Our Community Conversation experiment was fantastic this summer.  Thanks to all of you who participated and read during the summer series Life In The Upside Down Kingdom.  If you want to keep blogging with Northminster, check out the new blog: sammywilliams.wordpress.com.

Peace.

For those of you who are up and online early or those who want to follow along at home, here is today’s message.  This is the fourth and final installment in our series Life in the Upside Down Kingdom.  It has been great fun and such a privilege to lead this study.  I hope our blogging will continue.  Lots of you have been reading, but only a few brave souls have entered the comment section.  Start today.  What do you think of today’s message?  Of the whole series?  What’s our way forward at Northminster?  Let’s keep the conversation going!

Here are some books I’m using for tomorrow’s message.  Once we’re all done, I’ll make sure the final resource sheet includes everything for you to hold onto.  

First is Lauren Winner’s Mudhouse Sabbath, Paraclete Press.  Very readable, chapters are arranged by various Jewish practices.  Winner converted from Orthodox Judaism to Christianity and makes some really lovely, thoughtful connections between the two.  How might the essence of Judaism inform Christian practice?  Good stuff.

Second, a bit more academic, is Elizabeth Newman’s Untamed Hospitality: Welcoming God and Other Strangers, Brazos Press.  What does hospitality really mean for Christians?  What does it look like?  How do we live it out?  What things and old ways do we need to unlearn?

Scripture for tomorrow is primarily Matthew 22.34-40 with looks at Deuteronomy 6.5 and Leviticus 19.8.

Tomorrow is the last day in our Upside-Down series.  I’d love to hear your thoughts as we close these four weeks together.  What is the way forward for our community?  How do we begin to walk in step with Christ and with each other?  I’d planned to use an Isaiah passage tomorrow as the central point, but the more I think and read, the more I am drawn to Jesus’ response to the Pharisees in Matthew 22 when they ask, “What is the greatest commandment?”  What is his response?  To love the Lord your God and to love your neighbor as yourself.  

But I’m curious to hear your thoughts.  I’ll be near the computer most of today, and maybe your comments will make it into tomorrow’s sermon!  (With due credit, of course!)  Do you have ideas for action?  Ideas for unity?  Ideas for how we might love neighbor as self?  And what does that really mean, anyway?  Think about it, and join me in the comments section.  Enjoy your Saturday.

Don’t forget that our Second Family Movie Night of the summer is this Friday, July 18 from 6:00-8:30.  We’ll have free pizza, brownies, and watch Night at the Museum.  Our first Family Movie Night was a huge success, and we need your presence to make this night even better.  Friends, neighbors, and strangers are welcome–that’s what makes it a family night.  See you there!

Starting Wednesday, July 23, we will have three weeks of conversation about how to best organize our time, energy, and resources on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights beginning in September.  If you want to be part of these brainstorming conversations, please mark your calendar for July 23, July 30, and August 6 from 6:30-8:30.  Dinner is not included, but you’re welcome to brown bag it!  As we enter into these conversations, it is my great hope that we will ask ourselves how God wants to use us in our community in bold, upside-down ways.  What can happen on the corners of Moss Side and Westwood Avenues if we really walk in step together following the way of Christ?

Five Ways to Get Started Caring for God’s Creation

Want to DO something to take care of the earth? Here are 5 small steps you can take to begin to re-order your life and use less of the earth’s resources.

If making changes sounds difficult, you also may be pleased to learn that these are almost painless. In fact, they might not seem like enough to make a difference – but if ALL of us begin to make these kinds of small changes, they really do add up. 
(Unless otherwise noted, statistics and actions are from Center for a New American Dream, c3.newdream.org)

1. Eat Locally
Here’s a statistic I just can’t get over. Do you know how far the average food item travels from its origin to your dinner plate? Anywhere from 1200 to 2500 miles. It takes a lot of fuel to move that food – not to mention that this is also why we have so many pink, crunchy tomatoes in the grocery store. A nice ripe tomato just won’t survive the trip.

So for at least some of your groceries, visit a farmers’ market (Ashland, Goochland, 17th Street – there’s even a new one in Lakeside! Check out http://www.localharvest.org/farmers-markets/). Or buy somewhere like Ukrops, where you can tell which produce is locally grown. 

When you eat food that’s grown in Goochland or New Kent, you’re saving a lot of fuel and a lot of emissions from trucks. Not to mention that a Hanover tomato doesn’t crunch when you bite into it.
 
