Category Archives: Green

Sky Sunday: Season of Creation (Mt.16:2-3

This sermon is by Rev. Joe Shore-Goss, my husband.

This is the air I breathe

Welcome, Sulfur Dioxide

This is the air I breathe

Hello, Carbon Monoxide

Your Holy presence

The air, the air

Living in me is everywhere.

This is my daily bread

Breathe Deep

This is my daily Bread

While I sleep

Your very word

Breathe deep

Is spoken to me.

And I am desperate for you,

And I am lost without you.

This is the air I breathe

Bless you, alcohol blood stream

This is the air I breathe

Save me nicotine lung steam

Your Holy Presence

Incense, Incense

Living in me, is in the air

 

This is my daily bread

Breathe Deep

This is my daily Bread

While I sleep

Your very word

Breathe deep

Is spoken to me.

And I’m cataclysmic ectoplasm

And I’m fallout atomic orgasm

Desperate for you

And I’m vapor and fume

I’m lost at the stone of my tomb without you

 

And I breathing like a sullen perfume

Desperate for you

Eating at the stone of my tomb

I’m lost without you,

Looking rather attractive

I’m lost without you,

Now that I’m radio active

I’m desperate for you,

Just watch me spark

Cry out to live

I glow in the dark

I am desperate for you

Breathe deep

I’m lost

While I sleep

I’m Lost

Breathe deep

I’m lost without you
h up of this is the air I breathe by Michael W. Smith and Air from Hair by James Rado, Gerome Ragni. It is actually the first thing I thought of when I knew I had sky Sunday. The imagery that these two images bring about can be, and I hope it was, disturbing.

When I used to drive into Los Angeles from Palm Springs it would strike me as I came over the one hill and looking into the basin of Los Angeles there was a yellow/brownish haze just hanging over the city. The air is everywhere and this is the air we breathe.

The original Gospel assigned for today speaks of the sky turning dark for 3 hours as Christ hung on the cross. I choose instead the reading where Christ actually says red sky at night sailors delight red sky in morning sailors take warning…well more or less.

The other readings one is from Jeremiah and it says;
Jeremiah 4:23-28 Common English Bible (CEB)

23 I looked at the earth,
And it was without shape or form;
At the heavens
And there was no light.
24 I looked at the mountains
And they were quaking;
All the hills were rocking back and forth.
25 I looked and there was no one left;
Every bird in the sky had taken flight.
26 I looked and the fertile land was a desert;
All its towns were in ruins
Before the Lord,
Before his fury.
27 The Lord proclaims:
The whole earth will become a desolation,
But I will not destroy it completely.
28 Therefore, the earth will grieve
And the heavens grow dark

And still a 3rd reading form the psalms says;
Psalm 19
For the music leader. A psalm of David.

19 Heaven is declaring God’s glory;
The sky is proclaiming his handiwork.
2 One day gushes the news to the next,
And one night informs another what needs to be known.
3 Of course, there’s no speech, no words—
Their voices can’t be heard—
4 but their sound[a] extends throughout the world;
Their words reach the ends of the earth.
God has made a tent in heaven for the sun.
5 The sun is like a groom
Coming out of his honeymoon suite;
Like a warrior, it thrills at running its course.
6 It rises in one end of the sky;
Its circuit is complete at the other.
Nothing escapes its heat.

There is a theme here which is the voice of creation, or more specifically the way which the sky not only announces and celebrates God’s presence, but also sympathizes with Creation when it suffers.

Have you ever watched the skies when a storm was brewing, black clouds rolling? In like wall after wall of waves? Have you ever had a sense of God’s presence in?

The storm or God’s voice in the thunder as many ancient peoples did? (Note
Psalm 29!) Have you ever sensed that eerie feeling that comes during an eclipse? When all the animals are spooked?

Why is the sky so important to us? Our moods seem to change with the weather—When the sun shines we are likely to be happier than when darkness covers the sky. Why? What does the sky mean to us? Is our faith influenced by the sky or related to The sky in some way?

It is interesting to note that in general when the Old Testament refers to heavens the original Hebrew could be translated as sky or skies, and really that often works better, for me anyway for then the air around us, above us and beyond us. All of this space is where God dwells. God is living, according to the Old Testament, here between us.

We take God in…This is the air I breathe. We exhale God…This is the air I breathe. We harm and foul God with pollutants form cigarette smoke to exhaust from Coal mines and power plants. We made the Earth a member of our congregation and yet we walk in God daily.

In Jeremiahs vision he sees an enemy about to destroy all that God has created. As a matter of fact the season of creation author describes it this way;
“The Disaster he sees coming is so destructive he depicts the event as if it were a reversal of the original acts of creation. To understand this vision we need to return to the events of Genesis One.

Consider the following:
Compare v. 23 with Gen. 1.1: Return to pre-creation – all is ‘waste and void’
Compare v. 23 with Day One: No light in the sky
Compare v. 25 with Day Five: No birds in the sky
Compare v. 26 with Day Three: No vegetation comes from the land/Earth
Jeremiah’s vision turns the whole of the original creation process upside down. This Portrait, moreover, is more than a metaphor.”

If we look around us we can see this destruction happening around us every day. Fires are wiping out acres of vegetation. Drought is devastating our state. In other parts floods and mudslides are wiping out villages where glaciers are disappearing, and ocean tides are rising. Jeremiah ends his vision by predicting the earth will mourn the sky will turn black.

I have seen the sky turn black and the sun disappear due to the big fires in Oakland. I have seen the sky turn from a haze to a dark orange to fill with soot due to nearby fires. Jeremiah has laments where he speaks further of the earth mourning and the land crying aloud to God. I believe in many cases this is happening today. The land is crying out and some are listening.

The author of the Seasons of creation sky Sunday bible study tells us; “We have created a hole in the ozone layer. By excessive use of various sprays and chemicals we have released chlorofluorocarbon molecules into the atmosphere. In the stratosphere chlorine atoms escape from these molecules and attack the ozone molecules. The resulting ‘hole’ first appeared over the South Pole, but the ozone layer is thinning over other continents. Because of this thinning, UV rays from the sun have now increased and so have skin cancer rates. (though , due to changes we have made,, in a study released this summer if we stay the path the ozone may heal by 2070)

There are many ways in which we have polluted our skies. The combustion of fossil fuels in factories and cars produces a host of noxious materials that fill our skies. One of the common effects is smog. Air pollution is no longer a crisis we can avoid.”

I must say we are getting better but our dependency on fossil fuels is still way too high. We are still in the very early stages of switching from more hybrid and fuel cell cars but I believe we are getting there. We, as you know, have most of our electricity generated from the sun.

People have shrugged at solar energy claiming it is a flash in the pan or not viable. But I still wonder what would happen if we required every new structure to have solar panels, or at least every government building. “In full sun, you can safely assume about 100 watts of solar energy per square foot. If you assume 12 hours of sun per day, this equates to 438,000 watt-hours per square foot per year. Based on 27,878,400 square feet per square mile, sunlight bestows a whopping 12.2 trillion watt-hours per square mile per year.” We have yet to begin to access all the energy around us.

Of course, the biggest problem with this is someone will lose money. Someone else will make money. The energy companies, the way many stand, are losing money as solar becomes more popular. The gas companies are losing money as responsible organizations and people are divesting form them. They try to block advances that will better our environment at every turn. It really is a shame. Yet, in spite of all that, the LAPD announced today they have just bought 137 electric cars!
Finally the author I have been sharing with you form seasons of creation goes on to remind us Many of us have been conditioned to think that only humans communicate the mysteries of God. We do not expect other parts of creation to have a voice like that of humans. Butterflies do not talk. Trees do not sing the way we do. Skies do not communicate.

Psalm 19 indicates just the opposite. Many Psalms, like Ps. 148, celebrate the way trees sing, fields rejoice and the rest of creation praises God. This Psalmist invites all creation—including sea monsters and storms—to praise the Creator!

