Will you pray with me?  Lord, may the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your eyes, our rock and our redeemer.  Amen.

Probably because of the generation of which I am a part, the image of Noah’s ark in my head is not a still, but a cinematic one.  I imagine the beginning of a movie.  The production studio label has just faded, and the screen is black and silent for a few moments.  Suddenly, the viewer is startled by an earsplitting cacophony of shrieks and howls and roars.  A second later, the scene appears: the camera shot zooms through a dim, pitching room crowded with animals of every make and model.  It passes an exasperated woman valiantly and comically failing to defend the meal she is preparing from hordes of monkeys.  It passes a youngish couple just as they rise up in roaring indignation to shake their fists at a retreating pair of birds that have bespoiled the couple’s meal as they flew overhead.  The shot heads up a stairway to a higher deck, this one—louder still, and rowdier!—is shaped like a huge barn with row after row of stalls, and cages rising tier upon tier to a high ceiling.  As the camera speeds down an aisle, we catch glimpses of elephant trunks sticking out from between rough-hewn slats, lions pacing menacing circles in their confinement, baskets from which issue menacing rattles one can barely discern over the noise.  The impression is one of confined and ceaseless noise, tension, rattling, banging, arguing, fighting, and smelly, pulsing life. 

The camera heads up another flight of stairs, out into blinding sunlight and more noise, along a deck packed end to end with animals furred and scaled and feathered, every one calling or blaring or grunting.  We speed straight up to a man at the far end of the deck standing with his arm outstretched and a dove just taking off.  The shot pivots around the man, keeping him in view as the camera backs over the rail, out to sea, and up and back into the sunlit sky.  The din of all the animals fades as our view lengthens and the ship shrinks and the water, the water, the unbelievably vast water expands to fill the screen until all we can hear is the wind moving over its face, and all we can see is blue, and blue, and blue, and a tiny brown ark on its surface.  The shot stops there, and my hope as director is that the viewer suddenly remembers that all the earth, every inch, is covered by water.  Everything and every one that was living is now dead.  And the ark, so noisy, so full of life and fight, floats on a vast sea of nothing, floats miles above what should be the ground carrying all the life on earth, every bit of viable DNA that still exists.  It floats there, tiny and alive and precarious, just one well-placed hoof-kick through a bulkhead or one escaped ember in the hay, one small disaster away from the end of all life forever.

The view would then get even longer.  The shot would back up still more, out into space, out to the distance of the moon, maybe.  Out until the blackness of the sky filled the shot, and the Earth itself, with all its life and fight, had become just a little blue dot floating in the blackness.  The point, I trust, would be fairly obvious. 

Only earth, only our one planet floating along, for the love of the creation equipped by God for sustaining life as it floats a lonely path across the face of the void.  Like the ark, so noisy, so full of life and fight, carrying all the viable DNA in the solar system, maybe all the DNA in the whole galaxy, maybe all that there is in the entire universe. [pause]

These days, it’s almost impossible to think about Noah and his flood without thinking about another flood: the inundation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina a year and a half ago.  The news stories of those days, and since, focused rightly on the crushing poverty, governmental mismanagement, and human tragedy the event exposed to the nation. 

What got relatively little coverage, however, was the fact that Katrina was just one of 28 nameable storms that occurred in 2005, more than any other year on record[1].  2005 was also the hottest year ever recorded.  That is no coincidence: the nine other hottest years on record all occurred within the last 14 years[2], and in one of them, 2004, the United States set its all-time record for tornados, Japan set its all-time record for typhoons, and the first-ever hurricane in the South Atlantic was recorded[3].  All told, thousands of people lost their lives in these storms, and the cost to property and infrastructure is in the billions of dollars.

This is not a surprise to scientists.  There has been scientific consensus for at least the last 20 years that the average temperature of the planet is warming at an unprecedented rate and that that warming causes an increase in the number and severity of storms.  Further, there is unanimity among scientists—well, at least among scientists not in the employ of the oil, auto, or manufacturing businesses, or of the United States government—that this warming is caused by human activity that releases carbon—mostly carbon dioxide— and other greenhouse gasses into the air.  The burning of fossil fuels in cars, power plants, and factories is the primary culprit, but combustion of biological materials, as when forests are cleared and burned for farming, and other human activities, are there too. 

Those emissions create a layer of gas that traps energy from the sun that would otherwise be reradiated by the earth back into space.  The result of this heat trapping has been a steady, measurable increase in the average temperature of the planet through at least the last fifty years.

