The view from a hawley lake cabin

Text: Psalm 24:1-6, Matthew 6:25-33

​Today’s sermon is in response  to the President’s decision last week  to pull America out  of the Paris Climate Accord,  which was signed by all but two  nations, Syria and Nicaragua, with  Nicaragua’s objecting that the agreement didn’t go far enough. In a statement, United Church of Christ leaders have called this “a tragic mistake,”  going on to applaud  the Parliament of World’s Religions’ calling the decision  “scientifically, economically, medically, politically and morally wrong.”

I am sorely tempted to indulge myself in  a righteous political rant.  But I know  it is wiser, and worthier,  for my response today  to be  more thoughtful,  theological,  and Biblical. So,  we begin  with the Psalmist’s reminder  that  “The earth  is  the Lord’s,  and all  that is in it.”

* * * *

Vicky and I used to live in southern Arizona,  which is  desert.  In Tucson, temperatures  of 112,  113,  114  degrees Fahrenheit were  commonplace.  So anytime in the summer  we could get up  into Arizona’s “high country,”  we would.

I remember the August week  we spent in the White Mountains,  at the lakeside cabin of friends.  Hawley Lake  is 8,000 feet above sea level.  So we left behind  the bake-oven terrain  of cactus and lizard  to enter the green environment  of deer and bear,  of Ponderosa pines and Indian paint brush,  where it rained  almost every day.  It was a restorative week for us.

Especially, that summer, it was 1988.  In our home states of Ohio and Illinois, farmers were desperate,  their crops withering from drought.  And that summer  a NASA scientist  testified before Congress  about  what he called  “the first unmistakable indication  of  the ‘greenhouse effect.’”

The NASA scientist, James Hansen, said the warming trend had almost certainly been caused  by the burning of fossil fuels,  by other gases emitted from human activities,  and by wide-scale deforestation.  Because gases,  discharged into the atmosphere,  act like the glass in a greenhouse,  making the earth  warmer and warmer.  “We have altered the global climate,” Dr. Hansen said, “in a manner that will affect  life on earth  for centuries to come.”  That was 1988.

In the twenty-nine years since,  it has gotten worse.  Plant and animal species are dying off.  Glaciers and ice are melting.  Some scientists say  there will be  no  polar ice cap  by 2060.  A United Nations panel  on climate change predicts  permanent drought and famine in Africa,  massive flooding in low-lying Asian deltas, and severe hardship  for billions  of people.  Hurricanes, tornados and tsunamis  may be ahead  repeatedly, not only for Asian islands,  but also… cities like  Miami, Charleston, Washington, New York and Boston  are threatened  by massive flooding. The co-chair of the UN panel pointed out  that these conclusions, from the research of thousands of scientists,  are based on changes  already being observed.  “This is not speculation,” said Martin Parry. “This  is  empirical. We can measure it.”  

Which all  brings back  the sadness – grief, really – that I first felt  during that  baking summer of 1988,  when I read the headline: “Scientist says, Greenhouse effect  is here.”

* * * *

A book  I took along  that August – to Hawley Lake, in the White Mountains of Arizona – was Robert Heilbroner’s  Inquiry  into the Human Prospect,  because  he had warned  in 1974  about  “global thermal pollution.”  So up there,  in God’s wonderfully  ever-green Creation,  I read,  in a chapter titled,  “What Has Posterity Ever Done for Me?”  these words:

“Will [hu]mankind survive?  Who knows?”  “But,” Heilbroner went on,  “the question I want to put  is more searching:  Who cares?  It is clear  that too many of us  do not care – or  do not care enough.  How many of us  would be willing to give up  some minor convenience –say, the use of aerosols – in hope  that this might extend the life of [humanity] on earth  by a hundred years?  Suppose we all knew...that humankind could not survive  a thousand years  unless we gave up  our wasteful diet[s]..., abandoned all pleasure driving, [and] cut back on every use of energy that was not essential...  Would we care enough for posterity  to pay the price  of its  survival?

“I doubt it,” Robert Heilbroner wrote.  “A thousand years is unimaginably distant.  Even a century  far exceeds our powers of empathetic imagination.  By [then],  I shall probably have been dead  for three quarters of a century.  My children will also likely be dead,  and my grandchildren... will be in their dotage.  What does it matter to me, then,  what life will be like?  Why should I lift a finger  to affect events  that will have  no more meaning for me  seventy-five years  after my death  than those that happened  seventy-five years  before I was born?

