Invitations for Earth Day 2024
In my evangelical teenage upbringing, the adults I knew who followed Jesus absolutely didn’t follow with anything related to the earth or its preservation. I felt a queasy tension between my nature-loving, conservation-minded home (fun fact: I was a Girl Scout for eleven years, lead by my mom. My mom’s grandfather was a Boy Scout Camp director for decades.) and those who I respected without question in the church. Those who I respected who told me global warming was a hoax, tree huggers worshipped the created not the creator, and since we’d be raptured anyway, we didn’t have to worry about those Styrofoam cups so much.
Earth Day, I was told, was a thinly veiled extension of marijuana celebration, since it was so close with 4/20 and all of its associated debauchery. Needless to say, I didn’t observe.
Twenty years later, I no longer treat Earth Day with kid gloves, nor do I think it is the peak of the celebration of Creation Care. A bout in my twenties of existential dread and problematic flagellation in order to save the planet like a perfect Christian cured me of that. However, I think like any seasonal observance, it gives us an opportunity to look, listen and learn, to pause with our larger national community and think about how we can best steward this place we call home.
In that invitational spirit, here are eight opportunities I offer for the next few days and weeks (choose one, choose all!) for engaging Earth Day 2024:
The Porter’s Gate Worship Project album, Climate Vigil Songs is a gorgeous collection in its own right and the perfect soundtrack for this month’s focus on creation. With some of my favorite singer-songwriters, these new works for the church ask us to contemplate the beauty of the earth and our own responsibility to it as God’s people.
2. This Short Video from Disciple Science is the most engaging, concise, and theologically sound overview of how the Good News should spill over into our care for the world. Highly recommend for any age but especially for kids.
3. The poem, “Not Ordinary Times” by Allyson Sawtell stopped me in my tracks with naming feelings of overwhelm/grief while reaching for the hope of resurrection with community. It asks us to dare to believe there is another way forward besides denial or despair.
4. “A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World,” a conversation with Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: If you’re like me and Climate Change conversations make you want to curl up in a ball, this podcast episode (a little long but under an hour) is one that can point us to hopeful imagination.
5. Attend a local event like the Seed Exchange Party at EMU that marries justice, earth care, and faith while highlighting indigenous communities who are doing the work in areas most affected by climate change and destruction. See details from Kim Copeland from IMC:
As Earth Day rolls towards us again this year, we see the urgent need for repaired relationships in our global community and with our amazing home and all its creatures, with water, air, soil, and seed.
With that in mind, I wanted to invite you to a Seed Exchange and Learning Party on Monday, April 22 at 6:30 pm at the EMU Discipleship Center. This event is inspired by the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery and is hosted by the VMC Racial Justice Task Force, EMU's Sustainable Food Initiative, and local community members.
We will be celebrating seeds and our relationships with them. Please bring seeds or seedlings that you care about to share and swap, or just come to learn and support. We will also be hearing about the Colectivo In Laak Le Ixiimó (Our Brother Corn, Collective), a Mayan community in Campeche, Mexico, and their annual Fiesta de Semillas (seeds!). The Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery is developing a partnership with this community and is raising funds to send a delegation to the seed festival in May. At our Seed Party you will have an opportunity to contribute funds to help support this relationship-building travel.
Light refreshments will be served. If you plan to join us, please RSVP here so we know how many snacks to provide. If you don't RSVP, you are still welcome to join us that evening!
Learn more about a past delegation to southern Mexico and the bridge-building work between Mennonites and Mayan communities here; learn more about the seed conservation movement here.
Happy to answer questions you might have.Hope to see you and some of your seed friends on April 22,
Kim (for the ad hoc planning team)
6. Learn About Ecocide and about how lasting peace in places, like Gaza specifically, will require environmental justice that extends beyond times of war. Seeking peace means restoring shalom to what has been poisoned, destroyed, and harmed, something that time and again in Scripture is part of God’s central desires for our world.
7. Adventure in Foraging! Delight is both an antidote to despair and a increaser of devotion, especially reciprocal devotion with land and plants. Our family has reveled in foraging, especially the past few years, as we’ve learned from teachers like The Black Forager and Forager Chef. Not only are learning these skills and making these recipes fun and delicious (pictured are recent things we’ve eaten: Virginia bluebells in egg-drop soup, dandelion honey butter, redbud jelly), learning about foraging often introduces you to historical marginalization, traditional knowledge, Indigenous ways of interconnected living, and the just plain goodness of God’s design of the natural world. Try even one recipe this spring!
8. Learn the Names of Your Neighbors: Out of curiosity the other day, I sat down with a notebook and tried to list every plant I knew grew on our little square of land. There are a few repeats if you look closely, but I was shocked that there were over one hundred species surrounding us, most of whom I could call by name. At the end of Genesis 2, we see Adam participating with God in naming the creatures paraded before him. Katherine May in Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age says this: “Naming is a form of power. It cements a commitment to the subject of your expertise and, in the case of nature, often an ancestral continuity, too. Naming is an assertion of meaning, and in turn it creates meaning. It allows us to greet the things we know like old friends.”
Who lives in your yard? Around your place of work? Your school yard or church building? Can you greet them like old friends? How might that change our way of relating to our nonhuman neighbors to whom Jesus has called us to love?
How are you celebrating Earth Day this year? What has been your experience observing it (or not observing it) outside and inside the church? What are ways you are accepting invitations to know God’s creation and our place in it this spring?
