reallifepastor

         Judah had been through it.  They’d been conquered, uprooted from their beloved “promised land” and taken into exile.  After a few decades—and after their conquerors were conquered by someone else– they were allowed to return home to Jerusalem.

          In truth, though, it wasn’t much to return to—piles of rubble, little infrastructure, no king of their own.  No temple.  The people had returned to the same location, but it no longer looked like home.  What had been so easy in the past—worshiping in the Temple, governing themselves—what they once had taken for granted was gone now.  Yes, they were home, but the rules had changed.  There was no other place they’d rather be than Jerusalem… but inhabiting this new Jerusalem was going to take a lot more work than inhabiting the old one.

          That’s similar to what environmentalist Bill McKibben says about our home planet in his book, Eaarth; Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.  McKibben suggests that greenhouse emissions over the last two centuries have set a process in motion that has fundamentally altered our planet.  In fact, the planet has changed so much that we now inhabit an entirely different planet, one that’s going to take a lot more work to live on and with.

          Like the Israelites we, too, inhabit a home that isn’t as welcoming as it once was.  We, too, grieve the loss of a lifestyle we once loved.  We, too, might be feeling hopeless.

          What did God say to our 5^th c. BCE ancestors when, as the hymn says: “hope seemed hopeless?”    **To residents of Jerusalem who had been captured and exiled, God promises to re-create Jerusalem as a joy.  **To people who had been uprooted from their homes and whose ripening gardens had been vandalized, God promises that they “shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.”  **²²To people whose world had been completely destroyed, God promises to create a new heaven and a new earth. 

          I wonder how our ancestors in faith received these words of hope.  Hearing words of doom-and-gloom—that’s hard.  Ancient Israel and Judah experienced it when their prophets told them they’d be conquered and exiled.  We experience it when our contemporary prophets tell us our planet is fundamentally changing for the worst.  But as hard as it is to hear a message of doom-and-gloom, it’s sometimes even more difficult to hear a word of hope…. especially when you’re hip-deep in the debris of your de-created world.

A case in point:  my front yard.  In 2008, a storm tore through our neighbourhood.  It was a bad storm.  Twelve houses in our subdivision were damaged so badly, they had to be condemned.  Thankfully, just three weeks before, we’d had several pine trees removed, so damage to our house was minimal…but we lost a lot of trees in the storm, beautiful trees, some of them lovely hardwoods.  We were devastated.

Shortly after that—you might remember—I began planting trees like crazy, mostly in the front yard.  You all gave us a cherry tree; I planted that.  Someone gave us several saplings from their yard; I planted those.  Someone else gave us a tree from the Arbor Day Foundation.  That was a boon, because after that, I joined the Arbor Day Foundation and got scads of trees for a tiny contribution.  Have you ever ordered a tree through the mail?  You get this little stick in the mailbox, plant it, and it grows into a tree! 

          The only trees I did NOT plant that Fall were the pine trees offered by Jimmy Loyless.  Pine trees were scattered all over our neighbourhood for months after the storm.  I couldn’t bear to look at any more pines, so I passed on those…but everythingelse offered by anyone else, I took…and planted….in the front yard…right in front of the house….to the point that now you can barely see the house from the road. 

These trees in our front yard are a testament to just how hopeless I was after the storm.  I planted all those trees because—in my heart–I had little hope that many—if any—would grow.  And I planted the trees in front of the house because I didn’t think they would grow tall.  Now, several healthy growing seasons later, our house is all but obscured by trees.  Oh, a few trees died, but very few.  The rest of the trees have grown like gang-busters!  Every time I look out our window, it’s almost like creation is laughing at me.  “Ha, ha, ha!  Didn’t think I could do it, did you?  Just watch me grow!”  I laugh with it.

Here’s what I’ve learned from our yard in the last four years:  nature is strong.  Creation has a will of its own.  The world God created wants to live. 

But watching a few trees—and tons of weeds, truth be told—grow back after a storm… that in no way equates with our chemically-altered and fundamentally-changing planet.  Where is the hope for us, we inhabits of a place we’ve always known as home, but whose glory days might be passed?  How do we hope for earth’s healing when hope seems hopeless?

Today’s reading from Isaiah 65 ends with the image of God’s “holy mountain.”  The reading from Isaiah 2 talks about the “mountain of God’s house.”  In a region that is mostly flat—like much of Israel–a mountain really stands out.  A mountain that is taller than all other mountains—as Isaiah 2 describes the mountain of God’s house—is one that people will be able to see from miles around; it’s the peak that will remind everyone of God’s presence and power.  God’s holy mountain—by itself–will proclaim a message of hope.

