Easter and Creation Care for a Wounded Planet
David R. Weiss — April 7, 2024

[NOTE: This is the adult forum presentation I made for Incarnation Lutheran Church in Shoreview, MN today. It was a challenging presentation to prepare for as I chose to be more honest about my assessment of things than I’ve ever been in a public presentation. All the more challenging because I didn’t know anyone at the church. However, my words—hard though they were—were received with gratitude. As though these people, who could hardly have been “happy” to them, were grateful that someone dared to speak them aloud.]

[ALSO: This is a pretty long post. If you prefer, you can download it as a PDF here. I also handed out a bookmark at the end; you can find that HERE. (If you print it double-sided on card stock, you’ll wind up with 4 bookmarks you can cut out.)]

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Good morning. Thank you for inviting me to be with you today. We begin with gratitude. And love.

First, gratitude. Since our broad topic is Creation Care, I invite you to let yourself sink into Creation for just a moment. I want you to think about some facet of Creation for which you are grateful. Write it down in a word or short phrase on one side of the 3×5 card you found on your seat. Something that fills you with quiet awe, deep gladness, or simple joy: a sunset, a gentle rain or a loud thunderclap, the Milky Way in the night sky. Maybe hiking or canoeing, wriggling your toes in the sand, or your fingers at work in the garden dirt. Maybe the purr of a cat, the bouncing greeting of a dog, the dance of a bumble bee or butterfly, or the fragrant beauty of fresh flowers.

Write down—in just a couple words—one bit of creation that sparks gratitude in you. Now I’ll give you a few seconds to sink into that aspect of creation and wrap yourself in that sense of gratitude. I want you ever so briefly, to feel the gratitude, and savor it. Do that NOW.

Next, love. On the other side of that card, I want you to write the names of just a few persons you love. In particular—persons you love, whose futures most likely extend beyond your own. That is, persons for whom your creation care is gift to their futures.

For me, among those whose lives will stretch well beyond my own, I name my six children: Laura, Leah, Megan, Meredith, Ben, and Susanna, ages 43 to 28. And my nine grandchildren: Tomás, Kaleb, Waverly, Landon, Nora, Gretchen, John, Eli, and Benjamin; ages 17 to 7. Their names hardly exhaust the persons I hold in my heart, but they are enough for now. My care for creation is a gift to them.

Now, write at least a couple names on your card (you can add others later). Again, I’ll give you a few seconds to simply be with that love. I want you, ever so briefly, to really feel your connection to these persons into their future. Do that NOW.

Keep that card nearby during my presentation—and beyond. It is no small thing to commit to caring for God’s creation … in this moment. And we’re going to need both that gratitude and that love to steady us along the way.

How do we care for creation … in this moment … in light of Easter and the story of Jesus? There is too much to say. I will limit myself to three things, which is more than enough for one Sunday morning.

First, Creation care—in this moment—is going to be HARD. Pretending otherwise is not faithful. There will be real Grief involved. We will get to Easter, but we don’t get to skip Good Friday or Holy Saturday along the way.

Second, the church has a role to play in that HARDNESS.

And third, the church has a role to play in offering HOPE while making the hardness clear.

That’s my outline: This is hard. The church needs to carry some of that hardness. And the church needs to offer hope as well. Let’s begin.

I feel a certain kinship with Thomas, that disciple often named for his seeming “doubt.” But Thomas’ desire to believe is never in doubt. Yes, he wants to see with his own eyes, but the most evocative part of the scene is that he seems to intuit—with trembling wonder—that somehow Easter isn’t real until he has touched the wounds.

We like Easter to come with a trumpet blast, a shout of Alleluia, a bright display of Easter lilies, and the thunderous joy of the organ. But Thomas suggests that Easter is perhaps more complex than that. And I’m going to insist that whatever Easter can tell us about Creation Care … lies on the far side of touching its wounds.

We are headed toward an Alleluia this morning, I promise you. But first there are some wounds we need to touch. And the tone of our Alleluia will be colored by those wounds.

