Last Friday was  “Black Friday”, when the world goes crazy over shopping.  There was a lot of controversy in the days leading up to the event concerning stores opening not at 5 am, not ta 4 am, not even at midnight, but as early as 10 pm the evening of Thanksgiving.  This controversy was misguided.  The issue should not have been Black Friday “invading” Thanksgiving’s time slot, but Black Friday happening at all… As for me, my experience of Black Friday was different and unexpectedly blessed. What did I do on Black Friday?  I went to a funeral.  Read on…

I am an incurable news-addict, so I suppose it’s my own fault that I had heartburn before breakfast on Black Friday.  I woke up to a story from the Los Angeles Times that many of you probably saw in some form sometime during the weekend:

Matthew Lopez went to the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch on Thursday night for the Black Friday sale but instead was caught in a pepper-spray attack by a woman who authorities said was “competitive shopping.”

…”People started screaming, pulling and pushing each other, and then the whole area filled up with pepper spray,” [a] Selmar resident said. “I guess what triggered it was people started pulling the plastic off the pallets and then shoving and bombarding the display of games. It started with people pushing and screaming because they were getting shoved onto the boxes.”

Later, during the day I heard an interview on NPR with a guy who “had to” get in line at a Toy Store during his family’s Thanksgiving dinner .  “My mother didn’t like it, but I had to do it.” And another with a shopper who admitted that among all of her purchases, there was a total of one – 1! – item that was for someone else.  She had bought everything else for herself.  A review of the posts of my “friends” on Facebook showed a few expressing dismay over Black Friday, but also a disturbing number who were caught up in the spirit of the thing, and dragging their Facebook friends along for the ride.

Do I object to Black Friday starting at midnight or earlier?

No.

I object to Black Friday happening at all.

You could hardly find a sharper contrast between two events than the differences between Thanksgiving and Black Friday.  Thanksgiving is, by definition, a humbling experience.  I cannot be thankful without an implicit recognition that there is someone besides myself who is responsible for what I have and even for who I am.  Thanksgiving as traditionally practiced is about family, and sharing, and giving and as much as anything, about acknowledging those nonmaterial aspects of life which have no price but have incalculable value.

Black Friday – well, we’ve already seen it, haven’t we?  It’s about money.  Consumerism.  Irrational material acquisition.  Greed.  Black Friday is, perhaps, the middle class playing the same games that Wall Street bankers play every day.

You could make a pretty good case that this is one “holiday” that Christians should shun with all of the passion available to them.

So what did I do on Black Friday?  I went to a funeral.  And I found Black Friday turning into a very, very good Friday.

Ralph was an old friend of our family.  In fact, he was one of my father-in-law’s best friends, and showed that friendship in his own quiet way in the days leading up to my father-in-law’s own death some ten years ago.  Though we had to drive two and a half hours each way on a holiday weekend to attend the service, we felt we owed it to Ralph’s family.  After all, Ralph had already done more than this for our own family.

His death was unexpected but not surprising – he was, after all, 86 years old.  The service was a comforting tribute to a husband, father, grandfather who by all accounts had lived his life well.  There were the usual favorite hymns and Bible readings.  But what struck me was the contrast between what we were experiencing inside that church with what I knew was going on in every shopping mall in the country at that very moment.

This man had captured the essence of Thanksgiving in every aspect of his life, and he stood, even in his coffin, as a silent rebuke to all that is Black Friday.

According to the values of the world of Black Friday, Ralph didn’t accomplish much of note.  When the history books are written, he won’t get even a footnote.  But in the world of Thanksgiving, it’s going to be a different story.   Ralph’s eldest son paid tribute in simple eloquence.

“He was quiet.  And he was faithful.”

If something needed doing, Ralph was the one who did it.

We were treated to a number of examples of the kinds of little things that Ralph did quietly and faithfully.  What sticks in my mind, though, is the church sign.  The Pastor told us that the sign in front of the church – you know, the kind with moveable letters that announces a sermon title and maybe a verse of the week – had been updated every week by Ralph for years.  No one asked him to do it.  He just did it.  Every week.

In fact, the words on the sign on the day of his funeral had been placed there by Ralph himself.

“Quiet… and faithful.”  What a tribute.

You know the kind of person Ralph was because you know someone like this yourself.  People like this represent the triumph of selflessness over selfishness.  The victory of humility over arrogance and greed.  And the inevitable and glorious transformation of all of our Black Fridays into Good Fridays.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference in Bozeman, Montana.  The announced topic was ‘Human and Environmental Health: Social Justice Implications: A Program for Religious Leaders and others…’  The setting was magnificent:  A century old railroad inn an hour’s drive from the western entrance to Yellowstone Park, surrounded by the mountain ranges for which Bozeman is famous.  But what made this conference unique was the oxymoronic nature of the sponsors.  FREE (The Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment) is a conservative institution dedicated to the application of what they would consider ‘sound economic principles’ to environmental problems.  I call them my ‘libertarian economist environmentalist friends’, and while I happily retain my own convictions, I found much that was profitable in this conference.

New Friends

As with any gathering of people around a common concern, the most profitable and enjoyable aspect of this conference was the people.  There were just 25 of us including presenters, and we represented a wide range of intellectual and religious  and career backgrounds.  A number of mainline protestants (Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian and so on), a couple of Catholics, one Orthodox priest, two Rabbis (including one who survived the Holocaust as a teenager), and yes, four or five evangelicals. Someone commented than an afternoon hike could have been a joke:  “A priest, a rabbi and a minister went up a mountain…”

John Baden, founder and director of FREE has been doing these conferences for more than 20 years, and is a master of a ‘facilitated discussion’ format:  Everyone has an opportunity to participate, civility is required, and a conversation ensues that is far more in-depth than you would expect with a group of 25 people.   Of course, some of the most valuable conversations happen off-program – in breaks and during meals.  I have several new best friends after this conference that make the investment of time more than worthwhile.

