"God's Promise and Climate Change." Revelation 21:1-5.

It may be the most presumptuous thing in the world to try to imagine what
was going on in the mind of God at creation, to try to understand what
motivated God to bring the universe and the world and all that is in it into
existence. That would no doubt be an impossible task, but, still, it might be
helpful to throw caution to the wind and take a stab at it. So, with all the
arrogance I could muster I threw myself at it and, as I have told you before,
I came up with a conclusion. It may not be the conclusion, but it was a
conclusion, my own conclusion. It worked for me and maybe it will work for
you, too, so here goes…

God created the world because God is an artist. As with all artists, God’s
goal was the creation of beauty. The beauty God envisioned was an all-
encompassing beauty. It included physical beauty and moved on through
many kinds of beauty, the beauty of things visible and invisible, culminating
with a spiritual beauty, of which all of God’s creation would be a part. One
creative act of God was the creation of a garden, a beautiful garden, in
Eden, and another creative act was to put a human being, Adam, in that
garden. God paced Adam in the garden to till it and keep it. God also gave
the man a companion, Eve. They lived in the garden, which we have
always envisioned as a beautiful, perfect world. To us, that’s what Eden
means. In the garden Adam and Eve were given almost total freedom. The
only restriction was they were not to eat of the fruit of the tree in the very
middle of the garden, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Of course, as
we all know, a snake came along and convinced them God was lying about
the tree. They believed the snake, they broke that one rule and they ate the
fruit. They took the easy way. The turned their future over to the snake.

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It’s a very simple, elegant story. There are a few holes in it, though. First of
all, God created them male and female, indicating that God had some idea
where this whole thing was headed. The man and the woman, though,
don’t seem to have noticed it at first, even though they were naked. You
might have thought one of them would have said, “You know, I was down
by the pond the other day looking at my reflection, and we don’t look that
much alike. I wonder what that’s all about. Huh!” It was after the
disobedience that they noticed they were naked, and decided they needed
to sew some fig leaves together to cover themselves, even though it was
only the two of them there. Along with God, of course, and when God
stopped by even the fig leaves weren’t enough. They hid from God
because of their nakedness. That’s how God knew they had eaten the
forbidden fruit, because they knew they were naked. They had eaten of the
fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the first thing they
learned was that it was bad to be naked.

I’m not sure that hole in the story amounts to all that much, but there is
another one that I think does amount to something. They were punished for
eating of the tree of the knowledge of good an evil. Presumably, before
they ate of it they did not know the difference between good and evil, right
and wrong. So, how much awareness of the “badness” of what they were
about to do did they have? How culpable were they, really, or should they
have been? Maybe they were simply naïve, being willing to trust the snake.
In God’s mind, though, they were very culpable, and were very severely
punished. In fact, all generations of humans to come would be punished
because of what they had done. Humanity would struggle to force food
from the earth. Childbirth would be devastatingly painful. And, to make

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things worse by far, humanity would face death. Always, 100% of the time.
To make sure they didn’t escape the death penalty for what they had done,
God placed an angel with a fiery sword near the garden to keep them away
from another tree in the garden, the tree of life. All because they had turned
things over to the snake. A great ugliness had invaded creation. Humanity’s
story became one of poverty, sadness, murder, warfare, with nothing more
creative or inventive than all the ways death was visited upon humanity.
So, what had happened to God’s dream?

People of faith never gave up on God’s dream. They always had the
assurance that ultimately, when all was said and done, God’s dream would
be accomplished. The ugliness would not win. God’s vision of beauty,
finally, in some way, perhaps in a way we could never imagine, would be
fulfilled. We could keep going, keep being faithful, because we believed
that. Around the next bend in the road, just over that next mountain, we
would arrive at the destination people who dreamed God’s dream with God
sought – the destruction of the ugly. It would be Eden, Paradise, restored.
The head of the snake would be crushed.

We Christians could believe in that dream because in the middle of all the
ugliness we saw Jesus conquering death, and promising that ultimately all
of us would share in his conquering. And, coming perhaps miraculously at
the very end of the bible, we find those words of the Revelation telling us
that the holy city, the New Jerusalem, would descend, and, as in Eden,
God would once again dwell with humans, and God would wipe away every
tear, and mourning and crying and pain and even death – YES! DEATH! –

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the final enemy, would finally be destroyed. “See,” God said, “I am making
all things new!”