Eight years ago, in the spring of 2016, I was preparing to shift my focus as a theologian toward climate change. I was following the climate headlines in the newspaper with extra interest. One Sunday the headline announced that 2015 had been the hottest year on record since 1880. The article explained it was almost certainly the hottest year since long before 1880, but 1880 is the first year we had sufficient records from around the world to calculate an average global temperature for each year.

The news story included a chart showing the warmest sixteen years on record over that 136-year span. They were listed in order of heat, so at first glance they looked like a pretty random set of years. Until I looked closer. After scanning them up and down several times I realized that, as of 2015, out of the last 136 years—ALL SIXTEEN of the hottest ones had occurred during my youngest daughter’s lifetime—in fact, since she was just a toddler. Susanna turned 28 last month. And now ALL TWENTY-FIVE of the hottest years on record have occurred in her lifetime.

Two things struck me that day. First, that Susanna is growing up on an altogether different planet than I did. And second, that my love for her compels me to figure out how to care for creation in ways that might help her find her way on this unfamiliar planet that is her home.

My need to touch Earth’s wounds in order to reach Easter began that day.

Climate change and the related ecological crises were hardly new to me. But 2016 is when I turned my full attention in their direction. Frankly, I had no idea what I was in for. As much as that list of hottest years startled me, I turned toward this topic with eager conviction. I saw myself joining work already being done by many others; I would use my theology and my writing to improve climate understanding and deepen faith as part of that larger effort to save a thriving future for all of us.

Eight years later my convictions have faltered. Having dared to touch Earth’s wounds, I am humbled beyond measure. It is not that there is no Alleluia left. We will get there. But it has not been the journey I expected. But here we are.

I want you to hear the HARD things I have to say … remembering that my talk includes Easter and Alleluia. Remember, too, that you celebrated Easter just last Sunday … after making your way through Holy Week, which included tumult, suffering, death, and a long silent Saturday.

Still, Easter has arrived reliably at the end of Holy Week for 2000 years now. So, it can be difficult to recall—in your gut—how that very first Easter came without any expectation or certainty, after the cascading catastrophe of betrayal, arrest, trial, humiliation, and crucifixion. There was no extra choir practice or any pre-ordered Easter lilies. From late Thursday night to the following Sunday morning there was only loss and confusion, breathless dread and fear. And in the midst of that, Easter arrived. In that viscerally forgotten past, we know it’s possible to find ourselves without hope … only to discover that Hope has somehow still found us.

This is where my journey over the past eight years has led me.

Honestly, the news around our climate change is not hopeful. Virtually every news report ends with a seemingly obligatory note that says there’s still time, if only we act now and with urgency. But CO2 levels continue to rise—without interruption—well beyond any level that is safe for a thriving future. The “safe” number for CO2 to support a stable climate is 350ppm in our atmosphere. After holding remarkably steady at about 280ppm for some 10,000-plus years, we passed 300ppm around 1900. When we crossed the 350-threshold in 1987, our use of fossil fuels had raised the CO2 higher than it had been in over a million years. Currently CO2 is about 425ppm. This is not a competition. And higher numbers are not better.

For at least fifty years now we’ve known (without any real scientific doubt) that CO2 emissions would dangerously warm the planet. Knowing this, oil companies invested millions in sowing doubt in the science in order to extend their profits while increasing the planet’s peril. After 28 UN Climate Conferences over the last 30 years, CO2 levels have risen each and every year, with only a tiny pause at the height of the COVID pandemic.

Global temperatures have edged upwards relentlessly as well. Over the past twelve months we reached the first year-long period at 1.5 degrees Celsius (above the pre-industrial era) that was the original safest limit posed by the Paris Climate Accords. We’ll likely dip back below 1.5 as the current El Nino weather pattern fades. But not for long. Over the past year, global land surface and sea surface temperature aren’t just now and again flirting with new records; they’re creating entire new lines on the graphs.