“There is no rational answer,” Robert Heilbroner wrote.  “There is no rational answer  to that  terrible question.”

* * * *

And so,  despite decades of warnings  that this  finite  biosphere  is fragile,  we keep doing  what we have been doing.  In the terrible trade-off between  economics and the environment – the near-term emphasis on jobs  over against the long term question  of  planetary survival – once again  the immediate has been chosen  over against  the supposedly  further-off.  But, friends,  the limits  to  our  short-sightedness – and our excesses – are coming  ever closer.

I once heard our situation described  as our  “out-running our headlights.”  It’s like  a driver, at night,  going  so fast  that when the brick wall  in the road ahead  appears in the headlights,  there isn’t enough time  to stop the car  before hitting it.

At last,  we see it:  the brick wall ahead,  called  “global warming,” or “climate change” – not to mention  the hole  in the ozone layer,  deforestation,  pollution of the air and waters,  over-population.  Even  if we hit the brakes now,  there are  collisions ahead.

Do we care?  Well, we do.  But how much do we care?  And how much  does the rest of the American citizenry care?  And our public leaders?  Enough  to make significant changes? 

But then,  why should we?  “There is no  rational  answer,” said Robert Heilbroner.  But there is  a Scriptural answer:  “The earth  is the Lord’s,  and all  that is in it...”  

* * * *

When it was time to leave  Hawley Lake and the mountains,  we bustled about the cabin, cleaning up,  in gratitude to the people who let us use it.  With broom and dustpan, soap and sponge,  we got the cabin ready  for those  who would come after us. Why?

You know.  Because – we didn’t own it.  It wasn’t ours.  We were guests.  That’s it.  That’s the point.  “The earth is the Lord’s.”  We don’t own it.  It isn’t ours.  We are guests.

There was a brochure  I found in the cabin,  which advertised the nearby Sunrise ski resort; it’s owned by the Apache tribe of northeast Arizona.  There was a message in the brochure from the tribal chief  that caught my eye.  “Come...” he said.  “Come, share with us  this gift  from the Creator  that we  carefully protect.”

* * * *

When our European ancestors  came  to this great land,  they brought with them  an understanding of our relationship to nature  that was quite different from that  of  Native Americans. Our pioneering forbearers  read in their Bibles, 

    “Be fruitful and multiply;  fill the earth and subdue it...
    
“The fear of you and the dread of you  shall be put upon every beast...
    
“Look at the birds... Are you  not  of more value  than they?”

And  “subdue the earth”  our ancestors did,  leading to  the greatest national, industrial energy,  and power and prosperity  in the history of the world.  But – at a price.

“Subdue the earth,” it says,  in Genesis 1,  the first chapter of the Book.  But there is another strand  in our Biblical heritage.  And it is now past time  for us as a people  to heed it.

It is true  that the Noah story  ends  with the fateful deliverance of Creation  into human hands.  But there is also  Genesis 2,  in which  Adam is invited  to be  God’s care taker,  giving the animals names,  tending the Creator’s  garden.

In one strand,  all creation is implicated in the Fall,  but in another,  only  human beings are fallen – because we have misused our  free will – while nature  and the rest of God’s creatures  remain  unimpaired.

In one strand,  the names  for God  stress  power and authority – names like  “Lord” and “King” – emphasizing hierarchy,  suggesting  that earth  is  to be dominated.  But in  another stand,  God’s  presence in nature is emphasized – through images  like  “living water,”  “shelter,”  even  “womb” – which help us to recognize  the world  as cherished  and embraced  by God.

In one strand,  nature is  the wilderness,  the abyss,  chaos,  an enemy  to be overcome;  but in another strand,  nature is the realm  of  renewal,  refuge,  retreat,  revelation.

We can no longer act as if  we are  above nature,  or  against nature.  Human destiny  is intertwined  with nature.  We are  in nature,  according to the plan of God – to whom  we and the earth  belong.
Some of our  industrial, technological,  “modern” concepts  of progress and growth  need to be redefined.  And the time to do this  is surely now.  There are built-in walls ahead  in this,  God’s  precious  world.

With thanks to Elizabeth Dotson-Gray, Patricia Fort, Jeffrey Kluger and George Williams