Pastor Darren: Well, again, good morning, good to be with you today.
Pastor Darren: I keep waiting for us to get some closer to summer weather, but it was cold this morning when I got going.
Pastor Darren: I still have the sweater on it's spring after all but I'm glad that you guys are all here and that we're actually getting a pretty good day as it evolves here.
Pastor Darren: So the big question I had for today what do you preach after Easter?
Pastor Darren: All right, what do you roll around with?
Pastor Darren: We feel like we culminated so well, we took that journey through Lent and then Easter and then the next Sunday.
Pastor Darren: Huh, all right, I guess this just keeps going right.
Pastor Darren: We're here next Sunday as well.
Pastor Darren: What do we preach about?
Pastor Darren: And I talked last week about it being a feasting season.
Pastor Darren: Right, we have a fasting season in Lent about self-discipline, and then we have this feasting season where we look to where God is present and God's gifts are evident and we enjoy them and we soak.
Pastor Darren: Gifts are evident and we enjoy them and we soak them up and we get inspired by them, look to share them.
Pastor Darren: So I thought, all right, well, it's Earth Day this week.
Pastor Darren: This would be Earth Week.
Pastor Darren: I guess Earth Sunday.
Pastor Darren: I could preach that there's a feast there God's gift of the natural world.
Pastor Darren: Only once you kind of knuckle in on Earth Day, there's one problem.
Pastor Darren: It's a bit of a bummer.
Pastor Darren: We're not all that great with our stewardship of the earth.
Pastor Darren: These days I'm trying to think, all right, it's Easter season, it's feasting, it's celebration.
Pastor Darren: We should celebrate and run free through the earth.
Pastor Darren: And then you realize, oh shoot, but we're not so good about that these days.
Pastor Darren: So today's sermon kind of a mini Lent to Easter sermon, where we start in that self-discipline, looking in the mirror we need to get better at things but then land in hope, land in that feasting season.
Pastor Darren: So I hope that you will appreciate that journey.
Pastor Darren: I also trust most people don't necessarily disagree with the science of climate change.
Pastor Darren: We just sometimes disagree over the priority of that, that other things probably need to get fixed first and we can't let other things get worse trying to fix environmental problems.
Pastor Darren: So hopefully everybody can understand the value of these challenges.
Pastor Darren: And I'll tell you too these scriptures.
Pastor Darren: Actually they came with some material from the denomination, the United Methodist denomination, and I thought, oh, should I pick one or two?
Pastor Darren: And I thought, no, I see a journey here.
Pastor Darren: I see a journey I can take through a few different scriptures, so I hope that you can appreciate that journey as well.
Pastor Darren: So we start in Genesis, right from the very beginning actually, and then the first early lines are midway through the second creation story, with another really important line.
Pastor Darren: In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and to keep it.
Pastor Darren: Genesis, we know, first book of the Bible, founding text of our Christian faith.
Pastor Darren: This is how we understand ourselves, this is how we understand God, how we understand our role in the world, is kind of locked away in these two verses.
Pastor Darren: We're supposed to come here and take care of this place.
Pastor Darren: That's what God wants us to do.
Pastor Darren: So our report card these come from a website called earthorg.
Pastor Darren: Are you ready?
Pastor Darren: You might want to gird your loins.
Pastor Darren: Are you ready?
Pastor Darren: You might want to gird your loins.
Pastor Darren: Those of you who know what that is, don't gird your loins.
Pastor Darren: Those of you who don't, don't worry about it.
Pastor Darren: All right, here's a couple problems we got.
Pastor Darren: We got global warming coming from fossil fuels.
Pastor Darren: We've been hearing it over and over and over decades and decades and decades.
Pastor Darren: Well, it's a real thing, right?
Pastor Darren: And we think, oh, one temperature every 20 years, 30 years, is that really going to be so bad?
Pastor Darren: And then you realize, well, that's an average.
Pastor Darren: Some places it's going to be 5 degrees, 10 degrees, Other places it's going to be underneath what they're used to.
Pastor Darren: So that average, that one degree, yeah, we can go sit down there at the beach, right, and one degree is not going to matter so much.
