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Stewardship of God’s Creation
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20 April 2008 You all know that I’m a serious cartoon reader...a practice I inherited from my father’s father. So I particularly appreciate John Teigiser’s clipping service from the New Yorker, so I don’t even miss those...and he’s generous in sharing them via the Property Operations bulletin board in the hall. But this cartoon doesn’t come from John. Once in a while I clip my own. Last fall, the Sunday funnies ran an Opus cartoon with that frumpy penguin and his buddies lounging on the grass gazing at the night sky. Their friend Oliver says ‘hold out a speck of sand at arm’s length…that’s the portion of the night sky at which they pointed the Hubble telescope for a week. It was there...deep within that dot of dark nothingness ten billion light years distant..that they found the unexpected: galaxies! Thousands! Thousands …with billions of stars! And trillions of new worlds. And beyond those…More! All in the space of a single grain of sand on the vast beach of the cosmos. Which nicely frames the question (humans have) been asking for millennia.” When one buddy asks, “What question?” Oliver replies, “What’s the center of it all?” To which Opus and the buddies respond in their thought balloons, “Me. Me, baby.”[1] I love the insight wrapped in humor that cartoons give us. Because that’s the struggle. To recognize that we individually have a role to play in this vast, vast universe, in these fathomless galaxies; but we are never, ever the center of it all. But like every one-year-old, we want to be. Just as a family helps a child grow beyond him/her self, so does a faith community, in part through our shared scriptures. This morning’s scripture includes one of the great “I am” images we find in the gospel according to John: I am the way, the truth, and the life. Often we get so caught up in these images—that Johannine testimony to Jesus some two generations after his crucifixion—that we start twisting ourselves into pretzels over what they mean. Or we focus on the next phrase—no one comes to the father except by me, and want to take it literally. We say that all those who do not accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior are so far out to lunch they’re overcome by the mustard. As an aside, one of video clips making the rounds on the internet proclaims that Oprah rejects Jesus because she had the spiritual maturity to suggest on her program that God is big enough to include Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists and Jews—as well as Christians. Of course that left one of the women in the audience sputtering that – you guessed it – Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, and only through him do we come to God. But even though the woman can quote this little piece of John, she isn’t paying much attention to the context. And as you know, we in progressive Christianity pay serious attention to context. Remember way back in one of the old Superman movies, when Superman goes around to every woman he meets, saying “Marry me,” so that when he said it to Lois Lane, it won’t be taken seriously? Context. The context of today’s scripture is that Jesus has just predicted that Peter will deny him three times as Jesus walks that lonely path to Calvary. Life as the disciples have known it is about to change dramatically. In John’s version of that fateful evening, Jesus not only is comforting his disciples concerning the events that are unfolding, but also preparing his disciples to find new ways of tending to everything that is entrusted to them. And their first response is not, “What does the Lord require of me?” Their first response is anxiety bordering on panic: “We are clueless. We don’t know where you’re going—how can we possibly know the way? We’re on a spiritual journey here, just take us to the mountaintop and show us the face of God, and we will be satisfied.” We’re back to the Sunday funnies; it’s the “Me; Me; Me, Baby” response. This hits uncomfortably close to home. Because this is exactly where we are: life as we have known it is changing dramatically, and we are called to find new ways of tending to that which is entrusted to us. Yes, the disciples to whom John is writing are very anxious. Yes, anxiety is often the mood associated with 21st-century America—just because we are Jesus’ disciples doesn’t mean we don’t know a thing or two about anxiety. Not that we don’t have a thing or two contributing to our anxiety. The United States is now the biggest debtor nation in the world, with a national debt over nine trillion dollars. Our economy is heading south, helped along by the subprime mortgage mess and a six-year war that should never have begun; global warming and its attendant climate change is a reality despite all the Orwellian propaganda; we endure long lines at airport security only to learn our flight is one of hundreds grounded for possibly faulty wiring; the cost of higher education is once again quickly becoming an option only for the wealthy; and the Nationals’ one win hardly offsets their 2-8 record. Like the first disciples, we know a thing or two about anxiety. But like the first disciples, we are called to move beyond the infantile mantra of ‘me’ to the adult ‘we’. We still are called to follow the Christ and care for this messy, beautiful, fragile world that is entrusted to our stewardship, entrusted to our care. And as the most recent issue of The United Church News has it, that care moves way, way beyond plastic bottles and aluminum cans.[1] Stewardship of the earth is central to our walk of faith, a point underscored when I began my sabbatical in Northern California, where I spent several days attending Pacific School of Religion’s annual Earl Lectures and Pastoral Conference. Our theme was faith, community, and sustainability. To paraphrase Nick Carter, “If the Good News isn’t Green News we are all a bunch of frauds. How can we love God, how can we be followers of the Way, and not be passionate lovers and caretakers of God’s marvelous creation?”[2] Take water for example. Over the past thirty years, that basic building block of all life has become a symbol of health and status, marketed so effectively here in the States that we spent over $10.8 billion in bottled water in 2006…which is anywhere from 240 to 10,000 times more expensive than tap water. And that’s only the out-of-pocket cost. Meanwhile, despite all of the attention to global warming and the need for recycling, 77% of those handy little plastic bottles—about 2 million tons of them—get dumped in landfills every year. Then there’s the energy it takes to produce the bottles, bottle the water, package the bottles, and ship them to their destinations. And if that isn’t enough, the natural aquifers that supply the mineral and spring water are being overdrawn, threatening local streams and groundwater aquifers, sometimes taking water from areas whose residents need it. This scenario threatens to have the worst outcome in developing countries, where residents can’t afford bottled water and could lose their own local water sources.”[3,31] Of course, one simple step is to stop using bottled water. And if we don’t want to drink tap water, it’s easy enough to filter it. That step alone, multiplied by each of the people in this room, already makes an impact on landfill. But there are other steps too. First Church of Christ UCC in Mansfield, Connecticut created environmental stewardship guidelines for their congregation…certainly something we could request of our own stewardship board. The Mansfield congregation created the guidelines in 2004, and by 2006, they were recognized in a special service as a Green Church—the first of 248 churches to achieve that distinction in the Connecticut Conference. But they didn’t begin with the goal of becoming a green church. They just took one step at a time.[1] The first Christians didn’t set out to become models for faith for millennia to come. If the gospels are to be believed, there were times when they betrayed Jesus and denied even knowing him. They battled their own fear and anxiety and struggled with how to live the gospel they had received. And in the struggle, they found new ways of tending, new ways of being stewards, of that which had been entrusted to them. This weekend, our son Aaron did some kayaking on the Potomac River and returned with fantastic pictures of a bald eagle family—the male, female, and their nest. Just a short while ago, those birds were on the Endangered Species list, and there was a question as to whether they would even survive. But like those first disciples, we found new ways of tending that which has been entrusted to us. That is still our call, beginning with our own stewardship. May we be faithful in our time. *~*~*~* [1] United Church News, April/May 2008, Vol. XXIV, No. 2, Section A, “Centerstage: Beyond Aluminum Cans,” Joanne Griffith Domingue, pages A10-11. |