I guess I should confess right up front that I stole this sermon title! I remembered it from the years when my kids watched Sesame Street, where the Muppet character Kermit the Frog sang a song about his plight, which he called, "It's Not Easy Being Green." Of course, by "green" I'm not referring only to frogs, but to a whole way of thinking and living-- an ecologically and environmentally sensitive consciousness. And I want to acknowledge right up front, that in spite of all the awareness of these issues in our culture since the first Earth Day was observed 35 years ago this week, in spite of the fact that polls show environmental issues to be of great public concern, it's still not easy being green.
This is epitomized by an article I’ve kept telling how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is having a hard time fulfilling its mission of protecting endangered species. On the one hand, its budget keeps getting cut by Congressmen who want to see more areas opened up to mining and logging, which leads to charges that it is ineffective. On the other hand, environmentalists keep filing lawsuits forcing it to do its duty -- which has the effect of more of its resources going to pay lawyers and less to actually protecting species.
As most of you know, I retreat every summer to our family cabin in the remote town of Greer, Arizona, high up in the Apache National Forest, a place we’ve been going all my life. You’d think it would be a place of peace and quiet, of getting away from it all, but for the last couple of years there’s been a huge feud going on. It has to do with a proposed land exchange. This is where pockets of private land in the national forest are traded for forest service land bordering developed areas. That would seem to be a good thing, keeping development centralized, and letting undeveloped areas remain so. In this case, however, it’s quite messy! A wealthy landowner in Greer, whose estate is not far from our cabin, managed to acquire a 135 acre parcel known as the Thompson Ranch, a 9,000 foot high meadow with a small trout stream flowing through it, unused for years, and surrounded by national forest. It should be preserved. And so he has offered to deed it to the Forest Service in exchange for acreage in Greer, also right next to our property. It has divided the town! On the one hand are developers and real estate interests who see the potential for over 200 new cabin-sites. On the other are the folks who came there because it was a relatively undeveloped area, and who don’t want to see it grow too much. Our family is especially concerned, because the aquifer from which we get our water comes from the direction of the land in question. So it’s gotten kind of tense, and the newspapers report real hostility among neighbors. It kind of helps me understand why peace in the Middle East is so hard to achieve!
Closer to home, this Westmoreland Hills area is involved in a dispute with the Army Corps of Engineers, over clean water and sludge! We all want clean water of course, but to get it, you have to do something with the bi-product, namely sludge from he Potomac. The Corps is proposing to build a new sludge processing plant behind Sibley Hospital, and either create a sludge dump – which would actually be a mountain – or truck the stuff out, and you know what that would mean for us here on Westmoreland Circle! The suggestion has been made that a pipeline would be a better method of disposal, but of course it would have to go somewhere, presumably to some area with a shortage of sludge. There is always a cost for clean water, clean air, a pleasant environment, and we don’t always want to face it.
It’s very difficult to live a wholly green life, and I’m the first to admit that I could do a whole lot better at it – I have three TV’s, two cars (small SUVs, but SUVs just the same), have electric air conditioning, enjoy a hot shower more than I should, drive more than I should. At least I do compost and put the recycling out! And then I ran across a saying that really twisted the knife: "An environmentalist is someone with a cabin in the woods. A developer is someone who wants to build a cabin in the woods."
It reminds me of the time I went to a rock concert where the performer sang a song protesting nuclear power -- all the while strumming his electric guitar!
No, it's not easy being green -- for not only do you have to battle the forces of runaway consumption and endless development, of wealth and power, you have to recognize and somehow deal with the contradictions and even hypocrisy of your own way of living in the world. We're all in this together, and almost by virtue of living where we do, and in the kind of society we do, we are guilty of sins against the earth. On the global scale, we're all wealthy and powerful. How can we claim to be green at all, living as we do? How do we balance the violence we do to our world, and what we take from it, with what we give back and the contributions we make to its healing?
What to do? I think we begin where we are -- by acknowledging the contradictions between what we say we believe and what we do. The Calvinist in me understands that is the human condition. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The realist in me understands that we all have to learn to live in tension -- we're always held between that which we strive for and that which we are. We always live our lives between the poles of being and doing, of self-interest and self-giving, of work and prayer, of saving the world and savoring it, of reflecting God's glory and seeking God's forgiveness. We'll never arrive at perfection, and had better get used to being at home on the journey. So that's the first thing we can do -- just learn to live with the tension.
And then we can learn that just as the strings of my guitar make music only because they are held in tension, so can we make the tension work for us. We can use it to propel us to do some things that are worthwhile and lead to a more holistic relationship between ourselves and the earth.
