We Will Be the First Sustainable Congregation

EARTHKEEPING NEWS
A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY

Volume Six, Number Four
May/June 1997

Who Will Say "We Will Be the First Sustainable Congregation"?

I have been given 12 minutes to speak, so let us assume that we have 12 minutes to change the world, and what we say will be set in stone.

I will add : We must abolish all communities of faith world-wide today and reconstitute them like frozen juice.

We now have eleven minutes left, and in this time we will fill the vacuum left by this last commandment.

Minute one:
Let me offer this from Genesis: Till and care for the Garden. On this commandment hang all the laws and the prophets, the stories and church doctrine. The travelers umbrella for people of faith is avad and shamar (to till and to care for). This came along before the ten commandments and the Levitical code of 700 directives from the Torah.

Minute Two:
We must work to build our houses of worship on the primary commandment; reconstitute the bylaws, the charter, the fine print. Start from the foundation and build.

Minutes Three to Nine:
These are the key minutes for communities of faith. Let us take a long look at the two essential rituals in our communities of faith. Make sure that we emphasize that Baptism in the Christian Community is an environmental sacrament, for without clean water we cannot bring new members into the fold. You cannot baptize with impure water.

The first order of business is to preserve our ability to continue as a people of God. Baptisms, purification in the Jewish tradition, even confirmation, all are designed to grow the community of faith and they all use the precious gift of water. Therefore, all of us must become guardian spirits of water. How to protect and preserve the water supplies world-wide is a profoundly theological discipline requiring everyone's attention.

The second order of business is to protect the one act that binds us together, that is eating together. A meal is a sacrament. It is a holy enterprise, for without food we die. The Christian communion and the Jewish seder meal are both rendered null and void if the wine we drink is contaminated with pesticides, and soils in which we grow our breads become sterile and non-productive. How to protect these sacraments must be the purpose of the church or else we have nothing.

Therefore, the primary purpose for people of faith is not prayer, nor fund raising, nor social activities, nor outreach to the poor, not even worship. Though all are important, they are the second tier of importance for the long term health of the church.

We love God and our fellow human beings by deed, and therefore as strange as this may seem, we must all work for sustainable agriculture, healthy soils, and alternatives to chemically driven food production while protecting our water supplies, watersheds and aquifers.

Our earliest history is of a connection between the natural world and the human family, and today we in the church contribute to the disconnect by apathy and neglect; thus the necessity of our exercise in reconstituting the church of God based upon the first and great commandment -- Love God's creation and take care of it.

"I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies . . . . Take away from me the noise of your songs. . . . But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." (Amos 5:21-24)

Amos or Hosea or Jeremiah might say "Today all church rituals are meaningless, all church functions superfluous -- all are a waste of time unless the environmental ethic, the directive to keep the fragile island home healthy remains as the under girding, guiding theological principle."

I believe the church I love should be shut down when it fails to retrofit its lighting which uses ancient incandescent bulbs, or avoids using recycled paper, or continues to use pesticides on the garden or toxic chemicals to clean the Sunday School rooms.

The church I love remains silent except for a few quiet voices about two major killers of the earth community -- conception and consumption. We hear so little about limiting births, yet the simple act of having a child is what is really challenging the Earth's caring capacity. We are asking to change the world by having our voices heard about these issues.

The prayers of the people must address the loss of wetlands, or old growth forests, or coral reef exploitation, or pollution of air and water. These are profound theological issues, connected to the principle from Genesis of keeping and serving creation.

The overall strategy is to define the church as a sustainable community working to sustain God's creation.

Perhaps the last and best of our 12 minutes to change the world can be spent with our pastor, priest, rabbi or politician, saying: "I do not accept the fact that you are either too busy or too committed to other things to worry about the environment."

Tell them you worry about food, air and water, each of which relates to the initial commandment from God to keep and serve God's creation. When we join hands and cleanse the soil, heal the waters and purify the air together, then we can call ourselves a community of faith again.

Who Will Say "We Will Be the First Sustainable Congregation"?

By The Rev. Peter G. Kreitler