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 Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale's Solar Dedication Sermon Genesis 9:8-16 / Colossians 1:15-20 Every time a child is born into this church family, we stop, as a church community, and we re-enact the covenant that God has made with this child. “For you, little one, God created the world, for you Jesus Christ entered the world to redeem it. All this God did for you, little one, though you know nothing of it as yet. We love because God first loved us.” I love that we baptize infants, because it is a stunning reminder that God’s love for us is not the result of our piety, or our perfection, or even our attempts at seeking God. God’s love for us is prompted simply by God’s desire to love—nothing else. The maker of the universe has made a covenant with you—before you even had a chance to respond! God’s covenant promises to you are non-stop, through every beat of your heart, every day that unfolds before you, every pulse of love. Our hope as a community of faith is that together we will embody the kind of love that will lead a child to grow into recognition and appreciation of God’s promises. We hope and pray that youth in the church will get to a place where they say, “yes, God, I am ready to commit to the covenant that you made and have been keeping since my first breath.” I love the covenantal language of our baptismal liturgy, and of our Reformed faith, but I’ve come to believe that we ought to use that covenantal language in a much broader way than we do. Today I want to talk about the breadth of God’s covenanting. I want to ask, with whom is God in covenantal relationship? And I want to talk about it from the perspective of the passage in Genesis 9 and Colossians 1. Today we heard two passages about God’s covenant with the world. The first is part of the primeval narrative at the beginning of Genesis. It comes on the tails of the story of God getting fed up with human sinfulness and in righteous anger flooding the earth, destroying all living things, except for Noah and his family and a remnant of animals. It’s an awful story, really. God, annihilating all things, in anger for human sin. God apparently thought so too, because at the end of it, God hangs up the bow, puts away the arrows. God explains that every time a rainbow appears we should remember that God’s never going to take that bow, or any weapon of destruction, off the shelf again. God says, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” There are many who look to this passage in Genesis 9 as being the beginning of God being the God of Endless Grace. From this point on in the biblical narrative God’s not going to deal with humanity according to its sins, but rather according to God’s grace. As proof of this “new approach by God,” the biblical writer tells us, in the very next verse, that “righteous Noah,” just getting off the boat, went and got really drunk and passed out in the tent and embarrassed himself and his family. God didn’t flood the earth again, after Noah made a big mistake. God didn’t even flood Noah’s tent. No, rather God just kept living out God’s covenantal promises. God brought light to the morning, God watered the earth, God gave sun to grow plants, animals to eat those plants and pull plows. God gave otters river homes, God gave deer woods in which to roam. God gave silt and loam. God gave waters salty and fresh, God gave seasons, dry and wet. God created Eden , not for two, but Eden for all, a whole-earth-Eden that dripped with endless grace—God’s commitment to humankind. One way to read the biblical story is to read about the dichotomy between God’s continuing faithfulness to this covenant of love for every living thing, and humanity’s continual failure to love God and every living thing. Humanity seems to keep forgetting about the covenant, and fails to live into loving relationship with all living things! This story-line is addressed by God, in the person of Jesus Christ. Let’s look at the passage from Colossians. The passage from Colossians, written some decades after Jesus’ death, talks about the covenant with God that Christ (the presence of God in human flesh) is restoring. In Christ, God is reconciling all things (Paul says all things 5 times), whether on earth or in heaven. Friends, do you see what’s happening here. In Genesis, God said, “look, I’m making a covenant to do my part, regardless of whether humanity and all living creatures do their part.” In Colossians, God seems to say, “I’m doing my part, and now, I really want you to do your part so badly that I’m sending myself, in Christ, to help you do your part.” Friends, this is good news! God sent Jesus Christ, the very presence of God, to restore the covenant between God and “all things.” Jesus Christ came not just to save human souls, but rather to restore all things—flowers, and mountains and trees, and birds and bees and the whole creation that God breaths into existence and supports and upholds. This isn’t the only place where Paul writes of redemption in Christ as having benefit for more than only humankind. To the church in Rome he writes that “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God…the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; awaiting the redemption of [humankind].” One of my professors in college says, “the earth is waiting on tip toe for humankind to get it right, so the earth can stop groaning in pain, and instead rejoice in God’s graciousness!” Friends of Jesus Christ, it’s time for us to start thinking of covenantal community in much broader terms than we usually do. If we want to talk about God’s covenantal relationship, we’ve got to talk about all creation, all things. Maybe, as a sign, we ought to expand our baptismal practices. We could start with children who will not experience life in our community of faith? God covenants with them, and so should we. Maybe we should have a baptismal service, each year, which reminds us to care for all children, and to create a world where all children flourish? And then, then let’s imagine baptism for non-human covenant partners? How about a sapling? How about a tomato plant? How about a fawn or a kitten? How about for fish of the sea or birds of the air? I’m not suggesting that baptism would mean something to a sapling, a tomato plant, or a fawn. But then, infant baptism really doesn’t mean anything to an infant either. No. The act is about God showing love for the child, but those who are moved to become more fully committed to covenanting with God are the parents, the relatives, the congregation. That’s why, in the