{"id":1752,"date":"2012-04-20T11:13:49","date_gmt":"2012-04-20T11:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/fellowshipofsaintsandsinners\/?p=1752"},"modified":"2018-07-20T20:30:06","modified_gmt":"2018-07-20T20:30:06","slug":"earth-day-a-k-a-easter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fellowshipofsaintsandsinners\/2012\/04\/earth-day-a-k-a-easter.html","title":{"rendered":"“Earth Day” a.k.a. “Easter”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

We were driving home from school during Holy Week last year when I put the question before my then four-year-old son.\u00a0 \u201cDo you know what happens this weekend?,\u201d I had asked him- and I\u2019d be lying to say I had no<\/em> expectation about how he would respond.\u00a0 Surely, I had figured, all those bedtime Bible stories, weeks of Sunday school as a \u201cLion\u201d in \u201cNoah\u2019s Ark\u201d and a mommy who worked as a pastor would have rubbed off in an answer that betrayed at least a primitive understanding of the event called \u201cEaster\u201d on the church\u2019s calendar.\u00a0 That, after all, was the day that Christians around the world entered into a whole season of celebration around the resurrection of their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n

My son\u2019s answer had therefore elicited surprise: not \u201cEaster,\u201d not even \u201cthe Easter bunny\u201d- at the time his response had seemed more heretical than even this.\u00a0 \u201cEarth Day,\u201d he had said almost matter-of-factly.\u00a0 He was referring of course to the day that now annually draws global attention to environmental issues like global warming.\u00a0 What first began as a national teaching moment on the environment, having been founded by the U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson some forty years ago has now been officially designated April 22 by the United Nations as \u201cInternational Mother Earth Day\u201d and belongs to a full week of related activities.\u00a0 My son had spent the whole morning with classmates planting seeds in take-home biodegradable pots as a way to mark the occasion.<\/p>\n

Earth Day?<\/em>\u00a0 This environmentally sympathetic but dolefully uneducated mommy was admittedly taken back.\u00a0 Sure, we regularly recycled, and our sympathy had extended to buying energy efficient light bulbs and free range meat at the grocery store.\u00a0 In addition to occasional contributions to The Sierra Club and some new energy-efficient windows, we had even tried a compost pile in our backyard until a local possum made it his noisy perch in the middle of the night to the frustration of neighbors.\u00a0 But if truth be told, I was still chafing a bit at the strict enforcement of the ban on plastic sandwich bags and paper napkins at my son\u2019s school, and \u201cEarth Day\u201d in my ignorance had seemed a bit more like the pagan alternative to Easter for anyone seeking a more \u201cloosey goosey,\u201d pantheistic spirituality than what the Bible offered.<\/p>\n

Earth Day<\/em>. \u201cSay, what?,\u201d I had said at the time, laughing a bit at the scandal of it and then proceeding with the explanation that the most important event taking place this weekend was in fact Easter<\/em>, when we celebrate that Jesus rose from the dead after dying on a cross.\u00a0 In a few days, I had insisted, we would be celebrating Easter<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But what I failed to appreciate at the time was the undeniable and inextricable connection between Easter and Earth Day.\u00a0 When we as Christians celebrate these (traditionally) forty days of Easter, we marvel at the way that Jesus, having embraced the whole world and all creation, His arms extended on a cross, gives Himself away in death only to be resurrected and to invite us to participate in that new, unending life.\u00a0 No greater affirmation of our humanity and the earth we have been charged to care for can be found than the resurrection of Jesus Christ.\u00a0 In this one great marvelous act of God, God says \u201cyes\u201d to the broken, frail, limited stuff of our earthly existence; God weds God\u2019s Self to us and to the earth God loved into existence, with the result being that the inevitable decay of our own bodies, the disruption of fragile ecosystems and all of the ways that \u201cthe whole creation groans and travails\u2026waiting for redemption,\u201d (as the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans observes), find purpose, transformation and meaning in the hope of this new life.\u00a0 \u201cSee, I am making all things new,\u201d the resurrected Jesus says (Revelation 21).\u00a0 All <\/em>things.\u00a0 New.<\/em><\/p>\n

That, I suspect, is the message of the Bible in a nutshell.\u00a0 Since the very beginning, when God instructed the man and the woman to tend the garden and take care of the animals, human beings and the earth have been locked in a fateful embrace of sorts.\u00a0 Adam and Eve\u2019s first sin was to pick fruit from a forbidden tree; they then used fig leaves to hide from their Creator.\u00a0 When Cain murdered his brother Abel, Abel\u2019s blood \u201ccried out\u201d from the ground- maybe not unlike the stones that will themselves later cry out that Jesus is the Son of God in the face of human beings\u2019 silence.\u00a0 God\u2019s judgment of Pharaoh manifests itself in droughts and plagues and God\u2019s provision for the people of Israel in food that falls from the sky and rocks that overflow with water.\u00a0 Sin and the possibility of forgiveness are therefore interwoven into the very fabric of creation.\u00a0 \u201cIf my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land,\u201d the God of the Old Testament promises (2 Chronicles 7:14).<\/p>\n

And is not Earth Day, which we will again celebrate in two days’ time, in essence, this very thing?\u00a0 Humility in the face of the grandeur, beauty and mystery of the earth.\u00a0 A turning from the ways in which we deface and pillage our fragile ecosystems.\u00a0 An act of contrition and a seeking of forgiveness- if not explicitly from God, then at least from one another- for our failure to remember the delicate interconnectedness of all created things and our necessary unity in \u201ccreatureliness.\u201d\u00a0 A prayer for the healing of our world?\u00a0 In a way, yes.\u00a0So it seems fitting this second week of Easter to wish you a very, very happy Earth Day.<\/p>\n

For some tips on being green, watch this video compliments of “The Psychotic Earth Day Spokesman”:<\/p>\n