Earth Day

Earth Day
Rev. Carol Luther
April 24, 2005

Readings:

Acts 17:1-15
or Deuteronomy 6:20-25
1 Peter 2:1-10
or Acts 17:1-15
John 14:1-14
Psalm 66:1-11 or 66:1-8

Come to him, a living stone . . . , and like living stones, let yourselves
be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood.
1 Peter 2:1

Close your eyes. Think of a place you love. Spend a moment there in your heart. Feel its light, its sounds and smells. Feel its effects on you. For how many of you was your place a place of nature?

Earthrise Thirty five years ago Friday, on April 22, 1970, the United States celebrated our very first Earth Day, a day dedicated to planetary housekeeping, a pledge of clean air, clean water, and diversity of species. I remember that first Earth Day well, for at the time, I was a sophomore in college, living deep in the LA basin where the smog generated by auto exhaust was as thick as a Bay Area morning fog bank. This semi-arid basin was expected to support a population of 7 million people, complete with lush gardens, swimming pools, and a culture that thought nothing of driving 90 miles round trip to a rock concert.

Today the population of this same basin is over 16 million. Great housing cities of 50,000 souls now stand where there used to be open fields and rocky hills, and daily commutes of 100 miles each way are common, but thanks to the consciousness raised by those early Earth Days, the air is cleaner. Mountain lions have returned to the wild hills. On the surface, things seem to be prospering. But like any political movement, Earth Day had both its triumphs and unintended consequences. Perhaps because we can do it with less obvious effect, we are now consuming far more natural resources than ever: if what we consumed had calories, we couldn't fit into this church. You've heard it said that if the whole world lived at the standard of the average American, it would take from 3 to 5 earths to support us. Today, on the 35th anniversary of Earth Day, all China is poised to start driving cars. We are approaching a petroleum crisis, and great water issues loom all over the world, but at least we are not choking on our own poisons quite as much. Have we progressed? Yes and no. Welcome to the human condition.

Thirty five years later, however, the mood is very different than on that first Earth Day. Today, corporate interests wish to undo the clean air and water acts. Economic prosperity, they say, is not possible without pollution. If these interests have their way, they too, will produce consequences both for good and for ill. What is interesting for us is that both sides draw upon religion. At both ends of the environmental debate, both before the first Earth Day when pollution was out of control, and today, when people want to stop controlling pollution, the Christian religion has been invoked to justify a position. Some say that we are stewards of God's earth. Others say that God gave us the earth to use up on our way to heaven.

Indeed, passages like today's Gospel, which is traditionally read at funerals and memorial services, "In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?" are often used as proof texts to demonstrate that Christianity is a "pie in the sky" religion that values heaven over earth, the next life over this one. Today, thirty five years after the first Earth Day, the Biblical texts at the center of the discussion themselves have changed, from Genesis' gentle God blessed them, and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.' (Gen.1:28) to the Book of Revelation with its end of the world sensationalism, dread horsemen, plagues and crashing down heavens. Still, the question remains: what does the Church really have to say to us as a people charged-- or not-- with preserving the Earth?

There is no question that we live in difficult and destructive times. Earth Day is not the only thing we commemorate this weekend. Today is the first full day of Passover, when the earth itself helped the Israelites escape to freedom and then disciplined them with 40 years of life in the desert where they had to learn total dependence upon God. Today, April 24, is also the date appointed for the 90th commemoration of the Armenian genocide, in which the Ottoman Empire systematically slaughtered over 1.5 million Armenians while the rest of the world watched. Would that this were an isolated incident! In fact, it is only one in a series of unspeakable atrocities which include the slaughter of the Jews, the Cambodians, the Hutu, the Kosovar Albanians, the Sudanese, Indigenous people in both the Americas. How could the Earth not grieve the loss of so many of her beloved children? Few people speak of the effects of war upon the biosphere, but violence against the earth is always a consequence when armies are on the march, when wars are waged. War gives us a grand excuse to ignore the environment and dirty our house. Who grieves the forests that were bombed and burned during World War II, the innocent cows, pigs, sheep and pet dogs who were strafed?

