feet never learned the dunes, their scalp stayed clean, and they did not even notice when the song birds moved on. They desecrated this sacred place without ever encountering it. They knew not what they did.

Growing up close to land that is pristine enough to have a soul connects you forever to all land, similar to the way loving your own children seems to connect you to all children. So love of the earth remains embedded in me, my siblings, and our children, and continues to be deeply intermingled with our love of God. Buried beside the intermingling love, though, is also that first searing experience of how vulnerable God's precious creation is to the destructive capabilities of human kind.

A couple weeks before Easter this year these early childhood experiences combusted in a single convergence of love and pain, a convergence which since has surprised my feet along a path of unknown destination. This moment arose at a most uninvited time: family movie night. Now movie nights are not meant to host epiphanal moments, but are enjoyed for the simple pleasure of watching a story together and stuffing in as much popcorn and candy as the two hours will allow us to hold. The movie was "Arctic Tale", a spectacularly filmed children's documentary that follows the lives of the Arctic's largest animals. These mammals are brilliantly adapted to a gorgeous but unforgiving environment, yet recently even their adaptive brilliance cannot ensure their survival in a habitat that is literally melting beneath their feet. Due to the Earth's warming trend, twenty percent or over one million square miles of the Arctic's sea ice has melted in the last twenty five years. First and hardest hit is the polar bear, and the film captures the anguish of their struggle when a mother bear lies down beside her dying cub who is unable to compete in an increasingly impossible environment.

Now I've been reading about global warming, and the growing crisis in the Arctic for some time, but reading facts and statistics is always different than being confronted by the precariousness and preciousness of a single life. It was my children, however, that really got it, loud and clear, straight and true, they felt the anguish and the implications of that cub's death. "Mom, what can we do? What can we DO? We have to do something."

I sat awash in my own ache, helpless before their pain. In one blistering instant I realized that the smells, sounds, and animals of my childhood and the wild, sacred places of the world might begin to vanish during my own children's lifetime. And as our planet heats ups and dries out the young everywhere, animal and human alike, will be the most vulnerable in our harsher world.

Suddenly, I felt like I was sitting beneath the cross, watching the agony of God as we drove home the nails into his creation, his creatures, his children, Him. Having spent much of my life confused and at times even repelled by the story of the crucifixion, this image appearing unbidden before my eyes shocked me. But its vividness did not recede. Nor did the pain and questions of my children's' voices fade. Therefore, I did not do what I often due in my adulthood - that is numb out, get busy, turn tail on the pain and my own conscience. Instead, I began to read more about climate change. And the more I read the blacker grew the night.

I'm going to try to briefly summarize what I've read and learned. If you want more information I have written out some web sites you can follow up on, but here is a thumbnail sketch.

Almost every thing we do in technological societies depends on the burning of oil and coal and other fossil fuels to create energy. Oil powers our cars, our planes, and fuels our furnaces. Coal generates electricity for our lights, televisions, computers, air-conditioners, dishwashers, refrigerators, washing machines, cell phone rechargers and on and on. Whenever fossil fuels are burned, carbon dioxide is released. CO2 is actually a necessary molecule in our environment for without certain gases, including carbon dioxide, our atmosphere would not hold in any of the sun's heat and the planet would be to frigid to sustain life. But these gases, known as the greenhouse gasses, form a protective blanket around the earth allowing it to maintain a relative constant temperature. Too much carbon dioxide, however, is too much of a good thing for it traps more heat than we can handle and turns our lovely greenhouse into a simmering stewpot. Over the past hundred years, correlating with industrialization and the increased burning of fossils fuels, temperatures have been slowly rising. The last thirty years, however, have experienced the most dramatic spike. Rising land and sea temperatures now are compounded by the melting of the polar ice caps which exposes more and more sea area. Open water absorbs solar radiation rather than reflecting it the way the protective covers of snow and ice did. Furthermore, human consumption of fossil fuels has not yet peaked. With the economies of India and China on a trajectory to approach our own standard of living millions more carbon dioxide consumers will enter the global equation.

