Colossians 1.15-20                                                                                          22 June 2008

“CHRIST IN ALL THINGS IN HEAVEN AND EARTH”

When I was a teen in car crazy Detroit, Michigan, 350 was a number that loomed large in my consciousness.  I had been working as dishwasher and bus boy for two years.  Gradually, I had saved $950 dollars to buy a 1967 red Pontiac Firebird with 29,000 miles and yes, you guessed it, a 350 cubic inch engine.  I took my father to test drive it.  He knew more about cars than anyone. He drove off alone and returned with a worried look.  

“What’s wrong, Dad?” I pleaded, as though a piston rod was about to shatter. “I don’t know, Dale,” he shook his head.  “It spins those rear wheels awfully easily.”  “Oh, that,” I exhaled.  “Don’t worry about that.”  With no emissions controls, that engine howled with a sweet exhaust note that still stirs my blood today.  I dare say it stirred the blood of fair damsels at Bentley High School.  Gas prices ranged from 28 to 33 cents per gallon.  The Union 76 gas station on Telegraph Road next to the restaurant where I worked had gas wars where I filled up that red Firebird for as little as 17 cents per gallon. At that price, I could hardly pump one full tank before I wanted to burn it off and come back for another.

Today we live in a very different world.  Gasoline is not only headed up to $5 per gallon, which bought a full tank with some spillover back in 71. Petroleum is also implicated as a source of tension in geopolitics, the strategies of oil reserves affecting the wars we fight. Petroleum and other fossil-fuel wastes are implicated in altering the biosphere we live in.  The changes are massive, far-reaching and perilous in ways that we only begin to grasp.

Today the number 350 means something completely different to me.  Ten days ago our Conference Minister, the Rev. Jim Antal, called me to ask if we would be one of four churches at the periphery of our conference—Dennis, Williamstown, Sheffield and Marblehead--to kick-off an initiative.  This initiative seeks to lift up the number 350 to help educate the world toward needed change.  Our Conference is working closely with environmental theologian Bill McKibben. He directs us to the website 350.org. Click on it when you get home.  The number 350 signifies the safe upper limit of carbon dioxide in parts per million necessary to maintain a healthy and sustainable environment.  Right now we are at 387 ppm.  So we need an environmental “diet” to get our numbers down.

McKibben claims our most urgent action to combat global warming might be to ring the church bells 350 times.  Our choir did that for us internally as they entered and rang out our introit. Between services we will ring 350 again from the steeple bell as a witness to Cape Cod and the world. If you’d like to help pull the rope, meet me up in the balcony.
 
Maybe it sounds a bit nutty and leaves you scratching your head, but today we worship as chemists and as Christians. Today we are about a heady mixture of current biology, contemporary politics, and social policy.  Today we are about an abiding faith in the power of the witness of Christ’s church. We believe it’s vital for Dennis Union Church to speak out on this. For we have reached deep into our pockets to subsidize photovoltaic cells here as an alternative to burning more hydrocarbons.  Having put dollars where our carbon footprint is, our witness on this has moral authority. We are a leader church here.

You are have heard of global warming by reading the news or television programs on Discovery Channel or National Geographic. Things are not getting better. In the last year alone the data about climate change has grown steadily darker.  The scale and pace of global warming, McKibben writes, is larger and faster than we’ve realized in past years.
The most graphic proof of this was the rapid melt of the Arctic Sea last summer.  By the time the long Arctic night finally descended again in October, the Northwest Passage had been so wide open for weeks we broke our old record for minimum sea ice by 25%.
Scientists were shaken in a dramatic way by the powers they were seeing unleashed.

And what was observable in the macrocosm was visible also in the microcosm as well.  The small Aedes egyptii mosquito, bearer of dengue fever, was spreading rapidly across Asia and South America.  What in the world is going on here?  Even the most conserva-tive observers, like the Economist magazine, blamed this squarely on global warming. The Brazilian army was called out to open field hospitals in the center of the country because their emergency rooms were reporting 80 new cases of dengue fever per hour. Yesterday on PBS’ Scientific American program I learned that as the arctic tundra has warmed, it has gone from being a consumer of carbon to being a producer of carbon. 

In late winter, our foremost climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, published a paper.  Hansen is the same guy who first blew the whistle on global warming.  He testified 20 years ago this June to howls and guffaws that climate change was real.  Since then Hansen has advanced this number—350—an acceptable level of co2 parts per million.
His words were, “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,” we need a target number.

And it’s a tough number, this 350. As I said, right now we’re at 387 and on the increase. We are increasing 2 per year because of the residues from burning coal and gas and oil.  McKibben writes, we are like the patient who finds out that his cholesterol is too high.  We are already out of the safety zone and into the realm of heart attacks in the form of ice shelf collapses or maybe epic droughts.  Do you despair of ever us scrambling back?

I don’t and here’s why.  When I was a freshman in college my father had a serious heart attack at age 46.  My father was this patient Hansen describes: overweight, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. So my father who was raised on a farm, where gravy was practically a beverage, completely changed his diet regimen and his practice of exercise. Yes, this is the same father with whom I celebrated his 80^th birthday just last November. The changes weren’t easy for dad.  But crisis motivated dramatic transformation for him. What my dad did in his health care, we as the people of this earth must do for the planet. This won’t be easy.  But we can do it, if we would read the warning signals and respond.