Hear now a message of hope proclaimed by Mt. St. Helens in Washington state.  On May 18, 1980, Mt. St. Helens, a volcano in the Cascade Mountain range, erupted.  “Within 10 seconds, the northern flank of the mountain collapsed in the largest landslide in recorded history.  In a huge explosion, it released millions of tons of magma.  A cloud of searing gas and rock raced over the surrounding countryside.  Forests were flattened.  Thousands of birds from more than 100 species disappeared.  Billions of insects were gone.  Deer and elk were wiped out.  Four miles below the summit, the enormous Spirit Lake was choked with debris, its bed raised more than 200 feet from an avalanche.  The northern slope of the volcano was buried in several feet of ash.  Virtually all life was extinguished.”

Mt. St. Helens and its environs “looked like the moon.”  “It was hard to imagine life ever returning.”

Scientist Charlie Crisafulli was charged with the task of finding life around Mt. St. Helens after the eruption.  For the first 3 months, he found nothing.  Then, 8 miles from the volcano’s crater, he noticed something—signs of freshly disturbed earth—round earth on top of the gray volcanic ash…. evidence of the work of the northern pocket gopher.  Pocket gophers live completely underground….which is where they were when the volcano erupted, safe from the blast.

As the pocket gopher population worked on creating a network of underground tunnels, plant life also began to appear—even on the most damaged part of the plain below the volcano’s crater, the fluffy purple petals of the prairie lupine appeared.  As pioneer species, it makes sense that lupines and pocket gophers were two of the first species to appear after the eruption…but scientists were dumbfounded by how fast they appeared.

They were equally dumbfounded by the resurgence of Spirit Lake.  The eruption had obliterated all visible life in the lake.  The bacteria populations in the lake exploded, killing all the oxygen in the water.  Crisafulli and his colleagues thought it would be “decades and decades” before Sprit Lake would recover.   “Well,” he said later, “We were surprised.”

Three years after the eruption, they discovered a rapidly growing population of phytoplankton, the basic building block of aquatic life.  The beginnings of the population had been brought in by birds or blown in by the wind.  Between 1983 and 1986, 135 species of tiny plants colonized the lake.

Ten years after the eruption, life was flooding back to Mt. St. Helens, “the rate of recovery far faster than anyone expected.”  As Crisafulli said:  “Clearly, our understanding of the ability of these organisms to disperse was greatly underestimated.  We found that a lot of our conventional wisdom was just flat wrong.”  He describes the speed with which life has returned to Mt. St. Helens as “another form of eruption.  It was an eruption of nature.  Nature marched back with a vengeance.”  (PBS, Mt. St. Helens: Back from the Dead.)

I know, I know….life returning to Mt. St. Helens after a volcanic eruption isn’t anything like trying to refreeze the polar ice caps or reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or clean up all of earth’s fresh water sources.  In many respects, we’re comparing apples and oranges here…But…

Despite the differences in circumstances, it is still the same earth at work with Mt. St. Helens and with global warming…still the same natural world with its death-defying, life-affirming processes.  I thought my yard was dead.  It has come back.  Scientists at Mt. St. Helens thought the 200 square mile eruption area was dead.  It has come back—with a vengeance.  

So, I guess I’m wondering what might be happening with the rest of our planet.  Creation definitely suffers when we misuse its resources…. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do everything we can to reduce our carbon footprints and try to reverse processes that are working to destroy our planet. 

But—after hearing the words of hope to the ancient Israelites, after hearing the laughter of my trees at home, after hearing the message of hope preached by Mt. St. Helens…I’m beginning to wonder if things might not be as hopeless as they seem.  Oh, things are still dire…but I guess I just wonder if maybe there is some hope .   Maybe we should trust in that word of hope, a word that comes from God.   Maybe we should trust in creation’s will to thrive, despite its current dire circumstances.  Maybe we should dare to hope when hope seems hopeless. 

In the name of our God, who creates us, redeems us, sustains us, and hopes for our wholeness.  Amen.

Kimberleigh Buchanan  © 2012

Today is International Peace Day…a designation assigned by the UN.  This year’s theme for Peace Day is sustainability.  Makes sense.  Many of the world’s armed conflicts are rooted in scarcity of resources (or unjust distribution of them).

