“It's Not Easy Being Green”

Scripture Lesson: Psalm 24, Genesis 1:1, 31

Sermon Transcript for February 8, 2009

By Pastor Bob Coleman

This morning we continue in a series. I don’t like the title necessarily of the catchall—the social activities of the Christian because our social life is something that is so integrated and part of our whole we shouldn’t separate it out. It should be a natural part. But we’re challenged at certain moments in certain areas to understand what God is saying to us, what the Lord is leading us to do and to be. Let us prepare for this message with a moment of prayer. “May the words of our mouths, the meditations of our hearts, and the actions of our lives be acceptable unto you, our Lord, our rock, our redeemer. Amen.”

“It’s Not Easy Being Green” is the title. If you are a Sesame Street fan you’ll catch on right away where we found that. It has to do with Kermit, the Frog but we’ll get to Kermit a little bit later. This is Kermit’s cousin by the way; not an exact replica. But before we get to Kermit, the problem with being green today is understanding what it means in the concept of all of life and particularly what we do hour to hour, day to day. It starts with the very creation itself. That’s where we all should start—at the beginning. You can drive your car slower to save gas, you can put in energy efficient light bulbs to save energy, you can do all you want to be green, but God was the first one to be green. Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Now you pretty much know the rest of the story, but we want to share with you a visual and audio representation. Joe Sanford, our youth director, put this together using some of our own photography and voiceovers from several different people to tell us again that age old story of how God made it green in the first place. So let us listen and see.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty and darkness covered the deep waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’. And there was light! God saw the light was good. He separated the light from the darkness calling the light day and the darkness night. This was the first day. On the second day, God said ‘Let there be a space between the waters of heaven and the waters of earth.’ And so it happened. God called the space sky and God saw that it was good. On the third day God said, ‘Let the waters beneath the sky go together in to one place so dry ground may appear.’ And so it happened. God called the dry ground land and the water seas. God saw that it was good. God said, ‘Let the land sprout with vegetation every sort of seed-bearing plant and trees that grow seed-bearing fruit. These seeds will produce the kinds of plants and trees from which they came. And this is what happened. God saw that it was good. On the fourth day, God said, ‘Let lights appear in the sky to separate the day from the night. Let them be signs to mark the seasons, days, and years. Let these lights from the sky shine down on earth.’ And that is what happened. God made two great lights. The larger one to govern the day and a smaller one to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set these lights in the sky to light the earth, to govern the day and night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. On the fifth day, God said, ‘Let the waters swarm with fish and other life. Let the skies be filled with birds of every kind.’ So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that scurries and swarms in the water and every sort of bird each producing offspring of the same. And God saw that it was good. On the sixth day, God said, ‘Let the earth produce every sort of animal each producing offspring of the same kind. God made all sorts of wild animals, livestock, and small animals each able to produce offspring of the same kind. Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings in our image to be like us. They will reign over the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth and the small animals that scurry along the ground.’ God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them male and female. God blessed them saying, “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and double it, reign over all the animals of the earth, sea, and sky.’ God looked over what he had made and saw that it was very good. The creation of the heavens and earth and everything in them was completed. And so on the seventh day God rested.”

Light and dark, land and sea, fish and birds, plants and animals and then the males and the females. And that was God’s first mistake. He created a beautiful world. Actually we were a part of it. The intention is still there. The writer’s of Scripture inspired by God tell us time and time again throughout Scripture particularly the Old Testament about the great creation, the power of God, the great God Almighty who said, as it says in Psalm 24, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it the world and all who live in it. For God founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters. Who may ascend the hill of the Lord, who may stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to an idol, or swear by what is false.”

That and many other places continue to give God the credit and the glory and indeed it was a beautiful time in that way. So all of creation is admired and God is praised and God is given the glory for green is the color of life and growth in woods, in forests, in fields. And as beautiful as it sounds, it’s intended today for us to be green. That’s the current mantra--To be green socially, green as a company, green as a nation. But it is not easy being green today. That’s the truth.

Kermit the Frog is the one who made it famous about two decades ago or so when he sang a song. “It’s not easy being green.” And I can sing like Kermit because Kermit has no sense of flow for this song. “Having to spend each day with color, the color of leaves when I think it could be nicer being red, or yellow, or gold, or something much more colorful than that.” Anybody can sing that song. “It’s not easy;” he goes on and says, “being green. It seems you blend in with so many other ordinary things and people tend to pass you over because you are not standing out like flashy, sparkly in water or stars in the sky. But green is the color of spring,” Kermit says, “and green can be cool and friendly like. And green can be like a big ocean or as important as a mountain or tall like a tree. When green is all there is to be, then that’s what I want to be.” Kermit ends his song, “I think that’s what I want to be.”