For a whole range of reasons—CO2 emissions, disappearing ice, warming oceans, melting permafrost, even deceasing air pollution—we are headed for a much warmer planet. It’s happening even as we speak. The slow creep of a warmer climate is moving from south to north—at around 315 feet per day. It’s as though the weather from Saint Louis, Missouri will crawl 13 feet closer to us in the hour we’ll spend together this morning. But also, 13 feet closer during the hour of worship. And another 13 feet closer over your noon meal. All day. Every day. By the time my kids are my age, Saint Louis will be here.

But it’s much more than a warming planet. You know some of this: raging wildfires, unremitting drought, longer tornado seasons, super-charged hurricanes, devastating floods, and disappearing coastlines. And there are other ripple effects such as habitat loss, species extinction, ecosystem collapse, new pandemics, and crop failures.

We also live in societies that feel all these strains and fractures directly or indirectly. There will be no end to increasing immigration in a warming world. Which, along with all those other factors, will mean even more international tensions, crises and likely more regional wars. At home it will mean even more heightened political tensions (is that possible?—sadly, yes) … tensions that will be fanned by social media DESIGNED to amplify anger … among a population all too well-armed. I could go on, but you, no doubt, know these anxieties, too.

Right now it probably feels like we’re somewhere after Jesus’ arrest in the garden. Maybe during the trial or humiliation. What’s becoming clear is that things are vastly out of our control and all bets are off.

Still, I need to say two more HARD things. And I have to tell you, after eight years, I often feel like Jeremiah lamenting about the message I’ve been given to carry. I can’t join those who prefer to look on the bright side. I can’t help but feel like optimism seeks to “heal the wounds of God’s people … and the wounds of God’s planet too lightly.” (Jer. 8:11)

This is a good time to pull out that 3×5 card. Take a deep breath as you recall the images that spark your gratitude. And take another deep breath as you remember all those persons whose love empowers your actions. Two long breaths. And we move on.

Two last HARD things. Then we will inquire about Easter and Alleluia and Creation Care. We’ll be asking from the still, stunned silence of a Holy Saturday, but we will ask, I promise.

The elephant in the room … is Green. I drove a Prius here this morning. I’ll go home to a house in Saint Paul sporting twenty-six solar panels. And yet I do not believe green energy will solve our problems.

I say this for two reasons. First, there are significant technological gaps in green energy—from a neglected power grid to battery storage issues to certain manufacturing processes where green energy is (as yet) inadequate. We built our lives around oil, and we have largely wasted the 50-year window we had to make a smoother transition. Second, the real environmental and human costs to green energy (such as mining for metals) make it a pale green at best. This includes the recognition that renewable energy from windmills, solar panels, and car batteries, still means manufacturing new blades, panels, and batteries every couple decades to replace the others as they wear out … again and again.

There’s actually a third reason to be wary of green energy. The Jevons paradox, a term coined in 1865, names the confounding observation that for as long as we’ve made technological gains in energy efficiency, we have never lowered our energy usage. Every gain in efficiency is offset by making more new things to use even more energy. Our energy appetite seems endless. The Jevons paradox is the tip of a much bigger iceberg. An iceberg we are heading toward as surely as if we were the Titanic.

That iceberg is called Overshoot, and it is the root problem we face. Simply put, it means we’re using Earth’s resources faster—and today far faster—than Earth can replenish itself.

I’ll offer two images to help explain Overshoot: the Carbon Pulse and Earth Overshoot Day.

Almost all the conveniences and blessings (as well as the inconveniences and nightmares) of our modern era have been made possible by the Carbon Pulse. This refers to the energy rush that occurred once we learned how to harness fossil fuels for industrial energy, about 200 years ago.

Fossil fuels are made when living things die and are compressed over millions of years until their remains become coal, oil or gas. All fossil fuel on Earth today is from plants and animals that died between 150 and 400 million years ago. Imagine that 250 million years’ worth of fossil fuel as .25 miles on a timeline. All fossil fuel energy available to us was formed over that one quarter mile. We’ve used up HALF that energy in just 200 years. Compared to the quarter mile it took to form, it’s taken us about the thickness of that 3×5 card in your lap to burn through HALF of it. And the vast majority of that half has been burned through in just the past 70 years—one eighth of a mile of fossil fuel consumed in less than the thickness of a piece of a copy paper.