In his book Eaarth:  Making Life on a Tough New Planet, author Bill McKibben writes:  “On the new world we’ve built, conflict seems at least as likely as cooperation.  In 2006, British home secretary John Reid publicly fingered global warming as a driving force behind the genocide in Darfur, arguing that environmental changes ‘make the emergence of violent conflict more rather than less likely.  The blunt truth is that the lack of water and agricultural land is a signficant contributory factor to the tragic conflict we see unfolding in Darfur.  We should see this as a warning sing.’  When Time magazines’ Alex Perry traveled to the region the following year, he reported that ‘the roots of the conflict may have more to do with ecology than ethnicity.'”  (p.82)

Based on a Department of Defense report in 2009, an author in Fortune magazine wrote:  “Wars over resources were the norm until about three centuries ago.  When such conflicts broke out, 25% of a population’s adult males usually died.  As abrupt climate change hits home, warfare may again come to define human life.”

Sobering.

Today my prayer for peace is that everybody on the planet have everything they need to live, especially food and water.

What is YOUR prayer for peace?

So…a Harvard professor (Karen King) has discovered an ancient text where Jesus mentions “his wife.”

What do you think?  Would it shake your faith to think that Jesus was married?  As a married person, it would actually strengthen my faith to think that, in the midst of all his work of being Messiah, Jesus also was working on an intimate relationship with his spouse.  Or at least was negotiating the chores of marriage.  “Honey, would you mind cooking tonight?  I’m just pooped from all that fighting with the Pharisees.”  “Jesus, you know, I appreciate just how hard it is being the son of God and all, but the garbage in this place is really piling up.  Would you mind?”

The text goes on to quote Jesus as saying that his wife, Mary, could be a disciple, too.  It’s kind of nice to think that, even in the midst of the mundane tasks that surround married life, even there, discipleship is possible.

And, who knows?  Maybe it was Mary who helped Jesus figure out how to relate appropriately to women….the woman with the flow of blood?  Mary would have known how she felt.  The woman caught in the act of adultery?  Mary might not have understood the adultery, but she certainly got the double standard for women.  (Was anyone threatening to stone the man in that instance?)  Or the Canaanite woman Jesus called a dog….I wouldn’t be surprised if Jesus himself got called worse when he got home that night.

Singlehood is a good means of living a holy life.  As Paul says somewhere, When you’re married, you’re necessarily tied to things of this world.  Being unmarried makes you freer to focus on the things of God.

But having a Messiah who could focus on the things of God in the midst of being married and tied to the world?  That’s one tough Messiah.

Was there a Mrs. Messiah?  I don’t know that we’ll ever know for sure.  But if there was, I, for one, wouldn’t be disappointed.

Taped the Day 1 sermon on Friday.  I so love that process!  Peter Wallace is such a likable guy…and is so good at what he does.  As is Donald, the sound guy.

Here’s how it went…

When I got there, we video-taped a meditation on Matt. 5:37a–“Let you yes be yes and your no be no.”  (This one gave my Southern accent a little workout.)  My first experience with a teleprompter!  Very fun.  The meditations are supposed to be 2 – 3 minutes.  I came in at 2:12!  Cool.  I’m not sure, but I think it might be on youtube.  Check out www.day1.org to see.

Next, we audio taped the sermon.  Again, so much fun….except for the part where there’s no congregation and I can’t speak too loudly and where sudden movements are counter-productive.  No, seriously.  It’s fun to do the sermon, then to do re-takes.  And then, of course, the playbacks.  It’s always so strange to hear my voice on playback…kind of surreal.

After the sermon, we tape the interviews.  Okay.  I’m going to be honest with you–I don’t excel at the interviews.  If we did the interviews a day after I’ve thought through all the questions, they would be phenomenal…I’m just not that great in the moment (which is why I’m a manuscript preacher!).  So.  If you listen to the sermon when it’s broadcast and the interviews sound okay, just know that Peter and Donald did a fanstastic editing job!

Oh, yeah.  The sermon will be broadcast on Sunday, October 28.  Go to the Day 1 Website to see if there’s a radio station near you.  (After 10/28, it’ll be available on the website.)  Website:  http://www.day1.org

Today’s sermon ended with Monty Wyne singing and playing “Blue Skies.”  Monty’s been a member of Pilgrimage for, what?  20 years, maybe?  A long time, anyway.  I only learned a couple of years that he’s a jazz pianist.  After a little coaxing, I talked him into playing for church.  Initially, he didn’t really think it was okay to play jazz in church.

Whew!  I’m glad he got over THAT idea!

I’ve been convinced of the appropriateness of jazz in worship since I first heard Dave Brubeck’s piece, “The Voice of the Holy Spirit.”  (Listen to it.  You’ll love it!)  The piece is basically a classical choral work of the events of Pentecost (and a few things after that).  Every now and then, when you get to the parts of Acts where the the Holy Spirit blows in, the classical sounding piece suddenly goes jazz.