And already Earth is feeling the heat. Storms, hurricanes, draughts and flooding are increasing in frequency and intensity. Delicate ecosystems are already in great peril, the earth's poles and the sea's corals. Human deaths have increased from fires, flood, draught, and heat waves. Even if we dramatically cut CO2 emissions now the future temperatures will continue to rise, but could stabilize and even decrease before catastrophic consequences occur. And if we were to do nothing? Average temperatures could rise nine degrees Fahrenheit by century's end, and the consequences would be apocalyptic, the changes irreversible.

We have been given this most precious gift, this creation that sustains and nourishes us, and in turn is to be sustained and stewarded by us. But we have broken this covenant, desecrated the gift, and nature is becoming unnatural. Her generative abundance is twisting into destruction and death.

The passage from Jeremiah today is filled with the pain of a broken covenant, too. Jeremiah's world reels within a creation that no longer sustains. The writer captures the pain of the creation groaning when nature, so subverted that its most essential relationships are severed, lets the doe forsake her newborn fawn. Jeremiah feels the shame and dismay of culpability, of their inequities that testify against them, of their apostasies that indeed are many.

The more I read about global warming the more I realized my culpability, my unintentional yet significant participation in the warming and destruction of the planet. For although we in America total only 4 % of the world's population, we contribute 25% of the planets carbon emissions, 21% of which comes from every household here.

So there it was: glaring and undeniable, my own participation in the suffering and destruction of this creation I so cherish. In my own growing darkness, what I clung to was that image that first flashed before me the night of Arctic Tales, the image of Christ suffering through the suffering of his creation. I clung to that image, I pushed it and pleaded with it, and prayed, "O.K. if we are living through Good Friday then where, oh where, is Easter? Where is the resurrection and redemption, where is the light that shines in the darkness? Where is hope?"

Paul wrote to the Romans about hope during a time of great tribulation for them, "...now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience."

That is not the kind of hope I was looking for. I was hoping for something quite specific, like a plan for a way out of this crisis. But Paul's hope is no wish-list, it has no agenda. It's more like faith, faith in what we may not be able to see, faith that despite what we do see, Goodness made us in its likeness for the sake of good. And that kind of hope in the unseeable, in the midst of our suffering and our untransformed but eternally transformable creation, that hope is like a seed, a tiny seed that plants itself and waits patiently in the darkness, and then sprouts and grows we not know how.

Do not seeds actually require darkness to germinate? Their secret, magical stirrings only begin out of the light. Maybe the seeds of the Kingdom in us, the seeds of hope, of love, of goodness stirring towards Goodness, maybe these seeds are actually sown in darkness, our darkness, the darkness of a still suffering creation.

Now let me return one last time today to the scientific truth of our gathering darkness. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the IPCC, is a group of 2,500 scientists who represent the world's most authoritative voice on global warming. Their report released this fall concluded that to avoid the worst of the catastrophic consequences of global warming our timeline is urgent: we must stabilize greenhouse gases by 2015, begin to reduce shortly thereafter, and be carbon free by 2050. The head of the commission, Rafendra Pachuria, states: "What we do in the next two or three years will define our future."

That is not a lot of time. That is not the distant or even the near future. That is now. Today. This week. This month. This election. Now we must act, for the sake of the world we were given to sustain and protect as it sustains and protects us, and for the sake of our children and their children to whom we will pass it on.

But when the stakes are so high, and the growing shadow is so black, and the powers of destruction within us and all about us seem overwhelming and invincible, how can we act? How can we begin to move, as world citizens, as Christians, when we feel frozen by the appalling shadow of global catastrophe?

Maybe the secret to action lies in the secret of the seed. Maybe the darkness is not something we have to shut our eyes and our hearts and churches to, because in darkness stirs the seed. And if we hope, we trust that the seed will grow, that the earth will produce of itself, then from the ground of our being a sprout begins to grow and a grain to ripen. And when the grain is ripe it is time to go in with a sickle. It is time to move, it is time to act, it is time for the harvest.

And what might that look like - the harvesting of our grain, the transformation of the seed of hope into action?

I invite all of us here today to imagine what it might look like. Maybe it will look like us taking home our list of Ten Things You Can Do to Help Global Warming and trying out a couple, today, tomorrow, next week. Maybe we'll change a light bulb to an energy saving compact fluorescent one. Maybe we'll remember to switch off, and unplug more often, or hop in the car a little less often, or reduce our meat consumption by just 25% a week. (If every person ate 1/4 less meat in America it would save as much carbon emissions as though everyone were driving a Prius). Maybe we'll join an environmental organization which is fighting global warming, or organize within churches and between churches to begin pressing business and government into acknowledging the crisis.