It was God’s promise that ugliness would not win. Death would not have
the final word. The dream in the heart of God would come to pass. It would
be fulfilled.

People of faith have taken great comfort from this promise, as well we
should. It gives us a reason for our faith, our trust in God. Unfortunately,
even we people of faith are children of our father Adam and our mother
Eve. Even in our trust in the victory of God’s dream, we still take the easy
way. We abdicate our responsibility in the accomplishment of God’s good
plan. We face problems and we say, “It’s all going to be OK. It’s all going to
work out in the end. There’s nothing we need to do really. It’s all in God’s
hands and God can handle it.”

As we have always done, we keep right on leaving it to the snake. We

continue to make all the messes humans have always made, and we
expect that God will be there with God’s own divine broom and dustpan to
clean up our messes. Maybe, though, God expects that if we can’t act
responsibly in the first place, then we will be left with our messes and will
have to clean them up ourselves, if we can.

There is an old joke that speaks to this. It is so old and well-known I

absolutely hate to tell it, but if I am going to be restricted to new material I
will be out of business very soon. After all, all I really do is tell a 2,000 year
old story over and over again. So, as old as it is, here comes the joke.

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Hang onto something. In the first scene of our story an old farmer is sitting
on his porch in his rocking chair. It is pouring down rain. The local sheriff
pulls up in his cruiser, rolls down his window and says, “Mr. Tucker! Come
get in the car! A flood’s a’coming!” Mr. Tucker says, “No thanks, Sheriff.
The Lord’s gonna take care of me.” In our second scene, the waters have
risen further and Mr. Tucker is on his roof. The sheriff pulls up in a boat and
says, “Mr. Tucker! The water’s gonna get higher. Come get in the boat.”
And Mr. Tucker says, “No thanks, Sheriff. The Lord’s gonna take care of
me.” In our next scene Mr. Tucker is hanging onto the top of his old
television antenna, the water lapping at his heels.” The sheriff hovers
overhead in a helicopter. He drops a rope down and says, “Grab on, Mr.
Tucker! There’s still more water coming.” But Mr. Tucker says, again, “No
thanks, Sheriff, the Lord’s gonna take care of me.” In our final scene Mr.
Tucker is walking up to the throne of God. He says to God, “What
happened? I thought you were going to take care of me.” And God says,
“Hey! I sent you a car, I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter. What do
you want from me?” The point is, I guess, that God expects us to accept
the responsibility to do our part with what we have been given.

OK, I know you don’t want to hear about this, and, honestly, I don’t really
want to talk about it, but I don’t know how to be a responsible pastor and
not talk about some of the serious issues we face, especially what may be
the biggest problem we humans have ever faced.

Our legend of how we got here notwithstanding, it’s pretty clear that God’s
plan for our creation took a long time of development. Life on this planet
arose in the midst of a very precise set of circumstances – so precise that

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as far as we can tell those circumstances have existed nowhere else in our
solar system or even in the universe. They only existed here, and here is
where life developed, where we came into being. Life here took on an
amazing array of forms, from tiny critters so small they can’t be seen with
the naked eye to creatures so massive they must live in the sea so the
water can support them, and everything in between. It is estimated that
there are 8 million to 14 million species of living things on earth, 86% of
which have yet to be discovered or described. There have been many
millions more species over the eons, nearly all of which have disappeared.
More than 99% of the species that have lived on earth have gone extinct.
Species have always been going extinct and have done so regularly. In
addition to that, scientists say, in earth’s history there have been five
periods of great extinction, when huge numbers of species went extinct.
450 million years ago, 86% of all species died; 70 million years after that
75% of species disappeared; after another 125 million years 96% of
species disappeared; in 50 million more years 80% died; and then, 135
million years after that, 75% died. One of these extinctions, the one that
killed the dinosaurs, was caused by a giant meteor hitting the earth. The
rest were all caused by environmental change caused by atmospheric
change. The great extinction of 250 million years ago happened when
carbon dioxide warmed the earth five degrees, which then caused a
release of methane which warmed the earth more. The whole process
ended with everything but a little bit of life dead. This is happening again.
The difference is that the altering of the atmosphere is happening because
of one species of living things – us. We are now adding carbon to the
atmosphere at a rate multiple times quicker than has ever happened
before. The earth is measurably warming, and scientists are measuring the

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release of methane from the thawing arctic. There is now a third more
carbon in the air than there has been for at least 800,000 years, maybe 15
million years, when there were no people and the seas were a hundred feet
higher. Our use of carbon products is not decreasing it is increasing. The
majority of carbon in our atmosphere has gotten there since the premier of
Seinfeld. Some are predicting that by the end of this century the earth will
have warmed four degrees, perhaps more, and it is all happening much
more quickly than anyone thought they would.

