Today, in honor of the 23rd anniversary of Earth Day, we celebrate Environmental Stewardship Sunday, reflecting together on the wonder of God’s creation and our role as caretakers of the earth. Our reflections on creation are deeply connected to the Easter resurrection we celebrated last week—declaring that our God is a God of life over death, renewal and resurrection over despair and destruction. The Spirit that restored life that Easter morning is the same spirit that gave birth to life at creation, the God of love and life, beauty and wonder.

We hear in the book of Genesis, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, light and dark, water and sky and earth, plants, animals and yes even humanity, and God called it good. To say we have been created by God, as described in Genesis, is not to assert a scientific position or an account of history—if only it were that easy! No, when we remember that we are created beings, we take on an entire worldview, one that says that God, not us, but God is the source of all our life. Everything that we need for living comes from God and not from ourselves. That is the same thing Jesus reminds us in today’s Gospel reading. Consider the ravens, consider the lilies, consider the grasses of the fields—God created life, not you, and it is in God’s hands to provide for the lives of all beings within creation.

So to say that God created the earth says that every thing that exists on earth depends upon God as the source of its life. What a workload God has! Anyone who has raised a child, adopted a pet or even tended a garden knows the effort and patient tenderness required to sustain the life of another living being. How in heaven does God manage all this dependence? Yes, yes, God is infinite in power and might, omniscient and omnipresent, never tires, all that good stuff—but God is also quite clever, and possesses excellent managerial skills. How does God manage the daily sustenance of all life? God delegates. God fashioned the world so as to make us all dependent upon one another—so that every living creature is dependent upon every other for its survival. And so every living creature is responsible to and for every other.

In the passage we read this morning, God says, “See I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps upon the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” God provides for the needs of all life within the intricate web of creation. Theologian Leonardo Boff describes it like this: “Everything that exists, co-exists. Everything that co-exists and pre-exists subsists by means of an infinite web of life of all-inclusive relations. Nothing exists outside relationships. All being constitutes a link in the vast cosmic chain. As Christians, we may say that it comes from God and returns to God.” (Ecology & Liberation, 7)

We are not owners of the earth—it belongs to God. We are, at best, stewards of God’s creation, caretakers of the things of the earth, managers of God’s great system, charged with ensuring that God’s abundant provision is distributed to all creation. That’s where the word “ecology” comes from, the same Greek root as the word “economy.” Economy was not originally conceived as constant financial growth or unlimited expansion of production and consumption, but as “the administration of the fair and modest means necessary for life and well-being.” (Boff, 19) In the same way, ecology seeks to understand the interdependence of all life, the way all beings co-exist and balance their lives together. Ecology is the magnificent system God has set up to sustain all life in a web of interconnection.

Annie Dillard describes an example of God’s amazing strategy of interconnections for taking care of all creation—the horsehair worm, a tiny creature that looks exactly like a single hair of a horse’s tail. She writes,
 

“The ordained paths of some animals are so rocky as to be preposterous. The horsehair worm in the duck pond, for instance, wriggling so serenely near the surface, is the survivor of an impossible series of squeaky escapes. … Although scientists are not exactly sure what happens to any one of them, they think it might go something like this:

You start with long strands of eggs wrapped round vegetation in the duck pond. The eggs hatch, the larvae emerge and each seeks an aquatic host, say a dragonfly nymph. The larva bores into the nymph’s body where it feeds and grows and somehow escapes. Then, if it doesn’t get eaten, it swims over to the shore where it encysts on submerged plants. This is all fairly improbable, but not impossibly so.

“Now the coincidences begin. First, presumably, the water level of the duck pond has to drop. This exposes the vegetation so that the land host organism can get at it without drowning. … Let’s say ours can only make it if a grasshopper comes along. Fine. But the grasshopper had best hurry, for there is only so much fat stored in the encysted worm, and it might starve. Well, here comes just the right species of grasshopper and it is obligingly feeding on the shore vegetation. … Bingo, then the grasshopper just happens to eat the encysted worm.

“The cyst bursts. The worm emerges in all its hideous length, up to 36 inches, inside the body of the grasshopper, on which it feeds. I presume that the worm must eat enough of its host to stay alive, but not so much that the grasshopper will keel over dead far from water. Now the worm is almost an adult, ready to reproduce. But first it’s got to get out of this grasshopper.

“Biologists don’t know what happens next. If at the critical stage the grasshopper is hopping in a sunny meadow away from the duck pond or ditch, which is entirely likely, then the story if over. But say it happens to be feeding near the duck pond. The worm perhaps bores its way out of the grasshopper’s body, or perhaps it is excreted. At any rate there it is on the grass drying out. Now the biologists have to go so far as to invoke a ‘heavy rain’ falling from heaven at this fortuitous moment, in order to get the horsehair worm back into the water where it can mate and lay more seemingly doomed eggs. You’d be thin too.” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 172-173)

I find this tale of the horsehair worm a spectacular reminder of what only God can do—create and sustain the beautiful fragility of life. Consider the lilies, consider the ravens, consider the horsehair worm—God provides all that is necessary to preserve delicate life, through the interconnections of plants, animals, even weather. You and I are no different. Just like the horsehair worm, we too are thoroughly embedded in the web of creation. God is the source and giver of all life, and has created an intricate network of interdependence in order to sustain that life. We are absolutely dependent upon God and upon other creatures for our existence.

