Come, Let Us Rebuild
Anna & Nathan Jeide-Detweiler, guest preachers
April 24, 2022, Earth Sunday
Scripture: Nehemiah 2:17
Anna
Good morning, we are Anna and Nathan Jeide-Detweiler. We recently joined Plymouth, and we want to thank the Earth Day Committee for inviting us to speak today about our passion for environmentalism.
Nathan
If you would join with me in prayer: Creator God, we thank you for this good day. We thank you for the opportunity to breathe in and breathe out. We thank you for this good earth that reminds us of your unfailing love and unfathomable mystery. Help us to see ourselves as part of this good creation, as caretakers who, too, will return to dust. And may the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing to you. Amen.
Anna
We will begin with alternating readings. I will be the voice of scripture.
Nathan
I will be the voice of Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist who was recently arrested for locking himself to the entrance of a bank to protest new fossil fuel projects.
Anna
By combining these readings, we hope you will hear both urgency and hope.
Nathan
From Peter Kalmus, “I’m a climate scientist and a desperate father. How can I plead any harder? What will it take? What can my colleagues and I do to stop this catastrophe unfolding now all around us with such excruciating clarity?
“On Wednesday, I was arrested for locking myself to an entrance to the JPMorgan Chase building in downtown Los Angeles with colleagues and supporters. Our action in L.A. is part of an international campaign organized by a loosely knit group of concerned scientists called Scientist Rebellion, involving more than 1,200 scientists in 26 countries and supported by local climate groups. Our day of action follows the IPCC Working Group 3 report released Monday, which details the harrowing gap between where society is heading and where we need to go. Our movement is growing fast.”
Anna
Psalm 24: The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it. The world and all its people belong to God. For God laid the earth’s foundation on the seas and built it on the ocean depths. Who may climb the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in God’s holy place? Only those whose hands and hearts are pure, who do not worship idols and never tell lies.
Nathan
We chose JPMorgan Chase because out of all the investment banks in the world, JPMorgan Chase funds the most new fossil fuel projects. As the new IPCC report explains, emissions from current and planned fossil energy infrastructure are already more than twice the amount that would push the planet over 1.5° C of global heating, a level of heating that will bring much more intense heat, fire, storms, flooding, and drought than the present 1.2° C.
Anna
Genesis 1:1–2: In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good.
Nathan
Even limiting heating to below 2° C, a level of heating that in my opinion could threaten civilization as we know it, would require emissions to peak before 2025. As U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in the press conference on Monday: “Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness.” And yet, this is precisely what President Biden, most other world leaders, and major banks are doing.
Anna
Hosea 4:3: Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing.
Nathan
Earth breakdown is much worse than most people realize. The science indicates that as fossil fuels continue to heat our planet, everything we love is at risk. For me, one of the most horrific aspects of all this is the juxtaposition of present-day and near-future climate disasters with the “business as usual” occurring all around me. It’s so surreal that I often find myself reviewing the science to make sure it’s really happening, a sort of scientific nightmare arm-pinch. Yes, it’s really happening.
Anna
Psalm 121: I lift mine eyes to the hills, from where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.
Nathan
Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” Out of necessity, and after exhaustive efforts, I’ve joined the ranks of those who selflessly risk their freedom and put their bodies on the line for the earth, despite ridicule. It’s time we all join them. The feeling of solidarity is a wonderful balm.
Anna
Nehemiah 2:17: Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.”
Nathan
If we take Peter Kalmus’s perspective seriously, we are at a critical moment in our ability to have a positive effect on this planet. Some would even say we have passed that point. It is easy to look at the news and become nihilistic, but as a student of history, I also find plenty of examples of moments where humans surprised themselves by coming back from the precipice. I don’t believe we’re too far gone.
Anna
We need to act with urgency and decisiveness, but that urgency should not drive us to nihilism or fatalism. There are some who would argue that humanity has had only a negative impact on the planet. At times this feels true, but I believe we fall into a dangerous trap if we see ourselves only as agents of destruction.
Nathan
When God gave life to plants, animals, and humankind, God declared it all good—including us. We were not created to destroy. God intended a more symbiotic relationship between humanity and the rest of creation. While the fall may have disrupted that perfect design, we believe that we are still called to care for creation. As we work for the restoration of all creation, that includes the non-human parts of creation, too.
Anna
For too long humanity has viewed itself as separate from Creation. This separation has permitted some to view environmental destruction as something that has little to do with us. This is neither scientific, nor biblical.
In his book Oneota Flow, Dr. David Faldet illustrates just how intimate this connection with creation is when he describes people as “walking tributaries” of their local watershed. Many school-aged children can tell you that our bodies are 70% water, but do they learn the names of the watersheds that they belong to? Do they know where that water comes from, what chemicals it has or has not picked up along the way? Nathan and I belong to the Minnehaha Watershed. Which watershed do you belong to and who does it connect you to? What if we understood ourselves as walking tributaries, extensions of the waters around us? Would it change who you see as your neighbor? What if we truly saw ourselves as part of God’s whole creation, rather than separate from it? What if we saw ourselves as capable of the goodness God intended for us?
Nathan
If we only ever focus on our destructive potential, then that is all we will see. We have to believe we are capable of something different. While we have to acknowledge the destruction that humanity has wrought upon the earth, we also have to see ourselves in a different way—not independent but interdependent, not autonomous but accountable, not separate but mutual.