Sometimes we think this kind of talk is but poetic language, giving human voice to non-human reality. Psalm 19 suggests that the voice of creation is more than a poetic way of praising God. All creation is here communicating about—and with—the Creator.

In this Psalm the sky proclaims good news in its own way, not a human way. The sky is the mediator of God’s word. The sky announces two things—the vibrant presence of God and the creative work of God.

Unfortunately over the city of angels the sky often mourns and warns of the troubled air. The sky becomes distressful for those with conditions and young people on certain days as the particle count is just unsafe. We must listen to God in heaven, God around us, God in us, between us and remember. This is the air I breathe. This is the air we breathe. Amen.

Third Rock from the Sun: A Living Gift (Genesis 1:1-28)

I start this four week Season of Creation when as we explore themes on God’s Creation. We insert this into our church calendar of ordinary time and will end on Sunday October 4th with the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi and the blessing of animals. Today we will celebrate the Planet Earth.

James Lovelock, a NASA scientist, proposed the Gaia hypothesis, a compelling new way of understanding the Earth. It argues that we are far more than just the “Third Rock from the Sun,” situated precariously between freezing and burning up. His theory asserts that living organisms and their inorganic surroundings have evolved together as a single living system that greatly affects the chemistry and conditions of Earth’s surface. Lovelock proposes that living and non-living parts of the Earth form an interacting and complex system and that the Earth could be considered as single whole organism. He takes the name for Earth from the Greek goddess of the Earth, Gaia.

Earth’s living system appears to keep conditions on our planet just right for life to persist! Many other scientists are skeptical of Lovelock’s Gaia theory and dismiss it as religion, but many environmentalists take the Gaia hypothesis seriously, for his model appears ecologically sound because he sees that every Earth process and life are intimately interconnected. Over the years, Lovelock has written a number of books, making conflicting claims on the rates of climate change.

For Lovelock, Gaia, the Earth, is a single living system. Earth is alive in some sense, and we are part of the Earth. Ecologists favor Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis because it has the individual interrelated with larger bio-systems and, in turn, related to even greater biosphere, the Earth. The Gaia theory provides a metaphorical model or a deeper ecological understanding what is happening to the Earth from the perspective of biodiversity and bio-systems. There is an interaction between inanimate processes with animate aspects of nature. And they are mutually interdependent producing a stable climate and environment for life to flourish.

The Earth is viewed as life-forming and life-sustaining system, and humanity is dependent upon this complex system of processes and animate life. What is meant by inanimate process is such elements as weather systems of the Earth, the ocean currents, the atmosphere, soil, water, mountains, and sky.

Some evangelical Christians are uncomfortable with the Gaia hypothesis and quickly charge it as form of “scientific paganism.” That indicates how far some Christians are scared of environmentalists. They are pagans, worshiping the Earth as a god. But the sad fact is that these Christians have created an apartheid with nature and the Earth. And this is a major deficit in their spirituality when an incarnate God directs our attention to what God loves. I often wonder how these Christians can so often quote John 3:16: For God so loved the world that “God sent God’s only begotten child…” God loves and values all creatures, human and other life, and the Earth herself.

Just because we envision the Earth as a living entity, we do not comprehend the Earth as divine. It mediates God’s presence, and we can discover God within nature. The Earth, all of its processes, and bio-diversity can be sacramental means for connecting to God. I have claimed consistently that God incarnates Godself in human flesh, and that means God is communicated in and through the planet Earth. The words from the Book of Job ring so true me,

But ask the animals, and they will teach you, the birds of the air, and they will tell you, ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you, and the fish of the sea, will declare to you. (Job 12:7-8)

We experience God in and through all of nature and the Earth.
Whether the Gaia theory is hypothesis, science, or metaphor, it gives us, nonetheless, a model to comprehend the processes of the Earth and how they impact our environment, ourselves, and other life. It points out that there is one Earth in which all life originates from her processes and in which all life is interdependent. All life, including ourselves, is interconnected with each other and the planet Earth. Earth is our home and mother.

A second point, the Gaia theory insists that they we belong to a larger whole. It becomes clear that our lives are dependent upon what we do to the Earth. The poet and former President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel writes,

What could change the direction today’s civilization? It is my deep conviction that the only option is a change in spirit, in the sphere of human conscience.… We must develop a new understanding of the true purpose of our existence on this Earth. Only by making such a fundamental shift will we be able to create new models of behavior and a new set of values for the planet.

Havel calls for a fundamental shift in our relationship, it is a conversion from the way we view and relate to Earth and other life.

Rachel Carson, one of my heroines–a great ecologist and fighter for the environment and life– described the ancient world of the Eastern Atlantic shore as “the intricate fabric of life by which one creature is linked with another, and ach with its surroundings.” Carson witnessed such a marvelous vision of the interconnections lie within the Earth. She was a great spiritual prophet. Listen to her words: “But I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the world around us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”

Spirituality begins in wonder as we become attentive to the complex processes of the Earth: the winds, weather, mountains and trees, the oceans, so much more. The gift of the Earth is also the gift of God. Some Christian ecologists consider the Earth as “God’s House.” We are living in God’s House.

But humanity is trashing God’s House. Some ecologists are saying, because of our reckless behaviors to the Earth, we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction. 30% of other life species may become extinct by 2050. They point to the human assault on the Earth and other life, and they point to HIPPO, anagram for: Habitat destruction, Invasive species, Pollution, over Population, Overconsumption of resources. (Dyck and Ehrman) We recklessly pursue these actions without much restraint of government regulation.

When humanity separates itself from nature spiritually, we lose our capacity for wonder and being part of a larger biotic community. Our connection to the Earth expands our spiritual awareness of our connectedness to the community of life; it fosters listening, interrelatedness, and compassion. When we lose our sense of interrelatedness with nature and life, we make ourselves lords of the Earth. We harm the Earth without compassion and care for God’s creation. The prophet Jeremiah describes what happens when we separate ourselves from the Earth:

I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void, and to the heavens, and they had no light. I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro. I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled, I looked, and lo, the fruitful

land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins (Jer. 4:23-26)
This seems to be a prophetic warning of coming devastation of climate change, perhaps the sixth massive extinction.

The Gaia theory is not dissimilar to what we have done to comprehend the Earth as a whole, a living organism, and we made the living Earth, a member of our congregation. Why make the Earth a member of the Valley Church? It keeps our awareness how we are part of the web of life of the Earth. It encourages to live differently with the Earth. We see the Earth as intimately interwoven in our lives and our church. We cannot love God if we ignore our neighbor and fellow congregant the Earth. We owe the same care and pastoral attentiveness to a congregant who is suffering, oppressed, and vulnerable.

Here is a description by the by the African American pastor and human rights activist in the 20th century—Howard Thurman,

The earth beneath my feet is the great womb of which the life upon which my body depends comes in utter abundance. There is at work in the soil a mystery by which the death of one seed is reborn a thousand fold in newness in life… (It) is order, and more than order—there is brooding tenderness out of which all comes. In the contemplation of the earth I am surrounded by the love of God.

For Thurman, Earth is place we discover God’s tenderness and love as we connect t the earthiness of bodies and become re-connected to the Earth. Let me remind you that in Genesis, the poet writes “Then YHWH formed an earth creature from clods of the soil and breathed into its nostrils the breadth of the life, and the earthling became a living being.” We are metaphorically born from the Earth, and there is as Thurman so beautifully describes as a “brooding tenderness” from all life comes. As we contemplate the Earth, we are “surrounded by the love of God.”
The Earth is full of creatures, and it is important to remind ourselves that other life forms are our siblings. As I said earlier, we cannot claim to love God and ignore God’s Earth. As humans we do not own the resources of the Earth, we ideally share them responsibly and sustainably.

