One Hour by the Concrete Lake

The Reverend Seth Ethan Carey

April 22nd, 2007

First Congregational Church, Glen Ellyn, Illinois

www.firstconge.org

630-469-3096

Introduction to the Scripture (Job 38:1-11, 28-30)

As those of you who walked or biked to church this morning know all too well, today is Earth Day. And what a magnificent earth it is—a gift of creation for all of God’s creatures. But this scripture from the Book of Job reminds us in no uncertain terms that this is not a gift to be taken lightly. The story of Job will be familiar to many of you:

Job—a wealthy and healthy and God-fearing man—wakes up one day to find that he has become a poker chip in a wager between God and Satan. Satan thinks that Job only loves God because he has never suffered. Take away everything he cares about, Satan argues, and Job will surely turn to the dark side.

So according to this story—which shouldn’t be taken literally—God indulges this strange and cruel experiment at Job’s expense. Job loses his possessions, his loved ones, and even his health. Above all, he loses hope. In the end, God descends in a whirlwind before him, and delivers the soliloquy that you are about to hear. Although this scripture is only a fragment of God’s speech, I think it encapsulates the message: That just as God created Job, God also created this blue planet we call home.

But that doesn’t make either one of them invincible.

Sermon

I stand before the gas pump, gritting my teeth; this weekly ritual is beginning to wear them down. The digital display reads $2.91 per gallon of regular unleaded gasoline. The little engraving on my gas cap calls for premium, but I’m not ready to cross that three-dollar line just yet. So I hit the button for unleaded—$2.91 per gallon—and I can almost hear the engine groaning in protest.

“It’s alright,” I tell her. But I got a bad feeling that it isn’t.

While the pump does its thing, I turn my collar up against the wind; and for some reason I’m lost in a childhood memory. I’m watching TV on a lazy Sunday afternoon with my father. At first I’m not sure why this particular moment comes to mind, until I suddenly remember what’s on the screen. It’s the Sunday matinee on Channel 20, and they’re showing The Road Warrior, starring a younger Mel Gibson as Mad Max—a post-apocalyptic wanderer who eats dog food and drives a black Chevy Camaro and fights an army of leather-clad gangsters for their gasoline, the most valued substance on the nuclear-ravaged continent of Australia.

Funny thing about Mad Max, I think to myself as the pump clicks to a halt, is that his epic duals with the bad guys always seem to revolve around absurdly long car chases in gas guzzling muscle cars and monster trucks; which seems kind of counter-productive when you’re trying to conserve fuel.

And then it hits me. Are we any better? We aren’t exactly swimming in the stuff either, and still— we burn it like there’s no tomorrow. No matter that the price keeps climbing, outdone only by the carbon emissions that keep rising into the sky.

It’s right about this time that I start to regret buying the car with a V-6 engine. But hey—if this preaching thing doesn’t work out, I can always try to make a few bucks in the fast and furious street-racing underground of DuPage County.

***

Allow me a quick word about Carbon dioxide. We human beings produce it naturally in small quantities and unnaturally in staggering quantities and it has collected in the earth’s atmosphere. These carbon emissions lock in heat, preventing it from escaping the planet. This results in a rise in temperature, which means that glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising at an alarming rate, which means that you might want to reconsider buying that beach-front property.

For years, the Global Warming debate has dragged on. Scientists and politicians and environmentalists have argued amongst themselves and with one another as to the validity of the threat, with some claiming it as fictitious nonsense and others preparing for the end of the world as we know it. Most of us probably didn’t know what to think.

That is, until the good citizens of New Orleans woke up one morning under twenty feet of water.

The catastrophe wrought by Hurricane Katrina—itself a product of irregular weather patterns likely caused by environmental damage—blew the lid off the Global Warming crisis. And now, it’s beginning to look like climate change could become the defining struggle of our time. Experts are warning that if we don’t reduce our carbon emissions some 80% by 2050, we will be living “on a totally different planet.”

In spite of its implications, there’s something appealing about that phrase: a totally different planet. I’ll bet some of us would give anything for a totally new world—a world devoid of illness and decay; a world where nations don’t engage in endless mortal combat over resources or religion; a world where people don’t go on senseless killing sprees, depraved exhibitions of madness like the one that shook the nation this past week in Virginia. I’m still trying to come to terms with the immensity of the horror, and I haven’t the words to say anything helpful just now. But I’d tear out my eyes if I could trade them for an alternate universe where these things just don’t happen—if I could trade them for the Kingdom of God.

But when climatologists said we’d be living on a totally different planet, somehow I don’t think that’s what they meant.

***

We are stewards of this earth. We are shepherds, all of us—shepherds of one another, and of green fields not our own. But our civilization has harvested those fields for itself. Someone has been brewing chemicals, building vast cities and engines, polluting the sky—and perhaps even our minds—with the indifferent fumes of industry. To which the Scriptures reply, even as God replied to Job so long ago:

“Were you there when I laid the foundations of the earth…when the morning stars sang together, and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? Has the rain a father? From whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the frost of Heaven? The waters become hard like stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.”