Obviously, as was the case for my father, frittering away our response time is ill-advised. Cutting back on the amount of the carbon we pump back into the atmosphere is like dad cutting out vanilla ice cream.  Scientists have begun to worry about the collapse of the great ice sheets above Greenland and the West Antarctic.  Why the concern there? Each ice sheet is capable of dumping so much water into the oceans that sea level would rise many meters. I don’t know what elevation your home is. But that scenario grabs my attention, living in a place like Cape Cod, a setting of incredibly fragile beauty. 

It is such a different world we live in. I remember as a boy my mother would gather burnt out light bulbs and take them to the hardware store.  Detroit Edison Power Co. would exchange them for new ones at no cost because they wanted useable bulbs in the sock-ets at all times. They wanted to maximize their ability to sell more and more power. Now we switch out fixtures and bulbs here in our meetinghouse with bulbs that will over time use a fraction of old incandescent bulbs. This beyond the solar panels on the roof. I’m proud of DUC for making such responsible moves.  We can still find ways to do more.

Still, we need something bigger than one church at a time, one household at a time, one neighborhood at a time.  To counter the math of crisis level co2 emissions, we need national and international action.  I am thinking of the global Copenhagen, 2009 talks and the part America can play as a leader. We likely need to put a price on carbon emis-sions--to say that we can no longer emit what has become a dangerous gas for free.
This would work systemically and create a compelling economic logic. Then markets will perform much of this work, since we lack the luxury of one-at-a-time leisurely responses.

If the current round of talks in Copenhagen, 2009 don’t produce compelling imperatives toward reversing these trends, then a window of opportunity will have closed forever. At the micro level of mosquitoes, and at the macro level of ice sheets, that is why we talk like this today.  You know, to achieve anything, you need a goal. And that is what this number 350--the rings of our bell choir and our steeple bell are all about--creating a goal.

In Salt Lake City, 350 bicyclists rode through the streets for hours, creating a media sensation.  Surfers formed the number 350 with their bodies on a Maui beach, where aerial photographs were taken.  Likewise, we ring today 350 times for God’s good earth. Can you see something beautiful in that symbolism? I just hope it is a compelling beauty.

If it seems a bit nutty, then hear again the words I read from Colossians.  When Paul wrote about the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection, we are taught he didn’t merely die for you and me.  He died and was raised for  “all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” (v. 20)  As for his reign, it is not simply over the church, but “in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers---all things have been created through him and for him.  He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”  It is the most universally beautiful tribute to Christ in the NT.

In a word, Christ rules over all. He didn’t only die and rise for you and me, but also for kangaroos, old growth forests and sea otters.  Jesus died and rose for the planet Saturn, the sun and the Milky Way.  So the body of Christ--we stewards of his rule--assert his authority over the created order.  Today as we think about the supremacy of Christ over death, we lift his rule over all things living, plant or animal, in this galaxy and the next.

In a word, the dead and risen Christ is source and sustainer of all things living. This means rivers and sierras, salmon and cedars point to Christ. The church embodies and announces this message. The universality of Jesus needs to surprise us, to shock us into responding reverentially to the whole of creation. For if Genesis placed creation under our provisional dominion, Colossians situates it squarely under Jesus’ lordship.

We always knew creation is astounding as it reflects the Creator.  But as nature is wounded we become newly aware of the care and the keeping of the Redeemer Christ. As we hold together Creator and Redeemer God on the matter of the biosphere’s life and death, as we are led us to stand by life as agents and stewards, it is astounding.  Christ in his hiddenness is present in all things. And the love of the Godhead inspires us to care for creation because his spirit is within it in ways far beyond our understanding.

Can you see Jesus in the microcosm and the macrocosm? If you can, despair has met its match. And hope is on the rise as we reverse patterns threatening to undo the pros-perity those patterns helped to create. All praise to Lord Jesus, the ruler of all creation.  Amen.

Gracious God, first the Creator who made us and today the Redeemer rescuing us, your amazing love extends through all time and space, to all corners of your creation, which you shaped and then called good.  You made a covenant with Noah and his family and put a rainbow in the sky. To symbolize your promise of love and blessing to every last animal and every living creature, and to all of the successive generations to follow us.

You made a covenant with Abraham and Sarah, blessing them and their descendents, across the generations, giving them the Decalogue and challenging them to choose life.  In Jesus, you invite us to enter a new covenant, in communion with all who seek to be faithful to you.  In a critical moment, give us faith and character enough to choose life. Give us trust of your reign such that we look to long term well-being rather than the expediency of the short run.  As people of faith, we are called into your covenant.  Your covenant of love and faithfulness extends to sub-atomic particles and massive quarks. 

We pray for the healing of the earth, that present and future generations may enjoy the fruits of creation, and rise up to glorify and praise you….Closer to home, we pray for Judy Conrad and Howard Chesley after recent hospitalizations, for their healing and recovery.  We pray for Jack Clemence at the loss of his beloved wife Helen, for Ruth Parker as tomorrow she bids farewell to Ed, here where they did so much living together. We pray for the Midwest inundated by massive floods, seeking to survive those threats.