There is an image that I like described by Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff. Let me read part of his Advent meditation:

Each human being is a homo viator, a walker through the paths of life. As Argentinean Native poet and singer Atahualpa Yupanqui says: “the human being is the Earth who walks.” We do not receive our existence ready-made. We must build it. And to that end, we must open the path, starting with and going beyond the paths that preceded ours, and have already been walked. Even so, our personal path is never completely given. It must be built with creativity and without fear. As the Spanish poet Antonio Machado says: “walker, there is no path; the path is made by walking.”

The poet Atahualpa Yupanqui describes us as the human being as the Earth walking. It connects to our origins as an earthling, from the soil of the Earth, and we are given life by God’s breadth of life. As the Earth walking, we have responsibilities to the Earth and the community of life.

Boff claims our real nature born from the earth as the Earth Walking enlarges our vision of the Earth and all life. It moves beyond our human tendency towards individualism, replacing it with a new vision that we live on the Earth interrelated and interrelated to a bio-diverse world and interrelated to God triune community of love. We recognize our survival and the survival of species are dependent on living responsibly and with ecological care for the entire world.
Boff’s description of us the Earth Walking recognizes that we humans are not own. We are so interconnected to Earth in our bodies and our interconnectedness to other life and the Earth. Nothing is alone, everything is part of interconnected community. Humanity apartheid from this interconnected community leads to violence, disrespect, and reckless polices of exploitation.
Through prayer we discover our compassion is rooted in the heart of God, and it becomes rooted simultaneously in meditating on the presence of God in the world. Where do we find the presence of God? It is within us and surrounds us: in our brothers and sisters and all other life, and even with the Earth. Prayer ultimately leads us to make connections with God and life. We realize that the mystery how much our incarnate God loves the Earth.
The famous astronomer Carl Sagan and Nobel Laureate in physics, Hans Bethe, wrote together to religious leaders in the 1990s:
As scientists, many of us have had profound experiences of awe and reverence before the universe. We understand what is sacred is more likely to be treated with care and respect. Our planetary home should be so treated. Efforts to safeguard and cherish the environment need to be infused with a sense of the sacred.
Scientists felt the need to remind religious folks around the sacredness of the Earth and care and reverence for the universe. We had separated ourselves into an apartheid relationship with the Earth community.

Remember: “God so loved the Earth that God sent God’s only begotten Child…”

Eco-Theology Powerpoint

Educational resource in developing basic eco-theologies for Christian communities. It was part of training program for developing an Environmental Justice Team in congregations and in UCC Conferences.

Eco-theology Powerpoint

Eco-Actions: Resources for Building an Earth-centered Church

 

 

Easter is the Source of Our Green Faith, John 20:1-18

It is amazing how many Christians fail to see Easter as the greening event par excellence in biblical history. Even the Green Bible that has each sections of the Hebrew and Christian marked in green for environmental issues, but it does not mark out today’s gospel in green. Why do Christians miss the obvious, for me at least, dimension of ecological spirituality and themes in the resurrection story of Magdalene discovering the risen Christ in the garden?

Maybe it is my Catholic heritage that opens my eyes to environmental significance of the story. In Catholic Easter vigil, the paschal candle is dipped into the baptismal waters, signifying ancient symbolism of fertility and new life. For Christians, symbols of fertility and rebirth aptly signify the risen Christ, the new life of Easter. Christ is born to new life as we all hope and dream for ourselves.

There are so many clues that point to themes around earth, life, gardens, risen from the tomb, the dead cross and the green garden. The resurrection garden stands in contrast to the Garden of Gethsemane and even the Garden of Eden. It symbolizes the new life that God intended for us from the beginning.
If your green imagination is challenged, think about C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe of the Chronicles of Narnia. The long winter of the Witch’s reign is broken under the warmth of Christ’s springtime. The springtime here signifies new life, new growth, and the restoration of nature by the death and resurrection of the Aslan/Christ figure. Seeds sprout, fruit trees blossom with colors, lilies and flowers in bloom, birds chirping and life filled with hope. All these herald life; they point to God as creator and Spirit. It is time of birth and renewal.
Unlike many Christians who continually throw the Earth into God’s trash bin for a heavenly salvation for themselves alone, I see glimpses of hope in Easter: so marvelously inclusive and extravagant.

And let me tell you that many folks who fight for the Earth and all life are either there with Jesus on the cross Good Friday or with Jesus’ corpse in the tomb. They are so aware of the polluted rivers, the toxic waste dumps that harm us and other life, the extinction of millions of plant and animal species, the radioactive spills into the Pacific Ocean, the thousands of coal plants pumping unceasing carbon and toxic pollution into the air to warm our climate. I can’t help associating the unbreathable atmosphere in Beijing where millions of people have to wear masks against the heavily polluted atmosphere with the experience the asphyxiation that Jesus did on the cross. Humans tortured Christ and other humans through asphyxiation. Or Jesus being slaughtered at the time of thousands lambs for Passover celebrations. He suffered as animals suffered merciless killings or the extinctions of species. Global warming is and its ravages will continue to be a reality that we and our descendants have to live with for generations.

It is hard to maintain hope when you stand before the cross of the crucified Jesus and not think that the Roman Empire and religious fundamentalists have won; or lay in the dark tomb with Jesus’ corpse, realizing the body has been scarred and remains lifeless. This is where many environmental activists are today. They have been shocked out of hope by human degradation of the Earth and all life on the planet. Many mourn the passion of the Earth. Our mission given to us this is Easter to be people of hope and to share that hope with those Earth caregivers who still at the foot of the cross and mourn in the tomb. It is easy to fall into such thinking for myself when I look at the on-going news reports of the growing climate change and unusual severe weather events.

The tomb represents our groundedness with the Earth. It is the primal matrix of the soil from which we evolved. In Genesis, we were named adamah, earth creature because we came from the soil. We were bound to the soil. Dr. Daniel Hillel, a soil physicist, notes that humanity is associated with the soil:

The ancient Hebrew association of man with soil is echoed in the Latin name for man, homo, derived from humus, the stuff of life in the soil. This powerful metaphor suggests an early realization of a profound truth that humanity has since disregarded to its own detriment. Since the words “humility” and “humble” also derive from humus, it is rather ironic that we should have assigned our species so arrogant a name as Homo sapiens sapiens (“wise wise man”). It occurs to me, as I ponder our past and future relation to the earth, that we might consider changing our name to a more modest Homo sapiens curans, with the word curans denoting caring or caretaking, as in “curator.” (“Teach us to care” was T.S. Eliot’s poetic plea.) Of course, we must work to deserve the new name, even as we have not deserved the old one.

Jesus, like of all us, is tethered to the earth, and through our embodiment, we are tethered with Jesus in the tomb when we die. But we know that we join God’s Christ, alive and part of the mystical body of Christ. We know that existed in the biosphere, he breathed oxygen as we do, he ate food as we do, and many other actions we commonly do.

And the resurrection is the promise that all life has a future in God, not just us. God is calling us and all creation to communion with God’s self, in ways for us inconceivable. Yet God communicates that history is not predetermined but an open future.

Easter, then, is God’s victory over it all. The life, death, and resurrection of Christ is the decisive for all of us—the world, all life, the Earth, and the universe. What happens to Christ raised from the tomb will happen to all—transformed into resurrection life. Easter reveals the fullness of the matrix of all life with God; it is the web of grace that links all life, human and other life and the Earth together. That web is God’s Spirit, the Spirit that pulsed new life and energy into the risen Christ.

Creation is all interconnected bodily together through the Spirit. Creation is not just the beginning of the universe, it is the on-going evolution of cosmic and biologically processes, the coming of the incarnate Christ—now dead but risen to the new life intended for all—and the Spirit the navigator subverting all human distortions and destructiveness of life. That last point I hold on for dear life as I engage in Earthcare and fighting for the Earth and all life. It is too easy to become overwhelmed emotionally, loose hope when you see on daily basis human arrogance and human denial, exploiting the Earth recklessly, contaminating the waters and ground water, polluting the atmosphere, raping the mountain tops by harvesting coal, undoing the EPA just trying to protecting human well-being from human created diseases and cancers, greed and short term profit over the expense of all others.