And I have to say that the organizers and presenters are among the most delightful people I’ve ever interacted with.  John Baden wanted us to see his ranch, located just a mile away.  “Before you care about what we know, you need to know that we care.”  What was a broken down ranch when he bought it (a long time ago), is now mostly in conservation easements and features a series of trout ponds (see picture) which he uses to serve local organizations including the Wounded Warrior Project, a very cool program to help rehabilitate wounded veterans by teaching them fly fishing, among other outdoor activities. However much I might disagree with John on aspects of economics , there is no question he cares about the environment – God’s creation – just as much as I do.

Content

Conference content was not completely as advertised.  Of four topical components – economics, environment, human health, and social justice – the first received somewhat more attention than environment and health, and social justice was left to fend for herself.  This was probably to be expected given that the sponsors and many of the presenters are economists, and while not a fatal flaw, did reduce the value of the discussions a bit.

Part of the challenge here was a lack of upfront topical integration.  In my mind I had connected ‘environment’ and ‘human health’:  I see these as two sides of the same coin.  And I would like to have begun with some basic definitions:  What do we mean by ‘health’? Do we mean simply ‘not sick’ or are we looking for something more?   Wendell Berry has things to say that Adam Smith’s disciples need to listen to.

Most of us from the religion side of the table felt that the conference would have been better balanced with one or two presentations from a theologian.  Yes, there is a challenge implicit in that proposition (“Who would we ask?  Catholic? Jewish? Evangelical?”) but still:  In a conference trying to integrate economics, environment and health for religious leaders, the theological perspective was needed.  And this may be one reason it felt like social justice was left out in the cold.

My favorite comment from the floor came from an Orthodox priest after a presentation on how to use economics to evaluate environmental problems:  “The church doesn’t need what you are preaching.  We’ve been telling people how to live for thousands of years…”  He was not entirely correct – even after thousands of years, we in the church have much to learn from all of the other disciplines.  But he raised a valid point.  In a conference for religious leaders, the voice of the theologian needs to be heard.

A Tool – But Only a tool

The most important take-away for me came in a new appreciation for economics as a tool.  One of the early presenters laid it out this way:  “Warm hearts need a cool head.”  It’s not enough to want to help – you need to know which of your possible solutions will really help, what the tradeoffs are, not only in monetary costs but in exchange of one risk for another.  A great example from a toxicologist:  Yes, mercury in fish is a health hazard.  But eating fish is one of the best ways to reduce a variety of other health risks – lower risk of heart disease is just one.  Granted, eliminating mercury in fish would be the best option, what is the best way to proceed in the meantime?  Our current quandary with nuclear power is another excellent example.  How do we balance the risks of a Fukushima against the consequences of another century of CO2 emissions from coal?

Economics is a tool to bring us to the point where we can make an intelligent decision.  And like enthusiastic salesmen in the power tools department at Sears, we were invited to push all the buttons and watch this tool do its thing.

The challenge, of course, with any tool is to keep it in its place.  For a guy with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. And a guy with a new chain saw can be really productive – or really, really dangerous.  I’m afraid that economics looks to me a bit like that new chain saw.  The economist sees the whole world as a balance sheet.  Everything is black and white – cost and benefit, risk and reward, dollars and cents. Things will work out when we finally understand and implement private property rights.  Markets can be solutions to environmental problems.  Um, yes.  Okay.  But. What about things you can’t own? Things you can’t measure? Can you really have a market that is free of manipulation and distortion?

One problem is language.  Economics speaks in monetary terms because we have no other language by which to communicate value.  While economics  really does try to include all costs in a given situation or transaction, in reality the conversation almost always returns to money.  That is the only metric we have to measure risk and reward, cost and benefit.  For the business man, “What gets measured gets done”.  For the economist, “What can be measured can be counted.”  But the only ruler the economist has is denominated in dollars and cents, pounds and pence, rupees and dinars.

Measuring what cannot be measured?

One solution is for those of us who really want to save God’s world is to learn to speak the language of the economist.  If the only way we can save a forest or a watershed is to put a dollar amount on it, maybe we need to do that.  Valuing ecosystem services is one way to do this.

An article in the New York Times this week addresses this issue:

“Currently, there is no price for most of the ecosystem services we care about, like clean air and clean water,” said Stephen Polasky, professor of ecological/environmental economics at the University of Minnesota. He says that because economic calculations often ignore nature, the results can lead to the destruction of the very ecosystems upon which the economy is based.

“Our economic system values land for two primary reasons,” said Adam Davis, a partner in Ecosystem Investment Partners, a company that manages high-priority conservation properties. “One is building on the land, and the second is taking things from the land.”

“Right now, the way a forest is worth money is by cutting it down,” Mr. Davis said. “We measure that value in board-feet of lumber or tons of pulp sold to a paper mill.” What has been missing, he says, is a countervailing economic force that measures the value of leaving a forest or other ecosystem intact.

I have a friend who is giving his life to saving rainforests through investment vehicles.  His goal:  “I want to make it so a tree in the forest is worth more alive than it is dead.”

Will this solve our problems?  Not completely.  Too many things can never be measured – a great deal of this work project remains out of reach of economics, no matter how shiny it is as a tool.