In the liner notes, Brubeck says that he didn’t want to associate any one instrument with the Holy Spirit.  For him, jazz is the thing that represents the Spirit–literally, blowing where it will.  So, one time it’s the piano, another time a flute, another time the sax playing jazz.

Yes, I think God’s spirit must be a jazz musician (whatever the instrument)–taking what is familiar and expected and pushing it to new places, places that set your soul soaring.

That’s EXACTLY what Monty did today.  While he played, my soul was able to soar, to go with his flow, a flow that I think must have come straight from God.

Thanks for your music, Monty!  It was a wonderful gift….and it helped me meet God.

I never saw a sunset until I moved to Oklahoma.  I grew up in north Florida.  North Florida is a beautiful place—lots of trees…and lakes…and The Swamp.  But, because you can’t see the horizon—all those trees get in the way—you don’t really notice sunsets.

Oklahoma’s landscape is different.  I transferred to OklahomaBaptistUniversity in Shawnee my sophomore year.  I remember calling my mom to tell her about this strange new place.  It was flat.  The wind blew all the time.  (Hence, the greatest line in all of musical theatre:  Cue choir– “Oklahoma where the wind comes sweeping down the plain…”)  And there was only one tree on the entire campus.  One short tree…that leaned, due to it being in “Oklahoma where the wind comes sweeping down the plain…”

Moving to Oklahoma was a shock.  There was so much open space; so little elevational diversity, if you know what I mean; so few trees….

Once, the Bisonette Glee Club in which I sang (Go ahead.  Get it out of your system—Bisonette, Bisonette, Bisonette) went to Houston on tour.  I remember looking out the bus window as we approached the city, seeing all those tall pines and thinking “This looks just like home!”  At the same time, some of my fellow Bisonettes who hailed from even barer parts of Oklahoma and Texas exclaimed:  “All these trees make me nervous!”

Yes, Oklahoma was very new for me and was, I quickly realized, much inferior to my home state of Florida.

That’s what I thought, anyway, until I saw my first sunset.  Walking around campus early one evening, I climbed the steps of Raley Chapel, turned to the west and saw, really saw, my first sunset.  With nothing—and by nothing I do mean no thing—to disturb the horizon, I could see the bright ball of the sun slip down toward the ground and smoothly disappear beneath the horizon.  The sky seemed so big!  And it was so full of color!  When I saw that first sunset, I wondered how I’d lived my whole life without seeing one.

What happens when you look at the sky, especially a blue sky…or a sunset sky….or a sunrise sky?  There’s something about sky that triggers our imaginations, doesn’t it?  The shapes of clouds, the colors, the vastness of it all…

Allen and I have a Sunday morning ritual…we stop by McDonald’s for breakfast, then we drive off into the sunrise.  It’s a mile farther to come to church that way (Don’t worry.  We shorten other trips during the week to make up for the extra gas.)….but experiencing the beauty of the sunrise somehow feels necessary to us.  Allowing ourselves to be awed by the beautiful sky is our first act of praise on Sunday mornings.

When I started this sermon series, I was determined to preach it, you know?  Like the prophet Jeremiah, I was going to give you the unvarnished truth, paint dire pictures of what we’re doing to our planet, and challenge you—challenge us all—to get to work changing our lives so that we can heal the planet.  And I did that.  In two of the most depressing sermons I’ve ever preached, I gave you the truth about the state of creation.  Jeremiah—also known as the “weeping prophet”– would have been proud.

But in my eagerness to Preach It, I forgot something really important—the reason for tending to earth’s healing.  Why care what greenhouse emissions are doing to the atmosphere?  Why care about the increasing salinity of the oceans?  Why care about the melting ice caps?  We care because this world is beautiful.  We care because creation is full of complexity and diversity and life.  We care because caring for the earth is the best way to praise the Creator.

Whoever chose today’s Scripture lessons understands the important balance between preaching it like it is and praising the Creator.  The passage from Jeremiah is a vision of what the prophet sees is going to happen if Judah doesn’t change its ways—basically, creation is going to be un-created (or, to use our new word, de-created).  This hard prophetic text is then balanced with the classic praise of creation Psalm, Psalm 19:  “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of God’s hands.  Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.  They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them.  Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world…”

Look at the world, today’s anthem says—look at the world and see its hurt, yes, but don’t neglect to notice its beauty, as well.

This pattern of looking at the brokenness of the world one moment and praising God for its beauty the next, is crucial.  It’s a pattern I experienced on my visit to the monastery a couple of weeks ago.  While there, I was working on that first creation sermon I preached two weeks ago—the one with all the depressing statistics in it?  That was the acme of my prophetic zeal.  I was working hard to preach it!