But it’s still not easy being green today because we’ve had a change that happened to us. You see there were just two that started a long time ago. Two in that story of Genesis, we call them Adam and Eve. They represent the beginning of all of mankind. In the beginning there were just two. That meant that their footsteps were very, very light upon the earth. Whether you count back 4,000 years literally in Scripture or four billion years, the population of humans has stayed very low until the 19th Century. The 19th Century was not the beginning of the end but it was a major change as you’ll see on the chart that’s being displayed. The 19th Century began what we call the Industrial Revolution. The population is represented from the beginning of time on that very, very thin line but then if you can see the figures, about 1800 it starts to climb. The year 2000 we’re over 6 billion. And if it continues on it will be 11 billion in less than a 100 years. If we continue on in that way.

Well with two feet, or four feet, or six feet upon the earth, we tread lightly but with 12 billion pairs of feet we’re starting to have an impact in this world. It started or was continued by the Europeans when they first landed here. They felt God was sending them here. This was the land of promise, the paradise, but it was also the wilderness. They were some what in conflict. This was given to them as the new Jerusalem, but when they landed here all they saw was deep and dark woods. They carried with them a mix of feelings about what God had made. God was the creator of all there is and human beings were at the top of the pyramid of God’s creation, but somewhere along the way they had taught them that the things of this physical world are evil so the aesthetics, the monastic’s said, “You must conquer physical; you must take it over, subdue it.” Yes, that is a Biblical term. “Subdue the earth,” God said, “multiply”. But when it got to the 17 and 1800’s it took on a different meaning. Seemingly what we thought was a infinite world was there for the taking and we took it. The low population of the world still meant our impact was minimal, the earth could re-heal itself, could repair. But the more we gain power in medical and technical knowledge, the more we advanced our civilization, the word “subdue” changed to “overcome” and “conquer” and “explorer” changed to “exploit”. The population exploded as that chart showed you. The population exploded to the point where now we have so many people who are just trying to get by—the basics of food, and shelter, and clothing. Well, a few are able to gather wealth among themselves.

And then along came a humanist in the 1940’s, Abraham Maslow. And if you ever took Sociology in college or anything in that realm, you’ve heard of this. “The Hierarchy of Needs”, it’s called. Actually there is some good wisdom to it as far as it goes. But you’ll see where he disconnects from what we know. He says we have physiological needs, all of us, as human beings from the very first two and now with all the population. We need oxygen, we need food, and we need water. And we need a relatively constant body temperature. And if you were out at 12 degrees before zero the other morning, you know what that means. You want to be warm. But once you are able to make that as a human being, and be able to obtain that level of need then there is a safety need were security steps in. That’s housing and protection of your family and yourself. And if you are able to obtain that level then you move on to the next where you need love. Before it is just survival. And if you are able to have love met in your life, then you can move on as Maslow says to self-esteem. And it becomes for dominant. Human beings have a need, he says. The more they have the other basics in line to have self-respect and respect for others. After that comes what’s called self-actualization. Ironically, that’s supposed to be at the top of the pyramid. It means when you know why you were born. You were born to do something. It may come from within or from without, but it is that drive that if you’ve got all of these other things, that your needs are being met, then you will be able to actualize yourself.

And that’s when we part ways, because God created us for a purpose and it is for us to hear and know what that purpose is. It seems that the higher you go on Maslow’s hierarchy, the more you should be aware of what you are born to do. Yet often what happens is, the higher you go the more of those things you have, the less that you forget about it and you just become an accumulator of things and a consumer of things. We consume while the poorest get by with barely hanging on for food and shelter down that side of the pyramid and live on garbage pits recycling our throwaways. That’s what the ones at the bottom do.

But did Jesus come to tell us anything different than what had been recorded in the Old Testament? Yes and no, it’s kind of a split verdict. When he says, Jesus does, in Mark, Chapter 8, Verse 35, “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world (or to get to the top of the hierarchy to use Maslow’s terms) yet forfeit his soul. Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul.” Well that fits with the world as we know it. But then other things that Jesus said, for example, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever shall believe in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world.” That might mean everything, but what it really boils down to in most other things that Jesus says, for human beings to accept God. It is for the human beings that Jesus came.