Pastor Darren: But we need to recognize that's actually a big deal.
Pastor Darren: It affects a lot of what goes on in the world that God created.
Pastor Darren: Also, our fossil fuel dependence is still pretty strong.
Pastor Darren: We're not really looking to move very intentionally to other ways of creating energy.
Pastor Darren: Here's another one I looked up here Food waste.
Pastor Darren: We waste 1.3 billion tons of food annually.
Pastor Darren: The party is like oh shoot, we should be using that.
Pastor Darren: Obviously people are in need, we should use it.
Pastor Darren: But then you also think that's 1.3 billion tons that we did all the work to create and all the effect on the environment to create and then didn't use.
Pastor Darren: We have to worry about biodiversity loss.
Pastor Darren: Much of the health of our world, the natural world, relies on a certain amount of diversity of different plants, different animal species, being able to evolve to work with what is around.
Pastor Darren: When we lower the environment in which they survive in, they start to die off.
Pastor Darren: We get less of all of that and it becomes its own problem.
Pastor Darren: Let's see here Plastic pollution.
Pastor Darren: We're eating oatmeal and it doesn't taste very good.
Pastor Darren: They might have put some broccoli in the oatmeal along with something else that's really really healthy, but we're eating it, are you okay?
Pastor Darren: No, I don't want broccoli in my oatmeal.
Pastor Darren: Hey, at some point we got to eat this stuff.
Pastor Darren: 1950, we had 2 million tons of plastic that was made each year.
Pastor Darren: Today, 419 million tons.
Pastor Darren: So in 75 years we've gone up.
Pastor Darren: What is that?
Pastor Darren: 2,000?
Pastor Darren: , 2,000%?
Pastor Darren: Where's my mathematicians?
Pastor Darren: A lot, all right.
Pastor Darren: We've gone up a lot.
Pastor Darren: We make a lot of plastic, and plastic takes about 400 years to disintegrate.
Pastor Darren: So once it's made it's here forever.
Pastor Darren: So a little bit of a problem there.
Pastor Darren: Deforestation our world itself.
Pastor Darren: The reason it can process, let's say, the carbon dioxide that I just blew out, is because we got trees that process that.
Pastor Darren: Well, if we have less trees, we're processing less of that, right.
Pastor Darren: So it starts to become a problem for the air, air pollution itself being a problem.
Pastor Darren: Melting ice caps and sea level rise.
Pastor Darren: Our worlds, a lot of our communities are built in places that might get underwater.
Pastor Darren: Is it getting tough?
Pastor Darren: I hate being so negative and yet the mirror shows what the mirror shows, you know, as we're staring at it Ocean acidification.
Pastor Darren: It's a little bit like deforestation.
Pastor Darren: The ocean is this big source of what allows us to process the negative things that we create in the world.
Pastor Darren: Well, the more of negative things we create, the less the ocean is able to process it, and the things that live in the ocean that we need have less place to survive in.
Pastor Darren: So when we have over-ocean acidification, that correction that the earth does for us, they're less effective at it.
Pastor Darren: Our world can't offset the things that we do and the balance that we have with nature.
Pastor Darren: I'll move faster a little bit here.
Pastor Darren: Agriculture produces a big ton of our global warming, soil degradation when we oversoil, we don't produce as well what we grow.
Pastor Darren: Food and water insecurity.
Pastor Darren: By 2020, well, by now, over two-thirds of the world will have at least a month of water insecurity in the world.
Pastor Darren: So we're getting down to where most of the world at some point is going to have a problem with knowing they have enough good, clean water to drink.
Pastor Darren: Here's an interesting one Fast fashion and textile waste.
Pastor Darren: Do you remember when you wore clothes?
Pastor Darren: Functionally, that was the main reason for clothes to make sure you had something on you, so you weren't running around in your birthday suit, Some other functioning as well around the world Maybe it's getting cold, you need to be able to stay warm, all this stuff and you didn't get rid of clothes, maybe until you were finished with it, or it was ready it started to wear to the point you were finished with it, or it was ready it started to wear to the point.
