Roger Ray, pastor
February 13, 2011
Genesis 1:1-5
1In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 3Then God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
I was giving some New Testament lectures in a little seminary in Otavalo, Ecuador several years ago. This largely Quichua Indian area, high in the Andes Mountains, is surrounded by the taller peaks of volcanoes, Gaugau Pichincha and Pichincha Ruca, whose occasional eruptions sometimes make into our news. I noticed as my taxi driver took me from my hotel to the school each day that there were small fires lit, above the tree line, on the sides of the volcanoes.
At first, when I inquired as to why anyone would be so high up there and why they were lighting fires, my driver would mumble something like, "crazy peasants." It took some persistence to finally get the explanation that the local farmers maintained a belief that the black smoke from their little fires would help to encourage the rain clouds to form and bring rain on their crops.
And, I suppose, as you can say of a lot of prayers, if you keep it up long enough, it does eventually work..... the rain does finally come. Four hundred years after the Jesuits brought the Christian faith to that part of the world, some of their agriculture based earth religion still survives.
Obviously, the most primitive forms of all religions were nature based religions, trying to survive in a sometimes hostile and always capricious universe. And they did not originally see it as a religion.... It was their science. Religion evolved to explain why things are the way that they are. The weather sometimes seems angry. The fields sometimes refuse to bear fruit as if they were insulted like a jilted lover.
Clearly, they were wrong about a lot of stuff. Science and religion often seemed to go different ways with one attributing to demons what another would attribute to a virus. In the modern era, the two have often seemed at war with one another in a faith verses reason battle.
When environmental scientists began to warn us that we were nearing a tipping point in global climate change, the Rev. Jerry Falwell went on TV and said, "The fact is that there is no global warming.... I urge everyone to go out and buy an SUV... today."
I think that a part of the problem in this disconnect the Christian religion seems to have from a sincere reverence for the earth, was the movement from a more actively evolving religion into a religion based on religious texts. Sacred scriptures were written in interaction with the culture in which they were written. The values reflected in the pages of the Bible are attempts by the spiritual communities which produced them to interpret the meaning of their lives and as such, the Bible and other sacred writings have served us very well.
The obvious limitation is, however, the silence of scripture on matters which are of great urgency in our age but where not even thought of two thousand years ago.
Ancient cultures were at the mercy of the weather and the seasons. They had no concept of being able to pollute the air and the sea. They had no concept of running out of land or resources.
The ancient Hebrew scriptures essentially taught the faith community to dominate nature, to subdue it and make it serve their purposes without any thought of how that might end up destroying the planet in our age.
In the modern era our faith must become more nimble, not a battle of faith or reason but a new cooperation of faith and reason. In many ways, the Buddhist faith is more adept at this than we are. When the Dali Llama was asked by a reporter how the Buddhist faith coped with the explosion of scientific knowledge in the modern era, he replied saying that when science discovers a truth which is contrary to Buddhist traditions, Buddhism changes.
An excellent example of that came up when he was asked about homosexuality. When the question became clear to him that he was being asked if Buddhism approved of sexually active same sex couples he had a very negative reaction, declaring that such a life is incompatible with faith. When he was asked why, he sat and thought and then asked a few questions about fidelity and commitment in same sex relationships, and, as if the idea was just dawning on him, he said that if two people love one another and live in a committed, respectful and mutually supportive relationship that it should not matter whether they are of the same sex or the opposite sex.
I was relieved to hear that interview but I found myself marveling at it because it all seemed to happen so quickly.
I personally wrestled with that theological question for nearly 15 years before I was able to let go of my ingrained religious prejudices and arrive at the same conclusion the Dali Llama reached in about three minutes.
We Christians have had an inclination to try to use religion to trump facts, keeping factual scientific education out of public schools by declaring the superiority of our ancient texts. And Americans are similarly guilty of using patriotism to trump facts, demanding an interpretation of everything in the world based on our world domination. Sometimes patriotism and religion seem to merge, as in the attitude we have seen during our Middle Eastern wars in which we seem to be making the theologically profound and patriotically noble inquiry, "Why did God put our oil under their desert?"