The Challenge of the Cube

I inadvertently had the last comment of the entire conference.  I remembered an illustration I often use in my talks that seemed to capture the challenge we were left with:

Take two Rubik’s cubes:  One is assembled and ‘perfect’, representing the world as God gave it to us, and the world that we would all like to live in – theologians, environmentalists and economists alike.  The other is thoroughly scrambled and needs to be solved.  Economics teaches us how to manipulate the cube, while theology holds up the picture of the solved cube.  (Think about it – the cube is a great picture of the world of the economist, because every move on one side of the cube has a ‘cost’ on the other sides.  And the world of the ecologist – where ‘everything is hitched to everything else’ – thanks, John Muir.)

But here’s the problem:  In my talks, I’ll ask someone in the audience to solve the scrambled cube for me.  (There’s one in every crowd…)  He or she always fails.  Why?  Because my cube has been tampered with.  It’s not solvable.   And that is the world we live in.  Economics is necessary, even essential, for tackling the environmental problems in the world, and all the other problems as well.  But economics can’t solve a tampered cube.  Only God can do that.

And with that, the conference came to an end.

But not our task.  Economists and ecologists and climate scientists and policy makers and politicians cannot put together a world that has been broken by sin.

But God can.

My niece Stephanie Burkard has just finished her freshman year at Old Dominion University and wrote the following essay for a scholarship contest.  (See the link toward the end of the piece to help her win…)  I post it here with her permission.  [And if you are also a student and have a piece like this that you'd like to see published, send it my way. ]

I picked up Blue Like Jazz this week.  Chapter 2 coincided with some deeper thoughts I’ve been having.  One sentence sums up the chapter.  ”I am the problem” (Miller, 20).

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to change the world.  Well, no.  I’ve thought more about how to change campus.  It’s an easier target than the world.  I also know campus and what I want to change very specifically.  Safety is one.  I’ve only ever heard gunshots twice in my life.  I was in New York City once.  The other time, I was chilling on Beth Anne’s porch on 41st street.  Other ones are tuition rates.  I pay a lot of money to go to school.  Thank you so much, federal government.  Because of your financial assistance, our schools have no problem raising prices for things like i-pads at libraries and pizza parties for the social clubs.  Anyone else get mad thinking about this?  Man, I pay for a lot of pizza with that tuition of mine.  That’s why I spend hours working.  So SGA can throw a pizza party!  Not so I can learn the stuff I’m paying to learn.

Where do I find myself talking about this stuff?  Frustrated.  Nothing changes.  I see no difference in my life.

Let’s get bigger than campus here.  World poverty.  How many people live on less than 2 dollars a day again?  Oh yeah, every other person ever to be born.  We care, so we campaign.  We care, so we write letters to our government.  We care, so we cry when we watch the news.  We care, so we expect others to fix that problem!  They’re the only ones who can do anything about it!  What’s your problem, government!  Stop wasting money and feeding some hungry people!  I am conveniently selfless when it comes to fixing problems.  That’s about 3 % of the time.  The other 97%, I think about me.

Several years ago, my family sat down to watch An Inconvenient Truth.  It’s a documentary by Al Gore about global warming.  Basically, the world is being destroyed by people.  Now, since then, there has been much controversy about the validity of global warming, but anyone who’s sat at the Faith Academy soccer field overlooking Manila by day knows that people are indeed destroying the world.  As I was saying, my family sat down to watch this documentary.  Now, my father is a smart man and he understood a concept most people are not willing to admit.  ”I am the problem.”  My father made two changes in his life that reflected his understanding of this concept.  The first is he changed the shower head in the bathroom to a water conserving one.  The second is he stopped making foam surfboards.  He now makes wood ones which are better for the environment.  Sure, trees are involved, but for every one cut down, many more are planted, at least I believe Dad started shaping with a kit that promised that.

Dad got it.  I am the problem.  It took me a few more years to catch on, but I get it now.  I am the problem.  I am the safety problem at ODU.  I am the pizza party.  I am world hunger.  I am destroying the environment.  So where’s the shower head that I can change in my life?

Everyone has something they can do- recycle (and drive less ;P).  It costs you nothing to recycle other then minimal effort.  Something else you can do too- and all online!  Go to http://www.castleink.com/ and see what ink cartridges on your printer you can use to cut back on your Manila-smog output.

(This is for a scholarship contest.  The more of you who go to castleink.com directly through this note, the more chances I have of winning.  Feel free to share this with your friends.  Thanks.)

Oil Spills are bad enough – but how do you pray about a Tsunami?

It hasn’t been a year since the Gulf oil spill, which we rightly saw as the worst environmental disaster in memory.  At that time I wrote a piece trying to come to terms with that situation: “How Do You Pray about an Oil Spill?” And now I sit pondering a disaster that could turn out to be exponentially greater than the BP/Halliburton fiasco.  I am doing so at my dining room table, in a part of the world that is seismically if not politically stable, many miles from the nearest nuclear facility.  I am looking out at a landscape where the first birds of spring have arrived and are singing up a storm: Robins, redwing blackbirds, a cedar waxwing and (I think) a pine warbler (see pic below and tell me if I’m right, birders!)  just this morning.  The contrast between my window and the stories on my computer screen could not be more different, and I am forced to ask the same question I asked last summer: How do I pray about what is now happening in Japan?

Let’s start by experiencing the disaster just a little bit.  The clip below is one of the first live reports of the wall of water and debris engulfing the flat land bordering the sea in Miyagi Prefecture north of Tokyo.  I don’t expect you to watch all 18 minutes, but take it at least through the first four or five, remembering that every house, every vehicle being swallowed has people in it.

