This is My Father’s World
Genesis 1:31, Psalm 24:1, Romans 8:19-21
We’re going through Seven Simple Truths About LIFE which was precipitated by my son Luke turning 13. In the Jewish faith, 13 was considered to be the age of adulthood for young men. It may not be so true today with maturity rates but as our sound consultant, Chris Brown, told Luke last month when he heard he had just become a teenager, “Get ready, it’s going to be tough.” Well, it is tough, especially when you don’t live by the rules and what we’ll find today is if you don’t follow today’s rule, then it can be downright toxic.
The simple truth for today is don’t take for granted what you can’t live without. Or it can be rephrased by saying, Don’t be careless with what you can’t replace. I find that we often take a lot of things for granted in life, we don’t care for them and we always assume they’ll just be there. Like your hearing for example. How many of you went to rock concerts as a teen? Where’s the best place to sit? In front of the wall of speakers. And after the concert, your ears are ringing but that goes away in a day or so. But then later in life, you have to ask people to repeat things because you can’t hear them. The same is true with our physical bodies. After Katrina, they were broadcasting on the radio what solution of Clorox and water you needed to spray to kill the mold. They stated it needed to be a 10% solution, Well, my thought was if 10% good then why not 100% I sprayed that in my house and for the next two weeks, I wheezed as I tried to breathe.
Now there’s a 100 different applications of this principle but today I want to just focus on one: the world we live on. This planet is something which is irreplaceable and we’re completely dependent on. And yet, so often we take it for granted or worse, we’re just careless with it.
We hear a lot about going green in the news but today I want to speak about this issue from a faith perspective and a Biblical and theological framework. Today we want to ask this question, “What is it that God expects of us relative to how we live on this plant?” When I was growing up as a kid, my parents would harp on me about turning the lights off after I left a room. I had a hard time remembering to do that and so they were constantly telling me to turn off the lights. “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” And I find that my kids do the very same thing. They go into the bathroom, which is well lit with natural light, turn on every light and then leave with the lights still on. I find I say the same thing to my kids too. I’m turning into my Dad! But with him, it wasn’t so much about the environment as it was wasting money. For us, it’s even more than that. I can harp on my kids all day but I fail to see all of the ways I carelessly use God’s resources myself.
Let’s talk first about our faith and what God calls of us. State with me the Apostles Creed, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth…” First, We begin with this idea that God created all things. At the beginning of time, he spoke and out of the darkness came light and the universe was born. Four billion years ago, be began to form this planet and 200,000 years ago he began to form us. God is the Creator of all of this and Genesis tells us that he takes delight in creating and at the end of each day, he looked at what he had created and saw that it was good. Second, And at the end of the 6th day, he looks and see that indeed, it was very good. In Job it tells us how God loves and takes delight in his creation. Third, God owns everything. The Psalmist tells us, "The earth is the LORD’s, and everything that lives in it.” Everything that is in the world, God created, so God owns everything. Fourth, we are given dominion. After creating everything God turns to Adam and says, go and “rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." Dominion over all the earth does not mean we can just use it but instead makes us caretakers of the things of God and we would do that in a way that would please the maker.
Fifth, this is God’s handiwork and His glory is revealed in it. The Scriptures talk about creation and God’s relation to it. Paul writes in Romans 1:20, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” In Isaiah 6:2 we read, “the whole earth is full of his glory.” This is God’s handiwork and just as a person invests themselves when they throw a pot or paint a painting and do woodwork, we something of the nature and character of God in His creation. This is His handiwork and his glory is revealed in it and that is why we sing, “This is My Father’s World.” This is the Good News.
But the bad news is that Adam and Eve, knowing what God wanted them to do, they failed to do it. They chose to focus on themselves and not God will. As a result, they bring destruction into the world. Paradise is lost because they pursue their own needs first. Our Human Condition: we take the earth for granted And every generation since has done the same thing: we’re interested in what is in it for me. We’re interested in convenience and comfort and how much stuff we can accumulate. If we do think of someone or something else, it’s our family or those closest to us but at the bottom of the list is Planet Earth. And as a result we have pillaged the earth and wounded the planet, manifested millions of ways because we treat God’s creation carelessly. Time Magazine in 1989 celebrated not the Person of the Year but the Planet of Year. It was a wakeup call for me and convicted me and my faith. “Through most of his 2 million years or so of existence, man has thrived in earth’s environment -- perhaps too well…. The reason is … the reckless way in which humanity has treated its planetary host. Like the evil genies that flew from Pandora’s box, technological advances have provided the means of upsetting nature’s equilibrium, that intricate set of biological, physical and chemical interactions that make up the web of life. Starting at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, smokestacks have disgorged noxious gases into the atmosphere, factories have dumped toxic wastes into rivers and streams, automobiles have guzzled irreplaceable fossil fuels and fouled the air with their detritus. In the name of progress, forests have been denuded, lakes poisoned with pesticides, underground aquifers pumped dry. For decades, scientists have warned of the possible consequences of all this profligacy. No one paid much attention….. The Judeo-Christian tradition introduced a radically different concept. The earth was the creation of a monotheistic God, who, after shaping it, ordered its inhabitants, in the words of Genesis: "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." The idea of dominion could be interpreted as an invitation to use nature as a convenience. Thus the spread of Christianity, which is generally considered to have paved the way for the development of technology, may at the same time have carried the seeds of the wanton exploitation of nature that often accompanied technical progress.”