A few years ago, when I had taken a rather angry and intentional sabbatical from parish life, my one concession to staying in touch with a church community was in leading a book study which met once a week.... Several of you were there and will remember that read together Bob Edgar's book, Middle Church.
Edgar is the former General Secretary of the National Council of Churches and prior to that he served six terms in the United State Congress. From his long career in both politics and the church, Edgar composed a message to a dying church, a kind of prescription to save a patient which was circling the drain.
He argues that for the church to regain relevance in the modern era that we must focus on three profound ethical issues which are:
Addressing poverty - Advocating for peace
And restoring and protecting the environment
Two of those priorities the church can put its arms around if only we would just begin to take the teachings of the Christian and Jewish scriptures seriously. Compassion for the poor is the most consistent theme in the whole of the Bible. Advocating for peace and the things that make for peace.... Reconciliation, mutual understanding, forgiveness, generosity kindness, love..... that should be the most obvious expression of Biblical values. We are not doing very well in those two arenas but they are not hard to find in the pages of our scriptures.
But the environment is left to go begging in the Bible. Our sacred texts were written in a time and by people who had every reason to fear nature, they had no concept of nature having reason to fear us. In many ways, this means that we must show the kind of flexibility that the Dali Llama showed in being willing to change course on what he had to say about homosexuality.
We have to be able to look at the facts and apply our spiritually trained ethical minds to this new situation. Edgar quotes environmental scientist, David Orr's book, Earth in Mind, describing how, on any typical day:
...we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon. Tonight the earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.
Everyone has a right to their own opinions but no one has a right to their own facts. Faith, faced with scientific facts, must stretch to accommodate new information. The math of this situation is as direct as it is disturbing.
This is not about simply loving the wilderness. This is bigger than enjoying canoe trips, fishing, hunting and wilderness hikes. The facts point towards two issues that should bring the church to moral arrest. The first is that we are poisoning the only environment in which we have to live so that we are cutting off the next generations from having the resources to survive. We have no right to do that and we have a moral imperative to pass along to our children and grandchildren, a healthy planet.
The second is the fact that this is a huge issue of poverty. Industrialized nations of the world create most of the greenhouse gasses that then create the climate change that destroys the livelihood of the poor. The 2004 Asian tsunami was not caused by global warming, it was caused by and earthquake at sea but it gave us a chance to see how rising sea levels are going to primarily strike the poorest places in the world.
My friend, Dr. Jeanmarie Verchot, has a brother, Dr. Louie Verchot, who is currently living in Indonesia doing research on forest management. You can see one of his videos on CNN.com's website by searching Indonesia and deforestation. His work passionately underscores the way that demand for products in the developed world, results in the destruction of natural resources in the third world. We clear off rainforests in South America for space to graze cattle to increase beef production. The jungles of Indonesia are being cleared to produce palm oil, releasing centuries of stored carbons in the process.
We would not tolerate clearing our forests to plant cheap crops like sugar cane but we do it in Africa, in Asia and in Central America. In most cases, environmental policies fall apart at the point of conflict between the right of the rich to exploit the poor.
I think that we are sometimes seduce into thinking that we can recycle our newspapers and drive a more fuel-efficient car and save the earth. That isn't going to do it. In fact, sadly, a lot of our recycling efforts use up more resources than they save. Symbolic measures will not save us nor will individual efforts.
This is a point where the church must clear its throat and use its prophetic voice. The necessary changes must take place on a national level as we invest in alternative fuels and energy production. We must shift from private cars to public transportation. We must build smaller and more efficient homes. We are going to have to make some financial and life style sacrifices, literally living more simply so that the poor and the next generations can simply live.
If we live for ourselves alone then we shall collectively bring about the end of life on our planet. If we will live for the welfare of others then, in truth, we become partners in creation with God.