Trouble was, just about the time I’d really get into writing this prophetic sermon, the bells would start ringing, calling us to prayer.  Prayer in a monastery can be very annoying.  Interrupts all kinds of important work!

Especially my last night.  There I was, almost done with the sermon, when the bells started chiming.  I sighed.  And debated.  Since I had a long drive back home the next day and really needed to have the sermon done before I left the monastery…yes.  I should skip prayer and finish the sermon.  But praying is why I came to the monastery!  It didn’t make sense to skip it…except that I really did need to get this sermon done.  Back and forth I went.

Eventually guilt won out.  I made my way to the chapel.  (The monastery’s bell-ringing lasts for several minutes.  It gives you plenty of time to vacillate.)

Evening prayer always begins with a hymn.  Guess what the hymn was that night?  “For the Beauty of the Earth.”

I took it as a sign from God.  The prophetic is important; but so is the praise.  Taking earth’s illness seriously is crucial…as is celebrating its beauty and strength and diversity and life.  The prophetic without the praise can lead to hopelessness.
Praise without the prophetic isn’t realistic enough to do any good.  The key to true earth care is an equal balance of the prophetic and praise, praise and the prophetic.

And so today, in this moment, I invite us all to do a little praising…as Willie sings… as Monty plays and sings, imagine beautiful skies you’ve seen, remember how you felt, what you thought.  You might even like to turn around and look out the back windows to see if you can catch a glimpse of the sky.

And as you remember, as you imagine, as you think, as you enjoy the sky, whisper a thank you to the one who created it.

(Monty:  “Blue Skies”)

In the name of our God, who creates us, redeems us, sustains us, and hopes for our wholeness.  Amen.

Kimberleigh Buchanan  © 2012

Jeremiah 4:23-28

Whew!  I just finished the sermon I’ll be taping for Day 1 on Friday.  It’s been a few years since I taped a Day 1 sermon.  I forgot how nerve-wracking the process can be!

Don’t get me wrong.  I LOVE preaching on the radio….except for the part where you’re enclosed in a small padded room, and where every single sound you make–even the ones you can’t actually hear yourself making–are cause for a “Cut!” and where vocal modulation is best kept to a minimum (I have to check my “Baptist” at the door) and where there are no Amens or laughs or gasps or crying babies–okay.  I don’t miss the crying babies so much.

Yes, I love preaching on the radio…except for all the radio parts.  Sigh.

But…I do love to the opportunity it gives to hear what others hear when I preach.  (Oh, come on!  You’d listen to yourself, too, wouldn’t you?)  And I do love the thought that tons of people are hearing the same message and thinking about their faith in similar ways at the same time.  I especially love that Day 1 is broadcast on Armed Services Radio and that women and men in the military stationed over seas might get to hear the sermon….

…especially this particular sermon, now that I think about it.  I don’t want to give everything away–I want you to tune in an listen!  But the sermon I just finished is about seeing hard things…our military people serving in Afghanistan…I know they’ve seen hard things.  It’s nice to think that this message might reach people who might really benefit from hearing it.

You know what?  I need to get off this whole nerve-wracked self thing.  The gospel isn’t about me…it’s about helping others to experience good news.  And if this sermon might help someone stationed in a war zone experience good news?  The few nerves I’ve felt will have been completely worth it.

Last week’s sermon told the story of decreation.  It’s a word coined by author Bill McKibben.  McKibben suggests that we’ve been “running Genesis backward” to the point that we’ve fundamentally changed our planet.  We no longer live on planet earth, but a new, tougher planet called Eaarth, that’s Eaarth spelled with two A’s.  In the sermon, we took each day of creation and looked at how we’ve undone—or decreated—it.

Man!  That was one depressing sermon.  I’m glad that’s over!  Except…did anybody count how many days of creation we considered last week?  We talked about day and night (day 1), sky (day 2), oceans (day 3), plants and seasons (day 4), and every living creature in the water, in the air, and on ground (day 5).  What didn’t we talk about?  Oh, yeah.  God’s crowning creation:  humanity.  Today we get Day 6.  Sorry, guys.  There’s still a little more bad news to share.  Decreation takes a toll on human beings, too.

For instance, as I mentioned last week, the effects of climate change contributed to an increase of 40 million hungry people in 2008.  That means that today, fully 1/6 of the earth’s inhabitants are hungry; that’s over 1 billion people.  Hungry.