If that pulse looks like this [make the pulse], and it’s taken us half of that quarter mile of fossil fuel to reach this current “apex” of human civilization in just the thickness of this card, how long do you suppose we can sustain that? Maybe several more decades—at most. But only by extracting the hardest to reach and the dirtiest fossil fuel, because that’s mostly what’s left.

All that any of us in this room have known is life on the upside of that pulse. But everybody in this room knows somebody—maybe yourself, surely the names on that 3×5 card—who will live on the downside of that Carbon Pulse. So, our driving question is: What can Easter look like … on the far side of … all that we have ever known?

Ultimately, overshoot is more than just the Carbon Pulse. It’s taking more from the planet than it can replenish and dumping more waste back than it can reabsorb. Scientists have carefully calculated Earth’s capacities for this.

On December 30, 1970 for the first time in this planet’s history, one species took more in a single year than Earth had to give. We “borrowed” from 1971 to meet our needs for the last two days of 1970. That was the first Earth Overshoot Day.

We’ve now had 54 consecutive Earth Overshoot Days, almost always falling a bit earlier each year. For the past decade Earth Overshoot Day has been around August 1st. So, for the last five months of each year now, we’re borrowing resources from the next year and dumping our waste into that future—where it will takes years to get reabsorbed by nature.

But we have no plan to ever consume less. Our economy actually demands growth or it will collapse. So, “borrow” isn’t accurate. We’re stealing from tomorrow. Since 1970, we reached into that future a total of 169 months. Fourteen years. Thanks to technology, we’ve been able to surreptitiously sneak all the way forward into 2038 to dump the last five months of waste from 2023 and to steal the last five months of resources we needed for last year. And we’ll do it again this year.

And while Earth Overshoot Day will fall around August 3 this year, countries like the United States hit their overshoot day earlier. For the U.S., in 2024, overshoot day already fell … back on March 14. For more than three quarters of 2024—our patterns of consumption require that we steal from others on the planet right now as well as from the future of those we love.

It might be a good time to feel that card in your hand.

Even if we could replace all our fossil fuel energy (that entire Carbon Pulse) with green energy—which is a daunting technological challenge and a costly environmental one—we’d still be wrecking the planet because our appetite for consuming is so out of proportion with what the planet can offer. This is why green energy is no ultimate solution.

When any species in an ecosystem goes into overshoot—a plague of locusts, an algae bloom, an explosion of rabbits or deer—it’s because conditions are just right for that species to overstep its natural place in the order of things. Until conditions are no longer right. Then, ALWAYS AND IN EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE, the population of the species in overshoot collapses. This is a well-demonstrated, incontrovertible principle in ecosystems.

The Carbon Pulse has functioned like a “get-out-of-collapse” card for us. It’s provided almost supernatural advances in protection, shelter, food, transportation, medicine … as well as that insidious ability to steal from the future, from the lives of those not yet born. If we did not live on a finite planet, we could do this forever. But we are deep into overshoot on a planet that is profoundly fruitful, undeniably finite, and now inescapably fragile. The far side of overshoot, whether we’re discussing locusts or rats, rabbits or deer—or human civilization—is always, and without exception, collapse.

Ecologically, we are perched on the verge of collapse. Within the next several decades this will play out. What exactly collapse will look like around the globe or here in Minnesota, no one can say with precision. But there are persons named on your 3×5 cards who will find out.

Theologically, we are gathered at the foot of an empty cross on Holy Saturday. We do not know whether there are any Easter lilies available—or whether they will even seem appropriate for this strange season of Easter on the far side of Overshoot.

Despite being warned back in the early 70’s about the limits of a finite planet, no one thought to order ahead for Easter lilies. In truth, the only way we could have “ordered” those Easter lilies would’ve been to swiftly transition from fossil fuels and radically simplify our lives … starting fifty years ago. No choir has been practicing to sing Alleluia on our way into Collapse. And right now, on this ecological Holy Saturday, all we can really recognize clearly—if we dare—is that Overshoot fills the horizon from east to west, framing an ugly empty cross in the middle.

