Being a Green Christian

(LONG POST WARNING!)

This was shared with the (Seventh-day Adventist/SDA) staff here this morning for the morning devotional time. So far it has been met with blank stares and no reaction, but perhaps something sunk in! :)
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The World Wildlife Fund released their “Living Planet Report 2004” last week. It isn’t good news. In the past 30 years, humanity’s ecological footprint (a measure of environmental sustainability) has grown to exceed the Earth’s biological carrying capacity by 20 per cent. Biodiversity has fallen 40%. Our footprint has grown 70%, with freshwater species declining by 50%. Although the USA is the biggest Bad Guy in this scenario, with each human demanding the resources of nearly 10 hectares for their support, here in South Africa we’re not too far behind. Each of us needs 3 ½ hectares to produce our food and fibre, absorb the waste from our energy consumption and provide infrastructure space. Each of us uses on average 1.3 thousand cubic metres of water per year. The programme Fokus recently indicated that by 2020, a mere 16 years from now, fresh water will be a scarcity. Can you imagine what life will be like with fresh water hard to find? Already agriculture is suffering, our climate zones are shifting, malaria is spreading to previously-unknown areas. Images of shrivelled crops and parched livestock are on our TV screens at every news bulletin.

Yeah, so, what does this have to do with me, and especially with what is supposed to be worship time today?, you ask. Guess what – you’re just about to find out!

As part of my ongoing spiritual journey of discovery, one of the things I’ve learnt about is commonly known as the Kingdom of God. It’s a phrase that’s often thrown around in Christian circles, but surprisingly not that easy to define. Just what IS the Kingdom of God, where is it, when is it?

Well, we know that Jesus often said things like “behold, the Kingdom of God is at hand!”. He was busy ushering in this kingdom when here 2,000 years ago, but also said that it is to come. I’ve learnt that both are true. Jesus came to give us Good News of a change in ownership – this world has been conquered for God and is no longer the devil’s property. But He also left us with a task, to build His Kingdom here on earth, with an eye on the heavenly Kingdom to come.

In reading Brian McLaren’s book “A Generous Orthodoxy” recently, I learnt a new term (for me at least) – restorationist. A restorationist (briefly) is one who believes that God is going to restore the earth one day, probably really soon, as soon as we’ve got something right (like the whole world hearing the gospel). SDA’s believe this, and often refer to themselves (ourselves) as a remnant. However, sometimes, we as remnant can mean that we hold dearly to a hope of a rescue, a sky-hook to a better place, without letting our eyes rest on the earth as it is, now. It can, just maybe, make us lose sight of the fact that we have work to do here. However, to be a faithful remnant, we are required to turn our heart others-wise, outward, toward the unfaithful, in loyalty and love. To be truly faithful requires us to bond ourselves to our unfaithful neighbours, to care about their lives, their world.

Allow me to quote a little of what Brian McLaren has to say in a chapter entitled "Why I am Green", very much summarized (reading it all would take more time than I have available today):

"Imagine that right now you are standing with me, thigh deep in muck. Clad in hip waders, we’re slogging through a spring-fed bog in northern Maryland. We’re surrounded by tussock sedge, alder, jewelweed, skunk cabbage and swamp rose. The June sun is hot, I’m sweaty, I’ve got six mosquito bites on the back of my neck, and my forearms are scratched and itchy from thorns of various sizes. And I’m having a great time.

I’ve done this for a couple of days almost every spring for the last dozen years. I’m out here as a volunteer with the Department of Natural Resources to do wildlife surveys. In particular we’re looking for the rarest turtle in North America, the little four-inch bog turtle.

When I meet professional wildlife biologists and other volunteers, they’re surprised that a Christian pastor would be out here doing this sort of thing on his day off. They’re not used to seeing mud-smeared pastors groping around in bog muck for turtles…or counting chorus frogs and Baltimore checkerspots and Indian paintbrush. I know what they’re thinking; Christians are part of the problem, not part of the solution. They read James Dobson, Chuck Colsen and Jerry Falwell, not Wendell Berry, Herman Daly or Al Gore (who, by the way, see their environmentalism as and expression of their Christian faith): they focus on the family and the military, not the environment.

Too often my environmentally concerned friends are right. But as so many species slide closer to extinction, the rare species known variously as Christianus environmentalis or Disciplos verde is making a comeback.

The surface causes of environmental carelessness among Christians are many."

But there is hope. There is a change in thinking happening, an "environmental spring breaking through the formerly barren soil".

God’s creation is being re-valued as sacred, as God’s beloved artwork, and "in this view, these little bog turtles we’re looking for today are priceless treasures, original creations of the greatest Artist in and beyond history. If you see our world this way, you can’t help becoming" aware of nature, the world God created as something to enjoy, cherish, protect and encourage to be all it can be.

As more of us celebrate Jesus as master-teacher as well as Saviour, we are struck by the present hope of the Kingdom of God that is so central in Jesus’ message. In this kingdom, Jesus said, sparrows matter. Lilies of the field matter. Yes, people matter even more, but it’s not a matter of either/or; it’s a matter of degree in a realm where everything that is good matters – where everything God made matters, including that damselfly darting back and forth and the little pickerel frog peering out from the ferns.

The same forces that hurt widows and orphans, minorities and women, children and the elderly, also hurt the songbirds and trout, the ferns and old-growth forests – greed, impatience, selfishness, arrogance, hurry, anger, competition, irreverence – as well as a theology that cares for souls but neglects bodies, that focuses on eternity in heaven but abandons history on earth."