The effects of climate change on the world’s poor are especially devastating.  For us, it’s about $4-a-gallon gas, paying more for food, and periodic low lake levels at Allatoona and Lanier.  For the 430 million people in the world who live below the poverty line—that’s people who make less than $1.25 a day—it’s about walking long distances for water; it’s an increase in diseases like dengue fever, malaria, and cholera; it’s about having little food; it’s about rioting for what little food there is.  How does 2/3 of the populace in Africa who do not even have electricity help save earth’s resources?  What do they give up to save the planet?

That’s perhaps the most painful irony of climate change—the people who suffer most from its effects are not the people who created the problem.  Greenhouse emissions are almost completely the doing of industrialized nations…and yet, it is inhabitants of the developing world who are bearing the brunt of the effects of those emissions.  Most of the world’s climate change refugees—projected to be 700 million by midcentury—will be poor.

I’m going to stop with the statistics…because I know how much you all care for the earth.  I know you’re doing what you can for earth-care.  I know you take stewardship of God’s creation seriously, very seriously.

I’ve shared all these statistics, though, because it’s important to have our eyes wide open about what’s happening in and to the world.  As Bill McKibben says, “Hope has to be real.”  Because our lives in the developed world are so easy, it’s also easy to put blinders on, to save ourselves from seeing what’s happening in the rest of the world.  If we are to act the world into well-being, we’ve got to take seriously just how sick and fragile it is.

So, how do we begin to act the world into well-being?  That is, how do we express our love for earth?

One place to begin is to take Genesis 1:26-28 seriously, especially the part about human beings being created in God’s image.  I wonder how the world might change if we really took the time to see God in other people.  Seeing God in our family members, co-workers, fellow traffic-jammers, yes, that’s important….but also seeing God in the person begging at the interstate on-ramp, or the child with the distended belly and gaunt face in the news clip, or the person lying on a mat in a far away clinic with a disfiguring disease.

Several months ago, we started including “Ecumenical Prayer Calendar” in the weekly etidings.  Have you noticed?  The reason for the weekly list of countries is to remind us that we are not alone, that the world is full of people, each of whom is created in the divine image.

This thing about seeing others as if they are created in the image of God…it’s not always easy.  It takes a while (a long while with some people!).  For Thomas Merton, it happened one day in downtown Louisville in 1958—16 years after his final profession as a monk.  Here’s how it happened for him:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race.  A member of the human race!  To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.  As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this!  But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes.  If only they could all see themselves as they really are.  If only we could see each other that way all the time.  There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.

How might our thinking about our caring for the earth change if we considered how what we do affects someone living in Bangladesh?  How might our use of earth’s resources change if we considered how their use affected someone living in Ethiopia, someone whom God loves, someone created in the image of God, someone shining like the sun?

Someone like Brazilian Juan Antonio.  “If good rains do not come, he says, he will pack his bag, kiss his wife and two children goodbye, and join the annual exodus of young men leaving hot, dry, rural northeast Brazil for the biofuel fields in the south.” (35)

Someone like Bangladeshi villager Selina:  “We do not feel the cold in the rainy season.  We used to need blankets but now we don’t.  There is extreme uncertainty of weather.  It makes it very hard to farm and we cannot plan.  The storms are increasing and the tides now come right up to our houses.”  (35)

Someone like Tekmadur Majsi, a villager in Nepal:  “Small floods once a decade or so are routine, but now they’ve grown larger and more common.  ‘We always used to have a little rain each month, but now when there is rain it’s different.  It’s more concentrated and intense.  It means crop yields are going down.”  (35)

How might we change our lives, our pattern of consumption, our actions for earth’s well-being, if we practiced the African concept of UBUNTU.  Archbishop Desmond Tutu describes UBUNTU this way:  “It is about the essence of being human…It embraces hospitality, caring about others, being able to go the extra mile for the sake of others.  We believe that a person is a person through another person, that my humanity is caught up, bound up, inextricably, with yours.  When I dehumanise you, I inexorably dehumanise myself.  The solitary human being is a contradiction in terms and therefore you seek to work for the common good because your humanity comes into its own in belonging.”  (Desmond Tutu Archbishop, Emeritus of Cape Town)

How might our feelings about and care for the planet change if we saw everyone—every single person on the planet—“shining like the sun?”

In the name of our God, who creates us, redeems us, sustains us, and hopes for our wholeness.  Amen.

Kimberleigh Buchanan   ©  2012

Genesis 1:26-27

Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.  So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he craeted them; male and female he created them.  God blessed them, and God said to the, “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 teh air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

Guess what?  We’ve all moved!  No longer do we live on dear old Planet Earth, where the living is easy and the resources plentiful.  No, after decades of spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we have fundamentally changed our planet.  In a book titled Eaarth—that’s Eaarth with two A’s–author Bill McKibben suggests that we no longer live on Planet Earth, one A.  We now inhabit a new, less friendly planet he calls Eaarth, two A’s.