Human violence, self-centeredness and callous disregard for other life, and exploitation of the Earth and the community of life will not be the last word. The crucial issue of God’s incarnation, death and resurrection, reveals the seamless web of interrelationship of all life. At the intersections of this seamless web of interrelated life is God’s incarnated Child. The incarnate risen Christ weaves the web of interdependent life into his body. And the divine community of life and unconditional grace will have the last word. Resurrection, Life, Greenness!
We are all interconnected and interrelated. We are all siblings, human and other life. We are together in the body of Christ. Diarmuid O’Murchu, Irish priest and writer, envisions:

When you weep, we weep When a tree is felled prematurely, an animal in pain because of crazy experimentation, a teenager rebelling authority, a couple at their wit’s end trying to make a relationship work, an African woman burying the last of her seven children because of AIDS, a Peruvian farmer seeing his last piece of land swiped by a transnational corporation, we too feel the pain, the helplessness, the rage the cruel injustice.

What becomes stressed by Easter is that God’s ultimate act of compassion is Christ, his life and death, and then the resurrection. All the efforts of God at creating; incarnating, interrelating with us, all life, and creation; reconciling and sustaining and spiriting us to new birth and new love—all this is the outpouring of God’s unconditional love for all creation. It links us together in solidarity with all others. This the web of grace within we were created and within which Christ’s resurrection strengthens us together with the universe. God became human and materials so that humanity, all life, and the universe would become divine.

God will be victorious over human violence, greed, and selfishness. God will have the last word. I hold onto to this hope with all my faith and commitment though I see such human foolishness and arrogance.

The Resurrection of Christ is also about the transformation of the universe. Jesus’ resurrection is the hope that defies all hopelessness—even the hopelessness of Earth caregivers and activists. God proclaims that the relational matrix of the divine community of life outpouring an unconditional love and invitation to participate in that flow of love. On Easter, God announces radical inclusiveness. Nothing that we imagine as inclusive is inclusive enough for God. There will be no more outcasts: not any human, no other life, nor the Earth herself. Everything falls into God’s matric of interrelating graces. All creation! We now belong to the reign of God’s inclusiveness. God cares, and invites to care for all and to proclaim the hope of a new belong for all. We all belong to God.
God will not abandon creation and all life, but will continue to be presence to creation and all life and weave them continuous into a matrix of interconnected grace.

Christ’s resurrection was a wakeup call to his disciples, birthing a movement of compassion, forgiveness, peace-making, love, non-violence, radical inclusiveness, and extravagant love. It a wakeup call to God’s green grace that flows from the heart of divine love, birth in creation, thriving in evolutionary chaos and organizing life into more complexity, incarnating God’s self, and re-embodying in ourselves and all life, listening to the invitation of love at the end of this journey of all towards God.

Alleluia, God will triumph over all: climate deniers, fundamentalists, human exploiters, politicians committed to undo any efforts to stop climate change. God will be victorious.

Easter Message: Easter: Gardening as Spiritual Practice for Earthcare

for the message with pictures of our church garden: clik on http://www.scncucc.org/voices/2015/03/ucc-conference-church-life/easter-gardening-as-a-spiritual-practice-for-earth-care/

Rev. Dr. Robert Shore-Goss

“…or speak to the earth, and it will teach you.” — Job 12:8

Gardens have been sacred spaces for many religions. For Islam, there are three gardens: the garden of Creation or Eden, the gardens of this world, and the
Paradise garden at the resurrection of the dead. The Buddha was enlightened in a grove under a Bo tree in Bodhgaya, and he preached his first sermon ever in Deer Park. Japanese Zen Gardens have become a familiar landscape in American botanical gardens. The etymology for the ancient Avestan (Persian) word “Paradise” (pairidaēza) means orchard or a hunting park.

The Jesus movement became an urban movement within three years after the death and resurrection of Christ. It forgot its garden and rural roots and when it was propelled into an imperial religion under Constantine, urban Christians stood against pagans (paganus, Latin for rustic or country-dweller). Christians as they expanded throughout Europe during the late Roman period and in the Early Middle Ages cut down the trees of sacred groves of competing indigenous religions. It forgot that Jesus’ burial tomb was in a garden.

I love our church garden, it is surprise in an urban setting with desert landscape and indigenous California plants. I sit in the garden for prayer each day, often with my companion dog Friskie. He loves the garden fragrances and enjoys chasing the birds eating the bird seed. The garden teaches me about abundant life, the language of grace. I share this reflection with you at Easter as a time to re-covenant ourselves as individuals and churches to Earth-care and environmental justice, for me the Earth is one of God’s gardens.

The first truth about gardens is that they are created; they are relational. In Genesis 2, we have the primal myth about God and gardens. It is metaphorical history that speaks about a grace relationship between God gardens, and ourselves. Unlike the first chapter of the priestly account of creation in Genesis 1, where God speaks creation into existence, the Yahwist poet communicates that God didn’t speak the garden into existence but knelt down and fashioned a garden it out of dirt and placed our primal ancestors in the garden to live and care for the garden. It was a graced God’s space, but we alienated ourselves from the garden. This is perhaps more true than myth about contemporary humanity in the last two centuries as we have further disconnected ourselves from nature and gardens. For myself and many of the congregants, our garden is God’s graced space, and it grew of our decision to make the Earth a member of our church and our hope to restore our connection to the Earth. We have a remarkable garden in the urban space of North Hollywood. It is landscaped with flowers and indigenous California plants but also includes vegetables that we harvest and share with church members. Our folks tour the garden before to witness the latest blooms and sit in the garden to talk after service.

Our garden is truly a gift, literally because every plant has been donated by members, by stakeholders using our facility, and even by strangers. Gardens are gifts of natural beauty, with an abundant network of life. Gardens are works of art intended to be enjoyed. We co-live with them and participate in them whether as gardeners or visitors. We have a relationship with a garden whether we cultivate and care for the plants or are a visitor meditating and enjoying the garden.
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I have watched our church gardener for years, tenderly caring for each plant, watering, pruning, planting or transplanting, fertilizing, mulching, or enjoying. It is his spirituality, and he communicates with and listens to each plant. Our gardener is a member of our pastoral team, and he takes seriously that he has a pastoral responsibility to the Earth since we made the Earth a member of our congregation. He listens to the plants in the garden and is attentive to their needs. I commented to him several weeks ago how much his listening skills and compassionate care for congregants have matured with remarkable attentiveness and kindness to church members. I attribute this growth in pastoral skills to his listening and attentiveness to life in the garden. The garden has provided him with a pedagogy of listening and care, transferable also congregants.

The second truth about gardens is that they create a holy place where the sacred and nature come together. I experienced profound truth that God loves gardens and creates gardens. Dorothy Francis Gurney writes, “One is nearer God’s heart in a garden/ Than anywhere else on earth.” Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw also observes, “The best place to seek God is in a garden.” How many of us find now God in our own gardens, church gardens, botanical or urban gardens, or the wilderness gardens of the Earth? I treasure my daily prayer time in our garden, often spent with companion dog.

Early Christians grasped the depth of meaning of the garden scene between the risen Christ and Magdalene. They understood that God is a gardener, for God began the gardening process of creation, and God the Gardener is lost in a kind of revelry or enjoyment on the Sabbath in Genesis. Since the garden is so lovely and so interesting, there is no other place that God wants to be, for God wants to attend to the garden and the gardeners. God’s hands are dirty from garden care fashioning and creating. In the poetry of the book of Genesis, God the Gardener takes clay, breathes into clay, and fashions the first earthling–adamah. Dr. Daniel Hillel, a soil physicist, observes that the feminine Hebrew noun adamah indicates humanity’s origin and humanity’s destiny. In other words, we are tethered to the Earth from beginning of our lives to the end of our days. This is a profound truth of earthly embodiment and foreshadowing our destiny to return to the Earth until we resurrected from Earth tomb as plants arises from the soil.