Remember the verse "the earth is the Lord’s, and all it contains"? That should put our perspectives in place. We don’t own this earth, God does. We may THINK we own a house, or a field, or a resource – we paid for it, we have it in writing! – but we don’t own it.

"Whatever we "own" is really entrusted to us by God, borrowed and reverently used by us for a time, after which we must let go one way or another. Even the molecules that make up our bodies are on loan to us. One day we will give them back, rendering an account of how we have used them through time – time also being a precious gift of which we have been made stewards."

"The more we root ourselves in our local environment, the more we honour our status as creatures. The more we remember that we are part of one planet, the more we acknowledge where God has situated us. Clearly, if our thinking extends beyond "me, myself and I" to our neighbours (human and nonhuman) as the gospel teaches us, we will realize that our neighbours downstream suffer from our water pollution, downwind from our pollution, and downhill from our erosion. And when we consider our neighbours in time as well as space, we start thinking differently about our children, grandchildren, and more distant descendents. What toxins are we sending downstream in time to poison them?"

When God created the planet, he appointed us stewards of all. A good steward manages his owner’s property well. He cares for it, he doesn’t exploit it.

As I mentioned, earlier, us SDAs fall under the restorationist category. However, we honestly cannot say when exactly we might be sky-hooked to a new earth. What if it’s a thousand years from now? What it it’s only seven? What if it’s in 20 – 4 years after South Africa runs out of fresh water?

"The more we as Christians follow Jesus by thinking in terms of our duty to our neighbours downstream in space and time, the more we will take our stewardship of creation seriously.

What exactly will we do differently? That remains to be seen. But for starters, we will see differently and care differently and value differently. If those differences catch on widely among Christians, with Christianity being the largest religion in the world, there are bound to be good effects in our world.

Just caring is a good start. That’s a real start. Who knows where it could lead? Volunteering at my watershed (the environmental address that matters more than nation, state or zip code) is one small way to express my care for creation. I am a creature who wants to care generously for other creatures because I am made in the image of a Creator who cares generously for us all."

Still with me? Then allow me to share some thoughts from Danushka Goska:

"A group of concerned citizens was gathered in the basement of St Paul Catholic centre. They were thinking and talking about living their ideals. One frustrated woman voiced the nagging worry of many. "I want to do something, but what can I do? I’m just one person, an average person. The world is so screwed up and I have so little power. I feel so paralysed."

I raised my hand and spoke. "I have an illness that causes intermittent bouts of paralysis. That paralysis has taught me something, that my protestations of my own powerlessness are bogus. Yes, some days I can’t move or see, but you know what? Some days I can move. Some days I can see. And the difference between being able to walk across the room and not being able to walk across the room is epic.

I commute to campus by foot along a railroad track. In spring, I come across turtles who have gotten stuck. The track is littered with the hollowing shells of turtles that couldn’t escape the rails. So I bend over, and I pick up the still-living trapped turtles that I do find. I carry them to a wooded area and let them go. For those turtles, that much power that I have is enough.

I’m just like those turtles. When I have been sick and housebound for days, I wish someone – anyone – would talk to me. To hear a human voice say my name, to be touched; that would meant the world to me.

One day an attack hit me while I was walking home from campus. It was a snowy day. I struggled with each step, wobbled and wove across the road. I must have looked like a drunk. One of my neighbours, whom I had never met, stopped and asked if I was okay. He drove me home.

He didn’t hand me the thousands of dollars I needed for surgery. He didn’t take me in and empty my puke bucket. He just gave me one ride, one day. I am still grateful to him and touched by his gesture. I’d lived in the neighbourhood for years, and so far he has been the only one to stop. The problem is not that we have so little power. The problem is that we don’t use the power that we have.

Sometimes we convince ourselves that the unnoticed gestures of insignificant people mean nothing. It’s not enough to recycle our soda cans; we must stop global warming now. Since we can’t stop global warming now, we may as well not recycle our soda cans. It’s not enough to be our best selves; we have to be Gandhi. And yet when we study the biographies of our heroes, we learn that they spent years doing tiny, decent things before history propelled them to centre stage.

The very marrow of a believer’s bones should be impregnated with the conviction that everything they do is witnessed by God, and that everything they do matters to God. Whether or not one’s fellow beings see is secondary."

Let me end with one more thought.

When Jesus taught His disciples to pray, a part of it was a desire for God’s Kingdom to come ON EARTH as it is in heaven. If we pray that prayer, and we are serious about it, then we need to make sure we’re doing something about it.

I have only touched a little on care for our environment today, but it goes far, far beyond that. It’s a lifestyle of caring – for the creatures, for the homeless man in the street, for anything and everything beyond the tip of our noses that God has entrusted to our stewardship.

Yes, sometimes we feel powerless in the face of so much need, but one single act can make a difference – and the more of us who are doing that one single act, the larger the influence on creation around us.

That is why, as a Christian, as a Christ-follower, I choose to recycle. I choose to leave a corner of my yard wild as a mini-habitat for the small creatures. I choose to consciously manage my use of resources such as water and electricity, to think before I buy, to give generously and immediately when God says "that homeless guy approaching you needs what’s left in your wallet right now". I’m not perfect. There is much, much more I can do. It’s just a start.

I leave you with a single challenge. Be God’s Kingdom here, now, today.