Keepers of God’s Beloved World

Walking through the lobby at University Hospital last spring, I stopped to admire some charming artwork painted by Jack Gunter.  The work is called “The Peaceable Territory Group,” and includes four views looking north from the south side of the Montlake Cut toward what is now University Hospital.

The first painting depicts a Peaceable Territory of forest, animals and native peoples, before the city of Seattle was founded.  The second shows the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, with a couple wearing the latest European fashions, a Naval ship going by, and original University of Washington buildings in the background.  The third includes Russian and American shot-put teams from the 1990 Goodwill Games.  Among other buildings we see University Hospital, Husky Stadium, the 520 bridge, UW’s Suzzalo Library, and the Safeco Building.

All the paintings are delightful, but it was the fourth that most caught my eye.  This one is entitled, “A view northward of the morning commute over the University Islands Floating Bridge in a watery CO2 rich and not too distant future.”  Here a new floating bridge, packed with cars, goes northward, connecting scattered islands in which University Hospital, Suzzalo, the Safeco building and several clusters of houses each sit on their own tiny piece of high ground.  In the distance are the Cascades.  Everything else is water.

One function of art, in addition to that of delighting us, is to help awaken us to aspects of reality that we might not have taken in before.  Like a cartoonist, Gunter invites us first to laugh, and then to wonder: what will our world look like, if carbon emissions continue to increase, and the earth continues to warm?  Perhaps the University District will not be underwater, since it is fairly high above sea level, but what communities around the world will be flooded, and what other impacts of global warming will we see?

As we all know, the issue of our planet’s warming is of critical importance.  Two years ago, the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) predicted serious risks and damages to livelihoods, human infrastructure, societies, species and ecosystems unless future warming is reduced.  So far this decade, emissions, warming, and impacts, such as ice melt and sea level rise, have all been at the upper end of IPCC projections.

NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) reports that between 1.5 trillion and 2 trillion tons of ice  have melted in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska since 2003, and that the Arctic could be nearly ice-free within the next five years.  As vast ice sheets and glaciers melt, they lose their reflective power, and oceans and land absorb the heat instead, causing warming to accelerate.

NASA estimates that by the end of the century, sea levels will rise between 18 and 36 inches.  As the water rises, the most vulnerable communities around the world, from Bangladesh to the U.S. Gulf Coast, suffer from flooding and increased storm damage.  Hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of refugees will be created as communities are inundated with water.

As people of faith we must work to avert this catastrophe, not only to protect God’s human children, but to preserve God’s entire beloved creation.   Today’s Gospel passage is one of many throughout the Bible that not only makes clear our responsibility to act for the sake of the creation, but also assures us that God has provided and will continue to provide all that we need for the task.

“For God so loved the world,” John tell us, “that God gave God’s only Son…that the world might be saved through him.”  God so loved the world—the same world that Genesis tells us God created and pronounced good.  The evangelist reminds us of that act of creation with the very first words of John’s Gospel, the same as the first words of Genesis: “In the beginning…”  In the beginning, God created everything—darkness and light, sun, moon and stars, plants, animals, and humans.  Then God appointed human beings to be safe keepers of all this goodness.  And when humans faltered, God sent Jesus to save God’s world.

So, as we face the looming crisis of climate change, how does Jesus point the way for us?  Wendell Berry concludes in his essay “Limitless Reality,” in Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation, that Jesus understood the whole world to be holy.  Berry writes:

The foreground of the Gospels is occupied by human beings and the issues of their connection to one another and to God.  But there is a background, and the background more often than not is the world in the best sense of the word, the world as made, approved, loved, sustained, and finally to be redeemed by God.  Much of the action and the talk of the Gospels takes place outdoors: on mountainsides, lakeshores, riverbanks, in fields and pastures, places populated not only by humans but by animals and plants, both domestic and wild.  And these nonhuman creatures, sheep and lilies and birds, are always represented as worthy of, or as flourishing within, the love and care of God. (By Lyndsay Moseley, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 2008, p. 52ff)

Jesus says that he comes to bring us abundant life, but he is not referring to piles of possessions that moths can eat and thieves break in and steal.  Rather, Jesus’ abundance is about a cup overflowing with love from and for God, from and for neighbor, and a life lived in balance with everything else on our beautiful planet— water, air, earth, plants, animals, humans.

Auden Schendler has a wonderful article entitled “Getting Green Done,” in the Spring 2009 edition of Earth Ministry’s Earth Letter.  In it, he recommends to us the conception of God that Marcus Borg labels “Panentheism.”  In this conception, rather than seeing God as a person-like being “out there,” we imagine God as “the encompassing Spirit in whom everything that is, is.”   If we think this way, God is neither Father nor Mother, but rather “ultimate reality,” “the sacred,” “the ground of all being.”  The Talmud says of the deity, “God is the place of the world; the world is not God’s place.”

If we imagine God as “the encompassing Spirit in whom everything that is, is,” then the whole world is sacred, and our duty to be earth-keepers is clear.  Frederick Buechner has said that we will find our true vocation where our “deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”  I first came across this quote at an open house at the Pacific School of Religion when I was considering the ministry, and I thought of “the world’s deep hunger” as the hunger of human beings, and my “deep gladness” as my longing to be in ministry with and for people.  But now I hear these words in the context of the hunger of the whole created world, and the call becomes much broader: Your “true vocation is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”  Where is your vocation?

Schendler says the positive thing about the present global crisis is that it provides us:

the opportunity to participate in a movement that, in its vastness of scope, can fulfill the universal human need for a sense of meaning in our lives.  A climate solution—a world running efficiently on abundant clean energy—by necessity goes a long way toward solving many, if not most, other problems too: poverty, hunger, disease, food and water supply, equity, solid waste, and on and on.  Climate change doesn’t have to scare us, It can inspire us; it is a singular opportunity to remake society in the image of our great dreams.

And working to address climate change can happen wherever we are: by greening our dinner table (buying organic food produced near to home), greening our transportation (walking, cycling, car-pooling, taking the bus), greening our place of work or worship (recycling, insulating, heating with renewable energy) or greening our community (capping carbon emissions, establishing clean energy standards, outlawing coal-fired and nuclear power plants.)

God so loved the world that God sent God’s beloved Child that the world might be saved through him.  Now it is up to us to treasure the world as God does, to follow Jesus’ teachings to love God and neighbor, and to come together to save this beautiful, fragile planet that God has entrusted to our keeping.  Let us go joyfully about this good work, and let us begin now, while there is still time.  Amen.