Of note in Genesis 2, God takes human beings and places them in a garden, and it is paradise because it is the place where humans can walk, talk, and intimately meet God in a graced space, and we can enjoy the beauty of the garden together. Hillel writes,

The ancient Hebrew association of man with soil is echoed in the Latin name for man, homo, derived from humus, the stuff of life in the soil. This powerful metaphor suggests an early realization of a profound truth that humanity has since disregarded to its own detriment. Since the words “humility” and “humble” also derive from humus, it is rather ironic that we should have assigned our species so arrogant a name as Homo sapiens sapiens (“wise wise man”). It occurs to me, as I ponder our past and future relation to the earth, that we might consider changing our name to a more modest Homo sapiens curans, with the word curans denoting caring or caretaking, as in “curator.” (“Teach us to care” was T.S. Eliot’s poetic plea.) Of course, we must work to deserve the new name, even as we have not deserved the old one.

Gardens provide not only a Sabbath delight to God but also to ourselves because they are created space for intimate encounters that have been made fragrant to the smell and pleasurable to our senses. We have two primary relationships to a garden—actually as care-taking or as visitor invited to take care and preserve the garden. God loves and takes delight in gardens whether it is the immense garden that we describe as universe or the smaller Earth garden named Eden. And I understand this mystery as I and others sit in our meditation garden to pray and meet God or meet Christ each other in the garden while we share refreshments and conversations on a Sunday morning.

Czechoslovakian writer and gardener Karel Apek writes the following in his lovely book The Gardener’s Year. He describes a gardener, but I want you this Easter to imagine that he is speaking about God the Gardener.

I will now tell you how to recognize a real gardener. “You must come to see me,” she says; “I will show you my garden.” Then, when you go just to please her, you find her with her rump sticking up somewhere among the perennials. “I will come in a moment,” she shouts to you over her shoulder. “Just wait till I have planted this rose.” “Please don’t worry,” you say kindly to her. After a while she must have planted it; for she gets up, makes your hand dirty, and beaming with hospitality she says: “Come and have a look; it’s a small garden, but —– Wait a moment,” and she bends over a bed to weed some tiny grass. “Come along. I will show you Dianthus musalae; it will open your eyes. Great Scott, I forgot to loosen it here!” she says, and begins to poke in the soil. A quarter of an hour later she straightens up again. “Ah,” she says, “I wanted to show you that bell flower, Campanula Wilsonae. That is the best campanula which —– Wait a moment, I must tie up this delphinium . . .”

In the above description, I enjoy the delightful image of God as a female Gardener, poking, tilling, fussing, watering, fertilizing, and tenderly caring and fussing over her garden with a wonderful hat. As I earlier claimed, gardens are pure gift. We receive them as networks of abundant life, and they are places of life-giving beauty—splashes of color, designs that still our soul, and intoxicating scents that incite enjoyment. They still storms of raging emotions for a few moments, and they center us on beauty of life and the one who has graciously given life. For myself, our garden teaches me about God’s grace, it is a convergence of the scripture of the natural world and our written scripture. It speaks of resurrected life of Easter grace and God’s beauty.

Now Golgotha, the place of the skull, where Jesus was crucified and others were murdered by the Romans, was not far from the garden tomb, where the crucified Jesus was laid to rest. Golgotha was near the garbage or refuse heap of Jerusalem. In reflecting on our garden, I have grown to understand Golgotha as composter, a place of death where God uses the compost of Jesus to raise Jesus up from the garden tomb and bring new life to the Garden of the Earth.

On Easter morning, Mary Magdalene stood weeping outside the empty tomb in the garden, and she found no emotional peace in the garden. She spoke her emotional anguish and grief to one she thought was a worker in the garden. Jesus appears to her in the garden, symbolic of Eden resurrected and restored to a new fullness and the cosmos yet coming to life fully within God. She recognizes the gardener as her Teacher only when he calls her by name.
What Easter morning proclaims is the good news that, out of destruction and death, Jesus rises from the earthen tomb as the new Adam or resurrected adamah from the soil. God the Gardener, who planted a garden in Eden and then raised Jesus to new life in a garden, is still at work creating life and beauty in our world. No wonder at the empty tomb in the garden did the risen Christ appear to Mary Magdalene as the gardener. Her mistaken identification of the risen Jesus as the gardener bears much prophetic truth. Jesus, in fact, is the Gardener who transforms our lives now and finally and becomes at the same time the ultimate Garden where we meet the God of life anew and profoundly.

Magdalene’s inclination is to touch or to cling onto Christ. She reaches out to cling to Jesus, but Jesus tells her that she cannot continue to hold on this way as his resurrection transformation is not completed until his body becomes transformed from one plane of existence into the entire eco-system. The resurrection of Jesus is not only the radical transformation of the crucified Christ but the “green” transformation of all things in God. All things become divinely interconnected through the risen Christ as he described himself to his disciples at the Last Supper as the vine connected to the branches and Abba God is the vine-grower or the gardener. (Jn. 15:1-ff.) This strengthens the irony of Magdalene’s mistaken identity of Jesus as the gardener. The risen Christ now assumes the divine position of being God’s garden and the Gardener at the same time. Ultimately, what gardens and Christ’s resurrection have in common is the gift of abundant life. The sense of gift is the heart of the Easter experience–bringing surprise, abundant life, hope, and emotional peace and tranquility.
Magdalene and the other disciples were called to follow in the steps of the Christ the Gardener. They were invited to participate in the important job of co-creating and co-participating, co-creating, and co-living with the Spirit in giving life to the garden and bringing that garden to the fullness where God intends. As gardeners, Christians co-create gardens to help others find and meet God.

But God’s garden, the Earth, is dying, and human beings are responsible for killing the garden through our impact on climate change. Our reckless greed for fossil fuels and reckless exploitation of the Earth’s resources at the expense of other life has jeopardized God’s garden. One of the contributing causes is humanity’s disconnection with the Earth; we have separate ourselves from the web of life. We are separated from gardens and need to reconnect with gardens as intimate part of faith experience.

The most urgent need of today and the next decades is the transformation of humanity to reconnect intimately with our garden the Earth. Our arrogance has led to a radical disconnection and alienation from the Earth, and we have ravaged, exploited, and damaged the Earth garden and its life. We as Christians need to foster a gardening spirituality that not only connects us with our foundational experience of Easter but overcomes our arrogant separation from nature by learning to reconnect reverently to the web of interrelated life. The key to human immersion is to re-discover the wonder, enchantment, and beauty of God immanent in the natural world. I have witnessed as people fall in love with nature, they will fight for what they cherish and love.

Thomas Berry, a Christian eco-theologian or self-described as a “geologian,” points out that humanity must learn to listen to the language of the Earth. Natural phenomena—plants and other life—have their own language, and the natural world resonates with the voice of the Creator and Gardener. Just as the gardener in my church learned to listen to the voices of each plant and the birds in our church garden and just as I sit attentive in the garden, listen to the voices of the Earth in the garden and pray. I discover the resurrected Gardener who teaches me what Thomas Berry describes as “wonder-filled intimacy” with all life and the planet Earth.

All human resources are required to heal, nurture, cultivate, and restore health to God’s garden. It is the fundamental revelation of Easter that we follow Christ as disciple gardeners. We create gardens and cultivate and care for gardens, for gardens are on a spiritual quest. Human beings have sought the Garden of Eden as place where God and humans once co-lived. But God has promised us something greater—what God intended with the garden of the universe and the Garden of Eden—is to create them into a cosmic resurrection garden—where we walk once again with intimacy God in the garden.

