Episcopal parishes are famous for living in the past. You know the joke about how many Episcopalians it takes to change a light bulb? You can’t change that light bulb; my great grandmother gave that light bulb. A friend donated her architectural services to her big Episcopal parish in New Haven Connecticut. She designed a beautiful columbarium located inside the church nave. When she showed us the recently completed project a few months ago, she began her tour of the columbarium with the words: “In 1931, the vestry of Trinity parish voted to install a columbarium in the nave.”

Now I sincerely hope that our parish building project has a faster completion time than my friend’s parish.

But relying on the past and venerable traditions can blind us both to the future and the present. The world has changed more rapidly in the past fifty years than anyone could ever imagine. Our churches have been painfully slow to embrace change. And because most church teaching focuses on events that happened long ago, people do not learn how to connect their faith to current events. We tend to compartmentalize things so that environmental issues belong to scientists and engineers. Today the world tells us that churches should stick to their musty old creeds and doctrines while leaving technical problems to the engineers.

This process is how the church slips out of relevance and out of the public view. Bit by bit the church has nothing to contribute to modern life. But as Bob Dylan famously sung “You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone for the times they are a changin’” ALL Christians are called to apply our hearts and minds by connecting the Bible to the challenges we find in the newspaper and daily life. One author tells us that we should “pray [for events we find in] the daily newspaper.”

Destruction of our environment harms people for generations and it harms God’s good creation. Because of this the church should take a leading role on the environment. And if we do, people will come here because they will see the church getting involved in matters that are important to everyone.

Jesus tells us to “consider the lilies of the field.” A better word for “consider” would be “think deeply about” or put in a different way, “think theologically.” So how can we think deeply about the lilies of the field and all the other blessings of life on this beautiful planet without getting depressed and even anxious about the situation? Let’s consider the impact of mankind on the lilies of the field:

1. Somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii is a giant garbage patch of discarded plastic floating on the Pacific Ocean. It is twice the size of Texas. One scientist noted that cleaning up the 7 billion pound mess is not an option. The only way forward is to reduce our reliance upon plastics. An easy thing to do is use canvas bags when grocery shopping.

2. Over 400 marine environments around the world covering an area about the size of Oklahoma have no life in them at all. They are called dead zones. The principal cause is runoff of fertilizer from agricultural lands. An easy thing to do for this is to eat less meat and more vegetables.

3. In order to supply our nation’s appetite for cheap energy, in the past ten years over 1,200 miles of Appalachian streams has been totally destroyed. The former streams and their valleys are now filled with the debris from mountaintop coal mining. The simplest response to this is to use less energy. Install energy saving light bulbs and turn off all those little transformers plugged into the outlets around your house.

These are just a few examples. They harm peoples’ health now and will continue to do so for generations. Are we not called as Christians to care for the widow, the orphan, the prisoner, the sick, the elderly and the poor? These happen to be the very people who are often the most severely stressed by environmental damage. In short, improving the environment IS caring for the people that Jesus commends to our care.

Caring for the environment is not some political cause or ideology. It is conserving our planet for future generations. God calls us to be good stewards of the planet entrusted to us. When we take on this role as caretakers of God’s good creation, we need to make every decision from the perspective of our role as caretakers and not as owners.

One very practical example of this kind of decision has to do with the heating and air conditioning system for the new parish hall and offices. If we go for the lowest initial cost, we will be saddled with high energy bills. By spending more initially we can install a geothermal system that will reduce our energy usage and our utility bills forever. In this case the payback period of 6-7 years makes this decision good economic sense as well as the right thing to do as Christians.

Consider the lilies of the field. I hope that we can put environmental or “green” considerations into our new building, our parking lots, our Sunday school and adult education and even into our evangelism.

The future belongs to our children and grandchildren. Let’s make sure they have a green world too. Amen.