[Click here to go the clip - embedding has been disabled.]

My first reaction to this is that Hollywood’s disaster flicks don’t come close to duplicating the real thing.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything even in fiction like this monster as it races across the landscape, belching smoke and flame, swallowing everything in its path.  My second response is similar to how I feel when I stand at the base of Niagara Falls – very small and inconsequential.   Look – everything human is being obliterated.  Our greatest works hardly slow it down; instead, as human artifacts are swallowed they become part of the monster, swelling its size and increasing its power to destroy.  There is powerful metaphor here – read on.

This 20 minute disaster by itself is enough for a lifetime.   But this is only the middle act of a three-part tragedy.  To this we have to add, on the front end, approximately three minutes of the worst earthquake in recorded Japanese history, and on the back end a still unfolding nuclear disaster whose effects could last from decades to centuries.

Now would you like the really bad news? This is happening in Japan.

This is one of the wealthiest, most technologically advanced countries in the world.  Japan is not only the source of many of our cars and electronic gadgets – she is the most prepared-for-disaster country in history.  Japan knows earthquakes as Oklahoma knows tornadoes.  Building codes are possibly the strictest in the world.  Public education, early warning systems, disaster drills:  Everything that could be done in anticipation of a disaster was being done.  There is no way to blame this tragedy on greed (the Gulf oil spill), poverty (Haiti), or political ineptness (Hurricane Katrina).  No – it seems like this is one tragic event that was going to happen and there was nothing anyone anywhere could have done to prevent it or to adequately prepare for it.

An article in the New York Times on disaster preparedness sums up the situation nicely:  No matter how high the levee or how flexible the foundation, disaster experts say, nature bats last.

[Note for international readers: That last phrase comes from the American sport of baseball, in which teams have to take turns at bat, the only time a team can score runs.  The home team always bats last and therefore always has the last opportunity to win the game.   In the great game of life on earth, we human beings are the visiting team, and nature will always have the last say.]

So let’s get back to the original question:  In this situation, where the best that human society can offer is less than inadequate, how should we pray?

First, we need to put God back into the picture. “Nature” is a euphemism – God is the reality.  Nature does not control the movement of tectonic plates, the displacement of billions of tons of sea water.  But God does.  Isaiah 40 might be a useful chapter to run to in these times of trouble and chaos:

²¹ Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
²² He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
²³ He brings princes to naught
and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
²⁴ No sooner are they planted,
no sooner are they sown,
no sooner do they take root in the ground,
than he blows on them and they wither,
and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.

Does putting God at the center of the Japan disaster make you a bit uncomfortable?  It should.  “Fear God” is a common exhortation in the Bible for good reason – over familiarity with the God of earthquakes and tsunamis is not a good idea.

This leads directly to our second item:

We need to understand our frailty and adopt an attitude of humility. There’s a line I use often in my talks that applies here:

“The entire human enterprise depends on two things: Six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”

No matter how clever our inventions, no matter how beautiful our artwork, no matter how profound our works of literature or how powerful our weapons or how vast our (imaginary) wealth, we are in the end biological creatures who suffer and die quickly without air, food and water.  Our frailty is evident in every disaster – water and food become matters of top priority, and lack of these is often a major reason for breakdowns in security and social norms.  But absent a disaster, we human beings act like teenagers who are invincible and will live forever.  Could there be a better description of an economic system built on the premise that perpetual growth is possible, desirable and inevitable?

Perhaps James’ caution could apply here:

¹³ Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” ¹⁴ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. ¹⁵ Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” ¹⁶ As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil.

And we need to admit the reality of our sin and repent. Think back to the image of the tsunami wave racing across the landscape, engulfing cars and buildings and then carrying them along, adding them to itself and using them to consume and destroy yet more cars and buildings.  There is a powerful metaphor here:  All of our economic, political and social structures have been built, like the Tower of Babel on a foundation of arrogance and greed.  We have in fact “added house to house until there is no more room and we live alone in the land” (Is 5).  We have “destroyed the earth” and unknowingly lived on the blood of millions trapped in poverty.   And the system we’ve built for our comfort and prosperity is in the process of destroying us, more slowly but just as effectively as that tsunami wave whose destructive force was magnified by the cars and houses it had swallowed.  (See previous posts that relate here and here and here and here.)

Biblical repentance calls for a change of attitude as well as change of direction.  “Go and sin no more,” says Jesus to an admitted sinner.  Can an entire global society learn to “sin no more”?  I’m not sure we can, but I suspect this is the great challenge of our time.

And this brings us to our one hope in all of this:

We can appeal to the mercy and grace of a God who is not only wrathful but also loving:

¹³ “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, ¹⁴ if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. [II Chronicles 7:13-14]

And while we confess and pray, we can also hang on tight to the words of Jeremiah at one of the darkest periods of Israel’s history that are the source of one of our greatest hymns of prayer and praise:

⁹ I remember my affliction and my wandering,
the bitterness and the gall.
²⁰ I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.
²¹ Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:
²² Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
²³ They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
²⁴ I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”   [Lamentations 3:19-24]

And so I turn from visions of disaster and tragedy to think again of the warbler I saw this weekend, who has survived a long, hard  winter and a flight of thousands of miles, and who spends his morning singing praises to his creator, and mine:

Is it a warbler?  Let me know…

This is the final post in a series leading up to the third Lausanne conference that begins in just a few days – on Sunday, 17 October in Cape Town.  Earlier posts in this series are here; up to now, these have been summaries and excerpts from my book, Our Father’s World.  Today’s post is different.  This is a call to action that summarizes the challenge I will be sharing with a group of delegates at Cape Town.

