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Blogs are fun! One of the ways in which I like to use this space is to treat Letters to You as a space for outtakes from recent sermons. One of the saddest parts of my sermon writing job is that each week, I need to make cuts to the drafts of my messages. It’s not that everything must go, exactly, but everything can’t stay, either.

And so, let me speak for a moment here about what would have been a sidebar within last Sunday’s sermon on Psalm 126. (You can listen in here.) In it, I was talking at one point about how due to internal/psychological factors and also external/cultural ones, we’re often liable to suppress any reflections both about our past and also our future in favor of simply living in the now. Bob Seger spotted this trend years ago (thanks, Bob!), but more recently I sense that an ever-deepening fear and anxiety regarding what might be ahead, plus a suspicion that what lies behind us is only trauma, combine to compel us to feel like never before, "Who needs tomorrow?"  All that matters now is, well, now.

An additional riff that can be laid upon this basic tune is that the only mode we have at our disposal to discuss what's to come is to toggle between sky-is-falling panic and then head-in-the-sand obliviousness. It’s freefall and then a blissfully ignorant equipoise, over and over again.

Case in point, as far as I can see, is the discourse that typically surrounds environmental issues. We’ll tend to adopt postures of either hysteria (shrill, angry, negative, fatalistic) on one hand or denial (sedated, non-confrontational, naive, nihilistic) on the other. It’s hard to make constructive progress if the room is full only of Casandras and Dumb and Dumber Jim Carey’s. In practical terms, that means that we’ll not only freak out if we can’t find a recycling bin for our empty can of White Claw but also not think twice about the carbon footprint effects of our cross country road trip or aerial jaunt around the world.

Here’s the sidebar that I cut for time from Sunday’s sermon. I don’t love what seem to be the standard options that churches often give congregants when it comes to ecological discourse. (The environment has been on my mind as it appears that this summer seems headed to be one of the hottest on record.) If you’ll allow me an oversimplificaion, I perceive two basic “doors” that we’ll offer our folks, both of which are flawed.

For one, more progressive churches churches can be full throated in their championing of environmental causes, but they’ll go overboard in attaching themselves to larger ecological programs on the secular left that will at best show indifference to various things that the Bible shows we should care deeply about (e.g., God, Jesus, salvation, discipleship, etc.) or at worst outright hostility to these same things. (In a famous paper from the late 1960’s, an ecologist named Lynn White blames Christianity for the ways in which the West has abused our environment; commensurately, White argues, progress on the environmental front can only occur with a regress of Christian influence.) Please don’t get me wrong: if we can slow down the warming of our world, that would be an awesome thing. However, if environmental gains carry the cost of minimizing, or turning against, the gospel, I’d say that a properly Christian response would echo the words of Jesus, who once remarked in Mark’s gospel, “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul” (8:36)?

Then you have the predictable, equal-but-opposite response from the Christian right, namely that seeking to care for and conserve God’s creation is tantamount to worshipping Satan––which is a position that I find sadly ironic, since a proper (and properly faithful) reading of the Genesis 1-2 will cause us to want to steward well, and not trash willfully, the environmental resources with which God has entrusted us.  (A more ameliorated form of such a reaction is what I sense as an over-cautiousness on the part of some Christians who might otherwise be inclined toward action steps in creation care but are a) themselves worried about being "hookwinked by the left" or b) concerned that they'll be criticized by Christian conservatives who will tell them that they're selling out.)

We’ll talk at Liberti Collingswood about what it means to glean from the scriptures a “third way walk and worldview” that may occasionally present as being in alignment with either the secular right or secular left but is in fact captive to neither. It’s its own thing entirely.

I’ll check in next week to sketch a couple thoughts about what a third way walk and worldview requires of us when we think about the environment.

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