We in the United Church of Christ are called to be healers of the wounds of the Earth—making amends for our sins of consumptive greed and for placing our heads in the sands. It starts with a personal conversation and mistaken identity that began on Easter Sunday when Christ appeared to Magdalene in the Garden and invited us to participate in God’s mission of gardening the Earth. Easter is about gardening the Earth and nurturing life on the Earth for God. One of my favorite quotes that I will conclude my Easter Garden reflection:
When crated the earth, God “made room” for us all and in so doing showed us the heart of divine life, indeed all life, is the generous and gracious gesture. As we Garden, that is, as we weed out the non-nurturing elements within us and train our habits to be more life promoting, we participate in the divine life and learn to see and feel the creation as God sees and feels it.

Help commit yourself and your church this Easter to become gardeners of the Earth for Christ the Gardener and re-covenant your congregation and yourselves with the risen Christ and the garden of the Earth. You can do so by forming an Environmental Justice team in your congregation, join or create Environmental Team in your Association and/or Conference, and definitely connect yourself and your community to the Environmental Ministries of the United Church of Christ. Explore the denominational Environmental Ministries website. (http://www.ucc.org/search_results?q=environmental+justice) Take a virtual tour that is explore the site and its multiple levels of resources, play with the site, led the Spirit and your curiosity direct yourself. I did and that, and the Holy Spirit brought me into the UCC by the wonderful resources and documents that I discovered as a gardener of the Earth. Make sure your conference website and church website has listed environmental justice resources and interconnections. Let the Spirit help you discover as Mary Magdalene did that Easter is the celebration of God’s Garden and risen Christ as the Gardener.

Listening to the Cries of the Earth and the Cries of the Poor (Climate Change Sunday)

The scriptures, both the Jewish and the Christian, present God’s concern for the poor (anawim). God has always been partial to the poor, the vulnerable, and the oppressed. To practice care for the poor means that we identify with the poor, listen to their struggles to survive and the tragedies that they experience. In the segment “Crimes Against Nature” from the video series, Renewal, we witness how mountain tops are wastefully harvested through explosions, toxic chemicals polluting the water table and streams harming humans and other life. I am deeply touched by the testimony of the mother who bathes her child in water laced with arsenic and other toxins. We hear the cries of the land as the coal companies explode the mountain tops and the cries of animal and human life. Here the poor are the cries of the Earth community and all life, human and non-human. They are the poor, and they will be the ones to most suffer the climate changes of the future. The poor always suffer while the wealthy have means to escape the ravages. God’s option for the poor includes the Earth and all life that inhabits the Earth. Albert Schweitzer remarked, “Ethics means unlimited responsibility for everything existing and alive.”

I want to address how we as Earth-centered Christians might approach the scripture and try to listen to voices of the Earth in the Bible and how Jesus gives an example how we relate to the cries of the Earth and the poor.

The prophet Hosea utters these words some 2600 years ago, but they could today over what humans are doing to the land.

Hear the words of the Lord, O people of Israel, for the Lord has a case against the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness and loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land. Swearing, lying, murder and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the land mourns, and who live in it languish, together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea. (Hosea 4:1-3)

This reading could be easily applied to human recklessness in mountain top harvesting of coal, destroying the environment, harming animal life and human beings alike for greed of energy. Here in Hosea we hear the land, the Earth voicing its indictment against humanity.

Humans are created in God’s image so they can exercise dominion of the earth. They ordered to subdue and dominate the Earth in Genesis 1. And this has become a human principle in dominating the Earth, exploiting greedily its resources, without any constraint or thought of future generations. Sallie McFague has three principles for human beings living with the Earth: Take your share (of resources), Clean up after yourself, and Keep the house (Earth) in repair for future occupants. These are good principles to remember as we live out vocation as “Green” or Earth-centered Christians.

First, Hosea states, ‘there is no faithfulness and loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land.” Because of the command to subdue and dominate in the account of Genesis, humanity has often attempted to dominate, exploit recklessly, and without any thought than short term profitability and greed. But what about life impacted? What about the future for later generations? Hosea’s indictment that “no knowledge of God in the land” points to the secular devaluation of the Earth and other life to serve its own purpose. It has forgotten the wisdom that our ancestors and native people have long known…
We have lost our ability to listen to the voices of the land, the plants and trees, and animals and the voices of the sea. We ignore the agonized cries of all those from the Earth-community. There is a profound selfishness that ignores the poor and homeless and blame them for their plight.

We listen to the voice of the Earth here and other places in scripture. There are six “green” or creation-centered principles that we need to be aware of when we read the Bible according to biblical scholar Norman Habel who has shepherded the Earth Bible Project:

1) The universe, the Earth and all its components have intrinsic worth. All creation is loved by God.
2) The Earth is a community of interconnected living things that are mutually dependent on each other for life and survival.
3) The Earth is a subject capable of raising its voice in celebration and against injustice.
4) The universe, Earth and its components are a part of dynamic cosmic design within which each piece has a place to play in the overall goal of that design.
5) Earth is a balanced and divine domain where responsible custodians can function as partners with, rather than rulers over Earth, to sustain its balance and a diverse Earth community.
6) Earth and its components not only suffer from human injustice but actively resist them in the struggle for justice. Introducing Ecological Hermeneutics

These Earth-centered principles are used by Jewish and Christian interpreters of the Bible. Such readings shift a human-centric reading of scripture and provides a more inclusive creation-centered perspective, that is, a perspective from God.
I read the first reading from Hosea 4:1-3 as the cries and mourning of the Earth and the prophet Hosea hears those cries. It points to our need to carefully hear the cries of the Earth community today and give them voice to those unable to listen to the Earth.

Hosea observes, that the land mourns over those who live in it languish. Rather the Earth mourns the subversion of God’s created order depicted poetically in the creation account in Genesis. This time creation is reversed, from humanity to wild animals, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea. Israel. Now modern humanity, has upset the balance of God’s created order. So the Earth indicts humanity and mourns the degradation resulting from human destruction. Humanity has the destructive power and now the capability because our technology and industrial waste released into the atmosphere, into landfills, and into the oceans, we can undo the evolved created order of the evolution of a balanced Earth capable to support diverse life.

In Genesis 2, God gives humanity the mission to serve. God cares for all creation. How do we move from a human-centric perspective of acting towards the Earth to identify with the Earth community as siblings and seek the voices of the Earth community who are our sibling relatives?

There are several places in the scriptures to look for answer to my question. I want to look at Jesus an example. Certainly, Jesus was not aware of the environmental issues of today’s climate change, environmental degradation, and the extinction of species during his life. However, he had first-hand experience of domination by the Roman Empire and its colonization of Galilee and Judea. He witnessed the impact of conquest, spiraling indebtedness of peasants and their displacement from their farmlands, religious fundamentalism, and burdensome Roman and religious taxation, and so. Given the choice between domination and service, we see in the gospels that Jesus chose service. Here is his words in Mark 10:42-45)

You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not among you: but whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave to all. For the Child of Humanity came not to be served but to serve and give his life as ransom for many.

Jesus’ commitment to service and compassionate care for the poor can be extended to the Earth and all life. Biblical scholar Norman Habel writes,

The way of Jesus –serving rather than dominating—clearly stands in tension with the mandate to dominate in Genesis 1. I would go so far as to say that the way of Jesus supersedes the mandate to dominate. (Habel, An Inconvenient Text)

The principle of Jesus is service as a slave. Jesus is freely choosing service as a slave, the lowest and humblest position in his society. His introduction of his disciples and his audience into the new ways of God’s reign is that of serving, not being served. Serving has the built-in notion of listening and caring for the needs of the “other.” Jesus chooses to serve rather than the path of domination and ruling.

He models for us in the 21st century how we might care for the Earth and its community of interrelated life. As the incarnation of God, Jesus models the most profound image of God. He defines God as who is other-centered in love and compassionate care.