The Apostle Paul in Chapter 8: 19-21 says the entire creation groans under the weight of human sin. This is our human condition: we take the earth for granted, we fail to see it as the handiwork of God and instead see it as a tool for our personal enjoyment and nothing more. Now the Good news in all of this is that God sent a redeemer to save us from our sin and to give us a rebirth and new start so that we might see ourselves differently. Once we become followers of Jesus, it’s no longer about us but about others and God and His will for our life. It is now about God’s purpose and God’s plan. Salvation is not just about being saved or even about doing things like justice and sharing the Gospel with others. It’s also about caring for the planet that God made.
National Geographic’s show, The Human Footpirnt” looked at how many commodities we use. The number of soda cans you’ll open up in your lifetime: 43,371. 28341 gallons of water will be used in the shower and bathroom. Each of you used 700 lbs of paper each year. In China and India, it’s 25 lbs per person. We have 5% of the world’s population and 30% of the world’s cars. The average American produces 1600 lbs of solid waste each year. That means over your lifetime, you will produce 128,000 lbs of waster in your lifetime. That goes to the landfill and most of that stuff doesn’t decompose. It takes 8oz of crude oil to make one disposable diaper. A child will use 3,796 diapers and that’s 3,796 cups of oil. Most scientists believe it takes 500 years for the diaper to decompose. There’s enough diapers used every year to cover the state of TX. It also takes 4/12 trees to make those 3,796 diapers. At the grocery store when you’re checking out, they ask you what? Paper or plastic/ Paper actually takes more green house gases to produces and it’s harder on the environment. The problem is that paper bags will break down and plastic bags take centuries. Each year, Americans throw away 100 billion plastic bags. But many of these bags never make it to landfills; instead, they go airborne after they are discarded—getting caught in fences, trees, even the throats of birds, and clogging gutters, sewers, and waterways.
Now most scientists believe that we as humans are causing global warming. The debate rages on both sides but everybody agrees the planet is getting warmer. The 10 warmest years on record since 1900 have been in the last 13 years. We know that glaciers are disappearing. Show image. Most scientist believe that industry and automobiles are increasing our green house gases which trap the heat in our atosphere rather than letting it escape and thus raises the temperature. It’s like adding more blankets during the summer. For every gallon of gas you burn, you produce 20lbs of green house gas totaling 600,000 lbs of greenhouse gas in your lifetime.
So what do we do about this? First, recognize this is our Father’s world and we called to care for it. This is an issue of discipleship and our worship with our lives. This is an issue of our relationship to God. Second, reduce. Reduce the amount of electricity you use. One way to do that to do that is raise your thermostats to 76 degrees. Buy fluorescent light bulbs. If every household in America would replace one light bulb with one of these, we would save 600 million dollars in one year. That could supply enou….liggh electricity for 3 million homes and be the equivalents of taking 8000 cars off the road. Improve the fuel economy of your cars by getting tue ups, making sure your tires and inflated and don’t drive over 60 on the hiway. When youa re ready to buy a car, buy one that’s gets 20% better fuel economy than the one you have now. Look at buying a hyrib car.
Third, recycle Let’s look at recycling. 40% of what we throw away in paper goods could be recycled. That’s just the paper goods. Then there’s the bottles, the plastic and the cans. The average American recyles 30% of their solid waste. Here in New Orleans, we have no curbside pick up for recycling. The first thing you can do is demand it. Second, ask them to make it mandatory. In the Northeast, if you don’t recycle on trash days, it comes with hefty fines. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be mandatory. The BBC reported last year that there’s a city in India that recycles 100% of its solid waste. A four foot stack of newspaper equals a 40’ tree. Every glass bottle you recycle saves enough energy to produce to light a 100 watt light bulb for 4 hours. Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild the entire airline fleet every three months.
Fourth, reuse Let’s talk about reusing. You can now buy canvass bags instead of using paper and plastic. Stop drinking out of water bottles. Each day 60 million water bottles are thrown away! And I takes 450 years for that bottle to decompose! That’s why I use this container to drink out of. It’s not pretty and it is plastic but I’ve used this for over two years now. If you’ve got a water bottle, wash it and then reuse it.
This is our Father’s world. It can’t be replaced worth far more than a jelly dish. And we are called as those who seek to please him to care for that which he has entrusted in our hands, to savor it, enjoy and see that it is here in better shape for the next generation and far beyond.