We have been making the following case in this series:

• the environmental crisis is a direct result of human sin;
• God’s redemptive plan in Jesus Christ includes the restoration of all of our broken relationships, including our relationship to non-human creation;
• The church – the people of God – can respond to the environmental crisis in ways that no one else can;

From this case, it is hard to escape the following conclusion:

• Because we can respond, and because we have been commanded to respond, we must respond.

All that is left is to ask and answer the question, How?  What should we then do?

There are three steps we need to take as individual christians and as churches to begin to move forward.  Each one could be a full post or a full chapter  in a book, but here are a few thoughts:

1.  We begin by Repenting.

We have established that the problem is sin.  Biblically, there is only one way to handle a sin problem: Repentance.  Biblical repentance has a couple of important dimensions that go far beyond “I’m sorry!” -

Repentance means admitting we are wrong, acknowledging we are at fault.  We have disobeyed.  We have ignored God’s first command to us, to care for his creation.  We have used the authority he gave us over his creation to satisfy our own selfish cravings rather than using it to govern his creation according to his purposes.  We have sinned.

Repentance means, first,  changing our minds. When we repent of sin, we are in effect changing our minds and agreeing with God that what we did, and how we thought about it, was sinful.  In the present context, this mean changing how we think about God’s creation.

Repentance also means that we begin to stop sinning.  In this setting, true repentance means that we start, to whatever extent is possible, to do no more harm to God’s creation.  Changing lightbulbs, reducing our use of toxic chemicals in our homes, using public transportation all become acts of repentance.

None of these actions are by themselves sufficient – but they are necessary.

Repentance means making a start.  Now.

2. We work to Restore God’s damaged creation.

It is not sufficient to stop harming creation.  The world we now live in is a far cry from the bountiful and flourishing world God gave us.  As stewards we are called to care for creation.  Our mission should be to seek to do everything in our power to increase the value of the Master’s property in the little time we have on this earth before he asks for an accounting.

What might this look like?  I know a half a dozen people in several countries who have taken the call to restore creation very literally.  They either purchased – or in some cases inherited – small to medium size tracts of land, and have worked for many years to bring the land back to health.  One example in particular is spectacular – a broken down plantation in Jamaica 25 years ago is now a flourishing rainforest and a major tourist attaction.

Not all of us will have the resources to work with a piece of land like that – but we can start where we are.  If your church has land of its own, what a perfect place to start.  But even public areas – parks or watersheds – can be arenas in which we can work to begin to bring health back to God’s creation.

To do it right will be a big job – we will need the help of scientists, we’ll need to recruit members of our larger communities.  We need to learn to see things on a long time scale:  In my experience, 25 years seems to be what will be needed to do the job right.

To paraphrase an old proverb, if a journey is going to be a thousand miles, it would be best to start today.

3. We Prepare for the inevitable disasters ahead of us.

In the fall of 2009 I was scheduled to travel to Manila, Philippines, to present my ‘Our Father’s World’ seminar.  Just weeks before I was to come, Manila was hit by several typhoons.  Much of the city was flooded, including the homes of several of my hosts.  I offered to cancel the trip – it seemed like the wrong time to bring in a foreign speaker – but my host organization insisted that I come as planned.  “We know from these disasters that we have been guilty of sins against God’s creation.  We need your message more than ever.” [Several posts on this situation are here.]

It is evident both from current events and from a logical analysis of our situation that the abuse of creation globally has reached the point where environmentally related disasters are inevitable.  The typhoons in Manila were not caused by humans – though there is some evidence that their unusual power might have been exacerbated by global warming.  No, typhoons are a normal and natural part of creation.  The damage and human suffering came from the fact that Manila has been built in a watershed area.  The region’s orginal marshes and wetlands would have absorbed the power and the water of these typhoons and would have been better and stronger because of them.  These natural buffers have been replaced by streets, houses and concrete culverts.  The result was massive flooding, great damage and enormous human suffering.

The same lessons apply in this summer’s floods in Pakistan, China and most recently in Indonesia.  And every time a hurricane strikes Haiti.  And in the increasing numbers of wildfires in the US west every year, as well as in Russia this last summer.

No matter how quickly we repent, and no matter how energetically we work to heal and restore creation, there will be more of these disasters.  Thus the final word to the church is to prepare:

First , we should prepare for disasters in our own communities:  Every congregation has the potential to organize itself as a first-response agency for its own community, whether the danger is flood, fire, toxic chemical release or any of the myriad other ways that our abuse of creation might endanger us and those we love.

Second, we should prepare to assist sisters and brothers in other places as disasters strike.  This is difficult – when tragedy is heaped on tragedy, those in unaffected areas asked to respond lose interest.  The nonprofit community calls this ‘donor fatigue’.  We dare not grow weary in well doing; at the same time, it is apparent that our resources will have to be managed carefully if we need to plan on several major disasters every year.

Much more could be said in this area – perhaps I will expand on these thoughts in the future.

The conclusion, though, is clear:  We are called to be God’s people in this world at this time.  Let’s get moving.

This is a continuation of a series of articles leading up to the third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization that begins in Cape Town South Africa on October 15.  Today’s post is a continuation of the last as we move from the Fall to Redemption. Find the whole series to date here. Today we begin to answer an important question:  When the problems raised by the environmental crisis are as big and technical as they seem to be, what exactly does the church bring to the table?  Do we really have anything to offer?  Let’s find out…

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So how do we get the mission of the church out to onto the environmental Mifflin Streets of the world? How can a group of people that might know how to conduct a prayer meeting but doesn’t know anything about water quality make a difference?  What, really, does the church bring to this crisis?

