Your Easter celebration undoubtedly has included lots of physical signs of new life—eggs, flowers, new green growth.Because you’re an Episcopalian, it certainly won’t include going to church… or, if it does, hearing anything about Christianity if you do.
As the Easter season continues, consider how your daily living can be an act of greater life for other creatures. How can you enact the new life we know in Jesus the Christ?The “easter living” and “new life” which is, of course, the United Nations’ MDGs. That’s what it’s all about after all… read on. The “new life” certainly isn’t that of the Episcopal church, which is shrinking faster than any other denomination in the U.S. and which is actively replacing the life-generating love of marriage with sterile homoeroticism and murderous abortion.... but never mind all that… just keep chanting “MDG… MDG...”
In other words, how can you be the sacrament, the outward and visible sign, of the grace that you know in the resurrected Christ? How can your living let others live more abundantly?After all, it is _you_ who are and does sacraments, not God. It is _your_ living—not His… er, sorry, _its_—which is the center of the Easter message.
The Judaeo-Christian tradition has been famously blamed for much of the current environmental crisis, particularly for our misreading of Genesis 1:28 as a charge to “fill the earth and subdue it.”In case you missed such “famous” blaming, check out some of my other fine lectures.
Our forebears were so eager to distinguish their faith from the surrounding Canaanite religion and its concern for fertility that some of them worked overtime to separate us from an awareness of “the hand of God in the world about us,” especially in a reverence for creation.And in fact—hmmm… maybe this is why I mention this point—people still do that today, thinking that Christianity is “true” or “better”. Look at all these silly un-modern “witch doctor"-like so-called “orthodox” these days who are actually so presumptuous as to claim Christianity reveals unique truth.
How can we love God if we do not love what God has made?Remember: start with the fallen and corrupt creature… and then make God in that image. It’s so much easier that way. Imagine and then love God only insofar as He—er, sorry, it—matches our desires. Don’t love Creation for the sake of its Creator. That’s much more inconvenient.
We base much of our approach to loving God and our neighbors in this world on our baptismal covenant.That’s the _new_ baptismal covenant, mind you, with the innovation of its 60s-ideology secular-humanist “justice” trumping all that depressing talk about sin, repentence, forgiveness, and faith.
Yet our latest prayer book was written just a bit too early to include caring for creation among those explicit baptismal promises.… but don’t worry. We’ll be fixing that soon enough. We’ll be getting rid of some more of its inconvenient religious baggage at the same time too.
I would invite you to explore those promises a bit more deeply—where and how do they imply caring for the rest of creation?Er, that would be “those promises” as I’ve just redefined and rewritten them mind you—this environmentalist stuff—not what the text actually says. But that shouldn’t be any problem for you… we’ve been teaching our clergy (and you) to do that with the Bible for over 30 years now.
We are beginning to be aware of the ways in which our lack of concern for the rest of creation results in death and destruction for our neighbors.Of course, the few of you who have read the first chapters of Genesis might just notice that this isn’t a new idea… but, then again, those of you who actually read and believe the Bible will have left the Episcopal church years or decades ago, so that’s not really a concern for me, now is it?
We cannot love our neighbors unless we care for the creation that supports all our earthly lives. We are not respecting the dignity of our fellow creatures if our sewage or garbage fouls their living space.Of course, the same might well be said about this sermon… and everything produced by the HOB.
When atmospheric warming, due in part to the methane output of the millions of cows we raise each year to produce hamburger, begins to slowly drown the island homes of our neighbors in the South Pacific, are we truly sharing good news?Yes, ladies and gentlemen, _this_ is the Easter message… _this_ is what Christ (and, of course, Muhammad and Buddah and Confucious and John Lennon) came to save us from.... (drum roll please)… COW FARTS!!!
The food we eat, the energy we use, the goods and foods we buy, the ways in which we travel, are all opportunities—choices and decisions—to be for others, both human and other. Our Christian commitment is for this—that we might live that more abundant life, and that we might do it in a way that is for the whole world.Yup… _that’s_ our Christian commitment. Environmentalism. MDGs. Please stand by as we update your Prayer Book accordingly.
Abundant blessings this Easter, and may those blessings abound through the coming days and years.Just don’t eat meat. Or drive SUVs. Or read your Bible or believe in Christianity. Or we’ll have to charge and expell you under Title IV or our new and improved canon law.
Have a nice day.
(Please find enclosed the latest draft of our new Canaanite easter liturgy.)
First posted on SFiF, before I was banned there for being too articulately traditional and catholic... as have quite a few other anglocatholics.
