Cry of the Earth: Earth Day, 2008

I trundled up the dirt road in the preserve. The smell of salt air and the mud of exposed tidal flats were refreshing as I walked through field and forest… Stalks of buffalo grass swayed in the wind as did the branches of white spruce trees heavily laden with cones.

 Such a poetic statement! It was in the Portland Press Herald - someone writing about a walk through a coastal preserve downeast.

But on this Sunday before Earth Day, I’m going to begin with a more critical statement, which is that I don’t think there is a lot of value in talking about hopes and dreams for the world over the next couple of generations if you don’t start by asking, “What are you going to do about the environment?”

I’m with those who think this is the most important issue of the day. I’ve thought that for a long time. THE reason I’ve been studying this issue at BUSTH over the past 2.5 years is a sense of the religious dimension to it. Its spiritual. Its ethical. The church has something to say and we’d better get on with saying it because there’s a lot riding on it. I for one am not interested in just passing it on to my children as their problem and not mine.

Furthermore, there are many people here and around the world who think the Christian church is largely to blame - for the attitudes that have allowed people to exploit the natural world and ignore the consequences - but speaking for myself it was because of the church that caring for the environment has always seemed like a no-brainer as a religious calling. I remember as a child tagging along on youth group canoe trips that were led by my parents and some others. I remember standing along the banks of the Youghiogheny River - great white water river in western PA - and being told there were no fish in it: too polluted by paper mills, steel mills, and mine runoff. Perhaps because my father was a minister and would preach along the river bank, I remember sensing that, in a religious sense, something was wrong with this picture. Clearly the river valley was beautiful; I heard that being lifted up in prayer and sermon; but the river was quite dead, except for some tadpoles in pools along the bank. I remember them, too. Looking back on it, were they the early link in the biological chain of events that has led to apparent widespread deformities in the frog population today?  …As the argument goes, what else out there isn’t healthy that we should be concerned about?

Well, there’s a lot. We live in unprecedented times, documented ad infinitum by stories and reports about: population and poverty; contamination and cancer; species extinction and loss of biodiversity; dwindling resources and growing income gaps; abuse of renewable resources and renewed suggestions about turning to nuclear power; I heard someone speculate recently that the next big war won’t be fought over oil but over access to fresh water; Susan Rooks is doing a MPBS special this week about threatened bird populations in Maine.

It is an ecological crisis. To do nothing is not to maintain a status quo. To do nothing is to allow the ecological health of the earth to continue on a course of decline. It is not a static condition, it is a deteriorating condition. …Complicated, too. You may have heard about the food riots in Haiti last week - starving people down there - and what’s causing the problem? It’s a combination of drought and growing population and failure to invest in agriculture and diverting of corn from human consumption to bio-diesel production (that done with the good intention of cutting down on greenhouse gases only now the price of corn has gone so high that Haitians can’t afford food and the Brazilians are cutting down more of the Amazon rainforest because its now profitable to grow more corn as a cash crop, the net effect being that the good effect of burning bio-diesel is more than offset by the loss of the rainforest as a carbon sink which will exacerbate global warming, not reduce it, and global hunger takes a turn for the worse and………………….where’s it end?)

There’s a good book by the Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff - a former Catholic priest - called Cry Of The Earth, Cry Of The Poor. I recommend it. I mention it now because its title supports the point I’ve just tried to make: the ecological crisis is not just about the environment, as if you can say caring for the poor is one thing and caring for the environment is another. It was nice to hear Pope Benedict speaking in Washington last week about caring for the poor and the environment together. Because, frequently, the two are placed in opposition to each other as if those who care for the environment don’t care for people. It often comes in the form of the statement that you can either have jobs or you can have the environment, but you can’t have both. So let the loggers cut down the last remnant of forest that is still home to the endangered owls and go ahead and turn rainforests into cornfields and grazing pastures …and the loss of species is just the price you have to pay to care for people. 

Only, we don’t know all the ramifications of the loss of biodiversity, but it is known that such biodiversity as we see on the planet earth is the product of billions of years of evolution and this biodiversity has been seriously reduced by human activity in a matter of decades. One of the very good things about your support for Beneficio Coffee and the fair trade coffee we are now selling is their commitment to preserving the rainforest in Costa Rica, one of the most biologically diverse and healthy ecosystems in the world. When you buy those coffees, you are supporting organizations that sustain healthy environments and provide good jobs. And just as an aside, one of the misnomers about the environmental movement is that its just a hobby or luxury for the rich; but in fact its well documented that the general public in many of the poorer nations of the world are just as interested in sustainable development and protecting the environment as people in the wealthier nations, and even more willing to make sacrifices to support the cause. Maybe that’s because they live closer to the earth, they are more directly effected by pollution and degradation, and they are still influenced by the down-to-earth wisdom of indigenous cultures. Ironically - and I take it as a sign of hope - even here in the US many people are reexamining the history of the indigenous peoples to see what we might have missed that they could have taught us about the environment. I share with you this great quote that I think is a lesson to us (Frederick Turner as quoted by Matthew Fox in Original Blessing):

To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly seemed incredible because of the natural endowments. The land often announced itself with heavy scent miles out into the ocean. Giovanni di Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. The men of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory. (page 43)

 The notion that the “cry of the earth, cry of the poor” - the good of the earth, the good of the poor - that its all one – that must become the guiding rule and not the exception.