A values-based organization

One of Wendell Berry’s phrases sticks in my mind:  “the people who might have been expected to care most selflessly for the world have had their minds turned elsewhere.” [Wendell Berry, Art of the Commonplace, p 23] Everyone who wrestles with the problem of Christians and the environment starts at the same point:  “These people should care more than anyone else.”  Berry’s complaint is a pointer to truth:  The church has been expected to care, and should care about these things more than other people because of what she already believes.

My own experience is instructive.  When I first began what turned out to be a major shift in career direction toward environmental stewardship, I had to do some intensive self-examination.  This had not been part of my thinking.  But I discovered something that surprised me.  I was already an environmentalist.  I just didn’t kn ow it yet. I already believed God made the world. I believed that he reveals himself through his creation. I believed he put me here to do his will, and doing his will includes taking care of his creation.  I had an entire theology – value system, if you prefer – that was deeply embedded with environmental or creation care principles.  It was packed away in the attic, and needed to be dusted off.  But it didn’t take much to get it out and functioning again.

The same can be said of all of the material I’ve presented this far in this book.  Nothing here is new; if you are a ‘bible-believing Christian’ you know that everything I’ve presented is already part of the church’s belief-system.  And I have to say that what has been happening among Christians in this area in the last few years is exciting.  If outsiders can figure out that ‘we ought to care’, it shouldn’t be that hard for those of us already in the family to figure it out – and then to act on it.

It’s time for us to wake up.

A laboratory for community

If we are going to successfully respond to the environmental crisis, we – the entire human race – are going to have to learn how to live in community again.  Think about how many of the responses to environmental problems have to do with community:  Community gardens, farmer’s markets, car sharing programs, public transportation systems.  They all have to do with living together, working together, travelling together.  When we live together in harmony – sharing with each other, buying and selling locally, travelling with other people instead of alone, we make fewer demands on God’s creation, and we live healthier – and usually happier – lives.

It should not surprise us that in a creation designed by a God who loves community, patterns of living that emphasize community work better than those that don’t.  God created human beings out of the community of his eternal Trinitarian existence:

Then God said, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness… [Gen 1:26]

The entire biosphere God produced has community written all over it.  Plants can’t live without the services of pollinators.  Pollinators depend on plants for survival.  Even parts of creation that seem at first glance to be in violent opposition to each other – the wolf and the deer, for example – depend on each other.  Populations of deer without predators – as in much of North America today – rapidly expand to the point of sickness and starvation.  Healthy numbers of predators mean healthy deer herds.

And God designed us human beings for community.  He made us male and female, anticipating the community of marriage.  He placed us in a garden, so as to enable community with himself.  All through history, God has been working to form a community.  Abraham was chosen not for himself – but to be the father of a great nation.  Jesus was raised from the dead as ‘the firstborn of many brothers’ (Ro 8:29).  History will culminate gloriously and majestically in what John calls ‘the marriage supper of the Lamb’ (Rev 19) – and you can’t get much more community oriented than a wedding.

One of the most important functions of the church now, in this in between period of history, is to be a demonstration community – to show the world how community is done.  Let’s face it:  Community is hard!  It’s hard in marriage.  It’s hard in a family.  It’s difficult in a small town. It is almost impossible in a city.  But community is part of how God’s creation works, and we will never live in harmony with creation – that is, we will never solve the environmental crisis – without learning to live in community again.  The church was designed by God as a community.  As a community we have what the world needs if the world is to successfully navigate through the storm of environmental crisis now upon us.

Bill McKibben’s latest book, whether he intends it this way I do not know, is an exposition of this concept.  Deep Economy, playing on the concept of deep ecology, takes us ‘deeper’ than the balance sheets and profit and loss statements that normally encompass what we think of as the economy.  McKibben shows us, gently and effectively, that one of the basic assumptions of our modern world, that “More is Better”, is a fallacy.  In fact, once our basic human needs are met, more affluence and increased levels of technology seem to result in a lower quality of life rather than a higher one.  And one of the reasons increased affluence results in less happiness and satisfaction is that it almost always comes at the cost of community.  We have grown immeasurably wealthier in the last decades – and incalculably more lonely at the same time.

McKibben shows us that the answer to the environmental crisis is the same as the answer to our quality of life problem:  We need to restore and strengthen our communities.  One of my own principles is demonstrated over and over in the pages of Deep Economy: “If it’s good for community, it’s probably good for the environment” and it’s corollary: “If it’s good for the environment, it’s probably good for community.”  As McKibben sees it, one of the answers to the environmental crisis is to regain the kind of community we human beings used to have, and which in some parts of the world we still do have.

We have lost community at the same time that we’ve been sliding toward environmental disaster.  Whether this is cause and effect, or the two phenomena flowing out of a deeper cause that has given rise to both doesn’t really matter.   What is important – what McKibben is pointing us to – is that we will not solve the environmental crisis without learning community again.  The road back to environmental sanity takes us back to community, from the Supermarket to the Farmer’s Market, and maybe from the drive-in church to the old Wednesday night prayer meeting.

The church is marked by a set of beliefs or values that call her to care for God’s creation (among other things).  And the church already is what the world needs to learn to be to solve this problem – the church is a community.  The church can begin to respond to the environmental crisis simply by being the community she is called to be.   We’ll come back to this in the pages ahead, as it deserves exploration.  Obviously, a church that gathers to race SUV’s through a nature preserve is probably not using the concept of community to advance caring for creation!  But for now, it is sufficient to recognize this basic truth:  An effective response to the environmental crisis requires that we learn community again – and this is what the church does.

