On Earth Day

Here are some of my brief Earth Day reflections. I plan to liveblog the Pennsylvania primary later on tonight. Until then here you go. Oh, and I guess I’ll throw in a bonus: a sermon I gave last Sunday on Earth Day and climate change. It’s kinda long. And I don’t normally use a manuscript, so I or may not have actually said what is written. Bear with me.

Today is April 22. Today is Earth Day.

Today is the day we celebrate and appreciate our environment. We raise awareness about ecological sustainability and perhaps participate in eco-activism and acts of eco-justice.

As a Christian I reflect on my divine responsibility and my divine mandate to care for God’s good creation, not because there is an impending problem (though that fact is undoubtedly compelling!), but because God saw that creation was very good before human beings were even on the scene. And as beings created in the image of God we are given the wonderful responsibility of ensuring that creation remains good. That is our divine responsibility. That is our divine mandate. That is our original stewardship.

If anything I sincerely hope that we will all examine our lifestyles and our actions today, and everyday, realizing that they do indeed matter and they have deep implications not only for our collective future, but for our belief in and about God. We live what we believe. Are we participating as co-creators with God as creator, or are we participating as co-destroyers with God as destroyer? Our actions have already answered that question. Indeed, they have been answering the question for some time.

Further, I hope that we gain a new understanding of what it means to “Go Green,” realizing that we don’t have to go out any buy a new trendy t-shirt made of organic material to show that we care. The answer to solving the climate crisis and living more ecologically sustainable lifestyles lies not in consuming more, but in consuming lives and become better, more responsible stewards of what we already have. Until we are liberated from the arrogant assumption that we can simply buy ourselves out of our problems we cannot even being to addresses the real problem. The real problem is our hyper-consumptive nature that drives our politics, economics, religion, and so on. We must humbly face that demon, and remove that plank from our eye, before we can even begin to address other issues.