Sermon Archive

On the First Day of Creation, “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” (Genesis 1:3)

On the Sixth Day of Creation, “God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image…’ … And it was so. [And] God saw everything that [had been] made, and indeed it was very good.” (Genesis 1:26a, 30b–31a)

On the Seventh Day of Creation, “God rested from all the work that [God] had done in creation.” (Genesis 2:3b) “So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it.” (Genesis 2:3a)

And on the Eighth Day of Creation… “Hey! Wait a minute! Hold everything! Pastor, in my Bible, there’re only seven days of creation! So whaddya mean, ‘On the Eighth Day’?”

Ah, yes! Well, that is a good point! Yet, in light of the sorry state into which humankind has caused the goodness and beauty of God’s original creation to fall, some theologians have used the phrase “the Eighth Day of Creation” to designate the first day of God’s project of new creation, of God’s dramatic intervention to redeem the mess-of-the-world we humans have made.

So, for example, “the Eighth Day of Creation” is a phrase sometimes used to describe Easter—the day of resurrection, the day of fresh beginnings, the day of new creation, the day when, to recall to your minds the response we sang just a few minutes ago, “the garden of the world has” once more “come to flower.” (from vs. 1 of Shirley Erena Murray’s hymn text, “Because You Live, O Christ”)

But that’s not all. For we in the church also speak of baptismal days as days of new creation—as days of second birth, as days of being born not only of the womb but also of water and the Spirit. Recall these words spoken during today’s baptismal rite, these words that were part of our prayer of consecration. Listen again: “In this water we are buried with Christ in His death; from this water we are raised to share in His resurrection; and through this water we are reborn by the Holy Spirit.”

So we may also speak of this day, when in the name of the Triune God we have baptized Natalie—we may also speak of this day as an Eighth Day of Creation, as a day when the goodness and beauty of God’s world have once more “come to flower” in this child.

So every Easter is an Eighth Day of Creation, and every baptismal day is an Eighth Day of Creation. And there’s still a third type of day that we may appropriately call an Eighth Day of Creation—and that’s whatever day it happens to be when any one of us finally comes to accept our own personal responsibility for preserving the beauty and integrity of God’s creation, whatever day it happens to be when any one of us finally commits ourself to becoming an alert and faithful steward of God’s good earth. Yes, I believe such days as this become for each of us an authentic Eighth Day of Creation, as we vow to continue and extend God’s original work of creation, as we vow to assist God’s project of new creation, as we pledge to help God redeem the mess we’ve made of this created world.

And what better day could there be for any of us to make or to renew such a pledge—what better day than this one, Earth Sunday. Yes, today, April 25, 2004, is a triple Eighth Day of Creation. For first, it’s a day in Eastertide; and second, it’s the day of Natalie’s baptism; and third, it’s Earth Sunday—three Eighth Days in one!

And believe me, in 2004—a year when the beauty and integrity of God’s creation is under such intense assault from all sides—by our nation’s government, and by profiteering corporations, and by over-consuming individuals—God’s earth needs every bit of help we can pledge to give it on this day that’s so triply filled with God’s Spirit. So herewith, the Earth Day part of my sermon!

Reflecting on this morning’s psalm, a Presbyterian seminary professor by the name of J. Clinton McCann, Jr., has written this: “Thousands of years before smog, acid rain, [and] global warming …the poet who wrote Psalm 104 was an environmentalist. The psalmist knew about the intricate interconnectedness and subtle interdependence of air, soil, water, plants, and animals, including humans.” (in “Psalms,” The New Interpreters Bible, IV [Abingdon, 1996], p. 1099) And McCann is ever so right about this.

Yes, this psalmist was an environmentalist. And one of the modern environmentalists who have picked up the mantle of this psalmist is a nearby neighbor of Margaret’s and mine up in the Adirondacks. His name is Bill McKibben, and he happens to be a member of the United Methodist parish that we attend when we’re up there. Bill is quite widely and prominently published, and one of his latest articles appears in the March, 2004, issue of Sojourners Magazine. It’s entitled “Sins of Emission” (Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 8–12), and what follows is largely McKibben.

McKibben begins by acknowledging that: “’Sin’ … is a word we’ve agreed to stop using in polite company— … its force eroded by its constant application to matters of personal style.” So when McKibben discusses the current environmental policies of the government in Washington, placing his tongue firmly in cheek he refers not to its “sin” but rather to its “pattern of unfortunate option selection.” U-O-S.

Now, the unfortunate option selections, the UOS’s, of both this administration and the corporations whose interests it seems to be serving can be divided into UOS’s of commission and UOS’s of omission.

