Salt and Light – Vern Riediger – July 12/09

 

Salt and Light

Vern Riediger

 

 

Scripture Reading:  Matthew 5: 13-16; “Salt and Light”

13  You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?  It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.

14  You are the light of the world.  A city built on a hill cannot be hid.

15  No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.

16  In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

 Jesus refers to his followers as the salt of the earth.  Salt is being referred to here, not as a seasoning, but as a means of preventing food from spoiling.  Consider how the environment is affected by our ability to act as salt in a decaying world.  In the same way that salt preserves food, are Christians being called to preserve the natural environment?  An intriguing argument perhaps.

As some of you know, I majored in geography while at university, and so I have long recognized humanity’s ultimate dependence on nature.  Mathematics, however, was where my highest secondary school grades were achieved.  How is this relevant for today’s service?  Let me “draw you a virtual road map” on how global society got to where it is today (the abridged 7 minute version), and thereby identify some of today’s key environmental concerns!

CHECKPOINT 1:  There are over 6.75 billion people on earth today.  To put this into perspective, more people have been born on earth in the last 50 years than in all of the preceding 5,000 years!  The Club or Rome’s 1972 book “The Limits to Growth” modelled the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies.  Is our global society’s insatiable demand for resources now outstripping the limits of God’s creation?  No wonder countries are fighting for the world’s remaining resources – oil, clean fresh water, and yes, even fish which may be gone by 2050.  Do the math!  The earth simply does not have infinite supplies of the natural resources our western society demands, especially if all nations want to live the North American lifestyle.  You’ve heard of our “environmental footprint”, and how if everyone lived like North Americans, we would actually need 3 or 4 planets to sustain ourselves?  There is perhaps no better example of our unsustainable consumption of a resource than oil, which takes us to …

CHECKPOINT 2:  The world’s addiction to oil!  The industrialized world’s unprecedented economic growth during the last 100 years has been based in large part on increasing availability of cheap oil.  The world currently consumes between 83 and 85 million barrels of oil a day, so when you hear that a new reserve of a billion barrels has been discovered, remember that the world consumes 1 billion barrels in a mere 12 days!  At our current rate of consumption, we would go through 1 trillion barrels in about 33 years!  By the time we are extracting the last drops, oil will no longer be cheap.  The peak of oil discovery was passed in the mid-1960s, and the world started using more oil than was found in new fields for the first time in 1981.  Today we are using 3 to 4 barrels of oil for every barrel we find, a clearly unsustainable situation!  So why is our addiction to oil so important to the natural environment?  Well that takes us to …

CHECKPOINT 3:  The burning (consumption) of fossil fuels, including oil, is the primary source of carbon and other harmful emissions into our atmosphere.  The Ontario Medical Association estimates smog-related premature deaths in Ontario total 5,800 annually, so air pollution and smog have very direct impacts on public health.  Virtually all climate scientists (except those on oil company payrolls) agree that the carbon released from fossil fuel burning is what is driving global climate change.  Many of the world’s leaders this week reached consensus on trying to prevent global warming beyond 2C; well the Arctic has already witnessed a 2C rise over the past 25 years, and the Northwest Passage in the Arctic Ocean may be ice-free (for a short period of time) as early as the summer of 2012!  Over the last 5 years, the melt rate of the Greenland ice-cap has become 2 to 3 times faster.  Every year, we hear about more ice-shelves collapsing both in the Arctic and in Antarctica.  So what you ask?  On to …

CHECKPOINT 4:  The direct and indirect consequences of climate change are far-reaching and many, and include:

·  Rising ocean and sea levels, which are already impacting a range of countries including the Netherlands, Great Britain, and low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean which are gradually being submerged;

·  Increasing volumes of climate change refugees, which will impact national immigration policies; for example, New Zealand accepts refugees from low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean that are drowning;

·   Ocean “dead zones” void of life resulting from atmospheric carbon deposits into these “carbon sinks”; coral reefs off many continents are also threatened, and many are dying; ultimately, the food chain dictates that as ocean life is threatened, so eventually will life on land;

·   Threatened fresh water supplies; while ocean levels rise, many interior bodies of water are drying up due to higher evaporation from higher temperatures; after glaciers and ice caps melt, they no longer act as sustainable fresh water sources for those regions; only 2.5% of the world’s water is freshwater;

·    Adverse impacts to agriculture, as crops are destroyed either by heavier rains, drought, or more extreme weather events; this in turn affects global food supply;

·    Impacts to habitat ranges of many species as climate regimes shift; as climate changes in an area, so do the plants and animals that inhabit those areas; some species move out while new ones move in – witness the pine beetle in B.C. which has destroyed many forests there; less mobile species may become threatened, or face extinction; reduced biodiversity threatens to disrupt food chains;

·  Threatened cultures, especially ones that depend on certain species for their own survival (e.g., the Inuit culture);

·  Possible increases in new viruses in Canada; similar to plants and animals, viruses also move with changing climatic conditions.

Business-as-usual trends will lead to a troubled and unsustainable future, with many very real impacts that are serious moral and ethical issues for Christians who seek to be good stewards of the planet.

How can TUMC make a difference?

·  Do we want to create a “Statement of Environmental Values”?  Many provincial government ministries, such as my own, are required to post such a statement on the Internet for public review and comment.  Is this an opportunity for TUMC to “be a light”?

·  The “Green Energy and Green Economy Act”, passed by the provincial legislature on May 14th
, aims to create an environment that supports the generation of energy from renewable instead of fossil fuel sources;

·    Do we want to put solar panels on our church roof?  The GEGEA hopes to support such initiatives in Ontario;

·   What about tapping into geothermal energy from below our building?  There is more than an underground stream below us;

·   The goal would be to reduce TUMC’s carbon footprint.

While the environmental concerns I’ve shared are not a comprehensive inventory of challenges, I trust my message has in some way engaged you.  What does it really mean for Christians to be the “salt and light of the earth”?