Perhaps it is the combination of a late Easter, so that Earth Day, Mother’s Day and Graduation are all part of Eastertide, that has stimulated these musings on the themes of Eastertide—God dwelling among us, crucified and resurrected; life, death, grief and hope. The connections are inescapable to me—because I am a Christian, because I have hope, because this is God’s creation, and because I am a mother and seminary teacher, I spend my life helping others to see the connection between their faith and our care for the earth.

At the moment, it is whether to hide the newspaper from one’s kids that I find myself pondering. It seems quite ironic after all the time I’ve spent encouraging them to stay current on events. But I find myself asking, what is the affect of always reading headlines about the decline of earth’s eco-systems, the looming extinction of species, weird record- setting weather and destructive storms, or potentially the worst oil spill ever, when it is their future that is being implicated?  What must they think of the adults all around them that keep putting off signing international climate treaties or climate legislation at home, that keep thinking that near term politics are more important than the future of the planet, and all its inhabitants? I know many of them are angry, and many of them quite determined, at young ages, to do something and do it now. We urgently need to listen to their voices and act. Whether we are mothers or fathers or not, they are our future also.

I am still, and will forever be, haunted by the time I brought my son to hear Jared Diamond speak at Drew University about his then current book Collapse. At the very end of the lecture, when Diamond invited  questions from someone young and not gray-haired in the audience, that my son, then aged 10, insisted on going to the mike to ask “How will we know when it is too late?” Those words haunt me now in all I do. How does what I do, and what we all do, respond to the anxiety and longing for hope in that question?

I currently put a lot of work into greening seminaries as part of the Green Seminary Initiative—after all, seminaries are supposed to be preparing religious leaders for tomorrow.  But if we’re not teaching those leaders to claim care for creation as central to our faith, to be attentive to earth’s cries of distress, then where is hope? Where will our children turn when facing the depression, despair, and escapist consumerism and entertainment that abounds in their generation? Can they claim the glad tidings of Easter without turning apocalyptic and escapist, abandoning this degraded earth to anxiously await a “new heaven and earth”? Will they turn away from the Church as a place that was so preoccupied with “religion in buildings” that Christians have lost sight that we too are part of creation? Will more churches, enough churches to change the face of Christianity, remember what John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, so clearly knew:

…that God is in all things, and that we are to see the Creator in the face of every creature; that we should use and look upon nothing as separate from God, which indeed is a kind of practical atheism; but with a true magnificence of thought survey heaven and earth and all that is therein as contained by God in the hallow of (God’s)
hand, who by his intimate presence holds them all in being, who pervades and
actuates the whole created frame, and is in a true sense the soul of the
universe.”  Sermon 23, “Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, III” I.11

What would happen if we once again took to heart that we “should use and look upon nothing as separate from God?”

A lot of the students of Drew Theological School who will graduate next Saturday have heard Wesley’smessage, and I hope we are turning out leaders for a more progressive Christianity that sees creation as pervaded by God, and its care as central to Christianity. The lectionary reading for the sixth Sunday of Easter contains the verse that has always evoked Drew in my mind: Revelations 22:2 “and the leaves of the trees will be for the healing of the nations.” This is our call to eco-justice--we are a university in a forest, and it is the magnificence of spring on campus, the leafiness of the trees and the bird songs that fill the air that echo forth each year Easter’s message of resurrection and hope. At the same time, it is the deformations of the leaves caused by widespread pollution that reminds me that we are never far from the deaths and crucifixion of those who live in New Jersey’s old industrialized cities, like Newark, where environmental degradation from the past and present means too many children have asthma and other illnesses, and God’s creatures who can survive best are the rats and roaches. It is the belief in the resurrection that remembers the crucifixion, the hope that doesn’t ignore the grief and death, that is the source of the Christian understanding of eco-justice for all of creation.

In this time of celebrations of life and new beginnings tinged with the grief and shadows of the present and future ecological crises, let us remember, for all the next generations, the hope that carries us through, the hope for a future when we recognize that the earth, God’s ongoing,
indwelling among us, is the source of all our lives.