Anna
So how do we do that? How can our actions actually reflect this mutual interdependence?
Nathan
There are no magic fixes for urgently addressing the climate crisis and maintaining hope, but we’d like to share with you a few of the ways that we try to hold those two things together in our lives. I believe that you can’t work to save something unless you love it. My urgency starts with a deep attachment to nature all around me. My urgency starts with being so immersed in creation that I’ve come to love it with a passion that calls me to action.
Anna
Nathan and I try to live our lives as if our actions actually make a difference. We know that we are just two people. But we also know that when our actions accumulate over time, they can amount to a very significant difference.
Nathan
The average American produces 4.5 pounds of trash, per day. The largest category of waste in landfills is food, followed shortly by plastic. To combat this food waste in our household, we make a meal plan each week, buying only what we need so that we waste less food. We try to buy food that doesn’t come wrapped in plastic where possible. When we do buy food with plastic, we reuse that plastic at least once before throwing it away. (We’ve found the plastic food bags make great poop bags for our highly productive puppy.) Reusing plastic at least one time can reduce several pounds of plastic each year—just in one household.
Anna
We must live as if our actions actually do make a difference, because they do. So what can you do in your home? Many of us live several miles away from church. If you have a greater distance to come, is there someone you could carpool with? If you live close, could you bike or walk to church? Could you start a weekly meal plan with your family? Can you avoid plastics when going out to eat or taking coffee to go? Where else in your community might you take action? I’m willing to bet that some of us in this room have connections to corporations, government, and influential organizations whose actions can have a significant impact on our changing climate.
Nathan
One of the tensions of a complex problem like climate change is how to take actions that lead to positive change. Do individuals take actions or should the government and corporations take action? The answer, I believe, lies with all of the above. Individual actions are essential because our individual choices do add up to collective change. However, we also oftentimes need the resources and support that come from massive government or private entities. Throughout this work, we should be mindful that large-scale programs often are harder to access for decentralized or marginalized communities. Our climate action is also an opportunity for us to address some of the injustices in our society rather than further exacerbating them.
Anna
Finally, how can our faith guide us? We’d like to suggest three ways that our faith can instruct us to care for creation.
First, if we return to the beginning of our story, we know that this is God’s creation. And God declared it all good. This alone is an important reason to care for creation. If we remain grounded in this truth, then caring for creation becomes an expression of gratitude for the Creator.
Nathan
Second, in the Great Commandment, Jesus compels us to love our neighbor, especially our most vulnerable neighbors, like the widow, orphan, and refugee. We are seeing more and more climate refugees worldwide. According to UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, “Hazards resulting from the increasing intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, such as abnormally heavy rainfall, prolonged droughts, desertification, environmental degradation, or sea-level rise and cyclones are already causing an average of more than 20 million people to leave their homes and move to other areas in their countries each year.” If we are to be our brother’s keeper, we must be concerned for our neighbors from across the street to those around the world who are impacted by climate change, a change that is driven at least in some part by over-consumption in countries like our own.
Anna
Third, we are Easter people. We believe in the power of life that conquers death. Believing in the resurrection can and should fill us with hope because our God is a God who gives life abundantly, even when new life seems impossible.
Nathan
The Bible is filled with stories of hope in the face of uncertain or apocalyptic times. Our passage from Nehemiah is a perfect vehicle for this notion of hope in the apocalypse. The author of Nehemiah tells of a prophetic decision to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, a city that had been destroyed, by Israelites returning from captivity in Babylon. This prophetic vision flies in the face of everything that Israelites had been experiencing for decades, but somehow the author’s faith convinced him that he could dream, he could hope, for a city to be rebuilt: a city to offer protection for the future.
We said at the beginning of this that we have no magic fixes for how to have hope in the face of the distressing reality of climate change, but we hope you find encouragement today. We hope that you hear that faith, community, and our individual love for this beautiful creation can set us on fire for a vision of a healed creation.
Anna
Like in Nehemiah, we know we must rebuild. We wonder: What can that rebuilding look like? How can it look different from old solutions to rebuilding, which no longer equitably serve our planet? As we seek to adapt, mitigate, and reduce the effects of climate change, how can you and how can we rebuild together?
Nathan
We remain grounded in hope. We know that Plymouth is already working hard to become an environmentally just community. The Climate and Environmental Justice Committee has several suggestions for how to reduce your carbon footprint (which we recommend checking out on the church website). Plymouth’s solar panels and subscription to a solar garden with Cooperative Energy Futures and an Xcel energy wind farm have enabled the church to use 100% renewable electricity. We know many of you have already made significant commitments, too. Seeing these examples of individual and collective change gives us much hope.
Anna
I’ll close by sharing an image that gives me hope: In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes her research on black ash trees. Many in the scientific community assumed that human harvesting of black ash trees had a negative impact on the plants. It wasn’t until Kimmerer and her team studied this that they discovered the black ash trees actually thrived more when harvested, because the careful (non-exploitive) harvesting allowed more sunlight to peek through to reach younger saplings. Human interaction was actually necessary for the flourishing of all, something indigenous basket weavers had observed for years.
Nathan
As we celebrate Earth Day together, I pray that we will seek interdependent, mutually life-giving relationships with the planet, not as an invasive species, nor as passive admirers of beauty, but as active members of our shared ecosystem.
Anna
Let us strive to make individual choices and collective change, as we remain grounded in God’s goodness, rising together in hope as Easter people.
Both
Come let us rebuild together!