2. Change that light bulb
The next time the bulb in your closet burns out, replace it with a compact fluorescent bulb. Compact fluorescents give the same amount of light as traditional incandescents but use 75% or 80% less electricity.
 
According to Fast Company magazine, what that means is that if every one of 110 million American households bought just ONE ice-cream-cone bulb, took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people for a year.
 
“But they’re more expensive,” you say. Uh – not really. Yes, you will pay more at the cash register to take this bulb home versus a GE Soft White – but by the time it burns out, you would already have replaced an incandescent several times. Plus, you save on the electricity used to operate the bulb over that number of years. You do the math. (Fast Company, September 2006) 

3. Break the bottled water habit!
I’m not sure how I missed this fact, but somehow I did. Did you know that plastics are made from petroleum? What is most bottled water, bottled in? Uh-huh – plastic.
 
In 2004, the U.S. consumed more bottled water than any other country—almost 7 billion gallons. Making those bottles required more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 cars for a year. 
 
That’s the front end. Here’s the back end: 86% of those plastic water bottles aren’t recycled. Some are incinerated, which produces toxic stuff like chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals. Others are buried in landfills … where they can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.  
 
Here’s the wildest fact: did you know something like 40 percent of bottled water is just tap water! We complain about paying $4 a gallon for gas, but we’ll pay $8 a gallon for bottled water – something we can get out of our own faucets and water fountains practically for free!
 
·     So, you might consider giving up bottled water. You can put a filter on your faucet or get a filtered pitcher to keep in your fridge.

• To take water with you, get a water bottle that is designed to be reused.  (Don’t reuse a disposable water or soda bottle – it’s not safe. The plastic can begin leaking toxins into your beverage, especially if the bottle gets warm. Some plastic reusables aren’t safe either – look at http://mysigg.com) 

4. Give Your Clothes the Cold Shoulder
Want to save an easy 60 bucks? Wash 4 out of 5 laundry loads in cold water, and you’ll save that much in energy costs every year. 
 
A whopping 90 percent of the energy used by a washing machine goes to just heating the water.  You could reduce your CO2 emissions by 72 pounds in just one month by doing this!  

5. BYOB
Aren’t plastic bags great? Strong, lightweight, easy to carry…and they last forever. Literally. Plastic bags don’t biodegrade, they just break down into smaller and smaller toxic bits. They contaminate soil and waterways,  and get into the food web when animals accidentally ingest them – even killing hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine mammals who mistake bags for food.  Worldwide, human beings use over one million plastic bags per minute. 

It’s easy to find reusable bags these days, and they are cheap. Take your own bag along whenever you shop. Even if you only use one less plastic bag – that’s one less plastic bag. And when you have to use plastic bags, save them up and take them back to retailers who will recycle them.

Beth McMahon and I are preaching together this morning.  Expect a couple of posts from her in the next days as we share her info with you as well.  Here’s my portion of the message this morning as well as the updated resource list.  Everyone’s been pretty quiet on this week’s subject.  Any thoughts?  Any comments?

I’m sitting on my couch finishing up my notes for tomorrow’s message, and it hit me that I left some resources off of the handout you’ll be receiving.  If you’re looking ahead, these books have been of great interest to me lately.  I recommend them to you for your home library.

Brian McLaren: A Generous Orthodoxy, Zondervan Publishing–the subtitle of this one is great: Why I am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-Yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished Christian.  Chock full of good stuff that goes well beyond the scope of creation care.  This is a great book for who Northminster is and is becoming.

J. Matthew Sleeth: Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action, Chelsea Green Publishing–the foreword is by Rev. Richard Cizik with the National Association of Evangelicals.  Cizik has taken a lot of heat from old-guard evangelical leadership for his strong views on climate change, human culpability, and the church’s call to act.  This book would make a great small group study.  I’m still working through it and have found it to be fascinating.

Alright, there’s some new info to tuck away for tomorrow.  It’s a beautiful Saturday.  Don’t be like me, hiding in front of the computer inside.  Go outside and enjoy the day.  The folks at church are still working in the garden and giving out vegetables, non-perishable food items, and the children’s homemade cupcakes.  You’ve got another hour to go help out.  The Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens are hosting Jammin’ in the Gardens back in the Children’s Garden from Noon-3:00 p.m. today.  Live music, family fun, beautiful flower and vegetable gardens to explore.  Take some quarters and sit and feed the fish and turtles.  Blessings.

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!