Here, in the stunned silence among the fractured ruins of Earth’s own Good Friday, what is there to say about Easter?

PLENTY. So, hold onto to those 3×5 cards. You’ll need all that gratitude and all that love close at hand. I know, this is HARD stuff. How do we possibly move forward toward an Alleluia if my words are true?

From her diagnosis in 2016 until her death in August 2022, my mom was slowly ravaged by Alzheimer’s. For the last six years of her life, my dad, my two sisters, and I were helpless bystanders as more and more of Mom’s self was lost.

That’s not entirely true. Yes, Alzheimer’s took more and more of Mom over time. And, yes, we were helpless to stop it. But we were not bystanders. We loved her—carefully, attentively, and tenderly—each of the remaining days she was with us. We needed to know the hard truth that Alzheimer’s was relentlessly swallowing her life. Knowing this didn’t impact whether we loved her, though it surely shaped how we loved her.

So, too, with Earth. We need to be clear that the care we offer creation today is care for a deeply wounded planet. The urgency of the climate crisis and hard reality of overshoot dare not alter whether we love creation or those persons we hold dear, but it must surely shape how we love them.

I’ve spent the majority of my time just telling you the HARD things. Because nothing much I say in the remaining time matters if you don’t grasp the hard place where we are today.

But now it’s time to talk about what we can do. So, the second thing I have to say is that the church has a role to play in the HARDNESS of this moment. And this is Creation Care.

To care faithfully for creation in this moment means truth-telling: being painfully and poignantly honest about the wounds that our civilization has inflicted upon the whole planetary community. This will not be easy or enjoyable work, but it is essential “prophetic” work. It is “reading the signs of the times” in this ecological moment. There remain multiple futures in front of us—so our choices do matter. But every one of those futures includes Collapse. Our choices may help determine its scope, but not its likelihood. And that’s HARD.

Part of the truth-telling involves recognizing, as Paul did, that we contend not simply with flesh and blood—with the weakness of human character—but also with “principalities and powers”: systems that set the wellbeing of profit above the wellbeing of planet or people. We will need to name unapologetically how economies, corporations, lobby groups, government policies, social media algorithms, marketing campaigns, and the entertainment industry distort our lives and wreak havoc on creation.

Jesus called out the Pharisees for misrepresenting the Torah’s fundamental call to mercy and compassion; he challenged the claims of empire that usurped the sovereignty of God; and he overturned the tables of those who wanted to profit from Passover. Only as we take seriously the call to do truth-telling on behalf of the persons, creatures, and ecosystems who comprise “the least of these” can we also answer Jesus’ call to care for them today.

The second role churches have in the HARDNESS of this moment is to call us into deep grief for creation’s suffering. This is not about feeling guilty for that suffering—although those feelings may well arise. But this holy part is about feeling Earth’s pain, on its terms. From backyard to wilderness, the cries of nature are all around us, if we pause to listen. If we but dare to feel.

At the heart of Divine Mystery is God’s commitment to be Emmanuel. To be with us, even and especially in our suffering. One fundamental way that we image God is to be with creation in its suffering. There is no corner of creation that God regards as merely so-so. Every bit is called “good”—and altogether, the whole interwoven world, is called “very good.” The suffering of creation is surely worth our care. And as the church, we can surely find ways to BE with creation’s suffering, both individually and as God’s gathered people.

I want to make this caveat, however. This solidarity with creation is sacred work—and it will last us the rest of our lives. There is no moment in any future when we will be done with this grieving. One of deepest lessons we must teach our children is how to care for a deeply wounded planet. It is an Earth they can nevertheless deeply love, carefully, attentively, and tenderly, for all the rest of their days. And that teaching will be hard holy work on our part, but so faithful to the care of creation.