That’s what the rich man forgets in Jesus’ parable. The rich man’s land produced abundantly, and his response was to hoard up the grain so that he could have it easy, keeping more than his fair share, living better off than everyone else on the grain stored up in his extra barns. The rich man, in the words of theologian Dennis Hamm, “has lost touch with the land as gift, arrogating it to himself simply as a possession to be exploited. He has lost touch with the covenant community, seeing the abundant harvest merely as a challenge to maximum acquisition rather than a gift to be shared with his companions at the Creator’s table. He has lost touch with his own existence as a gift of God, forgetting that he is a transient steward of a land meant to feed others after him. His monologue indicates that he has come to overlook the fact that his entire life is lived in the caring presence of a Creator who has given him life as a gift to be shared not as a possession to be hoarded.” (Hamm, “The Eco-Crisis and the New Testament”, Journal of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society, April 1993)

Here in the United States, we are a wealthy nation, and we too often resemble this rich man. We want to believe that we are self-sufficient, that it is our own efforts that provide for our needs. We value independence, not interdependence, and like to believe that our hard work, cleverness, skill or persistence has earned us our level of personal comfort. We cling tightly to possessions, as if they had come from nowhere other than our own effort. We accumulate wealth and things, as if we could insulate ourselves from want and protect our own lives forever. But that lifestyle has an impact on the wider ecological economy of the world. Just listen to these statistics:
 

• The richest 20% of the world consumes 80% of the earth’s resources. Americans represent just 6% of the world’s population, but consume 35% of the world’s resources and create 35% of the world’s trash. (Ecocycle.org)
• Excessive consumption in the Northern hemisphere has depleted the world’s water resources. Women and girls in East Africa now walk an average of 21 minutes from home to get water every day. Meanwhile, in the United States, one toilet flush consumes the same amount of water used for an entire day in a developing country—including drinking, cooking, washing and cleaning. (National Council of Churches Earth Day 2003)
• About 80% of what Americans consume is recyclable, yet our recycling rate is just 28%. And the energy saved by recycling just one aluminum can is enough to power a TV set for three hours! (Environmental Protection Agency)

We have not been good stewards, or practiced an ecological economy that provides for the needs of all. Like the rich man, we forget that life comes from God, and God has provided for the need of every living creature, so long as all share abundantly as part of the interconnected system of life. Like the horsehair worm, God has placed our existence in a precarious interdependence with all other living things. As Christians, because we believe in God as the creator and sustainer of life, we must strive to live in ways that promote the flourishing of all living beings, from the ecosystems in our own homes and neighborhoods to the products we buy that destroy developing countries through the depletion of forests or the exploitation of workers. The phrase in ecological circles is “sustainable living”—the practice of sustainable living develops ethic of stewardship for the environment and the economy where the needs of human beings are balanced with the needs of other creatures, where the desires of rich countries are balanced with the desires of poor ones, where the needs of today are balanced with the needs of future generations. As individuals and as a congregation, we must continue to wrestle with ways to live a simpler lifestyle that remembers our fragile place in the interdependent web of life.

In that spirit, I challenge us to two tasks to take seriously our role as stewards of the earth. First, as a congregation, let us continue to reflect together on ourselves as participants in God’s creation, together learning more about the interconnection of all life and the impact of our decisions on the earth and its beings. As a Christian community, may we consider carefully the decisions we make as a corporate body, and their impact upon the earth. Second, as individuals, this Environmental Stewardship Sunday, let us hear a challenge to change our lives, even in some small way, to turn toward a more sustainable lifestyle. If we each commit to doing just one thing to be a better steward of creation, starting today, we could make a big impact. During coffee hour, you will find this list of 10 things you can do to tend creation, and I challenge you to take on even just one of them, as a part of your path of Christian discipleship.

Consider the lilies, consider the ravens, consider the grasses of the field, consider the horsehair worm. God has created the earth and everything in it, and everything comes from God and returns to God. Our lives are not our own, but are bound up in the interdependent web of creation, so we must live as faithful stewards of God’s great gift. The words of Psalm 133, which we shared in the Call to Worship, say it best: “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity. For there our God commands a blessing: Life forevermore!”
 

Let us pray.
Creator God, Source of Life, thank you for the abundant life you have created, for the beauty of the earth and all that dwells within it. Help us to remember that you are the source of our being, and you have placed us gently in the interdependent creation to nourish it and be nourished by it. Make us good stewards of this gift. Amen.

Genesis 1:26-31;
Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”  So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.

God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”  God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.”  And it was so.

God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Luke 12: 16-31
Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’  Then he said, ‘I will do this; I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.  And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink be merry.”’  But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’  So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

He said to his disciples, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear.  For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing.  Consider the ravens; they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds?  And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?  If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest?  Consider the lilies, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.  But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith!  And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them.  Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well. . .”