Pastor Darren: Now we kind of get rid of clothes when they go out of style.
Pastor Darren: Those clothes got to go somewhere.
Pastor Darren: So we're producing, just by culture decisions, more waste.
Pastor Darren: Overfishing, another problem.
Pastor Darren: And then finally, the last one Take a breather Cobalt mining.
Pastor Darren: Cobalt mining we think, oh great, we found a new resource that we can start using and we're not as much into the fossil fuels.
Pastor Darren: Cobalt is what we mine a lot for new energy, electrical energy, largely lithium batteries and stuff like that and we think, okay, we're doing great, we've transitioned.
Pastor Darren: Here's a little bit of a problem, though We'll run out of cobalt too, and we're doing a bit of work trying to find the stuff we're finding.
Pastor Darren: But anybody using chat GBT yet, right, are you starting to relax a little bit with that thing?
Pastor Darren: You know, maybe instead of the Google search, you do the chat GBT.
Pastor Darren: No, no, we're still nervous about it.
Pastor Darren: All right, we're not doing it.
Pastor Darren: All right, let me tell you, chat GBT, your request, your search, your question, takes about 10 times the amount of energy to produce your answer as the Google search, right?
Pastor Darren: So the better we get at finding that information, the more energy it's taking.
Pastor Darren: So now we got that problem too Right.
Pastor Darren: At finding that information, the more energy it's taking.
Pastor Darren: So now we got that problem too Right.
Pastor Darren: Anybody see Debbie Downer on SNL.
Pastor Darren: Right, it's Pastor Darren Downer.
Pastor Darren: Right now.
Pastor Darren: You know, wah, wah, I bring all of the bad news.
Pastor Darren: See, this is what I ran into doing an Earth Day sermon today.
Pastor Darren: I was kind of ready to talk about all the beauty of the earth and all this, and then you get in there and you're like, well, shoot, we're not necessarily doing a really good job with this role that we actually accepted, that we understood coming from God as Christians.
Pastor Darren: So we wrestle with that, all right.
Pastor Darren: Psalms 24, 1 and 2.
Pastor Darren: I like that phrase.
Pastor Darren: The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it and all that is in it.
Pastor Darren: I like that.
Pastor Darren: This points out our belief that it is not our world.
Pastor Darren: We tend it right.
Pastor Darren: We're renters down here, right, we've got a landlord God up there.
Pastor Darren: We've got expectations of future generations.
Pastor Darren: We're tending all of this for those future generations.
Pastor Darren: It does invite questions.
Pastor Darren: If we were to embrace this more intentionally, that we don't own the earth In fact we are tending it with the idea that it's God's earth, that it's the earth for the people that are ahead of us Would that change our mindset at all?
Pastor Darren: Does it change our mindset?
Pastor Darren: There's some humility embedded in that understanding of how the world works.
Pastor Darren: So I got finally to be able to go visit into Palisades, post-fire Palisades.
Pastor Darren: I don't know how many of you have had that opportunity yet.
Pastor Darren: It's humbling.
Pastor Darren: It is humbling when you start looking at the devastation.
Pastor Darren: And I lived in palisades when we were working at Aldersgate Retreat Center for a couple of years, so I knew what it looked like.
Pastor Darren: So I knew what it looked like.
Pastor Darren: So, driving through and seeing that particular home, that particular store now burned to the ground Palisades United Methodist Church the good news, bad news they've swept everything away.
Pastor Darren: Now it's all flat.
Pastor Darren: So the bad news it all burned down.
Pastor Darren: The good news they're really working on it, they're overworking on that church as a United Methodist, fills my heart to a certain extent, but it does kind of bring.
Pastor Darren: It makes your mind think a little bit about that whole incident and all that went on.
Pastor Darren: Part of what we don't always recognize is we kind of created a climate over there, a microclimate, that wasn't 100% natural.
Pastor Darren: We brought in the plants, we watered the plants, we kept fires to a minimum and that got to grow.
Pastor Darren: I don't know if you've seen pictures of Palisades 100 years ago, but it didn't look like it did six months ago.