The good news is we can reduce and stabilize emissions using technologies already in reach. But there has to be the political will to set scientifically based standards for the reduction of CO2 emissions, and there must be the political will to adhere to these standards. Government will have to support and fund more research, encourage investments in cleaner technologies and invest in building the infrastructures to implement these technologies. And that kind of determination, that kind of non self-serving political will can only come from us. From you, from me, from our towns, and our churches.

For our will grows from the tiniest of seeds that stretches forth into the greatest of all shrubs. And as our branches grow and extend and interlace with one another we can bring shade to our fevered planet, we can make shelter for our suffering creation. Through God's invitation and through God's will, but by our harvest we can redeem our covenant and save our Earth. Amen.

Amen.

Top 10 Things You Can Do to Reduce Global Warming
From Larry West, "Your Guide to Environmental Issues"

1. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Choose reusable products instead of disposables. Buy products with minimal packaging, including the economy size when that makes sense for you. And whenever you can, recycle paper, plastic, newspaper, glass and aluminum cans. By recycling half of your household waste, you can save 2,400 pounds of carbon dioxide annually.

2. Use Less Heat and Air Conditioning
Add insulation to your walls and attic and install weather stripping or caulking around doors and windows. Turn down the heat at night or away during the day, and keep temperatures moderate at all times. Setting your thermostat 2 degrees lower in winter and higher in summer can save 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide each year.

3. Change a Light Bulb
Wherever practical, replace regular light bulbs with compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs. Replacing just one 60-watt incandescent light bulb with a CFL will save you $30 over the life of the bulb. CFLs also last 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs, use two-thirds less energy, and give off 70 percent less heat. If every U.S. family replaced one regular light bulb with a CFL, it would eliminate 90 billion pounds of greenhouse gases, the same as taking 7.5 million cars off the road.

4. Drive Less and Drive Smart
Walk, bike, use mass transit or carpool when you can. When you do drive, make sure your car is running efficiently. Keeping tires properly inflated improves gas mileage by more than 3 percent. Each gallon of gas you save keeps 20 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

5. Buy Energy-Efficient Products
When it's time to buy a new car, choose one offering good gas mileage. Home appliances come in a range of energy-efficient models, and compact florescent bulbs are designed to provide more natural-looking light while using far less energy than standard light bulbs. Avoid products with excess packaging, especially molded plastic and other packaging that can't be recycled. If you reduce your household garbage by 10 percent, you can save 1,200 pounds of carbon dioxide annually.

6. Use Less Hot Water
Set your water heater at 120 degrees to save energy, and wrap it in an insulating blanket if it is more than 5 years old. Buy low-flow showerheads to save hot water and about 350 pounds of carbon dioxide yearly. Use your dishwasher only when full and let air dishes air dry. Wash your clothes in warm or cold water to reduce your use of hot water and the energy required to produce it. That change alone can save 500 pounds of carbon dioxide annually in most households. Use energy-saving settings on your dishwasher and let dishes air-dry.

7. Use the "Off" Switch
Turn off lights when you leave a room and use only as much light as you need. Turn off the TV, video player, stereo and computer when not in use. Turn off the water when not in use - while brushing your teeth, shampooing the dog or washing your car - until you need it for rinsing.

8. Plant a Tree
Trees and other plants absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. They are an integral part of earth's natural atmospheric exchange cycle, but there are too few of them to fully counter increases in carbon dioxide caused by automobiles, manufacturing and other human activities. One tree will absorb about one ton of carbon dioxide during its lifetime.

9. Get a Report Card from Your Utility Company
Many utility companies provide free home energy audits to help consumers identify areas in their homes that may not be energy efficient. In addition, many utility companies offer rebate programs to help pay for the cost of energy-efficient upgrades.

10. Eat Less Meat, Buy Fewer Frozen and Packaged Goods
Eating 25% less meat reduces the environmental impact that is equivalent to driving a Toyota Prius. Tons of pesticide usage, energy consumption and deforestation occurs in order to support our meat eating habits.