Sermon for 6/28/15: Now, Let's Finish It

Pastor Chrissy was out of town this week. Church member Margaret Imber Preached.

Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15, 2:23-24
Do not invite death by the error of your life,
nor bring on destruction by the works of your hands;
because God did not make death,
and he does not delight in the death of the living.
For he created all things that they might exist,
and the generative forces of the world are wholesome,
and there is no destructive poison in them;
and the dominion of Hades is not on earth.
For righteousness is immortal.
for God created man for incorruption,
and made him in the image of his own eternity,
but through the devil's envy death entered the world,
and those who belong to his party experience it.
 
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
But as you abound in everything—in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in all diligence, and in your love for us--see that you abound in this grace also. I speak not by commandment, but I am testing the sincerity of your love by the diligence of others. For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich.

And in this I give advice: It is to your advantage not only to be doing what you began and were desiring to do a year ago; but now you also must complete the doing of it ; that as there was a readiness to desire it, so there also may be a completion out of what you have. For if there is first a willing mind, it is accepted according to what one has, and not according to what he does not have.

For I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened; but by an equality,that now at this time your abundance may supply their lack, that their abundance also may supply your lack—that there may be equality. As it is written, “He who gathered much had nothing left over, and he who gathered little had no lack.”

Now, Let's Finish It

What a week.  The Supreme Court upheld Obama Care and the tools necessary to enforce the Fair Housing Act.  The Supreme Court overturned state bans against the marriage of gay couples.  As a Facebook post noted, if you have a conservative friend, give him a hug.  He’s had a rough week.

What a week.   President Obama gave the eulogy at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinkley, the senior pastor at the AME church in Charleston that suffered a terrorist attack during their weekly Bible study session.  It is hard not to grieve at this loss.  It is very hard not to be outraged at the sacrilege Dylan Roof made in furtherance of his white supremacist ideology.  It is hard not to be humbled by the extraordinary grace of the families of those slaughtered in the attack.  They chose to forgive.  If you have a sense of outrage over what happened, then measure the amount of fortitude and grace those closest to the attack displayed against the amount of anger and dismay we in Maine felt when we heard about it.


In his eulogy, the President urged all of us to grapple with both the uncomfortable truths of racial prejudice in our country and the terrible cost of gun violence in our society.  If these questions have been daunting in the past, President Obama suggested that the terrible tragedy of the attack in Charleston was a moment in which God has given us the grace to see clearly things which we had been blind to before.

What a week.  There are a hundred things in the events of the last seven days that could fill a sermon.  Unfortunately for me, I had picked the readings because I wanted to talk about climate change.  Any climate change news that might have happened last week was drowned out by the momentous actions of the Supreme Court and the tragedy in Charleston.  The only point of connection I could find between my topic, the readings and recent events was the reference to uncomfortable truths and to God’s grace.  Both references, in fact, might be used in a discussion of the climate change and the Christian’s response to the dangers we all face because of it.

Al Gore’s book and movie about climate change, for example, was titled, “An Inconvenient Truth.”  He might easily have called it an uncomfortable truth.  If we are going to confront the inconvenient and uncomfortable truth about climate change, I think some of us will also need God’s grace to see clearly things to which we have been blind before.  The rest of us will need God’s grace to act on what we have seen and now know.  As St. Paul suggests in Corinthians, it is not enough to know.  We are obliged to act.

Fortunately for me, Pope Francis issued an encyclical on the environment a few weeks ago.  It’s on line, easy to find and download.  Environmental groups have already posted reader’s guides to it.  The encyclical is long, but it is a very straightforward read.  Fortunately for all of us, the current Pope cares about writing clearly so that as wide an audience as possible can consider his arguments.  I shall here avoid the opportunity to make unfortunate comparisons to prior popes.

Let me summarize the main points of the encyclical here:  First, the Pope notes that there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is changing the earth’s climate.  If you don’t accept this fact, I’m not sure what to say to you.  I’d only ask you to consider why you don’t accept the overwhelming scientific consensus.  Who or what has caused you to reject this view?  Who would benefit if you and citizens like you refused to accept the consensus?  After offering his evidence for climate change, the Pope then notes that the consequences of this change, a disruption of water supplies and a decline in biodiversity, threaten the safety and well being of all us.  The threat is already real for quite a number of us.  And those of us who are suffering under the experience tend to be poor. 

By us, the Pope means, and I follow him here, all human beings who dwell on the planet.  Since he follows St. Francis of Assisi, he also means all life, plant and animal as well.  Today’s reading from the Wisdom of Solomon teaches us that God has made the planet for good:

For he created all things that they might exist,
and the generative forces of the world are wholesome,
and there is no destructive poison in them;
and the dominion of Hades is not on earth.

But even if we only talk about humans, the most common, basic aspect of human society, despite our many differences in races and creeds, histories and cultures, is that we live together on this earth and if we fail collectively to be effective stewards of our planet, in the end, each of us individually will suffer as the planet degrades into an arid, infertile, inhospitable place.  It is the present suffering of the poor under the effects of climate change that requires Christians to respond to the challenge of climate change now.  Why?