I really don’t want to belabor this, but I can’t believe it is to our benefit to
ignore it. They say species are disappearing at a rate 1,000 to 10,000 times
faster than the usual rate of extinction, and that we are already in the midst
of the earth’s sixth great extinction. Scientists say we are losing species at
a rate equal to the time when the dinosaurs disappeared. And, what does it
mean for us, we humans? As the earth warms, the impact on humanity
may truly be unimaginable. As the ice sheets melt coastlines, like the entire
state of Florida, will disappear. As the heat increases, it is said the hottest
place on earth will be North America east of the Rockies. Crop growing
patterns are changing. Humans get 40-60% of their food from grain, and
the grain-growing band on the earth is moving northward at 160 miles per
decade and there is only so far it can go. While the number of humans
continues to increase, the ability of the earth to feed them appears to be
decreasing.

We are part of earth’s intricate web of life that developed in those unique
circumstances. If those circumstances change as much as some people
are theorizing they will, what does it mean for our species, for us? Those

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looking closely at it say it is worse than we think, maybe even worse than
we can imagine. Vanishing coastlines, alterations in the ability of the earth
to produce food, massive wildfires, extreme weather, vast swatches of the
planet so hot humans can no longer live there, Maybe the conditions that
led life arising here will change enough that we won’t be able to adapt to
them. They say the average life-span of a species is 100,000 years. How
long have we homo sapiens been around? About a hundred thousand
years. I have to wonder what all this mean for my new little grandson, now
just barely a week old? What kind of earth, what kind of life, are we leaving
him, and all our grandchildren?

I could go on and on with this, but I am not going to. As a pastor, I simply
want to ask, as descendants of those who were placed in the garden to till
and keep it, is this not a spiritual issue? Should we not be talking about this
in church? Should we not be aware, and should we not care? Should we
believe that God simply would not let all this happen to God’s earth? Are
we to simply depend on God to stop it, or should we believe that God still
depends on us to acknowledge and accept our responsibilities to clean up
our own messes, to get in the car, get in the boat, grab onto the rope?

I do always intend to be practical in my peaching, and I think I can hear you

asking right about now, “OK, what do you think we Christians ought to do
about this problem?” Well, I’m not going to suggest that we do a better job
recycling and start driving electric cars. If everybody did, maybe it would
help, I don’t know. I think, though, that we are well beyond that point. If we
are going to preserve our world for its current species and for ourselves
and our children and grandchildren, it is going to take a world-wide effort to

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change the ways we are affecting our atmosphere and altering those
special circumstances that made life possible. We need to be urging our
government and all governments to take action. If we don’t do it, and do it
fast, this time the snake just might swallow us whole.

So, what happened to that special dream of God? What happened to God
making all things new? For people of faith that dream never dies. Our faith
is not in humanity, it is not in the earth, it is not in our continued survival as
a species. It is in God. Psalm 46 reminds us,

God is our refuge and strength,

an ever-present help in trouble.
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Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
, i3
though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging.

As people of faith we should do everything possible the stop the cascade of

climate change, which is not merely theorized, it is happening and we can see it
happening. We, and all the people of the world must demand of our governments
that they take definite and immediate action, thinking of the human future and not
merely the profit margin of the next quarter.

Even if we did that, would it work? I don’t know. Honestly, it doesn’t look good.
We’ve already done enough that the cycle will continue spinning, to a greater or
lesser extent. Whatever happens, though, to us and to the earth, the promise
remains. We simply don’t know how it is to be fulfilled. It was always clear that

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history was headed towards a conclusion. Maybe now, this generation, we are
actually looking at it. Whether we are or not, we must continue to trust that this is
finally, ultimately, God’s world. We have never known how things would finally
come to pass, but we have always been assured that, somehow, God’s dream
would prevail. We have always believed that however it happened,

Those who hope in the Lord

will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.
Isaiah 40: 31

Being assured of that, let us pray. Let us hope. Let us have faith in the promise of
God. And let have the courage and the gumption to do anything and everything
we can to make sure that our great-great-great grandchildren have a green and
verdant earth on which to run and laugh and play. It seems to me that’s the least
that we can do for them.

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