Earth Day Sermon at Otterbein United Methodist Church, Harrisonburg, VA
Scriptures: Psalm 95:1-7; Luke 12: 32-34
It was a perfect day. The sky was bright and the trees formed a canopy overhead, shading me from the sun as I stood silently in the woods. I could hear the stream tumbling slowly across the rocks down below. In the tree above me, a spirited mockingbird was singing joyously. As in Wendell Berry’s short poem:
Best of any song
is bird song
in the quiet, but first
there has to be the quiet.
Then our hearts sing in tune with creation as we praise God our creator in unison with the Psalmist in our Scripture reading:
Let’s come into God’s presence with thanksgiving.
let’s shout for joy with songs of praise.
What I especially enjoy about being retired is beginning my day tending plants. Getting my hands dirty in my garden makes me happy. This most likely has roots in working in my traditional Mennonite mother’s garden when I was a boy. But I did lots of grumping about garden work back then.
My younger brother was excused from gardening because it made him break out in hives. How did he do that? I thought it was so unfair! So it has to be more than learning to garden at an early age. I recently learned that getting our hands in contact with soil bacteria triggers the release of serotonin in our brains, which boosts our immune systems and makes us happy.
Native American naturalist Robin Wall Kimmerer gave me a new insight into this in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. She writes, “Something essential happens in a vegetable garden. It’s a place where if you can’t say ‘I love you’ out loud, you can say it in seeds. And the land will reciprocate in beans.”
That’s why I love gardening. Digging into the damp, dark soil and getting that dirt under my fingernails puts me in touch with something that’s much bigger than I am. I can’t build vegetables and flowers like a carpenter builds houses. All I can do is plant, water, fertilize and then allow nature to do her work.
We’re part of an interconnected web of life. The following motto from the David Suzuki Foundation says it well:
We are the earth, through the plants and animals that nourish us. We are the rains and the oceans that flow through our veins. We are the breath of the forests of the land, and the plants of the sea.
We are human animals, related to all other life as descendants of the firstborn cell. We share with these kin a common history, written in our genes. We share a common present, filled with uncertainty. And we share a common future, as yet untold.
The Old Testament is full of creation stories. I chose the one from Psalm 95 for our worship service this morning because I want to emphasize praising our Creator God along with the rest of creation. What I especially like about the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis is the repeated refrain after each act of creation, “God saw how good it was.” I imagine our Creator standing back after each creative day and exclaiming, “Wow! That’s really good.”
It’s an expression of absolute joy in the wonder of it all. In this respect, love for all of creation and love for God are inseparable. We run into trouble when we separate ourselves from the rest of creation with disastrous consequences for the earth and ultimately for ourselves. This, in turn, separates us from God.
How do we explain our penchant for doing this? Perhaps greed but it has to be more. It’s easy to be driven by our anxieties and insecurities. Native American elders puzzled over the way European settlers randomly destroyed the land after they arrived. It was as though they still had one foot on the boat, and they didn’t know if they were staying or not. They feared the natural world in this abundant land and thought they had to bring it under control.
Jesus taught his disciples to not worry about their lives, what they will eat or wear. Such worries easily become destructive and we need to check ourselves. Jesus’ tells us to examine our hearts and our desires. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (34).
We humans have been consuming natural resources at an unsustainable pace for a long time. Forest cover, topsoil, and natural species are disappearing at an alarming rate. This has become exponentially worse within my lifetime. What’s especially concerning is how our dependence on fossil fuels for energy (coal, oil, and gas) is contributing to climate change.
To prevent the most catastrophic, irreversible level of global warming from occurring, we will need to do all we can to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gasses in the next several decades. I’m putting a lot of my energy into this. Though the situation is dire, there are sustainable solutions we can all work on together.
It can be fun and rewarding. My wife Ruth and I put lots of planning into building our energy-efficient retirement house. By building green and installing a solar electric system, we have a house that generates more electricity than we consume. Yes, building a new house consumes lots of energy in itself but we built it to last. We plan to live here a long time and then pass it on to others.
Yet another hopeful way to reverse the ecological degradation of the earth starts in our yards. Most urban and suburban yards consist of grass and non-native foundation plants that do not sustain native insects, birds, and other species. Doug Tallamy, an etymologist at the University of Delaware, tells us that nature’s best hope lies in transforming our yards and bringing nature home.
We’re working to shrink the size of our lawn and we’re planting native pollinator garden beds for insects and birds. I encourage us to get started somewhere with a patch of natives and then expand. Seeing the insects and birds it attracts is so much fun. This is where I see a connection between our love for God, our love for the earth, and our love for each precious human life. Such love moves us to action.
Robin Wall Kimmerer comments, “Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.” Indeed, to love God, to love the earth, and to love all people are inseparable. In involves a deep spiritual and social reciprocity.
The thing of it is, “We cannot protect something we do not love, we cannot love what we do not know, and we cannot know what we do not see. And touch. And hear.” This is why I deeply respect the energy your congregation has put into the organizing efforts of Valley Interfaith Action to enhance the common good for everybody in our community.
Through our listening campaign we heard stories and learned about the felt needs of people. Out of that grew our campaign for available, affordable, and equitable childcare. Likewise, our campaign for available public transportation that serves everybody.
As the coordinator for Shenandoah Valley Faith and Climate, I look at this through an environmental lens. Love for God our Creator, love for all people, and love for all of creation seamlessly fits together. It’s all the same thing. It prompts us into action to protect and care for that which we love. So when a group of you asked me to recommend an Earth Day speaker for this worship service, I gladly volunteered.
We don’t only love and protect. We also celebrate! The Psalm 95 creation story begins with celebration and the Genesis creation story culminates in doxology—praise and worship. God rests on the seventh day, enjoying and hallowing all of creation. I love the way Wendell Berry expresses it in this poem:
To sit and look at light-filled leaves
Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir (Washington DC: Counterpoint, 1998), 8.
May let us see or seem to see,
Far backward as through clearer eyes
To what unsighted hope believes:
The blessed conviviality
That sang Creation’s seventh sunrise,
Time when the Maker’s radiant sight
Made radiant every thing He saw,
And every thing He saw was filled
With perfect joy and life and light.
May it be so!
Shenandoah Valley Faith and Climate 