God Calls us to be the Church
To Live with Respect in Creation

Power-point Presentation notes by Matthew Dileo
with Theological reflections by Richard Moffat

During these weeks of Lent our focus is on God's call to be the church. Following the direction of our creed we come on this second Sunday to the statement: "God calls us to be the church ... to live with respect in creation."

Our meditation time today will focus on the environment and will be divided into two segments -- a power-point presentation followed by some brief theological reflections. First of all then we'll call on Matthew Dileo for his presentation. Matthew is a grade 6 student and schoolmate of our grandaughter, Darci, at Kempenfelt Bay School. He was very moved by Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and put together a power-point presentation as a school project that Rev. Pat and I had the privilege of seeing a couple of weeks ago at his home. We felt it would be a blessing to our congregaion to see what he had done and asked him to come today. We welcome him to our service along with his mother, Graziella. The Dileos are members of the Roman Catholic Faith Community so please join me in extending to them a very warm ecumenical welcome.

I saw a dcumentary that Al Gode did about global warming. I read a book called Fragile Earth. And we talked about how the government was going to TALK about global warming for the next 3 years. This cannot happen and I am going to show you why. Global warming is complicated but I will try to give you a simple version.

What is Global warming? The earth gets warmed up by the sun. But there is also a warming blanket around it called Greenhouse gases. These gases are carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane. They are naturally there and keep our planet at the right temperature. But we have done many things to release more of these gases into the atmosphere and they get trapped there and the temperature of the earth rises causes global warming.

Do you see what we are doing? You will after this.

One of the biggest causes of increased amount of gases is the exhaust that comes from energy plants. This is the energy that we use to heat homes, light up our cities and use our appliances.

Car exhaust is another problem. We are all a part of this. We have cars, dirt bikes, snowmobiles, go karts, boats, ATV

Next there are factories that have huge emissions.

Transport trucks and big machines that are used everyday release more gases into the atmosphere.

Airplane exhaust is another huge problem. Thousands and thousands of planes fly in the air space everyday releasing their exhaust.

Everyday traffic. We get caught in this all the time and the idling cars cause a lot of emissions.

Deforestation. You might not think that this would case a problem but it does. We burn down acres and acres of forests every day for whatever reasons but the gas that is released from the burning is carbon dioxide. This is the rainforest in Brazil in 1973 and thi is it in 2003.

What have we done? That's right, created Global warming.

Look how it has affected us...

We have had many more huge hurricanes and tropical storms. Take for example 2005. North America had 5 category 3 storms. Hurricane Dennis, Emily, Katrina, Rita and Wilma.

Many areas in the world are experiencing drought.

• In Australia kangaroos and sheep are starving and dehydrated because the areas that use to have water are shrinking
• People in Africa have the same problem and have to dig deeper to find water.
• This is a picture of the Aral sea in Central Asia in 1973, 1986, 2001 and now in 2005. This used to be the world's 4th largest lake. This lake has dried up because of warmer temperatures and some of the rivers leading into it were diverted so they could be used for irrigation.
• These are abandoned ships on the Aral sea. This used to also be a fishing community.
• This is the Lake Palace Hotel in India in 1998 .. It was build on a tiny isalnd and you could only get to it by boat.
• Now in 2005 the lake has dried out due to drought.
• Closer to home is the Colorado River. The first picture was taken in 2002 and the second in 2004. This is due to low rainfall in western USA.

Global warming has affected glaciers. The rising temperature has caused many glaciers to shrink.

• This is Glacier Toboggan in Alaska in 1999 and this is it in 2000. What we need to understand is that the glaciers put lots of weight on the earth and now there is less. Because of this Alaska is having more earthquakes because the plates under the ground move more easily.
• This is Muir Glacier in Alaska in 1976 and in 2003
• This is a different shot of Muir Glacier in 1941 and in 2004.

Our planet is also exeperiencing more floods. This is due to the fact that the polar ice caps are melting and there is more fresh water and also because the warmer tempteratures make the water expand.

• The island of Tuvalu is in the Pacific Ocean. The rising water has caused many of its people to leave to New Zealand and they are worried that soon no one will live there anymore.
• Venice is a city built on water and is slowly sinking but the rising sea levels are making it happen even more quickly.

What about the animals? This has affected them too.

• The polar bear. Migrates back and forth through the ice caps every year. They have now found dead polar bears and they are dead because they have drowned. There are fewer ice sheets for them to jump on so they end up drowning because they are tired. On this last photo the bear is trying to even out his weight so he won't break through the ice.
• Then there is the caribou in the Nunavut. These animlas every year migrate from one end to the other using the same path that they have taken for hundreds of years. The problem now is that the land that they ar used to traveling on is melting and there are cracks in the earth. They fall into the cracks and die.

So what is the plan and what are we going to do?

• The government says 3 years of talking. That's not good enough. We need to start now.
• Do simple things like talk to your family and friends about this.
• See the movie or buy the book so you can understand better
• Do small things like
• Use a bus or carpool
• Buy a car that is environmentally friendly
• Put a brick in the tank of your toilet so you don't use as much water
• Take a 3 minute shower
• Try to use solar and wind power
• Use cleaner gas for your car
• use energy efficient light bulbs, change them now
• I hope that I can turn many of our parking lots IDLE FREE. I hope to make this happen by February 2007.
• I challenge you to do something too. What is your plan?

I think that is probably fair to say that we don't need a lot of convincing that serious action on this front is both urgent and necessary, at very least from the perspective of our own self interest as dwellers on this planet Earth. But there is a more fundamental question before us today. Why does all this belong here particularly, I mean in worship? What is there about this theme that brings it in a central way into our church life? Why is it of concern to us as Christians?

Our Creed answers by saying that respect for creation is an integral part of what it means to be a Christian, an essential part of God's call to be the church. But in what way is this so? Our scripture readings today help us here. They lift up three words that we need to hold in our minds and hearts. The first of these words is image. The creation story from Genesis tells us that God has made us in God's own image. To be made in the image of God writies Canadian theologian Douglas Hall in his book, The Steward A Biblical Symbol Come of Age, means being called "to stand on our feet and be God's partners in creation" (p. 16) But listen again to Genesis: "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. and to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so. God saw everything that he had made and indeed it was very good. (Genesis 1:29-31a) To be partners with God whose image we bear means to ensure as God does that every part of the creation has its needs met for sustenance, growth and life. Again I quote Hall, "The image of God does not refer to a quality that we possess, making us so much better than other creatures, but to a realtionship in which we stand vis a vis our Creator. And this relationship does not set us "above all the other creatures"; but rather makes us responsible for and representative of the others!" (p. 106)

The second word for us to remember is dominion. The Genesis story tell us that the God who made us in God's own image granted us "dominion over" all the other creatures of the earth (Genesis 1:26). But far too often we've totally distorted the meaning of this gift. Somethimes we've interpreted dominion to mean a license to lord it over creation in a heavy-handed way and to use and abuse the earth and its creation simply for our own selfish ends. At other times we've just abandoned the creation altogether, focusing on supposedly more important things while rendering the creation a victim of our careless neglect. Douglas Hall writes, "Christians have been so busy preparing themselves and everybody else for heaven, (or hell!) that they have regularly left the fate of the earth not to 'the meek' to whom Jesus promises it, but to the revenous, the power-hungry, the plunderers and grabbers!" (p. 81) As far back as 1975 Senator M. Lamontagne wrote in Consumer Notes (Vol 1, No 2, Dec., 1975) published by The Science Council of Canada, "North Americans throw away enough solid waste each year to build a wall 75 feet wide and 200 feet high along the Canada-US border."

But all of this is a terrible misunderstanding of the scriptures. To have dominion over creation, to share God's authority over it means not to become domineering in realtion to it, or neglectful of it, but to be the bearers of responsibility for it on God's behalf. As Christians, our model of dominion is not Caesar or Pharoah, or the religious authorities, after all, but rather Jesus the Christ who exercised dominion or Lordship not by "regarding equality with God as something to be exploited, but by emptying himself ... and becoming obedient to the point of death -- even death on a cross." (Philippians 2:5-8) The point is that we are called to be of the "same mind," to exercise Christ's kind of dominion, to be servants, care-givers, representatives for the rest of creation.

All of which brings us to our third word: stewardship. The Apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians that we are called to be "servants of Christ and stewards or God's mysteries." (I Corinthians 4:1) But what could possibly be a greater mystery of God than the whole created order as such?

In the New Testament the steward serves as representatives of the master or Lord on the one hand, and, on the other is accountable to his Lord for the exercise of authority within his Lord's domain. The steward is called not only to serve his master, but in so doing "to serve those whose interests the master has at heart." (Hall pp. 25-26) Some years ago Jeremy Rifkin wrote in his book, The Emerging Order, "The new stewardship doctrine turns the modern world view upside down. The rules and relationships that are used to exploit nature are diametrically opposite to those that are necessary to conserve nature... Stewardship requires that humankind respect and conserve the 'natural' workings of God's order." (pp. 269-270) Or to use Paul's words: "It is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy." (I Cor. 4:2)

"The gospel of stewardship begins," says Hall, "by overcoming that within us that prevents our being stewards -- the pride of imagining ourselves owners; the sloth of irresponsibility and neglect -- and gives us that grace which we need to exercise a love of the world that is larger than our self esteem or our anxiety." (p. 25)

Image of God, dominion, stewardship, these are the key words for us in relation to the matter of environment. But there is a fourth word that gathers them up and is in fact the most important of all. It is love. In the end, says Hall it "is not merely whether we are against the destruction of the world but whether we love it!" (p. 119)

As Church called to live with respect in creation, we are not asked just to take on the environment as another great issue or worthy cause but to embrace the world as those who love it, and thus to become models for others of God's love for the world. (John 3:16) It is fundamental and basic to what we are as church. We cannot faithfully celebrate God's presence without living with respect in creation any more than, as we shall see in the weeks ahead, we can faithfully celebrate God's presence without loving and serving others or without seeking justice and resisting evil, or without proclaiming Jesus crucified and risen our judge and our hope. It is all of a piece. It's what we pray for every Sunday when we utter the words, "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as in heaven." We make ourselves responsible as stewards of God for the "blessedness" of the world.

We begin with the quesiton, Why is the matter of the environment, of care for the earth properly before us here in worship? Let me conclude with this question of Doug Hall, "What if, in the midst of such a society, instead of showing up as a well-known religious element going about our well-known attempt at saving the world from its moral wickedness, or winning converts, or winning arguments, or influencing the powerful, or just trying to survive(!), the church began to be perceived as a community that cares for the world as such, for its welfare, its justice, its peace, its survival?" (Hall p. 138) Yes, What if? What if? Thanks be to God. Amen.