Pastor Darren: We made it look a little different than God had made it and we held off a lot of the natural cycles of creation.
Pastor Darren: Now I don't want to say this was inevitable.
Pastor Darren: I don't want anybody to feel that.
Pastor Darren: It's been a real horror for those who have lived there and they are still living that challenge.
Pastor Darren: But it is to say maybe we ought to be, as human beings, a little more deferential, To know more about creation and how creation works, more than just how do we keep this thing from burning, but also how do we allow the natural cycles to process in these areas?
Pastor Darren: How do we create room for what we know to be true About the world that God created?
Pastor Darren: How do we work with God In these areas, as opposed to fully adjusting what God created?
Pastor Darren: I wonder if that culture of humility Might help us there, might help us to remember, to recognize that God's here and God built this world and God is at work in it.
Pastor Darren: Let's live in step with that.
Pastor Darren: Romans 8, 19 to 22.
Pastor Darren: That's a long one.
Pastor Darren: I won't reread it, but some of my summary in my head is what if creation, the natural world, is anticipating the same kind of transformation, living transformation that human beings are?
Pastor Darren: You know how we live our lives looking for God's presence to come into our hearts, to guide us in certain ways, to feed us, to nourish us, to inspire us.
Pastor Darren: What if the natural world is looking for that same kind of transformation and living in those cycles of hope and becoming all that God would want it to be?
Pastor Darren: My drive back from Palisades yesterday, I'm coming down the 101, you know back into the Conejo Valley, and as I drive through and you guys have seen there you guys have been here, most of you way longer than I have been here, but I see the area where Woolsey just brought the fear of God into everybody's heart in 2018.
Pastor Darren: And I drive through and I see it's regrowing, it's getting going again, probably looking a little bit more like God originally intended that area to look, and it warmed my heart a little bit, but it did strike me too.
Pastor Darren: You know, when we get rains or fires, we push the fires out to the natural area, right, because buildings and property those have money, those cost money.
Pastor Darren: So we're going to throw it out into the natural world that doesn't cost any money, which I think would bother a lot of coyotes and mountain lions and other rabbits.
Pastor Darren: They might argue it has more value than that.
Pastor Darren: But we push it out there and it makes me think, think, huh, is that largely, or even partly, because we know the natural world is going to replenish itself, it's going to regrow, and we trust that.
Pastor Darren: We know that cycle is happening, that remodel is happening.
Pastor Darren: There's a human remodel happening in Palisades.
Pastor Darren: You guys have been around for a human remodel after Woolsey, but the God remodel is out there working too.
Pastor Darren: I wonder what it would mean if we were to live more in step with that godly remodel, that transformation that nature is constantly working towards, moving towards.
Pastor Darren: What if we were to look to be more in step with how nature works, even in times like this where it's replenishing?
Pastor Darren: Finally, colossians when I read this one, I thought to myself okay, this is talking about creation and Christ being that essence of the divine, both of them existence from the very beginning of time.
Pastor Darren: That was always here.
Pastor Darren: It links right.
Pastor Darren: Our writer of the letter to Colossians is linking Christ and creation, that they are of one essence.
Pastor Darren: I wonder how we might do a better job of seeing that connection.
Pastor Darren: As much as we understand God's loving and nourishing presence in Christ, might we also look for that in creation?
Pastor Darren: So I told you it would be hopeful at the end.
Pastor Darren: Here are my reasons for hope.
Pastor Darren: Are you ready for hope?
Pastor Darren: I'll take a little hope.
Pastor Darren: I guess I got nowhere to be Going to hit Taco Bell on the way home and that's it so sure.
Pastor Darren: Are you ready for hope?
Pastor Darren: Good, okay, let's get a little hope here.
Pastor Darren: The reality of climate change is starting to sink in.
Pastor Darren: We're starting to go.
Pastor Darren: Okay, I think we are going to have to pay attention to some of this.
Pastor Darren: Raise the priority of dealing with this just a little bit.
