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Our Part                        Revelation 7: 9-17                   April 25, 2010 (Earth Day)

This past Thursday was Earth Day. And most of us probably didn't pay much notice - except, perhaps, for reading a small mention of it in our daily paper.

Forty years ago, on April 22, 1970 - the first Earth Day - 20 million people demonstrated.

One columnist put it this way: "The first Earth Day was a dramatic expression of what was then a growing awareness that corporations had been using our air and water as a free dump, and that something needed to be done. It occurred at a time of anti-war protests and anti-establishment rhetoric - a time when change seemed not only possible but also inevitable."

I'm guessing you won't be surprised to learn that I was one of the demonstrators, that day. We held a "teach-in" on the steps of the Boston University Chapel. Yes, those were the days.

"The environmental movement in the late '60s and early '70s was driven by a strong sense of urgency," said Robert Stone, the Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker, in an interview this week's New York Times.

Whereas "the movement now is sort of a victim of its own success in that our environment as a whole seems pretty good. Air is for the most part O.K. and our lakes and rivers are thriving - or at least they're not catching on fire anymore. What we're confronting today is more intangible. So going forward I think people need to be offered something that renews that sense of urgency and not simply bombards them with dire warnings or paltry efforts that are not commensurate with the scale of the problems we face."

"Thinking more about this," he goes on to say, "it seems the environmental movement has been asking people to think small, when I think it would have more success asking people to think big - if we are to solve the greatest challenge ever to confront us as a species since the last ice age."

Americans, Stone argues, need to make the United States "the most fuel efficient country with the cleanest air, the cleanest water, the most advanced electrical grid, the best educated work force, etc., and let others follow our lead."

Sounds to me like an admirable goal. Perhaps even a holy one.

Our service today is a celebration of God's Creation, a demonstration of our love for the Earth and an affirmation that we, as people of God, must care for creation and minimize the harmful impacts we make on our planet.

Fortunately, Creation Care is a subject on which people of faith can agree. Unlike the "wedge" issues - the subjects that polarize and divide us - our stewardship of the earth and the earth's resources is something that causes Christians on the left and Christians on the right - and Jews and Muslims, for that matter - to unite.

And unite we must.

Because the evidence suggests that Robert Stone was correct when he called the current environmental crisis the "greatest challenge ever to confront us as a species since the last ice age." In fact, the evidence is overwhelming.

Glaciers and ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic are melting much faster than expected. Warming temperatures over the next century could turn rich agricultural land into desert, dry out the rainforests, raise sea levels, extinguish countless species, and cause disastrous storms. In fact, most scientists now say that climate change is not something facing us in the future, but is already here.

As Gus Speth, the Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University said recently, "This is our last chance to get it right. We have run out of time."

It's hard to talk in such apocalyptic terms - and equally hard to listen to them, I know.

But the words do ring true. And they sound remarkably similar to the apocalyptic words we read a few minutes ago - words of the Prophet Ezekiel and words of John, the author of the book of Revelation.

And as hard as these words are, we are compelled to speak them, here in the church, because here, above all other places, we must speak the truth; the truth that the threat to our environment - to God's Creation - is very real. Real enough, hopefully, to call us to action.

As one scholar wrote, "The purpose of apocalyptic literature in the Bible and the purpose of the eco-apocalyptic warnings of scientists and environmentalists - is not to paralyze us with fear, but to spur us to act and, even, to invest us with hope."

Our text for this morning - from Revelation chapter 7 - was written sometime between 81 and 96 A.D. Roughly 60 years after the Easter miracle.

This was during the reign of a particularly cruel Roman emperor who persecuted Christians for not addressing him as "Lord and God" as Roman emperors often required.

Many Christians were put to death or exiled for their beliefs. The writer of The Revelation, a man named John, was evidently one of the lucky ones. The book itself tells us he was exiled to safety on the Island of Patmos, a small Greek island in the Aegean Sea.