I want to end with a story:

The Maori of New Zealand reenact the arrival of their ancestors from across the ocean more than a thousand years ago. They are confronted by four fierce guardians of the volcano, the ocean, the forest, and the wind. As they come unto the land, they hear the cry of mother Earth: will you be guardians of my land? Their call echoes the cry of the Earth in Genesis 2. Will you be my guardians? (Habel)

Indigenous peoples like the Maori are more in tune with listening to the voices of the Earth—the plants, the animals, ocean, forest, volcano, and wind. Indigenous peoples factor in their ability to co-live with the Earth; they focus their attentiveness on living with and maintaining the existence of other beings because other beings are our siblings and have the right to exist.

Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff has spoken for the indigenous peoples of Brazil. He tells us modern folks we need to recover a shamanic consciousness:

Inside each of us lies the shaman dimension. That shaman energy causes us to stand speechless in the face of the immensity of the sea, to sense the eyes of another person, to be entranced on seeing a newborn child. We need to liberate the shaman dimension within us, so as to enter into harmony with all around us, and to feel at peace.

Will you follow Christ and use his principle of service to care for the Earth? Will you commit yourselves to be guardians of the Earth community this climate Sunday?

Join Me in the following Earth Covenant:

We, the MCC / United Church of Christ in the Valley, proclaim our love for God’s Creation and profess our belief that the Earth and all life are an interconnected part of the sacred Web of Life. We acknowledge we too are part of the Web of Life.

We covenant together to commit ourselves as a church and individuals in the great work of healing, preservation and justice as we strive to reduce our individual and collective negative impact on the environment and to repair the damage that has been done to God’s Earth. In worship and church life we will express our appreciation and give praise for the Earth and display a reverence for the Earth community of life. We commit ourselves to principles of taking only what we need, cleaning up our damage to Earth we do, and keeping the Earth in repair for the future.

We make this covenant in the hope and faith that through our Earth care we will be able to help improve and sustain the health of the land, air and water for the benefit of all current and future inhabitants of this Planet. Amen!

Christ and the Land (Mt.12:38-42) (Season of Creation)

Let me explain what I mean by land. Earth is old English word for soil, dirt, ground, dry land, and it later comes to mean district and finally referring to the whole planet. I am speaking about Christ’s relationship on all these levels of land, dirt, ground, and planet.

Today’s reading speaks symbolically of Jesus in the tomb of the Earth by speaking symbolically of Jonah in the stomach of a whale. God gives signs that those faithful who are open will recognize them even though even if this evil generation does not understand them or even distorts them. Jesus says the only sign that will be given this generation is the sign of Jonah, symbolically pointing to the resurrection of Jesus from the tomb of the Earth. Even though many Jews will not accept the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, there will be Christians who do not accept this as a sign and they wage war on the land and the Earth. They willfully ignore the sign of Jonah.

I want to give you some examples: There is a right wing Christian war on the land that supports corporate greed and reckless exploitation of the earth. Conservative Christians see enchantment of the world as a dangerous threat to their faith and their political and economic doctrines. They attack any reverence of Mother Earth as demonic.

Pat Robertson has stated, “What happens in the wilderness, may be important to nature and the natural processes of earth, but is certainly not holy.” He goes on to say, “God gave man sweeping and total mandate of dominion over the planet and everything in it.” For Robertson, environmental care and saving the earth is the work of the antichrist

Fortify your stomachs: Conservative Ann Coulter remarked, “God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

The land is poisoned by pesticides and radiation. We poison, in turn, the water tables and streams and rivers and oceans. Pesticides poison the land, residues in plants, soil, and water tables—all creating greater production of crops in large corporate agribusiness farms. In Silent Spring years ago, Rachel Carson has shown how insecticides applied to crops not only poisoned and killed insects, but that there were other unintended victims, the birds who ate the insects and those animals that ate the birds. She saw this as symptom of sick society driven to dominate and conquer nature. Carson, prophetically wrote, “What is important is the relation of (humanity) to all life.”

We recklessly blow up mountain tops in Appalachia to get at the coal. And we upset environmental balance of the mountain and forest, with poisonous chemicals of arsenic and mercury into the water tables and streams, affecting animal life and human beings alike. People bathe in poisoned waters, and they have to import bottle water for drinking and cooking. We have not respected the environment, nor have we restored the mountain environments with trees and vegetation. The mountains remain as open wounds and scars of human greed for energy and reckless actions to mine coal. But to me, they are also scars on the body of Christ.

We use a type of hydraulic fracking, called horizontal fracking, to secure oil and natural gas in many states. Horizontal fracking is more destructive of the strata of the subterranean strata than vertical fracking, drives water and chemicals into the land to create splitting of the earth. It weakens the plates, making the land susceptible to greater numbers of earthquakes. States such as Ohio, Oklahoma, and eastern Pennsylvania have seen an upsurge these horizontal fracking methods expand across the country contaminate the water table with methane and other chemicals that are harmful to life. They have wanted to start horizontal hydraulic fracking in LA in earthquake zones and poison the water table when water has become precious to us in a time of drought. The war on the land is justified in the religious claims of human dominion over the earth and everything. Here religious claims justify economic exploitation and rape of the earth.

This harm to sacred land bring cries like the wounding of a mother. Reckless exploitation of resources, contaminating water and harming animal life make the land sick; and its sickness is contagious for those who are poor and close to the land. Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian theologian, points how the cries of the Earth and the cries of the poor are so intertwined. Mountain harvesting, horizontal hydraulic fracking, pollution with chemicals and unhealthy toxins are not found Beverly Hills or any location where the rich live. It happens where the poor reside. The cries of the land are mingled with the cries of the poor before God.

We sang the Christian hymn this morning, “We are standing on holy ground.”

Let me make the case that we Christians need to re-enchant the land and the Earth with a sense of sacredness. I am reminded of the scene of the burning bush, in which God tells Moses: “put off your shoes from off your feet, for the place where on you stand is holy ground” (Exod. 3.5). In India and Asia countries, you enter a temple or even a church by taking of your shoes. It indicates the recognition that this holy ground. In taking our shoes off and standing on the ground, we experience a sense of holiness as Moses did. You might try this occasionally to ground yourself and connect with the Earth. All the land is holy in the Bible.

In 1944, Howard Thurman, a black pastor and civil rights activist, wrote:

The Earth beneath my feet is the great womb out of which life which upon my body depends comes in utter abundance. There Is at work in the soil a mystery by which the death of one seed is reborn a thousandfold in the newness of life…(I)t is order, and more than order—there is a brooding, tenderness out of which it all comes. In the contemplation of the earth, I know that I am surrounded by the love of God.

Thurman discovers God’s presence around him in the land, and in his meditation on the earth, he experiences the love of God.

In Genesis, it says poetically that we are made from the earth, the soil. This indicates that humanity is intimately connected to the soil and the land. The word from what we were made is the name Adam comes from the Hebrew “adamah”—meaning earth or dirt creature, if you choose “earthling.” Adamah is made from the clods of dirt and soil, God breathes God’s own spirit into the human being, God formed the earthling from the clods of clay and soil, breathed into its nostrils, and the earthling became a living being. Genesis is correct in showing humanity poetically connected to the soil and the land. By tilling the soil, the adamah sustained himself and makes the soil become productive. Our bodies are connected to the soil, we feed from the soil and plants grown from the soil.

Now the story in Genesis tells us that God plants a garden, and God forms plants and animals also from the earth. They share the essential earth nature as the adamah. This links humanity to plant and animal life. God places the human being in the garden. Humanity is assigned the vocation of taking care of the soil and land, tilling, pruning, and caring for the garden. God places the first human beings in a garden. Our vocation is to follow God in becoming gardeners of the Earth.