 And the Bible is just filled with so much that supports this viewpoint, not just as a practical viewpoint but as the way it is, the way God made it to be. In the Noah story, God says:

13 I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. (Genesis 9)

And God hears the cry of the earth. In that passage from Romans Paul speaks of the whole creation “groaning in travail” or “groaning in labor pains” - labor pains - that’s about giving birth - bringing forth life - sustaining life. And Paul speaks of the creation being subjected to futility. Obviously in his day he wasn’t speaking about global warming or something like that, but in our day …I have no problem interpreting the futility as something like the manner in which we foul our own nest such that it loses its potency as a place for bringing forth and sustaining life …as God the creator intended it.

     Trusting that God has given us something inherently good - something that is good for us - something that is everything we need - something that certainly we’re entitled to manage in ways that enhance the quality and comfort of life - but it’s a sacred trust.

Psalm 8:

3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; 4 what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? 5 Yet you have made them a little lower than [angels]… 6 You have given [us] dominion over the works of your hands…

 …only I think we have lived as if we think we can do better than the raw creation itself -the things God has established - and move beyond it somehow - almost leave it behind. And I’ll certainly tip my hat to technological achievement. We can put a man on the moon and remove a tumor from the very center of someone’s brain and have them up and walking later in the day; but, we can’t even build an ant and breath life into it. It bothers me and concerns me immensely that we might think its OK to destroy such a thing. In fact, there’s a great admonition in Proverbs 6 about ants and natural wisdom:

6 Go to the ant, …; consider its ways, and be wise. 7 Without having any chief or officer or ruler, 8 it prepares its food in summer, and gathers its sustenance in harvest…

Last week I read to you what I think are two of the most challenging versus from the Bible, where it says:

2:44 All who believed were together and had all things in common; 2:45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.

Now here’s two more:

30 you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' 31 [and] "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' (Mark 12)

That is a very down to earth kind of instruction to us. The religious life isn't just a reaching up to a God beyond us, but a reaching out and over and down to those within reach: we are a neighborly religion. "And who is my neighbor?" you may ask. As Richard Niebuhr answered, writing decades before the first earth day of April 22, 1970, our neighbor is "… man and … angel and … animal and inorganic being, all that participates in being." Everything! His theological insight, as it turns out, is quite organic when you consider the ecology of life - the web of life. We are to love all creation and to care for the way the earth works - the way it grows, the way it purifies the water, the way it replenishes the air, the way it provides food. And not just to love and care for it, but to realize that we are one with the creation - it all comes from and goes back to God. So we need to nurture in ourselves that mindset that burst forth from Jacob the morning he woke up and suddenly realized:

How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. (Genesis 28:17)

Otherwise, it’s like saying to God, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

 I trundled up the dirt road in the preserve. The smell of salt air and the mud of exposed tidal flats were refreshing as I walked through field and forest… Stalks of buffalo grass swayed in the wind as did the branches of white spruce trees heavily laden with cones.

I think I understand where that person is coming from - very much alive to the natural world around - alive because of the natural world around. Its neither a luxury nor a raw resource that needs us to cultivate it. It just needs to be and we need to be part of it. This past Christmas day we were up in the hills of Mt. Vernon, Maine and I took a late morning walk in 2 feet of snow out through some woods and came out to an abandoned and really isolated old hay field - maybe 5 acres. It was on a hillside and at one lower corner where I was there were 9 abandoned automobiles (5 Saabs) and I walked up to the far corner of the field, beyond which its heavily wooded and it drops off steeply down to a brook. And I just stood there in silence… looking …listening to the water below and the wind in the trees…thinking …and I just felt like this is intrinsically good. You can’t improve on this. Then …my cell phone rang …it was Jill …she said I had to come home and mash the potatoes …which I did …begrudgingly. It’s not that I’m anti-culture or anti-city or anything like that; but, I don’t think we can keep our cultured, over-producing, over-achieving, overly-competitive, overly-consumptive lives in perspective if we don’t stop from time to time and just go stand in the wilderness. Because …that’s where we come from. And I mean that in the very best and complimentary way. We can build great cities and cultures and nations, but that’s not where come from. From dust we came and to dust we shall return. We’re part of God’s great creation - embrace it - renew yourself in it - reclaim yourself in it - and just realize that we abuse it, we abandon it, at our own peril. Joni Mitchell might yet prove to be a prophet:

They took all the trees
And put them in a tree museum,
And they charged all the people
A dollar and a half to see 'em,
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone,
They paved paradise
And put up a parkin’ lot.

So I guess what I’m saying is …you’ve probably seen those bumper stickers that say, “Have you hugged your kid today?” And that’s a good thing - I don’t have any problem with that - hug your kid today. But what I’m saying is that you really should …hug a tree today, too.

Amen.

 The Peace of God Be With You.

  Rev. Steve