But not for long.

It’s funny that Job should mention ice, being as rapidly melting glaciers are of primary concern in today’s ecological conversations. But what I find even more interesting is God’s extended monologue about the ferocity of water in the book of Job, which finds metaphorical representation in a giant sea-monster called Leviathan. In antiquity, there existed a tradition in which it was believed that God subdued the chaotic waters—subdued Leviathan—before the creation of the world, and before entrusting humans with its care. We too have tried to subjugate the elements, to claim the power of God; but it’s proved too much for us to handle. Hear this from the book of Job:

“Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook? Can you put a rope in its nose, or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it speak soft words to you? Will you play with it as with a bird, or will you put it on a leash for your girls? No one is so fierce as to dare stir it up. Who can stand before it? Who can confront it and be safe?

—Under the whole heaven, who?

All this talk of giant demons in the ocean deep may seem kind of childish. But what else do you call it when the sea itself rises in revolt over New Orleans, a natural weapon to fight back the civilization that carelessly wounded the planet?

Leviathan is just a metaphor. But what it represents is all too real.

***

In the past, I was never too involved in environmental concerns—although I did once come up with a plan to save the world. It came to me one day in a flash of inspiration, clear as the deep blue sky—an all-purpose blueprint for ending poverty, for fighting crime, and for cleaning up the environment. And it all made perfect sense. I was sitting in class one day when this happened, and I scrambled to write it all down before the moment passed me by. But in the midst of my frenzy, I spilled coffee on my notebook and the whole idea was lost forever. The revelation had passed. And all I was left with was the inspiring—if rather unoriginal—title that I’d given this mother of all crusades, which had somehow escaped the murky flood of caffeine: The Earth Defense Force. Pretty good, eh?

If only I’d skipped my coffee that morning, we might be living on a totally different planet.

Fortunately for everyone, I haven’t been the only one working on the problem. Grass roots organizations around the country have been stepping up in the wake of an official report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which concluded that the problem is much worse than previously expected. Activists everywhere have been demanding a commitment from federal lawmakers to reduce carbon emissions 80% by the year 2050, and the movement has been getting a lot of attention. This past week both Time and Newsweek ran cover stories on global warming, echoing a trend of growing awareness—and a call to action that is getting louder each day.

Just last weekend, a sizable group from this very church participated in a nationwide event—a waste-free picnic lunch aimed at increasing awareness and lobbying for federal policy change around the environment. Our church’s involvement in that effort was spearheaded by our very own, newly created, and highly enthusiastic Environmental Ministry Team—dedicated to making this church friendly not just to people, but to the planet as well.

When I see what they’re fighting for, I catch a glimpse of hope. And when I look around at the bigger picture, that hope starts to bloom. Because I see major automotive corporations building better hybrid cars. I see companies investing in eco-friendly skyscrapers that not only consume less energy, but actually produce it. And I see scientists working tirelessly to harness the power of alternate energy sources like wind-power, solar-power, and ethanol.

I see the all the makings of a new industrial revolution. To be honest, a lot of the technology is over my head. But just as God saw when looking out on the finished creation—I can see that it is good.

***

In the southern Ural Mountains of eastern Russia, there is a quiet lake whose name I will not even try to pronounce. Since 1951 it has been a dumping ground for radioactive waste from a nearby nuclear waste storage and preprocessing combine. It has been said that this lake is the single most contaminated spot on Earth, even worse than the abandoned Chernobyl facility. Its radiation levels are so high that a single hour spent by the lake is more than enough to give off a lethal dose.

Between 1978 and 1986, the lake was filled with ten-thousand concrete blocks to prevent the toxic sediment from shifting and drifting off into ocean. Can you blame me if I think of Job once more? What was it he said? The waters become hard like stone.

Now, there’s a thought—just fill up the all the oceans with cement, make it one big vacant lot. Take that Leviathan, you old devil. No more worries about melting icecaps, and no more worries about parking; a totally different planet.

But if we’re aiming for a totally different planet—a New Earth—then we should set our sights on the kingdom of God. We should be laying the cornerstone of a new civilization—one that isn’t driving a 12-cylinder diesel engine into planetary meltdown. There are tons of things we can do, and even one of them can make a difference.

Ride the train. Or plant a garden. Open a window, instead of using the A/C. You can pay your bills online to reduce paper consumption. You can drive a more fuel-efficient car. You can lobby congress to get more involved. You can even purchase a carbon-emission credit to offset a year’s worth of bad behavior. You can consume less, share more, and live simply—even as Christ taught us to do in the first place.

Or you can walk or ride your bike to church.

But most importantly, you can change the way you view the world. We all grew up after the industrial revolution, and for many of us this world full of congested highways and raging commerce and strip malls and towering smokestacks is the only world we know we know.

So close your eyes and imagine a future where all the world is green. We are shepherds, after all…every one of us.