There really isn’t much in Jesus’ gospel about being green partly because the population was so small there wasn’t a need or a necessity. And now it is because we’re finding out today more and more that indeed as it says in Acts 17, “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands and so we worship beyond ourselves, beyond this world.” But we’ve also found that the world that God has given us is on pretty shaky ground. Jesus offers salvation of the spirit and also of life but doesn’t say much about the physical world. And so what we have to pull together out of that is that the whole of scripture is there. For Jesus didn’t come to deny what had been said in the Old Testament but to fulfill it. And we go back, then, to “in the beginning”. “In the beginning, God created all there is and said it’s very good.”

And so what we have now today is the challenge of recycling. We think that’s one of the answers or to consume less in the first, to be careful about resources. And that’s where Kermit, indeed says, it’s not easy being green today. It says in the fact that, ironically, this little stuffed animal is made out of recyclable bottles that would normally go in the trash can and then to a trash heap. The irony is that when old Kermit finally bites the dust, what’s going to happen to that same plastic? It’s still there.

I’ve got some pictures to show you that’s representative to what’s happening to our world today. One is pollution of water. And without water, that’s a basic necessity of life. You can’t see it, but there is an oil slick here. You can’t tell it, but fish and the animals are dying because of that. I remember the time when we went by Albert Lee, Minnesota. This was several years ago. It was a beautiful lake by Albert Lee. We drove by on the Interstate. Fantastic, beautiful deep blue, pristine looking lake except we began to recognize, no boats, nobody swimming, nobody fishing, nobody skiing. There was no one on that lake. And we found out later that lake, literally, was dead. They had warned people about even going on to the water, not going in to the water, because of local pollution. They have since made some headway in cleaning that up.

But our next slide is one that we live with called clear-cutting. Where we replant in our country, other people are just for subsistence cutting down the trees in the Congo to turn their trees in to charcoal so they can have charcoal to light their fires to cook their food. And they are stripping their land out of necessity because there are so many. And the next picture is a power plant and we’ll call it a coal fire. It really doesn’t matter because if it’s putting out that much, it might be steam. But more than likely we still have the challenge of using the coal in the first place and then what will you do with the pollutants that come from it or gasoline. You can go on and on. With six billion people it’s not going to get easier, it’s going to get worse.

The next picture is one that shows us our landfill where that recyclable Kermit the Frog will end up some day unless there is another answer to it. Or the following is my wife, Joyce’s, phone broke this last week and this is where it will end up along with billions of other phones. And if you think phones are just a US issue, in Uganda a year and a half ago, that’s what everybody talked with, their cell phones. They had skipped the land lines. So now here are millions of cell phones in one of the poorest nations of the world because they are available. But you’ve heard the stories about children who are on piles of these and computers, which are on the next photograph, taking out the precious metals and being exposed to the terrible things that are incorporated in that. But we have to have our computers, don’t we? We live in the computer age today. Or the very microphone that I have has a battery in it and when the battery goes dead, and today they gave it to me, what we want to know is what happens when the Eveready bunny finally dies? That’s what this little character represents. And so here’s what happens. We push him down in, we ignore him, and we put him in to a recycle thing and we say we’ve taken care of it. It’s our world and we are being green.

Well, yes and no. The truth of the matter is, I don’t know what the truth of the matter is or where this part of life is going. I don’t know where it will be in the next 50 years. Probably I won’t care at my age, but my grandchildren will and their children. So we have something that’s before us that is a challenge. It’s not easy being green because first of all it is not easy being made in the image of God. Because we are made in the image of God, we need to spread the word. That means we have a sense of unity together in the whole world. And we have a purpose given to us to live in that world in that way of Jesus Christ. It’s not easy being green, it’s not easy being made in the image of God, and it’s not easy accepting that as Christ lives in our hearts it’s more than saving our souls, but it’s for us to live in this world now so that we might become God’s people making a difference in this world.

We started with “In the beginning…” and the Bible ends with Revelation. The 21st chapter tells about the new heaven and a new earth. That’s what the pilgrims thought that they were bringing a new Jerusalem when they came to the shores of what we know now as the United States. But actually it was something greater and more long term. Eventually God will remake everything and all will be made new and all the garbage in this world and of our lives will be cleansed and will be forgotten. But until then, until God takes that step, we have to live here and now. This church has taken steps to be greener then it’s been—turning down the temperature, recycling things, doing whatever we can. It helps a little bit on the cost of utilities. But the greater good and the greater goal is it helps us save energy for the whole world. For as Maslow’s hierarchy puts people at the top, what we understand is, we’re here and our purpose in this world is to be for all people and servants for all.

So I wan t you to think about it this day. It’s not easy being green, it’s not easy being made in the image of God, and it’s not easy being saved in the name of Jesus Christ because it means we have a responsibility. We are the ones who are chosen to do what we can in our small corner of the world to do what we can to believe again that God has made everything and it is good.