What birthed this new, tougher planet?  According to McKibben, “We are running Genesis backward; (we’re) decreating.”  (25)  Hear now the story of de-creation.

On the first day, God created day and night.  …and, in the last two centuries, we’ve worked hard to confuse the two.  With electricity, we’ve extended day into night.  With smog, we have be-nighted our days.  With day and night, it’s getting hard to tell one from the other.

What difference might confusing day and night make make?   It makes a big difference to birds and sea turtles.  “Long artificial days, and artificially short nights induce early breeding in a wide range of birds…it can also affect migration schedules.  Leaving early may mean arriving too soon for nesting conditions to be right.  Some birds become confused by the lights and fly into buildings, or fly in circles until they drop from exhaus­tion.

“Endangered nesting sea turtles, which show a natural predisposition for dark beaches, find fewer and fewer of them to nest on. Both the adult sea turtles and the babies that hatch from the eggs become confused and turn toward the road instead of the ocean.  (Seasons of the Spirit)

                        God created day and night.  We are decreating them.

On the second day, God created sky.  You’ve heard of carbon footprints, right?  The carbon at issue is the level of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, or sky.  A safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere is 350 ppm.  That means that to keep the earth we were born into, we need to maintain 350 ppm of CO2.  “In September 2009 the lead article in the journal Nature said that above 350 we “threaten ecological life-support systems… and severely challenge the viability of contemporary human societies.” (16)  Right now, we’re at 390 ppm.

Also in 2009, at an environmental gathering of the world’s nations in Copenhagen—church bells rang out 350 times….for 350 ppm of carbon.  It felt hopeful.  The world’s leaders were listening!  Or they were until they barred everyone not officially associated with the gathering from the proceedings.

At the end of the day, “If you took every government pledge made during the conference and added it all together, the world in 2100 would have more than 725 ppm carbon dioxide, or slightly double what scientists now believe is the maximum safe level of 350.  Even if you took all the possible ‘conditional proposals, legislation under debate and unofficial government statements”— in other words, even if you erred on the side of insane optimism,” McKibben writes–“the world in 2100 would have about 600 ppm carbon dioxide.  That is, we’d live, if not in hell, then in some place with a very similar temperature.”  (20)

                        God created the sky.  We are de-creating it.

On the third day, God created oceans.  As we pour CO2 into the atmosphere, the ocean heats up.  As the ocean heats up, the ice caps melt.  As the ice caps melt, the sun’s rays no longer bounce off the white surface of the ice; now they are absorbed into the blue of the ocean, thus creating even warmer seas.

Warmer oceans mean more storms.  “111 hurricanes formed in the Atlantic between 1995 and 2008, a rise of 75 percent over the previous 13 years.  These storms are stronger and stranger…. just ask the residents of New Orleans.

In addition to rising temperatures, acid levels in the ocean also are rising—at a rate 10 times faster than expected.  Higher acidity is contributing to an 80% death rate of baby oysters.  Coral reefs are being decimated at an alarming rate.  Scientist Nancy Knowlton notes that “coral reefs will cease to exist as physical structures by 2100, perhaps 2050.”  (10)  Phytoplantkton, the most fundamental piece of the oceanic food chain, is in precipitous decline.  (25)

In addition to the mammoth chemical and temperature alterations of oceans, rising water levels are wreaking a havoc all their own.  McKibben notes that “Some places with civilizations that date back a thousand years—the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, Kiribati in the Pacific,” to name two—“are actively preparing to lower their flags and evacuate their territory” because of rising water levels.  (45)

God created oceans.  We are de-creating them.

On the fourth day, God created vegetation and seasons.  Stories of decreating vegetation and seasons abound; I could cite statistics all day.  I could explain how climate change contributed to an increase of 40 million hungry people in 2008 due to failing crops (24).  I could tell how ragweed is now 10% taller and creates 60% more pollen (35).  I could explain how warmer winters have contributed to a significant increase in the tick population (34).