Pastor Darren: In fact, climate change action is still moving and it's getting pretty active and, in fact, we're starting to see more clearly the economic benefits of moving toward alternative sources of energy and a diversity of energy, not just a focus on fossil fuels, and that economic benefit is starting to become more obvious.
Pastor Darren: Countries like Sweden are figuring out not only how to be highly environmental in the way they do things, but actually also blessing their economy with it.
Pastor Darren: So we're starting to get there, and most of that action, most of the movement, is designed to be equitable and just, where all humans are treated equally and with respect.
Pastor Darren: So there's that advantage that's going on.
Pastor Darren: There is a strong US climate movement.
Pastor Darren: In fact, where you have the majority of people and where you have the majority of our economy are the places that seem to be the most supportive of treating environmental issues with importance, with respect, and those are the ones that are understanding it and those are often the ones that are making decisions, and our economy is already moving towards more renewable ways to create energy.
Pastor Darren: It's happening.
Pastor Darren: It's happening, and so we can have some faith in that.
Pastor Darren: All these are coming from the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, as well as from Oxfam, and then one more from a program called Tree Aid or a few more here.
Pastor Darren: Here's the one that may bless us the most and the one that we, as Christians, should celebrate the most.
Pastor Darren: Nature is resilient.
Pastor Darren: The world that God created knows how to evolve, knows how to take care of itself, knows how to exist in harmony.
Pastor Darren: That's the nature of the divine presence in the world.
Pastor Darren: So we are blessed not only that we live in that, but that we are a people who believe in that Nature-based solutions help people and help the planet.
Pastor Darren: So, even though we've got a lot of problems and we worry about whether this is the most important problem to solve right away, and we worry about whether this is the most important problem to solve right away we do know that environmental solutions help people and help the planet, and there is a growing resilience in the face of climate challenges.
Pastor Darren: The more difficulties that happen, the more rainless winters, snowless winters that we have, the more people start understanding we need to do something.
Pastor Darren: So how do I close up such a heavy kind of hmm, thanks for ruining Easter Pastor sermon?
Pastor Darren: I'm going back to a season of feasting.
Pastor Darren: God blesses us with this natural world and most of us who are intentional about getting out there some of us all the time, some of us now and again.
Pastor Darren: We know how we're blessed by being in it.
Pastor Darren: You feel nourished, you feel exercised, you feel a little more in step with the created world that is around us.
Pastor Darren: You feel a little more balanced.
Pastor Darren: Let's feast on what God gave us in the natural world.
Pastor Darren: Let's go out hiking, let's go swim in the beaches, let's go see all that God has created in this world and allow ourselves to be blessed by it.
Pastor Darren: I know that often we can lock ourselves away in our homes.
Pastor Darren: Books are very good things and they stretch our minds, but the world also is a blessed thing.
Pastor Darren: I'm going to do a confession of yours, and we know we're not supposed to share things people share with us.
Pastor Darren: But I have to pick on Boyd because he's being good about taking notes over here.
Pastor Darren: Boyd plays video games 4 to 8 hours every day.
Pastor Darren: He is addicted to single game shooter games and he's locked away in the darkness in his comfy chair.
Pastor Darren: You all know this, I know this.
Pastor Darren: I'm putting it out there, boyd, sometimes it's best to have a public confession.
Pastor Darren: It's the only way to healing Boyd.
Pastor Darren: Lets me tease him.
Pastor Darren: I appreciate it.
Pastor Darren: He teases me every time.
Pastor Darren: I appreciate it, but let's Tease me every time.
Pastor Darren: Yeah, every, that's right.
Pastor Darren: You're only doing four hours, not six.
Pastor Darren: Like this guy, you'll never win.
Pastor Darren: No, you get the idea.
Pastor Darren: Let's get out into the world.
Pastor Darren: Tech's got its value, but the natural world, creation might have the higher value.
Pastor Darren: We walk into God's world.
Pastor Darren: We leave humbled.
Pastor Darren: We live more in right relationship with the world around us.
Pastor Darren: We leave inspired to share that with the world.
Pastor Darren: Let us feast on that this week, amen, amen.