But let’s shift to the Christian scriptures: Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (Jn 12:24) He speaks metaphorically of his death as a seed placed in the tomb of the earth. Jesus’ body is laid in the heart of Earth in death. Jesus too is connected with the ground. He is three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. God’s Spirit fashions a new Earth body for Jesus and resurrects him to life, and Paul describes Jesus as the first born from the dead, the new Adam. He is the new earthling in God’s future world of promise and hope. He too stresses our vocation to gardening, for he is resurrected in a garden and mistaken as the gardener by Mary Magdalene.

I want to end with the voices calling to understand how we stand on holy ground:

The first is Hildegaard of Bingen, an abbess and green saint in the twelfth century, who wrote a lot about nature. In particular, listen to her poem to honor the Earth.

Glance at the sun/ See the moon and Stars. Gaze at the beauty of Earth Greenings,/ Now, think,/ What Delight/ God gives to humankind/ With all these things…/ The earth…is mother of all…./ The earth should not be injured,/ the earth should not be destroyed.

Hildegaard speaks of the greening activity of God in creating the world, incarnating in the world as a green fruitfulness, and through the continuous greening power of the Spirit. The greening activity of God within the world made the world, the land, and fertility of life sacred to her.

In 1991, thirty two Nobel laureates and eminent scientists wrote “An Open Letter to the Religious Communities.”

Many of us have had profound experiences of awe and reverence before the universe. We recognize that what is regarded as sacred is most likely to be treated with respect. Efforts to safeguard planetary environmental need to be infused with a vision of the sacred and as a universal priority.

They see environmental restoration as a spiritual practice and universal priority for continued interrelationship with the Earth. I find it ironic how scientists remind peoples of faith the need to see the sacred enchantment of the Earth. It is our scriptures pointing to our need for earth care.

The final voice is Sallie McFague, a feminist eco-theologian. She argues that Earth is sacred, it carries the sacramental presence of God. In fact, she invites us to understand the Earth as not only the matrix of life, the mother who creates the web of life, but as God’s body and household. She argues that Earth cannot be excluded from our spiritualities and theologies. “Everything is interrelated to everything else.” We Christians need to see ourselves as part of the web of life, an incredibly vast, complex, subtle, beautiful web that amazes us and can call forth our concern for ourselves, a reverence for life, and see the Earth as the sacramental presence of God.

McFague understands the Earth as house, God’s body that we live on and are entrusted by God to live responsibly upon. She gives us three principles or household rules to live on the Earth.
 * Take your share only. Do not exceed the use of the Earth’s resources.

*Clean up after yourself. If you make a mess, clean up your mess. It is the      responsible action to do.
 *Keep the house in repair for future occupants. Use responsibly so others after us can use the Earth. We are interconnected with the future occupants.

She argues for respect to recover a sense of the sacredness of the land.
We hear scriptural voices, the ancestral voice of Hildegaard, Noble laureates and scientists asking Christian leaders to recover a vision of the sacredness of the Earth, and Sallie McFague inviting us to understand the Earth as body and household of God.

I would add the sign of Jonah is a warning to those Christians who have distorted their relationships to the Earth out of greed and a drive towards domination. When they are harming the land through reckless scars and harming life, they are harming the body of the new Adam, the risen Christ constructed from the Earth and God’s Spirit. Are we endangered in the process of losing the earthly material that will lead to our own resurrection and the resurrection of life? Or do we as green Christians stand up and fight for the holiness of the land—our vocation to care for the land, all created life that is beloved of God. We stand up against the fundamentalist Christian war and their allies’ crucifixion of the land!

Christmas Message 2013

I just signed an op-ed piece with a coalition of Los Angeles religious leaders entitled “Giving Thanks for the Gift of the Sun.” LA has some 300 days of sunshine, but less than 2% of the power is generated from the sun. I am aware that we will hold a Solar Night on the evening of January 8th at 7 PM at our church for faith communities, businesses, and home owners to help reduce energy usage and move to become a carbon neutral space. Ideas from Christmas and the Feast of the Magi spark the crazy conflation of the gift of the sun and the gift of Christ because another solar event heralded the birth of the Christ child. Both the sun and Christ are gifts from God.

Some Christians, drawing from an ecological perspective of God, view Christmas celebration of the birth of Christ as environmental hope for our present century. I have begun to read the gospels from a “green” perspective as well. Christ was born into a world when the poor needed hope at the time of oppression and suffering from the Roman Empire. We have been accustomed to view the birth of Christ during the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace. This was a Roman propaganda myth, for the period was anything but peaceful. The Roman legions maintained the power and exploitation of the peoples of the Mediterranean world. The Empire generated a religious theology that cultivated Augustus Caesar as the “Son of God Apollo.” No power could stand against the military, religious, financial, and political power theology of Rome with the divine Emperor Augustus.

And in Bethlehem, Mary gave birth to a child in a cave with animals present. The cave in Bethlehem was not only at the margins of the Roman Empire in an obscure province; it was at the margins of the margins—stable with domestic animals. A light shone above the place of Jesus’ birth, and shepherds and the magi traveled to witness the wondrous flicker of light.. The child would grow up to proclaim God’s liberation and our potential to claim God’s reign. God’s reign, unlike the Roman, would champion the poor, the slaves, the marginalized, and the social outcasts Jesus reminded the poor and the marginalized that God’s power was measured in vulnerability, love, compassion and peace. God’s reign stood against the Roman Empire, and it would challenge the Empire with a revolutionary message of love, unconditional grace, forgiveness, and non-violence as its weapons to combat brute violence, coercive power, and greed..

The new Roman Empire crosses the Earth and dominates itself. It is what I call the fossil fuel industries and corporations that have few checks and balances. Fossil fuel companies have co-opted even liberal legislators in California into believing that fracking is safe, even though there is danger of contaminating the water table.

Most of Los Angeles energy and much of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels whose dirty carbon emissions have contributed to global warming, extreme weather events, wildfires and droughts, extinction of species, and impact the health of people and animals alike. Our greed for fossil fuels continues to grip humanity with a short-sightedness and consumer greed that will impact life severely this century.

But many churches are, likewise, complicit in their guilt with the fossil fuel empire. They turn a deaf ear to the cries of life and the Earth at the reckless exploitation and harm of the Earth’s weather systems wrought by the fossil fuel empire. Their focus is “Forget ‘Save the Earth’, save your soul.” They support the climate change deniers by denigrating God’s creation and Earth and viewing global warming as having little importance. This is true of many church leaders, including our own in MCC. The United Church of Christ has taken the prophetic stance of encouraging all church properties to reach carbon neutral in 2030.

Our Christmas candle, representing Christ, shines brightly during the day and energized from the sun. I come to work and look at our 90 solar panels, and I am aware that they generate clean solar energy for ourselves and others. They take the abundance of sunlight to generate more clean energy. It becomes for me a parable how God’s extravagant grace works in the work. And I can’t help look at them, thinking that Christ is the light of the world. But I would reframe in environmental terms–Christ is the Earthlight, God’s greening power.

On Christmas Eve service, when we light our candles and sing Silent Night, we are proclaiming our hope to bring the sun light of Christ into our church, our homes, our city, our nation, and our planet to challenge the fossil fuel empire that governs our planet and creates climate change and upheaval. Christ is the Earthlight, generated from God’s sun. God’s greening power (viriditas) of God, is an extravagant and gracious energy bringing life and sustaining life through Christ the Earthlight and the winds of the Spirit.

My wish for Christmas and hope for the New Year is a greener Christianity, a greener world challenging the fossil fuel empire with a revolutionary spiritual movement spreading the message Christ the Earthlight. Join me to work on your family, your neighbors, your faith communities, your businesses to help make 2014 a greener year for Christ. Abandon the outdated theologies that proclaim “Forget ‘Save the Earth’ save your soul.” Embrace greening grace of God’s life this Christmas and have hope that together with God we can lessen the ravages of climate change for 21st generations.

Merry Christmas and Green New Year.