baptismal liturgy, Pastor Stephanie and I always ask the church to stand and make vows to help the new baby experience the covenant of God’s love. Today, I want to think about what it would mean for us to make vows for the broader world with whom God covenants. For children born into the world in smog filled, drug riddled urban poverty, we know God’s vows to you. God is consistently going to get you up in the morning, fill your veins with pulsing blood, put thoughts and ideas and the potential for wonder inside of you. Oh, the list could go on and on of what God will do for you! Now, what are our vows to God, on your behalf, dear children of the ghetto, the barrio, the slum. Maybe our vow is to encourage affordable housing, job opportunities for your financially stressed parents. Maybe our vow is to pass legislation that gets the smog down in your neighborhood so you aren’t so prone to severe asthma. Maybe those are the vows that we’d make, when we had our baptism service for children from the ghetto. But I want to go farther today. As Genesis and Colossians show us, this covenant expansion moves beyond human community and into all creation. For blue herons born in New Jersey , we know God’s vow to you. God gave you an amazingly long neck, great eyes and fast reflexes for catching fish. God gave you long legs, so you can get into deeper water, to get those bigger fish. God gave you graceful strides, God gave you a wonderful bill. Maybe our vow to God on your behalf is to commit to wetlands preservation in New Jersey , to read up on acidity levels in Jersey streams, and to commit to making them healthier for you as you grow up. For the sapling, we know what God does for you to. God waters you, God gives you sun. God supplies the soil and proper dynamics for your growth. Our vow to you, young sapling, is that we’ll let you grow to fullness, that we’ll protect the water coming your way, that we’ll not clear cut you and others with little foresight, that we’ll let you be the CO2 depositor and Oxygen creator that God intends for you to be. This might all sound a bit crazy to you today, and if so, I’m sorry, I’m sorry that it sounds so ‘out there.’ Because it’s not. What is crazy is that covenantal language has been kept for use within the walls of the church only. Christian community needs to remember the breadth of God’s covenant. I know I’ve been deficient, especially in regards to God’s covenant with non-human things. Other than a few passing comments I’ve rarely mentioned the natural world in my preaching. And that will change. Now, on a practical level, we can’t possibly hold a baptismal service, a covenanting service, for every tree frog and river otter, or even for every human being in the world. I think we’ve got 9 church babies coming up for baptism in the next few weeks as it is! But, today I want to say that we’ve done something recently with our church facility that is about covenantal care for all things. Sitting over our head now, while we worship God, sit 42 2 x 5 solar panels. When we go into the social hall, for coffee hour (fairly traded, in reusable ceramic mugs, I might add) we sit under another 84 panels. All of that adds up to 13,500 kilowatt hours of renewable energy per year. That amount equals 30-40% of the light and power that we use to operate this building. Up until now all of our energy came from non-renewable sources, fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are hypothetically renewable, they are made of ground up animal and plant particles, but they renew so slowly (like millions of years) that they will be depleted beyond repair in the not-to-distant future unless something drastically changes in the way humans consume fossil fuels. Truly renewable energy is from an energy resource that is replaced rapidly by a natural process, such as power generated from the sun or wind or flowing water. That’s what we’re doing now, we’re letting the light from the sun provide much of the energy needs for this ministry. We are leaving less of a permanent footprint on the earth now, by making this change—sucking less fossil fuels from below the earth’s surface. Just as importantly, the renewable energy we are using is clean energy, meaning the conversion process is clean—no carbon is burned. The conversion process of making fossil fuels into usable energy has created an overabundance of Carbon Dioxide in the air. Earth needs a certain level of CO2 in the air. The right amount makes a thin and necessary “green house gas sheet” that surrounds the earth, “trapping the warm air in the earth’s atmosphere. That “gas sheet” protects us from freezing to death, as the sheet keeps the earth warm even when the sun isn’t shining. But that sheet has now become a super thick “green house down-comforter,” which is pressure cooking the earth at temperatures that are doing irreparable damage.” With these panels we’ve begun to try to thin the blanket of greenhouse gases. I read this week that if all houses of worship would transfer 30% of their light and power costs to renewable energy it would be the equivalent of taking 1 million cars off the road (and save them 500 million dollars annually). Imagine if every person who worshiped in those churches went home and made adjustments in the type of energy they used to light and power their houses. The panels on our roof now serve as a symbol to me of our church thinking about the breadth of God’s covenant of love. I cannot think of a symbol with broader significance. Probably the most all encompassing threat to the earth that God made and sent Jesus Christ to reconcile to beauty and fullness is the emission of excessive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. The first to see the effects are animal and plant species, whose existence depends on the earth’s natural climate control mechanisms. Second to see the effects are the poor and the oppressed, living in vulnerable places, in vulnerable houses, with vulnerable food and water supplies. Eventually, we will all see the effects. Harnessing the sun for energy and power, in ways that are clean and safe and renewable, is one of the things we do now, in response to God’s covenant with the world. God has baptized the world, and we’re witnesses! These solar panels are part of our vows on behalf of “all things.” What will the rest of our vows be? God has baptized all things, saying “yes I love you.” The fullness of God’s “yes” will be realized when we say “yes” back with a breadth that matches the “yes” of God. Amen. << Back to the Reformed
Church of Highland Park 
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