There are hundreds of verses in the Old Testament that praise those who aid the poor and curse those who oppress the poor.  Jesus spoke repeatedly about necessity that we, his followers, help the poor.   Jesus said, "If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth." 1 John 3:17-18.  We all share the common inheritance of the earth.  Some of us enjoy a goodly portion;  others, a far smaller share.  If human action is creating a catastrophe that right now oppresses the poor far more than the rest of us, then our Christian duty calls us to remedy that oppression.

It’s especially important for those of us who have been blessed with material wealth to take up this burden.  I should note that the poorest person in Winthrop lives like a king compared to at least a billion people on the planet.  If we are looking at the human community, not just our hometown, everyone in church today is very wealthy indeed.  It’s an irony of our economic system that those of us who have more economic resources tend to be the ones who engage in the behavior that causes climate change.  If you are too poor to drive a car, or take a plane – you’re not sending much carbon into the atmosphere.  If you’re so poor that you spend your day searching for clean water, you probably not bagging up plastic Perrier bottles for the recycling pick up.  So the fortunate among us have the greatest capacity to do the most harm.  Yet, this is precisely what today’s scripture reading warns us against:

Do not invite death by the error of your life,
nor bring on destruction by the works of your hands;

The Pope says that our economic system is premised on the notion that the earth is an inexhaustible storehouse of resources.  Whoever figures out how to exploit the resources the planet provides best will earn the most.  But this assumption is belied by our experience.  We are presently living through one of the greatest species die offs in human history.  If you think there is an inexhaustible supply of water, you may not want to move to California anytime soon.  If you’ve ever been in a garden, you know the soil needs to be replenished.  The earth, our common inheritance, is threatened by the assumption that its resources are inexhaustible.  So why don’t we abandon this erroneous assumption.  We are not blind to these facts: 1) the earth’s resources are finite; 2) believing otherwise allows the wealthy in the west to engage in a type of economic system that burdens the poor today. 

If we are not blind we must act.  “Let us not love words or tongue but actions,” Jesus said. But action is hard.  And talking about what actions we could or should take in the heavily polarized political times we live in seems virtually impossible.  Maybe people will show some restraint around the Pope, but if I call for “more balanced levels of production, a better distribution of wealth, concern for the environment and the rights of future generations,” I can only imagine what Governor LePage might say.  I know my brother will call me a hippie, pinko, tree-hugging, commie crazy lady.  And then I’ll call him a troglodyte, exploiter of God’s gifts and peoples.  And neither of us will take any action.  But we will love our words.

Is there away around the problem of climate change?  Can we talk about in a language that isn’t political but is faithful.  Perhaps if we start with the poor -   perhaps, if we recognize that the problems of poverty, the ills of our environment, the failures of our economy are not separate issues but all pieces of the same issue, then we can begin to act.  If our goal is to ensure the human dignity of all members of our community, we should start with the poor.  We wouldn’t build coal powered electric plants in poor neighborhoods, for example.  Fewer coal fired electric plants, however, means that electricity will cost more.  That’s my pocketbook we’re talking about now.

This is the conversation we must begin in our neighborhoods and towns, and our country, and our globe.  Where could we possibly find a model that would allow us share our resources and combine our efforts?  Well, let’s not hide the ball.  The Christian tradition is filled with examples of communities of Christians who lived modestly, shared equitably and defined success by the value of the life of the least among them.  We could start with the book of Acts and continue right to the present day, looking at examples of people, motivated by their faith who lived and worked together with a goal of making the world a better, more just place. 

Indeed, we could start with St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians – our second reading today.  He is writing to ask the Christians in Corinth to collect money to support the Christians in Jerusalem:

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich.

When we live in a community of faith, we share, just as Jesus shared with us.  Moreover, it isn’t as St. Paul says a bit waspishly, enough to mean well.  We have to do well:

And in this I give advice: It is to your advantage not only to be doing what you began and were desiring to do a year ago; but now you also must complete the doing of it ;

Finish doing it, says St. Paul.  It is not enough to mean well, we must do well. And we must act within our communities according to our means.  This is not some crazy alternative economic scheme, Paul insists.  Instead, it is a holistic, long term way to think in community.  Those who have give now, so that in the future, when they have less, others may support them.


 For I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened; but by an equality, that now at this time your abundance may supply their lack, that their abundance also may supply your lack—that there may be equality.  

 To me, this passage is especially striking in the context of climate change.  Paul insists that members of the community think of the future when they make their decisions. 

Perhaps we should send this letter to the Corinthians to the politicians in Washington and Augusta.  Perhaps we should insist that they think of the future, of the children yet to be born, who – if nothing changes – will live in a world far different than our own – a wrecked world, destroyed by the work of our hands.  Perhaps we should tell the politicians that we, like the Corinthians, are willing to give some of our resources now, to avoid wrecking the world for this generation’s poor and all of the next generation.  It’s not enough to agree that climate change is a problem.  Our Christian faith demands that we finish doing it.  Our faith demands that we take our stewardship of the wholesome, generative forces of the world God has made for us very seriously. We cannot destroy it by the works of our hands.  Our faith demands that we give now to help the poor among us live a life of dignity.  And if we do that, not just talk about it, we will, along the way, save the world for the next generation.