Although I have been spared living through a war, I was born in the shadow of war. I have lived my whole life in the shadow of war, in a culture that has normalized, even celebrated force. Star Wars® movies show entire planets being ripped apart. Earth moving equipment tears up living hills. While the unthinkable happens all the time, in the news, on television, I feel increasingly marginalized in a mass, celebrity driven culture. I have to do something. Yet, what does it matter what I do?

When things become monstrous, when history, entertainment, literature all conspire to show me that evil has grown so huge that I am helpless against it, in order for me to be able to live with myself in the face of monstrous wrongdoing, I throw my pain away. I hang it on someone else. I blame the Soviets, I blame the Taliban, I blame Bill Clinton or George Bush, television, the Religious Right, anything to keep from falling into the darkness within that I did not cause, that I cannot help and yet is breaking my heart. Or if I am too polite to blame, I hide in my house and rationalize that there is nothing I can do.

But God knows otherwise. God has prepared a place for me, not only in heaven, but on earth. Or in the words of my daughter, "I don't worry. God put me here so I know I'm here for a reason." Or, in the words of today's Gospel, Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.

But when you turn to Peter's letter, those great works look pretty humble. Peter, the rock upon which Jesus built his church, calls us, not brilliant thinkers and doers, but 'living stones.' That's such a Peter thing. I love Peter. He made every mistake in the book and yet managed to keep the faith. Peter, who denied Jesus three times on the night of his arrest, learned from bitter experience, that blaming others won't work. So he, or one of his disciples, writes, Rid yourselves of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation-- if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.

What a wonderful, earthy, mammalian image. Even spiritually, we are still baby animals in need of milk. And then he calls us "living stones." What could be more earthy or common than a stone? We dig up tons of stones every day right here in San Rafael down at the quarry. Stones are the foundation of all building. They are everywhere. Geologists call stones the very bones and skeleton of the earth. Stones are dense. They change very slowly. They take millions of years to move a foot. Living stones suggests that we are a world of blockheads who think we are so smart, but God loves us to pieces. We ask God to build us into a living house because we are not individuals in magnificent isolation, but connected in every way. Our house of living stones is nothing less than the body of Christ.

The Episcopal Church is often called the "Incarnation Church" because in our teaching and worship we celebrate the fact that God became one of us as living proof of God's love of human life on earth. Moses told us to "Choose life." Jesus says "I am the way, the truth and the life." Jesus said of bread, "this is my body," of wine, "this is my blood." The elements of the Eucharist remind us that we are formed of earth and fed by earth and that how we take care of the planetary body reflects how we care for our own bodies.

The earth is not "the environment," a backdrop to our individual dramas, successes and failures, the Olympic arena of life. Earth IS life, and our molecules and earth's molecules are inseparable. As we know from our own Eucharist, earthly elements infused with the divine become the very fabric of our existence. Bread and wine are no ordinary food and drink. They are collaboration between us and the earth. We cannot just pick them; we make both from vegetable ingredients infused with living yeasts, so that the food itself seems to live. If you have ever watched bread rise, you have seen that it almost seems to breathe, while wine contains all the joy and all the danger of life in the spirit. This, the life led fully as aware animals in the arms of our loving God, this and not some Armageddon Apocalypse, is our rapture.

Contrary to the End Times crowd, the Rapture is not wreckage on the freeway of life when a God with a taste for special effects plucks the innocent into the sky and leaves the rest of the earth to crash and burn. Rapture is what we experience in prayer, in sacrament, when we walk through the place that we love and feel the wind against our face and smell the sweet smells of creation. Rapture lifts us out of ourselves. It's as Kit described Heaven and Hell yesterday at our healing workshop: Heaven and Hell are the same place. Heaven is when you become a mirror reflecting the divine light of God. Hell is when you hog all that light to yourself and burn up inside. To celebrate Earth Day asks us how we reflect the maker of Heaven and Earth. To remember the horrors of war as part of Earth Day is to admit that we are in the same place, and to find the courage to ask forgiveness of a God who cannot wait to forgive us. To work toward a clean and healthy earth is to live for health, not sickness. To love and cherish what God gave us is to love and cherish God and, like the Israelites before us, to pass out of slavery and death into the promised land. Or, in the words of today's Psalm,

All the earth bows down before you,
sings to you, sings out your Name.

AMEN.