We can work smarter. Just as we would urge logging and mining and ranching practices that are smarter -- after all, we cannot live without the products of these endeavors, and so its hard to be against logging and mining and ranching per say -- so we can be smarter environmentalists. Examine more carefully the results of rules and regulations. Work together. Don't be divisive. I am especially appreciative of the work of the Nature Conservancy -- an organization that works across political lines, and facilitates partnership between private enterprise and government, between those who work the land and those who want to protect it -- in ways that work to everyone's best interest. And it IS in our best interest to see that the earth is protected.
And we can look to the resources of our faith and lift up those which promote a more environmentally sensitive ethic and way of being. There are many who see Christianity, and particularly Protestantism, as being in conflict with sound environmental sensibility. Is Christian Environmentalist an oxymoron? Well, there is that strain of Christian tradition that would seem to say so. When the emphasis is on "take dominion", lord it over the earth and every living thing, that is not very green. When the image of God is a distant, all-powerful, uninvolved monarch, there's not much to support an environmental consciousness. When we believe that God gave us everything for our use, to do with as we please, it leads too easily to abuse. Or when like one Secretary of the Interior of a previous administration you believe there's not much point in protecting the environment or conserving our resources because it won't be that long until Jesus returns and makes it all a moot point – well, you get the picture!
These are all things Christians have believed -- and acted upon! I remember reading about William Mulholland, the man who brought water to Los Angeles in the early part of the 20th century. He said if he had his way, he would have a hundred photographers thoroughly document the majesty of the Yosemite Valley -- and then he would dam it up and put and end to the waste!
But there is another strain to our tradition -- a creation-centered or "green theology" as it were, one that moves from the domination of nature to understanding God as immanent, present in all things, working in and through the natural world, and which stresses that humans are part of the web of life. A kind of pan-entheism -- not pantheism -- which knows God up close. It's been part of our faith tradition all along, as well as many others – and that has been the problem. Religions -- like those of Native Americans -- which have a strong nature-relatedness have generally been denounced as "primitive". And so the Church has sought to eradicate the practice of such religions wherever they were encountered, and suppressed its own similar traditions.
But a truly green strain does exist within the Judeo-Christian tradition. Just look at the 104th Psalm, written several hundred years before the birth of Christ, and thousands of years before smog, acid rain, and global warming. This Psalmist was an environmentalist. This Psalmist knew about the interconnectedness of all life, of the interdependence of air, soil, water, plants, and animals -- including humans. This Psalmist understood the truth revealed in the fact that the Hebrew word for human is "adam" and the word for ground, "adama". The Psalmist knew this and knew that nature, while it is not divine, is sacred. "It does not and cannot exist apart from God and God's renewing breath. Because for the Psalmist life derives from God, it follows that our lives belong to God. Because we live in God's world, everything we do has an effect on God's world and on us. Ecology and theology are inseparable."
As I have studied and come to understand the historical Jesus, I have come to see that he, too, stands in this tradition. When you get down to the things he really said, many of them have to do with describing reality in the way the Psalmist did -- of interconnectedness and interdependence. He used many nature images in his parables. And he modeled relationships that were not based on domination, but upon mutuality and caring. Indeed, he said that the greatest person is the one who is servant of all. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
And this tradition has been furthered through the centuries by various mystics and teachers -- from St. Francis of Assisi, to Julian of Norwich, to Matthew Fox in our own day. John Paul II frequently issued “green” pronouncements. In the last couple of decades especially, there has been a hunger to recover this side of our tradition, and a willingness to learn from other traditions -- without dismissing them as primitive nature worshippers -- and discovering how much we have in common. That’s why it did not surprise or shock me when I took the “Belief-o-matic” quiz at “beliefnet.com” and discovered that just behind my “100% “Liberal Quaker” rating, I am 98% “Neo-Pagan”. Even in evangelical Christianity there has been a re-interpretation of WWJD – not “what would Jesus do?” but “What would Jesus Drive?”
It's not easy being green. We have to live with the tensions caused by the fact that much of our way of living is not green. We have to stand watch against forces which have little regard for environmental values. We have to overcome those parts of our own faith tradition that are anti-environmental, and seek to lift up the parts that are ecologically sensitive. It's not easy. As the Lord told Moses, "I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is I will part the waters of the Red Sea and let you escape, and I will send the waters crashing back upon the Egyptians as they try to pursue you. The bad news is, you're going to have to file an environmental impact report first!"
It's not easy being green. It involves a change of consciousness, and it involves work. But it is worth it, and in the long run, we have no other choice. On this Sunday, which is known in the UCC both as “Good Shepherd Sunday” and “Integrity of Creation Sunday” I hope we will see the connection, and resolve to become good shepherds for this earth.
I leave you with these words from Chief Seattle: "Teach your children what we have taught our children-- that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls he sons and daughters of the earth. If we spit upon the ground, we spit upon ourselves. This we know: the earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth... All things are connected like the blood which united one family.... We did not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves...."