Picture this scenario: A man named John, a faithful disciple of Christ, is exiled in an isolated place. The people he knows and loves are being killed for their faith in the one they believe to be the Messiah. He is trying to make sense of it all.

All of stories of Jesus and his message about the coming Kingdom of God have all been told and retold. The Resurrection is now just a distant memory. The promise of Christ's imminent return, a hope that once seemed to be visible on the horizon, now has all but disappeared.

"Where is the Christ, the Savior?" John is most likely asking himself. "Why is there so much suffering and death? Was Easter real, or were we just imagining things?"

Viewed this way, the vision John records is not a foretelling of some cosmic struggle between good and evil that will happen in the future - at the end of time. It is rather a vision of a struggle between real people trying to live their faith in a world dominated by and oppressive, empirical power.

And into this real-life struggle comes John's vision of great multitudes worshiping before God. Not just a small band of seekers following a prophet from Nazareth - a vision of a great multitude from ". . . every nation. . . all tribes and peoples and languages. . . worshiping God, day and night."

Many see this vision of John as a picture of Heaven, which it may very well be. But it is not only that. It is also a picture of Earth.

The apocalyptic vision of John in Revelation 7 was written to a people who were in crisis, who were struggling and desperate. To a people who needed hope. And so it reveals to us, here and now, in the 21st Century, a vision not of heaven as pie in the sky, but as the possibility of heaven on earth.

In fact, as one preacher put it, "in the book of Revelation, heaven is not something we are raptured up to, but heaven is raptured down to us! Heaven is on earth, and God dwells on the new restored earth, as poisoned rivers become the river of the water of life."

The farmer / environmentalist / poet Wendell Berry once wrote "It is the destruction of the world in our own lives that drives us half insane, and more than half. To destroy that which we were given in trust: how will we bear it?"

As I mentioned before, Christians generally agree on creation care. I have never known a serious Christian who disputed the notion that the earth is our sacred trust. That we humans - created, after all, in the image of God - are charged with the responsibility of caring for the air and the water and the creatures that depend on it for life.

And I can't see any way to deny that we, the residents of the industrialized world, are, to borrow Wendell Berry's words, "destroying that which we were given in trust."

So unless we intentionally look away from the unfolding truth - in the same way we might look away from a particularly gruesome scene in a Quentin Tarantino or Coen brothers film - we must sense on some level that the earth that we know and enjoy right now will not be the earth that our children and grandchildren inherit.

What, then, are we Christians to do? Two things, I believe.

First, we are compelled by our faith to act.

There are small things we can do - compact florescent light bulbs, fuel-efficient cars and a steadfast commitment to stop polluting the water and the air, for example.

And there are big things as well, such as environmental advocacy right here in New Jersey, and in elections at every level of government. We can join with organizations that have alerted our nation and our world to the dangers of climate change and the importance of investment in green solutions; organizations like the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and many more.

Yes. First, we can, and we must, act. And second, we are also compelled by our faith to hope.

Recall, once more, the image created by John in our Revelation text. John, in writing to his fellow Christians, gave them a gift. He pulled back the curtain that obscured their vision of history, and showed them a party going on. A party, of all things, joined by those who, like themselves, had endured what he called "the great ordeal" - by Christians who had borne the cross of faithful living and who now, vindicated by God, were praising and glorifying God's holy name.

This image was John's way of saying, to them and to us: Have courage, you who follow in the steps of the Savor. Continue to hope and not despair. For you are moving toward the triumph of God!

You and I have the capability to envision a new earth. We have an opportunity to be born again, not only as children of God but as children of the earth - children who are committed to restoring creation; children who are committed to serving God's creation with nurturing love.

Can we make the United States the most fuel efficient country on the planet, with the cleanest air, the cleanest water, the most advanced electrical grid, the best educated work force, etc., and let others follow our lead? You bet we can. And when you think about it, we really have no other choice.

                                                                             AMEN

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