First, UOS’s of commission. “This covers the aggressive vandalism of the nation’s landscape, a deliberate and carefully planned assault on every part of the nation’s landscape. To give just a few examples on a very long list: [a. This] administration has returned huge sections of the national forests to the tender ministrations of the logging industry on the pretext that this will prevent forest fires ([this is what’s cleverly and quite misleadingly entitled] the ‘Healthy Forests Initiative’); [b.] they are trying to let power plants increase the amount of sulfur and nitrogen [and mercury] that they are allowed to emit [up their smokestacks] ([this is what’s so trickily mislabeled] the ‘Clear Skies Initiative’ [and I call it the “No Power Plant Left Behind Program”]); [and c.] they have allowed mining companies to appropriate as much federal land as they would like [for] stor[ing] the slag from the[ir] operations ([this I like to call] the ‘Thanks for [Your] Campaign Contribution’ initiative)…” Those are some of the UOS’s of commission.

“And then there are the unfortunate option selections of omission. This category [includes] … [a] willful and childlike blindness to physical reality.” For example, mountainous piles of scientific evidence have concluded that global warming is happening—evidence which says that at the present rate of “our use of coal, gas, and oil, the temperature of [our] planet will increase [on average] something like five degrees Fahrenheit before the century is out …”—melting glacier packs, raising ocean levels, flooding coastlines, leading to the mass extinction of species and the death of untold numbers of humans, like the 12,000 folk who died of the heat last summer in France. This planet will become hotter than it has been “for tens of millions of years.” Yet in the face of all this, our government is doing nothing. It “has ended our participation in the Kyoto accords” and “proffered an energy plan that foresees … Americans producing 20 percent more carbon dioxide in the next generation even as the rest of the industrialized world is working hard to cut its emissions.… You could, I think, call …all [of this, rather literally,] the ‘Go to Hell’ initiative.”

It is truly unfortunate that as a denomination we’ve worn out the strength and power of that good old-fashioned word “sin” by worrying so much about who people have happened to fall in love with. For right now it would be ever so helpful to be able to use that word “sin” from the pulpit, with all of its thunderous force and meaning—to use that word “sin” for condemning “the willful destruction of the created world” that’s currently being practiced by our government and its corporate allies.

Now, a crucial question for us over the next few minutes is this: if we want to make a pledge today to do something about all of this, so that this Earth Sunday becomes for us a truly meaningful Eighth Day of Creation, what might that pledge of ours include?

Well, first, we can vow to vote this November 2nd for the major-party candidate at every level of government whom we judge most likely faithfully to tend to the beauty and integrity of God’s creation and to mend the harm that’s already been done to it. “If [we] care about national forests, endangered species, Arctic refuges, toxic waste dumps, asthmatic children, …acidified lakes—” well, come this fall, we will have the chance to vote for some candidates who won’t let their friends dump their slagheaps on the public land that we hold in trust for God. Yes, let us pledge now to use well our chance to vote this fall!

OK, that’s easy enough. But here’s a second task that’s really hard. We can vow today to change our own lifestyle. We can help to demonstrate that we American Christians are willing to do the hard things it’ll take to halt global warming, to demonstrate that we actually are willing to buy and live “green,” to cut our levels of consumption and our burning of fossil fuels, and to use fuel-efficient cars and mass transportation! Until a few years ago, “renewable energy…meant guys with pony tails out in their backyards trying to figure out what direction to point the solar panel that connected to an array of 20 batteries down in the basement that needed to have their water level checked every few days…. But that’s changed—the first wave of actual usable new technology has arrived…. If we g[e]t serious about this transition now, we c[an] not only head off some of the climate trouble, we c[an] also do great things for our communities. Imagine a world where people dr[a]w their [electricity] from an array of wind turbines a few miles away. Imagine a vastly decentralized power grid that d[oes]n’t depend on the brute power of ExxonMobil and the 82nd Airborne—that d[oes]n’t require slave labor to build pipelines through dense jungle, that d[oes]n’t need young men and women to travel halfway around the world to shoot at and be shot by people who ha[ve] the great misfortune to live atop reservoirs of crude [oil]. Imagine a defensible energy supply—physically defensible, and morally too.”

So first, we must vote; and second, we must change our own lifestyle. These are things that today we can pledge to do—one of them, easy; but one of them, really hard. Yet we need to do them, lest we and our nation continue to be numbered among those who, as in our Second Lesson, are found striving against our Maker, against the Holy One who “made the earth, and created humankind upon it.” (Isaiah 45:9a, 11a, 12a) Yes, on this Eighth Day of Creation, let us vow that we will be found on the side of our Maker, that we will be found among those who are striving alongside God to preserve the beauty and the integrity of all creation.

Let us pray: