Community Conversation @ Northminster

Beth McMahon and I are working on our message for Sunday, July 13, A Green Life.  Kyle Kennedy passed along this article from The Washington Post, and I thought I’d share it with you.  I’ve added some local conservation resources in our links section, too.  Virginia Interfaith offers some fantastic resources on conservation care, if you’d like to do some reading before Sunday.  

For some of us, talk of environmental conservation, sustainability, and climate change just conjures up images of Birkenstock clad 20-somethings gathered around a sacred tree.  On Sunday, Beth and I hope to paint a better picture rooted firmly in scripture.  As we continue to consider what God asks of us as we participate in the work of God’s kingdom, we must consider how God wishes for us to engage the physical creation around us.  

Brian McLaren, in his book A Generous Orthodoxy, explores these ideas and considers what loving Jesus means for all of creation.  (You’ll hear more of this on Sunday!)

“God sent Jesus into the world with a saving love, and Jesus sends us with a similar saving love—love for the fatherless and widows, the poor and forgotten to be sure, but also for all God’s little creatures who suffer from the same selfish greed that oppress vulnerable humans.  The same forces that hurt widows and orphans, minorities and women, children and the elderly, also hurt the songbirds and the trout, the ferns and old-growth forests: greed, impatience, selfishness, arrogance, hurry, anger, competition, irreverence—plus a theology that cares for souls but neglects bodies, that focuses on eternity in heaven but abandons history on earth.

When greed and consumerism are exposed, when arrogance and irreverence are unplugged, when hurry and selfishness are named and repented of, when the sacred-secular rift in our thinking is healed, the world and all it contains (widows, orphans, trees, soil) are revalued and made sacred again.”

What are your first thoughts?  Is this a faith issue?  Does this conversation excite you?  What do you think about Brian McLaren’s observation that human “greed, impatience, selfishness, arrogance, hurry, anger, competition, irreverence” impact not only the marginalized in our society but the whole of creation itself?  Share your thoughts with us and get a new discussion going!