A sermon by Jessica Zimmerle, preached at Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry, Thursday April 25, 2019.
Text: John 20: 19-31
For many of us, this may have felt like a long couple of weeks. One of my Facebook friends summed it up well when she posted that “Holy Week is like the super bowl, a wedding, and herding a giant field of cats. All at the same time.”
In the world of faith-based environmental organizing, this week was a double-header. Earth Day was on Easter Monday. Can I see a show of hands if it was on your calendar? No shame if not, we’ll explore this holiday together.
The first Earth Day in 1970 was the largest demonstration in US history. It was 5 times larger than the 2017 Womxn’s March. People young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, came together to demand that the government clean up the environment. Why? Because at that time, smog was blanketing cities and waterways were literally burning.
Lo and behold, the protest worked. One week after Earth Day, creation of the Environmental Protection Agency was recommended. The following decade gave rise to new protections through 28 federal environmental laws, including the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.
Earth Day will be celebrating its 50th anniversary next year. One article that I read this week claimed that Earth Day is experiencing a midlife crisis. Environmentalists interviewed for this piece said that it has become a surface level holiday. One feel good day to justify a year of consuming and polluting. Others said that it has become too much about individual actions instead of systemic change.
I might not go so far as deeming it a midlife crisis, but I will say that it’s time we start to think of every day as Earth Day. Because one thing that is certain is that we still have much more work to do to protect our communities and God’s creation. In the fall, two major climate reports presented an alarming wake-up call. The world’s scientists concur that we have 12 years to limit climate change from being completely catastrophic. They reported what we are seeing, that creation is groaning.
Yet what about those who do not see the turmoil of Mother Earth? Those for whom the topic of climate change triggers a response akin to that of the disciple Thomas after the resurrection of Jesus.
I’ve always felt kind of bad for “doubting Thomas.” All of his friends claimed that, while they were conveniently gathered without him, Jesus appeared back from the dead. It feels rather human for Thomas to question this miraculous appearance. Can we blame him for wanting some evidence to back up their claim?
Not only does Thomas say he needs to see Jesus to believe in the resurrection, he says he needs to feel his wounds. He set a high bar for his belief, demanding a visceral confirmation that the man claiming to be his mentor, rabbi, and friend was indeed crucified and risen.
While Jesus provides what Thomas needed, he does not condone this request. Instead, Jesus lifts up the many who will never see him and yet will believe the good news as the disciples start proclaiming it. But going back to his first presentation to the 11, Jesus leads by showing them his wounds.
What do you imagine the wounds from Jesus’s crucifixion may have looked like?
Perhaps covered with new skin, taught and shiny as if treated by a heavenly doctor’s hand and given time to heal? Or maybe rough, scabbed, blood-stained?
When the disciples’ eyes fell upon these wounds, might they have felt a stab of pain in their own hearts? Regardless of how outwardly gruesome, it could not have been easy to look upon the wounds of Christ, let alone feel them.
So too, it is with climate change.
When we really look at the impacts of climate change, the images are painful. It’s not just drowning polar bears that break our hearts, although no one likes to see that, but also the struggle of our fellow humans. Climate change looks like water buckets on bone parched soil, vast expanses of wildfire smoke visible from space, and women carrying their children through waist high floodwaters. It looks like indigenous, black, and brown bodies bearing the burden of decades of pollution driven by white-dominant culture. It looks like injustice.
Injustice is a hard foe to lock eyes with. Harder yet is to let yourself feel the weight of culpability for its cause.
Yet we must face the fact that climate change is happening and IS human caused. There’s more consensus among scientists that humans have caused climate change than there is in the medical field that smoking causes cancer. Unlike Thomas with Jesus, this present-day crisis is not a matter of belief. It’s an issue that our faith calls us to address because we have a moral responsibility to confront sources of wounds being felt by our human and natural family.
How then do we invite in those who are averting their eyes and hearts from this painful reality? Especially those who are far removed from the discomfort of the impacts of climate change?
One answer is to have a good messenger, like Sir David Attenborough. Even if you don’t know his name, I bet you’d recognize his voice as the one behind numerous nature documentaries. Last week, a study was released that one year after his Blue Planet II series was released, single-use plastic consumption has been cut in half in the US and UK. They’re actually calling this “the Attenborough effect.”
You see, the work that Attenborough has collaborated on has increasingly shed light on the plight of the natural world. The last episode of Blue Planet showed coastlines and marine environments filled with litter. It’s tough to watch a baby bird choking down a bit of plastic while knowing that it very well could have come from your home. And upon seeing those mountains of trash, it’s hard to doubt that we have a global problem with pollution.
Attenborough is making waves through his position of influence. But what about those of us who are not a famous, and may I add knighted, voice actor?
You are even better. You are the Church.
Together, we form the body of Christ through which God is at work in the world, through which all things are possible. Just as Jesus sent the disciples out to proclaim the good news, so too are we sent to provide a hope-filled response to our changing climate.
As people of the resurrection, tasked with tending God’s garden, we are messengers that the world needs. It’s daunting, true, but as Church leaders who are serving in the era of a changed climate, we have the opportunity to use our moral platform to disrupt the path from apathy to despair.
We can present creation care as a moral obligation. We can provide resources and support to help people practice good stewardship. And we can inspire faithful advocacy to spark systemic change.
To be real, you’ll probably end up having some hard conversations with modern day doubting Thomas’s. But please don’t let that scare you away from bringing environmental themes into your preaching and ministry. Similar to how Thomas needed to feel the wounds of Christ, a number of people you serve may need to hear about climate change from the pulpit to really see its magnitude.
So let’s round back to Earth Day. Even after a long span of Holy Week or Passover, religious leaders I work with across the state are weaving environmental themes into their worship this weekend. How might you join them in lifting up care for creation?
It’s likely that your faith community already has their bulletin printed, adult education class planned, and sermon in the works. Maybe it already includes a beautiful celebration of Earth or call to ecojustice. If it doesn’t, that’s ok. I’m not asking for you to show up and propose anything drastic.
For this Sunday, I simply invite you to start, or continue, the conversation. It could be chatting with someone over coffee hour, pulling your pastor aside before service to ask that Earth be included in the prayers of the people, or looking for a few friends who might want to help start a Green Team at your church.
Values-based conversations, stories, and preaching about creation care are what will take root in people’s hearts and minds. Once planted, you never know how many seeds of your conversation, or your preaching, will sprout into action. What you say this weekend could move someone to treat every day a little bit more as if it were Earth Day. And hopefully, eventually, people will speak of “the Church Effect” as one of the main actors that restored creation.