Sermons on Environment (Page 4)

This land belongs to…

This land is your land, this land is our land; this land was made for you and me. When Woodie Guthry wrote this iconic song in 1944 it had a different slant. There were two verses that don’t appear in this version. In one, Guthrie challenges private property ; There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; Sign was painted, it said private property; But on the back side it didn’t say nothing; This land was…

Forests

Today we start our annual celebration of Creation. From today through the first Sunday in October we will be focusing on God’s work and God’s presence in the created world. If I were to ask you what is the biggest living creature, some of you would say the blue whale, and some would debate what actually we mean by living.  But I doubt that many of us would immediately say Pando. Pando is a forest, but all of its 47,000…

Cosmic Christ

Today we celebrate Cosmos Sunday. Usually when we think of Creation, we think of Planet Earth or maybe of this solar system. But in recent years we have seen astonishing images coming from telescopes like the Hubble space station. These images of distant solar systems, supernovas, quasars and the like have fueled huge advances in scientific understanding of the universe. No longer can we think of Creation as just this extraordinary blue-green planet with the huge problems we have brought…

Creation’s Suffering

Today is Fauna or Animal Sunday, but I’m not going to talk about polar bears or about cats or coyotes. Instead I want to talk about pain. Last week, several of you spoke to me about the pain of seeing the oceans heating up and the water rising; the pain of knowing about the plight of sea mammals hurt by our trash. This is painful stuff. And it is right for us to feel the pain and difficulty that human…