[Note: This article is excerpted and revised from my book, Our Father’s World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation, chapter 6: “Ambassadors of Redemption”.  Order the book here.]

This is a continuation of a series of articles leading up to the third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization that begins in Cape Town South Africa on October 15.  Today’s post is a continuation of the last as we move from the Fall to Redemption. Find the whole series to date here.

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I live in a college town in the US – Madison, WI.  Our university is known for “partying”, and one of the annual events loved by students and despised by residents is known as the Mifflin Street Block Party, with a history that goes back to the days of Viet Nam war protests.  The party is normally leaves behind an incredible mess that the city has to clean up, at considerable expense.

But in 2005 something different happened.  That year several people from a local church here got a crazy idea.  “Let’s serve our community by cleaning up after the Block Party.”  Word went out by email and text message.  At six am on Sunday, more than 50 people, rubber gloves and trash bags in hand, formed a line and began marching down Mifflin Street.  In front of them, a carpet of bottles, cans, paper trash and worse.  Behind them, the street was clean.  By midmorning, the job was done – but the repercussions were just beginning.  Television crews showed up at the church.  No one called them.  The goal was not publicity.  But they came because they could not understand what had happened.  Why would Christians – opposed to everything that “The Party” represents – get out at six in the morning and do the clean up?  The answer was simple:  “We wanted to show what it means to love your neighbor.”

This is true Christianity.  This is the church at work in the world.  When this kind of thing happens, the world notices.  It can’t help it.

Here is an example of a church doing exactly what it was created by God to do.  As that line of people formed early on that Sunday morning, they were demonstrating the redemption/reconciliation pattern that we have been describing:

• Individuals whose relationship with God had been restored by an experience of forgiveness from God (the first relationship)
• and who were therefore at peace with themselves (the second relationship)
• joined hands with other people to work together (the third relationship)
• to clean up a mess in the world (the fourth relationship).

The Mifflin Street Block Party clean up shows what happens when God’s redemptive plan hits the street.

This image is the heart of what I believe it means for the church to respond to the environmental crisis.   If the environmental crisis is a result of our sin, and if God desires, as part of his redemptive plan, that the effects of that crisis be reversed and his creation be restored, this can only happen through the church.

Mobilizing the church goes to the very heart of what the church was created to be!

“Think globally; act locally” describes nothing so much as it describes the church of Jesus Christ being and doing what Jesus has created it to do.  The redemption, reconciliation and restoration that God is accomplishing in the world is being accomplished through the church.  Cleaning up a Mifflin Street should not be occasional, newsworthy add-ons to a church’s program.  They should be the church’s program – as closely tied to the church’s reason for being as performing baptisms or celebrating communion.

What was God  thinking when he decided that this frail, all-too-human fellowship of people should be at the center of God’s plan to bring his redemption not only to all people, but also to all of creation?

Reading the mind of God is presumptuous at best.  Granting that, it appears to me that God’s plan of reconciliation rests on redemption taking place in the same arena where the curse has reigned supreme – that is, in this physical creation.  Isaac Watts put the idea into one of our favorite Christmas carols:

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found…

(Isaac Watts, Joy to the World)

In God’s wisdom, he seems to have decided that the creatures that caused the curse in the first place – you and me, the human race – should be those charged with the job of reversing its effects.  It is as if he were saying to us, “You broke it. I’m going to let you fix it.”

Think about what that means.  Unable to earn our salvation or in any way make ourselves right or righteous before God, he has done more than forgive our sins and offer us a restored relationship with himself.  He is giving us an opportunity to help set right what we caused to go wrong.

So how do we get the mission of the church out to onto the environmental Mifflin Streets of the world? How can a group of people that might know how to conduct a prayer meeting but doesn’t know anything about water quality make a difference.  What, really, does the church bring to this crisis?  That is the subject of our next post.  Stay tuned.

[Note: This article is excerpted and revised from my book, Our Father’s World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation, chapter 6: “Ambassadors of Redemption”.  Order the book here.]

October  16 – three weeks from this weekend – 4,000 delegates will gather in Cape Town South Africa from 200 countries around the world.  They will be convening the third Lausanne Consultation on World Evangelization.  These meetings happen approximately every 15 years, with the first being called by two of the great evangelical statesmen of our time, Billy Graham and John Stott, in Lausanne Switzerland (hence the name) in 1974.  I am honored – and a bit surprised – to be attending this conference both as a delegate and as a presenter.  I’ll be doing a seminar on (naturally!), ‘Mobilizing Your Church to Care for Creation’.

The Lausanne ‘movement’ has given the modern evangelical church several gifts.  Among these are the ‘Lausanne Covenant’, which has become a de facto “evangelical statement of faith”, a creed for a movement that tends to avoid such, and the Lausanne theme:  “The Whole Gospel from the Whole Church for the Whole World.”

You will not be surprised that my conviction is that creation care is – and must be! – a key component of the ‘whole gospel.’ I will be elaoborating on this conviction by posting a series of “Countdown to Cape Town” articles over the next three weeks.  Note that some of this material is excerpted (recycled!) from portions of my book, Our Father’s World – you can order the book here to get the whole argument in one convenient package.    Stay tuned and let me know what you think.

And of course, pray for these meetings.  We live in historic times.

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Countdown to Capetown I: Diagnosis Sin

I am personally committed to the task of mobilizing the church to respond to the environmental crisis for one reason:  I believe that God has called all of us to this task, and that it is a central part of our mission as Christians and as a world-wide church.  Let me put this in more theological terms:  I am convinced that God’s redemption brought to us in the work of Jesus Christ on the cross is more than human salvation.