Thus, the church’s role in the HARDNESS of this moment is two-fold: truth-telling and grief bearing. And while neither of these may feel quite like Easter, sometimes Alleluia is speaking truth to power and sometimes it is cradling suffering with care.

The third and final thing I have to say is that the church also has a role to play in offering HOPE even while making the hardness clear. I will lift up four aspects of this hope, but there are countless expressions of it.

First grief. I mentioned this above, because in our culture, we are often invited to distract ourselves from grieving, so, it is part of the HARDNESS that the church must carry, calling people to stop and grieve, when we would rather busy ourselves in a million other ways.

But GRIEF is also a holy work of HOPE. When we truly feel the suffering of creation, that empathy begins to rekindle the buried memory of the DEEP kinship we have with all creation. We cannot imagine the depth of power here because we have spent millennia imagining we are somehow other than or above the “very good”ness of creation. Honestly, this existential loneliness is killing us, and allowing us to kill the planet as well. But if we embrace our place AT HOME ON EARTH, we will find that from the smallest microbe to the largest mammal—we are kin. Entangled in grace. Intended for intimacy. And grief is the doorway home.

Second, the church can offer a WISE HOPE that is not afraid of or offended by finitude. Part of the lure of the Carbon Pulse and Overshoot, is that they seem to outsmart finitude. But finitude is at the heart of creation’s “very good”ness. The ebb and flow of life and death is a challenging mystery, but it is not tragic. It is the miracle of creation: pulsing, rising, and receding in its turn. Wisdom invites us to be humble: we are here in this moment and then gone. Yet wisdom also invites us to be noble: we are the echo of stardust able to dream, able to love. Easter’s hope may well include a life beyond this, but it most assuredly announces life that runs eternally deep—right now. Life framed by finitude, yet aflame with love.

Third, the church can EXPERIMENT WITH HOPE in its communal life. In the Book of Acts, the Alleluia of the earliest Christians in the weeks and months after Easter is “sung” though their determination to meet the needs of everyone in their community. Their lives were uncertain, at best. The Temple would be destroyed in the near future; Jerusalem would fall; and they, themselves, would be outcast by their fellow Jews and subject to fierce persecution by Rome. And yet they were determined to foster love for one another in their daily life with an amazing zeal.

If we are honest—painfully honest—overshoot means that our lives are also uncertain at best. How do we sing Alleluia amid such uncertainty? By choosing to rest in gratitude and relish moments of awe, for creation remains a wonder. By deepening our connections to and our solidarity with the natural world and one another. By recognizing that the only truly GREEN energy, is the energy we invest in simplifying our lives—because on a finite planet, simplicity is the shape of love, and community is the source of joy. And by remembering that in the story of Jesus, God manifests power not by avoiding vulnerability, but by embracing it. Creation care on a wounded planet will emerge in surprising ways as we experiment with hope.

Finally, and this is perhaps both the hardest and the most important task of the church: to MODEL HOPE THAT IS NOT TIED TO OUTCOME. On the far side of the Carbon Pulse, as both civilization and creation reel from overshoot, all bets are going to be off. Every article in the mainstream media continues to say that there’s still time to avert a climate catastrophe, still a slim chance for “success.” Overshoot says otherwise. But what happens when “success” is no longer an option. Do we give up? Do we despair? Do we say that hope has betrayed us?

I believe the promise of Easter, the sound of Alleluia on our lips, lies in our shared perseverance in compassion, love, and care. For creation and for each other. As the practice of our personal discipleship, and as the life of the Body of Christ. Doing these things faithfully—no matter what—counts as Hope. And carries Alleluia from one generation to the next.

This is probably not the “uncertain” Easter that any of us would have chosen. But it is the Easter that has chosen us this year—and for many years to come. In closing I invite you to recall the biblical story of Esther. It is possible that, like her, we were born for just this moment. It may be that Hope itself waits upon the Alleluia that is ours to sing …

I hope that our voices are clear and true. Thank you.

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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, “writing into the whirlwind” of contemporary challenges, joys, and sorrows around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, peace, and family. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in Writing into the Whirlwind atwww.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.