Friends and Family Plan (Preached with Dr. Kristen Poole)
Genesis 12:1-3 and Luke 10:25-37
August 11, 2024
This sermon is the second message in a four-part series on The Climate is Changing. We’re looking at views we’ve held about our world that we need to deconstruct and then coming up with better ways to understand our situation.
For example, last Sunday I looked at a traditional way many have understood heaven and the world to come: the lifeboat of theology of escape. This view says we’ve permanently wrecked our present world and the only solution is for God to rescue us and take us to a different place. If this is true, we don’t have to worry about what happens to this earth. God’s going to destroy it soon after we’re all raptured off it.
Other people including myself would support a theology that is not based on a lifeboat theology of escape but an ark theology of restoration. The ark returns to the land after the flood and Noah begins to restore the world to its former glory. This ark theology of restoration means that we have a responsibility and opportunity to make a difference in caring for this world.
Last week I also contrasted two views of this restoration work. One view says that it is only God who does the work. The second view which I hold is that we are citizens of this world and therefore have a responsibility and opportunity to work with God in restoring this world.
We are fortunate to have Dr. Kristen Poole with us today. She is a professor at the University of Delaware. She wrote a book entitled: Christianity in a Time of Climate Change. I found it helpful. Kristen is going to be sharing wisdom she’s learned on her journey that will help us as we respond to Climate Change.
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Kristen: sharing about shift from individualism to interconnection: three to five minutes
First of all, I wanted to thank Rev. Tupper for inviting me, and I’m glad to have you all here. I think that climate change is the most pressing ethical problem of our time, and some churches have been slow to connect this to Christian ethics, the moral code that presumably guides our lives as people of faith.
Since I am an English professor, I thought it would be fitting to start off by giving you a quiz. Don’t worry—it won’t be graded. It is just a one-question quiz: In which book of the New Testament does it say, “The Lord helps those that helps themselves”? Any guesses?
This is actually a trick question, because the saying does not appear anywhere in Scripture. But over the last few generations there has been a striking shift in how people understand the message of the Gospel. I want to read from an article that appeared in The Meridian Star in 2010:
“Twenty years ago if you polled people on the street and asked them to name a scripture, the majority of people would quote John 3:16. A few years ago, if you polled a similar group of people they would have responded “Judge not lest you be judged”. A recent poll however revealed another shift in the consciousness. Asked to quote something by Jesus, a majority of people responded “the Lord helps those that help themselves”. The problem is, that is nowhere in the Bible, and is actually contrary to the Gospel.”
How did we get to this point, where people associate Jesus with individualism?
Individualism has long been an American virtue. We can think of cowboys and the idea of rugged individualism. We can think of the ethos of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. We can even think of the association of individualism and Nature: both the philosopher Henry David Thoreau on the East Coast and the naturalist John Muir on the West Coast extolled the virtues of going into the wilderness to be alone. The word “individualism” also echoes its cousin, “independence.” All of these are admirable qualities: it is a fine thing to be make one’s own way in the world, to commune with nature in solitude, and to be able to support oneself.
The problem isn’t with ideals of individualism, which are part of our national heritage. The problem comes when this individualism overrides the values of community, when we forget that we are parts of a whole. Our actions do not happen in a moral, social, or environmental vacuum—our individual actions impact others. The other problem with putting too much of a premium on individualism is that it runs directly contrary to the central message of Jesus: love one another. Care for one another.
Much of the conversation about Christianity and climate change has been focused on God’s dictate to care for the earth. As we read today in Genesis, God’s promises are often rooted in the earth: he tells Abraham to go “to the land that I will show you,” and “by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.” There are strong and repeated reminders in the Hebrew Scriptures that it is a human responsibility to tend to the earth. And so yes, absolutely: when we think about the ethics of climate change, we should think of the damage that we are doing to our planet—the increasing rate of devastating fires, catastrophic floods, frequent droughts, and dangerous storms. We should also think about the natural beauty we want to preserve: around here, maybe you think of the mist in a field at daybreak, of the lilies and cornflowers and Queen Anne’s lace, or the sun over the lake at the day’s end. Thinking of the glories of the earth and a desire to preserve it as a motivation for addressing climate change is a good thing.
But we need to think just as much about overcoming the fantasy of individualism. The climate crisis is not the work of an individual; it is the consequence of the collective actions of people across centuries. To address the problem, perhaps we first need to alter how we think of ourselves: not just as individuals, whether we are rugged or not, but as people connected all of humanity. Turning for inspiration to a different Christian tradition, we can look to Pope Francis’s calls to address climate change, in which he emphasizes our interconnection. He writes about our earthly interconnection, as well as our cosmic interconnection: “as part of the universe, … all of us are linked by unseen bonds and together form a kind of universal family, a sublime communion which fills us with a sacred, affectionate and humble respect.”