I could tell you how in “the last six years, as warming temperatures and drought have killed off the native vegetation that hold soil in place, windstorms have dumped twice as much dust across the American West.  In April 2009, after the biggest of the storms blew through Silverton, CO, one witness said the landscape ‘looked like Mars…you could feel the dust, you could taste the dust.”  (44)

Much of that dust and dirt is dropped “on the snowpack of the Rocky Mountains, significantly speeding up its melt.  The snow-pack now melts ‘weeks earlier than normal’… which spells ‘disaster for thousands of farmers and ranchers in the region who depend on slowly melting snow to provide water’ flows over the dry summer months.  ‘A lot of the water’s gone by the time the crops need it,’ one researcher explained.” (44-45)

Of the changing seasons, I could tell you about Ohio’s state tree: the buckeye.  As climate changes, the tree’s habitat creeps northward.  If the trend continues, the tree soon will vacate Ohio entirely and reside in “the territory of its college football archrival, Michigan.”  (34)

The results of our confusing of the seasons was even a topic of conversation at the monastery last week.  Commenting on the earlier blossoming of flowers and the lengthening of the hot season, one sister said:  “Things are blooming a month earlier, now.  Indian summer is coming a month later.  It’ll come in October this year.”

God created vegetation and seasons.  We are de-creating them.

On the fifth day, God created every living creature on land, in the sea, in the air.  We’ve already heard how light pollution affects birds and sea turtles.  We’ve heard how the increasing acidity of the ocean is decimating oysters, coral reefs, and phytoplankton… And who hasn’t seen pictures of the polar bears floating on smaller and smaller pieces of ice?

God created every living creature on land, in the sea, in the air.  We are de-creating them.

Anyone depressed yet?  Read McKibben’s book.  You’ll get really depressed.  Reading Eaarth (two A’s) has opened my eyes to this one fact:  the earth has fundamentally changed, it’s changed to the point that we can’t reclaim the planet we used to inhabit.  Greenhouse emissions have set a chain of chemical reactions in process—scientists call it “feedback”—that we cannot stop.  Even if everyone on the planet reduced their carbon footprint to zero this afternoon, processes have been started that can’t be reversed.  We can’t recreate the polar ice caps (not without another ice age).  We can’t rebuild the rain forests.  We can’t decrease the carbon dioxide content of our atmosphere to 350 with the flip of a switch.  As Bill McKibben says:  “Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all.  It is our reality.  We’ve changed the planet” (xiii); we can’t go back.

What we can do, what we as people of faith must do is figure out how to live on this tougher planet in ways that honor God’s creation.  I’ve thrown a lot of science at you today.  And science is important—it helps to describe the earth we now inhabit; it explains how we arrived on this new planet; and—to a point—it’s helping us learn to live on it.

But the true solution to finding a way to live on our new, harsher planet, I think, is spiritual.  God created the earth…then appointed human beings to be stewards of it.  What happened?  Where did we go wrong?  How did we fail so miserably at our job of stewardship?  I am convinced that something in our spirits led us astray.  Something in our spirits taught us to see creation as something to be conquered rather than something to be cared for.  Something in our spirits has made us blind to the beauty—and fragility—of creation.

And just as our spirits have led us astray in caring for creation, I am convinced it is our spirits that will teach us how to create a life of well-being on this new, harsher planet Eaarth, two A’s.  God created the earth; we’ve worked hard to decreate it.  It might be too late to reinhabit planet Earth, one A…but it’s never too late to reclaim our role as stewards of God’s creation.

So, how do we do that?  Stay tuned the next three weeks as we work our way toward an answer to that crucial question.

In the name of our God, who creates us, redeems us, sustains us, and hopes for our wholeness.  Amen.

Kimberleigh Buchanan  ©  2012

No….not THAT Ellen!  But our Ellen–Ellen Green–came to church yesterday.

I remember Ellen as the 8th grader who came to sit with me while the Pilgrimage congregation voted on whether or not to call me.  Even as an 8th grader, Ellen showed great maturity and was a gracious host during that anxious few minutes.

One of the joys of being a long-term pastor–I’ve been at Pilgrimage 11 years now–is watching the teenagers and children grow into adulthood.  To see them graduate from high school and college, to watch them find their life’s calling and pursue it.  Sometimes, even to marry them.  What an amazing gift being a local church pastor is!

Watching all the children and teens grow up is wonderful.  What’s very, very cool, though, is to see one of those teens follow a call into ministry.  After graduating from Reed College, Ellen spent a couple of years (I think that’s right) living and working in a L’Arche community.  Now, she’s just completed her first year at Harvard Divinity School.  Yes.  Ellen feels called to ministry and wishes to be ordained.

See what I mean!  SO.  VERY.  COOL!!!!!!

Also at church yesterday, we baptized 9 month old Cade Lumpkin.  As a congregation, we pledged to nurture Cade into the Christian faith until he is able to claim it for himself.  Ellen was able to hear her call to ministry–in part–because of the love and nurture of her community of faith.  Both Cade’s and Ellen’s journey are beautiful reminders to all of us in the faith community of just how important our task as nurturers of our children is.

Thanks be to God!