Scripture: Psalm 104: 1-24; Revelation 11: 15-19
Sermon: Spring Cleaning: Earth Care
Topics: creation, environment, garbage
Preached: March 15, 2009
Rev. Mike Abma
INTRODUCTION
This week I stumbled upon a brand new edition of the Bible.
It is called the Green Bible.
You know how there are red-letter editions of the Bible that have all the words of Jesus printed in red ink.
Well, in this Green Bible, all passages referring to creation and the care of creation are printed in green ink.
Of course, the ink (both the green and the black) is not just any ink – it is soy-based ink, environmentally friendly ink.
It is printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper,
and bound together in an all-natural cotton-linen cover.
All this for only 29.95 at your local Baker Book House.
I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrows a bit.
“Isn’t this a little much?” I thought.
But then I thought of this sermon I was writing, this sermon on caring for creation.
I wondered if we are all getting a little Green Fatigue.
Perhaps a mild case of Eco-Anxiety.
That is when the words and catchy phrases like
Energy efficient
Environmentally friendly
All-natural
Organic
Carbon-footprint
All begin to lose some of their appeal and even some of their power.
So I begin acknowledging we may have become somewhat jaded,
perhaps somewhat cynical,
and perhaps even somewhat critical
of what some have called the Green Agenda.
THEOLOGY MATTERS
But does that mean we can ignore it?
Does that mean we can pretend it is not an important part of our life – our Christian life?
Working on this sermon got me thinking of my first “environmentally-friendly” sermon. The year was 1989. I was just out of seminary. I was full of enthusiasm, full of idealism. I was preaching to my first congregation in a church just east of Toronto. The sermon was from the book of Revelation. It asked the question: what would happen to this planet earth on the day of Christ’s return. I noted that the Bible is pretty fuzzy about the details. I said there were some Christians who believed that this planet would be totally annihilated, totally destroyed and totally burned up and discarded.
Then I noted that we, in the Reformed tradition, see things differently.
We see the kingdom of this world becoming the kingdom of our Lord.
We see heaven coming down to earth,
forming a new heaven and a new earth
in which all things are made new.
We see the old being cleansed.
We see the polluted and damaged planet being perfected, and made a paradise again.
I even quoted Tony Hoekema’s book The Bible and the Future. In that book, Hoekema writes that if this present creation is totally annihilated, then Satan would have won a great victory. For then things would have gotten so bad, so rotten, so corrupt, that God could do nothing with it but destroy it completely. But Satan cannot be given such a victory. Why? Because Jesus has won the victory. Our world belongs to him.[1]
Well, after that sermon, an older member of the congregation approached me and told me I was dead wrong. Waving his finger at me, he said that this earth is just a filthy rag and at the end of days, it would be disposed of as a filthy rag.
We agreed to disagree.
A while later I learned something about this man.
He and his family ran a roofing business.
For years they had been avoiding the cost of disposal fees,
and disposing old shingles in the back of fields.
This was an environmentally hazardous practice
and I even think an illegal one.
And I thought, “Theology makes a difference.”
How we see the world and what will become of this world makes a difference.
HOW DOES PSALM 104 SEE THE WORLD?
How does the writer of Psalm 104 see the world?
Well, we know the psalmist fully appreciates the beauty of the world, the wonder of it, the diversity of life in it.
But what I would like you to see is how this psalm also acknowledges the vulnerability of the earth. Its fragility.
Look at verses 5-9.
Read that closely and you see that creation is threatened by water.
Water might again flood the earth.
We know that from Genesis onward, water has the potential for life and death.
Water breaking beyond its boundaries is chaos.
What God does is set boundaries for the water.
What God does is protect his creation from chaos.
Then from verse 10 onward, the Psalm is about God providing order rather than allowing things to spill over into chaos.
Order comes in the water being diverted into springs, and streams and rivers.
This water provides animals and birds with drink.
It allows fields and forests to flourish.
How does this psalm see the world?
It sees it as a place that God protects as well as provides for.
God is the one who takes care of creation
and he is the one who delights in creation.
This psalm also invites us,
the image-bearers of God
to protect and care for creation,
and also to delight in creation.
This kind of creational language is not uncommon in the Psalms.
If we were to take every creation image out of the Psalms,
The Psalms would be left looking like Swiss Cheese.
The truth is that throughout the Psalms
creation is pictured as a choir singing God’s praise.
Is it any wonder that John Calvin called creation a “theatre of God’s glory?”
Is it any wonder that the Belgic Confession calls creation a “beautiful book”
and a key way we come to know who God is?
As Christians, we do not simply practice conservation for creation’s own sake.
We protect and care for and delight in creation,
out of reverence for our Creator.
What we Christians have not always been tuned to
or sensitive to
is how painful destroying or even messing up creation is to the Creator.
It is like silencing part of God’s creational choir;
It is like ripping pages out of this beautiful book;
It is like throwing rotten tomatoes onto God’s theater of glory.
God does not look kindly on those who ruin and destroy his creation.
Our Revelation passage sounds a clear warning:
The destroyers of the earth will be destroyed (Rev. 11:18)
HOW SHALL WE LIVE?
How then should we live?
How should we live according to Psalm 104?
How should we live as people who,
with God’s help try limit chaos and provide order;
who allow this creation to flourish rather than falter and fade,
who work for the renewal of creation rather than its ruin?
Well, honestly, we could go in all kinds of directions at this point.
We could talk about the energy we use,
the homes we live in
the cars we drive
the food we eat
the clothes we wear
the length of our showers in the morning (by the way, the North American average is 8 minutes – way too long).
But in keeping with our Spring Cleaning theme this Lent, I want to keep things simple. I want to talk about garbage.
The sad truth is, we consume more resources and produce more garbage than any other people on the planet.
In December of 2008, NPR (National Public Radio) ran a story on David Chameides. David wanted to know how much garbage his lifestyle was producing. He also wanted to see if he could life a garbage-free lifestyle. So he gave himself a challenge. For one year, the calendar year 2008, he decided to live a garbage free lifestyle. He would either recycle, reuse, or compost everything….everything.
At the end of the year, he said that it was pretty tough. The hardest months were the first ones. Like most of us, Chameides had the habit of simply throwing anything and everything into the trash. He suddenly had to think about not producing trash at all.
His interviewer said that living a garbage-free lifestyle is pretty unrealistic for the average person. So what could the average person do?
Chameides said that the worst pieces of trash are the single-use items.
These are the things we use once and through away.
So many of these disposable single-use items are used for one reason – convenience.
We simply do not want to be bothered with washing a plate or cleaning a cup.
That is why each year 50 billion more Starbucks disposable coffee cups go into this country’s landfills.
What Chameides discovered is that if we do not think about our garbage,
then it is too easy to simply bag it up and leave it on the curb.
If we do not think about our waste,
it is too easy to grind it up and send it down the drain.
It is the habits, the daily rituals of life, that make the difference.
It is the habits of our personal life, and our church life too, that need to change.
We need to change those habits to reduce the garbage we produce.
Personally I am thrilled that we now have a taskforce in Woodlawn looking at how we can be a “Greener” congregation, and how we can produce less trash.
CONCLUSION — ATTITUDE CHANGE
The problem is we are creatures of habit.
And many of us have bad habits, wasteful habits, trash-producing creation-defiling
habits.
We will not change our habits until we truly see things differently.
We will not change unless we begin to realize the damage we are doing.
We will not change until the Holy Spirit convicts us with the truth that
for the sake of Jesus,
for the sake of his creation,
for the sake of the generation of Brian, and Emily, and Sophia (all babies)
we must start changing the way we live.
But that doesn’t come easily.
I remember being at a school event a number of years ago.
I can’t remember whether it was a Middle School event or High School event,
but I do remember that there was a crowd of kids.
And I remember that there were wrappers, and popcorn, and pop cans and all kinds of junk littering the floor.
I got the attention of the kids and I said, “Hey, hey, hey.. what’s with all the garbage?”
And one of them said, “They pay someone to clean things up.”
They pay someone to clean things up.
That phrase struck me, and has stuck with me ever since.
They pay someone to clean things up.
Who pays?
A while ago, our family saw a squirrel with some sort of plastic container stuck around its neck. The squirrel had wiggled its head through some plactic container and now couldn’t get that piece of trash off.
And we couldn’t catch the squirrel to help get it off.
And I wondered: Who pays?
The other day I was bringing Rachel Warners home.
She is a daughter of Professor David Warners here in the biology department at Calvin.
I happened to be dropping Rachel off just as Dave was coming home.
I think he had just walked from Calvin all the way to his Alger Heights home.
What I noticed was that his hands were full – not with books, or papers, or assignments.
His hands were full of plastic bottles, and cans, and wrappers and all kinds of other junk that he had clearly picked up on his way home.
And I wondered: Who pays?
This Lenten season,
we think of the one who trudged up Golgotha’s hill,
bent over by the weight of a groaning Creation,
stumbling with the burden of our decaying world.
We remember the one who did all this
not only to wash our hearts clean
but to wash and clean and renew this whole creation.
So who pays?
He paid.
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Anthony Hoekema, The Bible and the Future. Eerdmans, 1979, p.281. ↑
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