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It’s helpful for us to move from thinking individualistically to the ways we are interconnected. I think of St. Francis who wrote our opening hymn. In the traditional version of that hymn, Francis referred to the sun as our brother and the moon as our sister. Francis is also known to have preached a sermon to the birds. For Francis, the natural world around us is our family. We are all kin. We are closely connected.
I believe in addition to our family connection with Nature and the world around us, we also have a reciprocal relationship. It’s not simply a one-way route in which we have so much to offer the world. It’s a two-way reciprocal connection in which we each offer gifts to the other. We love the earth, but the earth also loves us back.
Isn’t that a fascinating thought? The earth loves us. The natural world around us loves us… loves you.
The earth expresses that love through sharing its gifts with you. The gifts of beauty and life and light and air and water and food and so much more.
It could be the earth even communicates its love for you. Some encourage sitting under a tree and simply listening. Or listening to a forest as we walk through it.
The earth loves you. As a result, we’re invited to love the earth back. Not as masters and stewards and owners, but as fellow creatures, siblings, partners. It’s a reciprocal relationship of give and take as equals. Not a top-down pity for the poor, helpless earth.
We are truly connected to the natural world.
While reading Kristen’s book a few months ago, I came across another idea I had never considered before. It had to do with loving our future neighbors. Tell us about that Kristen.
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Kristen: From Present to Future Neighbors – three to five minutes
Well, let’s start making our way towards today’s Gospel lesson, the Parable of the Good Samaritan. This is perhaps the most important story of the whole New Testament. It might seem like a simple story at first. A lawyer sums up the Jewish law, ending with “[love] your neighbor as yourself.” But then, in his own trick question, the lawyer asks, “And who is my neighbor?” We can imagine that this question was asked in a tone of aggressive condescension, or with a smirk, or with an implied “gotcha!” In the spirit of the creative writer’s mantra of “show, don’t tell,” Jesus’s answer about a man who helped a wounded stranger when others did not demonstrates what this neighborly love can look like. At the end of his story, Jesus offers his own trick question. Instead of legally defining the neighbor in a way that would satisfy the lawyer, he turns the situation on its head and asks which of the people passing the stranger is being a neighbor. The lawyer gets there in the end: “The one who showed mercy on him,” he says. Instead of being smug about his own storytelling, Jesus gently turns the parable into a call for action, saying “go and do likewise.”
So let’s say we want to put our faith into action and do what is right. Those who ponder ethics have considered how the complexities of the modern, globalized world are causing us to re-think some of the basic principles of moral action. In an earlier time, moral action primarily was considered in terms of the immediate social sphere in which you lived. Suppose, hypothetically, there was someone called Farmer Dave. Farmer Dave has a bunch of rotten apples he doesn’t want to deal with, so he dumps them on the property next door that belongs to Farmer Fred. In this scenario, Dave and Fred need to work through their conflict, or the local community or legal system might need to intervene to enforce a shared sense of communal right-and-wrong. But as our world has changed since the time of the Industrial Revolution, the clear-cut ethics of local contexts no longer apply to many situations. With the advance of machines and technology, problems have emerged that can affect people at a great distance.
This becomes especially true when we start talking about the environment, and especially about the atmosphere. If Farmer Dave decides to pollute Farmer Fred’s property, it is a straightforward moral situation. (In the words of a book my daughter wrote as a little girl, the answer would be “No, David!”) But what if, say, the city of Pittsburgh is sending pollution into the air that is making the air quality in Philadelphia dangerous for toddlers to even go to the playground? And even more difficult to figure out, what if the accumulated carbon pollution of millions of inhabitants of the earth over hundreds of years is causing grievous harm, like this week’s terrible fire in California or the new kind of massive rainstorm hitting the South? How do we figure out the ethics of this complex situation?
In these situations, traditional, here-and-now ethics fail us. Instead, we need what the Rev. Jim Antal (a fellow Congregationalist, I believe) has called “the Golden Rule 2.0.” This idea takes the fundamental principle of “love thy neighbor,” but considers that neighbor as a person who can live far away from us in space or time. He writes:
“We must recognize that future generations are no less our neighbors than those who live next door today … [we need] to embrace the universal principle of the Golden Rule by expanding it to recognize future generations as our neighbors. … A repurposed church that explicitly values continuity of creation could declare our more interdependence with our billions of neighbors the world over as well as our countless yet-to-be-born neighbors.”
This is a big idea, and it can be hard to fully comprehend. But it is true. And it calls for a renewed sense of what it means to show mercy to the neighbor. What follows from this understanding is a larger recognition of when we are causing harm to others. It is easy to see that it is wrong to rob a traveler, beat him up, and leave him lying on the side of the road. And we know it is wrong to dump our trash on our neighbor’s property. But what are some of the less direct ways that we are causing harm through our actions? How are we hurting the people of the future?
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Let’s look at two Scriptures that undergird this message of loving our future neighbors.