For some of you, this is a bit of a stretch, so let me explain myself.

To understand my thinking, let me take you back to Genesis 3 – the story of our initial fall from grace and into sin.  You know how it starts – Eve and the Serpent, discussing the one and only command God has given his creatures:  ‘You may not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden…’  But she looked, she ate, she gave to him and he ate, and then…

We are told that they “heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the Garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God…” (Genesis 3:8)  They heard the sound of God in the Garden; what I hear is the sound of relationships shattering.  Like dominos, they fall one after another:

a) Their relationship with God was broken. Implicit in their relationship with God was his right to command them, and their obligation to obey.  Having dispensed with their side of the arrangement, they could not face him, and so they hid.  Separation.  Alienation.  Because they were created to live with – and within – God, disruption of this primary relationship led immediately to inner turmoil:

b) Their relationship with themselves was broken. Adam says to God, “I was afraid because I was naked…” (v. 10)   Pages have been written on this short phrase.  It could mean many things; at the very least, it shows that people who had been at peace with themselves are now filled with guilt and shame.  There’s an inner turmoil evident here that was absent before Adam disobeyed.  Adam, and Eve, is no longer at peace with himself – an inner relationship has been broken.

Because each of these sinners could not live with themselves, they could not live with each other:

c) Their relationship with each other was broken. It doesn’t take long for the first marital argument to break out:  “The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” (v. 12)  Whether the discord is between spouses, parents and children, neighbors on the street or heads of state about to go to war, it all started here.  Shattered community.

Being unable to live with each other, it is not surprising that they were no longer able to live in harmony with other members of God’s creation:

d) Their relationship with the rest of creation was broken. God pronounces his curse on the serpent, on the woman and on the man.  In pronouncing judgment on Adam, God says,

Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.It will produce thorns and thistles for you,and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food,
until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken;
For dust you are, and to dust you will return. (v.17-19)

This is presented as a criminal judgment, but Adam’s doom is also the logical outcome of what has gone before.  He was created by God to live in harmony with the rest of creation. That harmony depended on an ongoing relationship with the Creator.  He broke that relationship, and disharmony – disease, thorns, thistles – follows as surely as night follows day.

Thus begins our history in sin… and the story of our miserable race.

Thus also begins the story of our redemption…  [Stay Tuned.]

[Note: This article is excerpted and revised from my book, Our Father’s World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation, chapter 4, “Diagnosis: Sin”.  Order the book here.]

I am having a hard time believing that we have been watching the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico for four full weeks, and only this morning did we have the first bit of partially good news – an attempt to siphon some of the oil into a tanker is starting to work.  No one dares to say this is even the start of a solution – it has just made the current situation a little less bad.  Meanwhile, reports over the weekend suggested that one of the reasons not as much oil has reached land as originally anticipated is because the stuff is lurking underwater, in enormous “plumes” – one of which might be as large as 10 miles by 3 miles. 

Most frightening for many, the spill is perilously close to, or may have already reached the Loop Current (see graphic), a powerful ocean current that feeds directly into the Gulf Stream:

Water flows through the Gulf of Mexico deep under the surface.  It enters with warm water from the Caribbean between Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba, loops south of Louisiana, then exits around the Florida Keys.  This could bring oil up the US East Coast in the Gulf Stream Water. This was mentioned a few weeks ago in this report, and now scientists believe it is already on the move in that direction.

A researcher tells the Associated Press that computer models show the oil may have already seeped into the powerful water stream called the loop current. A boat will be sent later this week to collect samples.

William Hogarth is the dean of the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science. He says one model shows the oil already in loop current, while another shows the slick three miles away.

[UPDATE:  Check out this infographic... click on the picture to see it full size.]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece that was picked up by a number of people – “How do you pray about an oil spill?” That concept has now been developed by others into a full website:  http://www.oilspillprayer.com that I urge you to check out and bookmark.  In particular, read “The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Tragedy: How Your Church Can Help!” by Kendra Juskus of Flourish (http://flourishonline.org).  Beyond calling us to prayer, Kendra offers some very good suggestions about how to become more informed and even how to move to action if God leads you in that direction.  This is a sample of what is on offer:

A number of organizations are recruiting volunteers to help out with immediate efforts in the areas impacted by the oil spill. The links provided here will bring you directly to the volunteer opportunities provided by these organizations. Please note that experience relevant to oil spill clean up and skills associated with wildlife observation and handling are in particularly high demand. But there is also a need for folks to take photographs, tend databases, and staff phone banks, so check out these opportunities and see where you might fit in:

• National Wildlife Foundation Gulf Coast Surveillance Teams – Volunteers are needed to track and report on the impacts of the oil spill, support the wildlife rescue and rehabilitation effort, and restore delicate coastal ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Audubon Society – One of the more detailed volunteer registration forms available, which may helpful in determining where you can plug in.
• Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana – This aggregate of organizations is just asking volunteers to register at this point, with the understanding that they will be contacted when appropriate opportunities emerge.

Pray we must – but action is called for as well.

Let me know what you and your church are doing.

“Old Literature” is an occasional series pointing to works of the past, sometimes well known, sometimes not, that have embedded in them a clear creation care message.  [Check out previous posts in the series here.] C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books are perfect subjects for this series, and have long been on my mental list.  Before I got to him, though, Dean Ohlman at Wonder of Creation blog did the job for me, with a little Isaac Watts and John Newton thrown in for good measure.  Here is his meditation on Narnia – reposted by permission: