Occasional Sermons

In all of my fifty plus years, I have only won one contest. There is a silver lining to this, however. My memory is not cluttered with countless ribbons and trophies and prizes, so I can recall the details of my singular triumph very vividly – as though it were yesterday. The year was 1966, which put me at seven years old. A few years earlier Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring, and the modern environmental movement had been launched. My school hoped to raise the environmental consciousness of its students by sponsoring a poster contest showcasing environmental themes. I asked my mom if I could enter, and I detected a hint of maternal pride in her budding environmentalist when she said yes. We went out and purchased a nice big piece of poster board, “Well, Becca,” my mom asked, “do you have ideas?” “Yes,” I replied emphatically, “I know exactly what I want my poster to say.” “What?” she asked, betraying another hint of maternal pride at my pro-activity and determination. “DON’T BE A LITTER PIG,” I pronounced. I could see my mother’s maternal pride dissipate just a tad. “Sweetheart”, she said, “That’s litter bug, not litter pig.” “But I want it to say Litter Pig,” I insisted stubbornly. My mother frowned. I’m sure she was thinking that it was not surprising that such a pig-headed child would demand to refer to a litter bug as a litter pig. “Do whatever you want,” she said, and she left the room. I set to work. Using construction paper, pipe cleaners, glue, and a black marker, I created the ugliest pig ever depicted on poster board. The finishing touch was an angry unibrow above his snout in the shape of a “V.” I surrounded the ugly pig with used tissues, junk food wrappers, and even some cigarette butts from the ash tray. Remember this was 50 years ago. In those days most houses had such things. Then I scrawled my message across the top – “DON’T BE A LITTER PIG.” When my teacher beheld my entry, I could tell she was aghast. She didn’t exactly call me an aspiring juvenile delinquent, but it’s clear that’s what she was thinking. She sang a different song, though, when two days later my poster bore the blue ribbon. I had brought glory not just to myself, but to my classroom as well. In hindsight, I can only think that the judge must have had a dark side. Or maybe he just felt sorry for the dark horse entry, or perhaps it’s better to say, the dark pig entry. In the last analysis, I guess the poster contest succeeded in its aim. My consciousness of the modern environmental movement was raised. In the following years, I tried to follow news as best I could as it related to litter, air and water pollution, oil spills, toxic waste dumps, loss of wilderness, and the extinction of species. My mom got me a subscription to National Geographic. By the end of the decade, I was cognizant of the birth of the EPA, and the inauguration of Earth Day. I remember those days as days of hope – of new awareness, new wisdom, and new action on behalf of the environment. We were pointed in the right direction. Sad to say, nothing came of it. We were pointed in the right direction. It was just as Rachel Carson had written: “We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road -- the one less traveled by -- offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.” We were pointed in the right direction, but we took the wrong one. Today, some fifty years later, not only do the aforementioned problems still exist, there is now a problem that may be added to them, a problem next to which all the aforementioned problems together pale; and that, as you all know, is Climate Change. Climate Change has raised the stakes regarding the environment. It is no longer just a matter of the mess that’s been created; it’s a matter of survival. An environment so drastically and suddenly altered cannot properly sustain the life within it that has not had the time to adapt to those alterations. In ways we know and in ways we do not know, all life now stands threatened. If we do not act, swiftly, radically, and concertedly, God only knows what the consequence will be. Yet history gives almost no evidence of our capacity to do so. God can only be shaking his head in sorrow. It not as though God has not made amply clear to us what our right relationship with and responsibility to our environment is. It is born first out of the awareness that God created our environment. It is God’s handiwork. It tells of God’s glory. God affirms it as good. But above all it is God’s and not ours. We are but a part of it -- though a special part. God gave us a special role in our environment, for God created us in his likeness and image. This means God created us able to know him, to be in relationship with him, and to act on his behalf with reference to our environment. But alas, God also created us subject to sin -- subject to pride, subject to attempt to supplant God and enthrone ourselves in his place, subject to make ourselves the Sovereigns of Creation. But God didn’t leave us in this place of contradiction. God sent his son to bear our sin. Jesus Christ was the one pride-less man, the one man who did not seek to supplant God, who rather than enthrone himself in God’s place, sacrificed himself in acknowledgement of God’s sovereignty. And he did so as our representative, for our benefit, so that our sin would no longer contradict us, so that we could rightly act on God’s behalf with reference to our environment, so we could take the right direction. And yet, though God has done all this for us, we have still chosen to make ourselves the Sovereigns of Creation, and we see where it has gotten us. We are forced to learn again in our own generation that deicide leads to suicide. But the choice still exists. Through Jesus Christ our sin still no longer contradicts us. We can still act rightly on God’s behalf with reference to our environment. We can still be, as the apostle Paul put it, the “first fruits of the Spirit” for the sake of a creation which is groaning for redemption. The modern environment movement may have proven ineffective in one sense, but in another it has not. What started out as a national movement, both here and in other nations, is becoming a global one which is beginning to unify the world. This is because despite all our divisions, it recalls to us all that there is one thing we all share in common -- the planet Earth. We now as a world, confront what has become the vital issue of our time. It’s on all of us and it’s on each of us to act - not to wait for things to get worse, not to wait for others to act first, not to wait for new products, laws, or campaigns -- but to act -- for the sake of the Earth, and for the sake of its creator. Amen.