The familiar Scriptural reference is the story from the gospel of Luke about what happens when an expert in the Law of Moses asks: What must I do to have eternal life?
Jesus has the man answer his own questions with the two greatest commandments, “Love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. And love your neighbors as much as you love yourself.”
The man continues his questioning of Jesus with: “Who are my neighbors?”
The assumption the man came with was that there were limits around who were his neighbors. It wouldn’t include everyone. He assumes that neighbors mean people who are like us, who believe like us, who live close to us.
But Jesus tells a story that indicates that a real neighbor could be a despised, non-Jewish person from that foreign country of Samaria.
Kristen has taken this idea further to indicate that a real neighbor could be someone from the future. We are to love our neighbor of the future, the inheritors.
This is indicated as well by the Scripture from the beginning of our Bible. God is calling out to Abram to leave his country to go and start a new family in a new land. God says to Abram, “I will bless you and make your descendants into a great nation.”
It’s about extending the love and blessing to future generations.
Something that is troubling as we reflect on responding to Climate Change is the discouragement and pessimism we come across. I appreciate how Kristen wrote about the importance of responding to that in her book.
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Kristen: From Despair to Hope– three to five minutes
Yes, it is one thing to say that we want to live by the Golden Rule 2.0, in which extend “love thy neighbor” extends from the people in our immediate sphere to those who live around the globe and to those who will be born in the future. It is another thing to imagine how you might put the Golden Rule 2.0 into practice.
And yes, it can seem like an exercise in futility and a fool’s errand to try to address climate change on a personal level. What can you do about someone who burned coal in a locomotive 100 years ago? Because yes, the burning of coal leads to carbon dioxide molecules that stay in the atmosphere for centuries. We are now dealing with the build-up that has accumulated. And what can you do about someone who is burning coal right now in, say, China? Because yes, the burning of fossil fuels is now shifting to emerging markets around the globe, as wealthier nations are transitioning more rapidly to cleaner energy. And yes, what if you can’t afford, say, an electric vehicle, or your family lives far away and you want to fly to see them?
It can seem overwhelming. But, to quote that rugged individualist Teddy Roosevelt, you can do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.
I might offer some suggestions for actions.
First, just be conscious and knowledgeable. If you are not very informed about climate change and want to learn more, you might go to a trusted website—I think in this polarized day and age we all still like NASA? They have great information. You do not need to be a climate scientist to understand the cause of climate change: it comes from burning stuff that was once in the earth—coal, oil, and natural gas. We have basically been in the midst of a centuries-long process of burning those sources and transferring carbon from under the ground into the atmosphere, where it has been forming a layer of gasses that trap the sun’s heat.
Second, be self-aware. I have been trying to notice my actions that are contributing to the problem. There are some things about my life I can’t change, but others that can. What better choices can I make? How can I think of those choices in terms of the Golden Rule 2.0?
Third, talk about the problem of climate change! As the climate scientist and evangelical Christian Katherine Hayhoe says, just talking about the problem is part of the solution. In our current moment, in which climate change has unfortunately become recently politicized, simply having neighborly conversations about what’s going on and normalizing the discussion is an ethical action. This is also a way to build local and collective will for reasonable changes about our energy use and production.
Fourth, don’t conflate the plastic problem with the climate change problem. Plastic waste is indeed a huge issue. In 2017, we passed the dubious milestone when sales of plastic water bottles reached one million per minute, 91% of which are not recycled. It is projected that by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the sea, by weight. So abolutely, yes, keep recycling! But recycling is only tangentially related to climate change, which, again, comes from burning fuels that were once under ground. It is a problem that should be largely de-coupled from climate.
And fifth, think of environmental successes. Remember when Lake Erie burned because it was so polluted? Remember when bald eagles were nearly extinct because of toxins in their food sources? Remember when we realized in the 1990s that aerosols were creating a hole in the ozone layer? All of those problems are on the mend because people worked together to find solutions. Climate change is a bigger, more complex problem to solve, but not impossible to address!
Finally, practice mercy, patience, and forgiveness, to yourself and to others. One of my favorite parts of the Bible is the post-Resurrection appearance of Jesus on the beach at the end of the Gospel of John. Peter is in a boat, and when he sees Jesus he is so ashamed of his own cowardice and betrayal that he dives into the water, trying to hide. But what does Jesus do? He gently, kindly invites him to sit down and have breakfast.
Addressing climate change as a Christian thus entails both action and attitude. We can do things and support larger communal efforts to minimize our burning of fossil fuels. But we can also think about how we think about the climate, and reframe our ideas in moral terms.
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Thank you so much for coming and speaking to us Kristen. We need to hear this message.
I’m ending each of the messages this month with a time for each of you to make some suggestions about how we can respond to our changing climate, the work that we can do to bring God’s kingdom to earth, to restore this world to God’s intention. What are some specific things that you are doing or that you would like to do?