The problem, once dismissed as the nightmare ravings of the environmental lunatic fringe, has been clear to scientists for decades.  And now it’s becoming clear to the average person as well.  Storms rage ever more fiercely, driven by warmer seas and air masses.  Glaciers retreat further and further up the mountains they used to slide down, and the fresh water runoff that millions depend upon for drinking is visibly lessening.  An article in yesterday’s New York Times reported that, where once 80% of the world’s maple syrup came from the United States, now 80% comes from Canada, at least in part because an increase in winter temperatures has moved the sugar maple’s prime habitat northward several degrees. 

More and more of the Antarctic ice shelves break off each year.  Their meltwater, coupled with the expansion of seawater as it heats up, is driving a measurable rise in sea level around the world, on the average of 1 to 2 centimeters per year, and speeding up.  At that rate, experts say that low lying areas such as the Netherlands, Bangladesh, New Orleans, and much of Manhattan are in danger of being underwater in my lifetime.  Another flood.  And another article in yesterday’s Times reported that the Bush administration estimates that greenhouse gas emissions in the United States—by far the world’s biggest producer, both per capita and overall—will continue to grow at the same rate they grew during the last decade[4].

The bible tells us that Noah’s flood was unleashed by God because of the sins of the people; afterward, God promised to never do such a thing again.  But the scientists tell us that we are facing another flood.  This one will not be God’s punishment for our sins, but the simple consequences of our overconsumption, our greed for things and convenience, our willful blindness to the clear writing on the wall.  Noah’s flood killed indiscriminately, for good or ill wiping life from the entire planet; the flood that we face will disproportionately affect the poor, the marginalized, and the powerless, as it did in New Orleans. 

Global warming, and the very real possibility of another flood are upon us.  But, there is good news: If scientists agree that global warming is upon us, they also agree that it is not too late.  And the God that created the heavens and the earth and the universe, the God that blew over the face of the waters, the God could not in the end bear to destroy all life in Noah’s flood even though she had determined to do so, that God is with us.  Here, on the very planet to which God chose to come in human form, and into which God chose to resurrect God’s son even after the world had killed him.

More and more people are remembering that at the beginning God made us stewards, not owners, of the world, and that if God promised that there would not be another flood, so must we.  And the tide is turning, if not yet receeding.  More and more people are joining in ways of living designed to honor God’s creation and undo the damage that has been done.  In so doing, they are acting as if the resurrection, God’s power to turn back the tide of death and decay, were real.  And they are practicing resurrection themselves.  Here are some of the signs: 

In 1963, the Congress passed the Clean Air Act to reduce pollution, and have updated periodically since then.  As of December, 2006, 169 countries—the Unites States not yet among them—had signed the Kyoto Protocol, agreeing to reduce carbon emissions below their 1990 levels.  Former Vice-President Al Gore’s remarkable documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which I recommend to you, just won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature and is spreading the word to more and more people.  Resurrection practice.

Eight northeastern states, including Massachusetts, have agreed to significant emissions caps, and many US cities, including Boston, have signed on to the Kyoto principles.  Old South Church has recently undergone a complete energy audit, and the Operations Committee is examining ways to save energy and fuel.  Resurrection practice 

On Friday, March 16^th, the Interfaith Walk for Climate Rescue will begin in Northampton.  Over the next week, it will cross the State, growing as it nears Boston and more and more communities of faith join in.  On Saturday, March 24^th, the walk will leave the Cambridge Common in the morning and end here at Old South Church, where the faithful will gather for an interfaith service at 2PM, where we will worship the God that gifted us with the world and calls us to live on it with care and as people who believe that life is stronger than death.  It will be followed by what we hope will be the nation’s largest-ever rally for a faithful response to climate change, on Copley Square, at 3PM.  Your presence at the walk, service, or rally will be a resurrection practice.

My sisters and brothers, global climate change is upon us, it is dangerous, and it is real.  But our God is with us.  Our God, who made the world and who will not let it end.  Our God brings life out of death, hope out of despair, strength out of weakness, and salvation out of crucifixion.  Our God loves everything she has made so much, so much, that at the time of Noah she would not, could not let it end even when it was at its most blind and wicked.  I believe that even as I speak, that God is at work in the world, calling leaders and followers, presidents and regular people like us, to a better way, a cleaner way, a healthier way—a way that honors both God’s creation and the truth that this planet is our only ark.  That is, our God is busy resurrecting. 

When Old South hosts the Interfaith Service for Climate Rescue on March 24^th, the parament that will be on this pulpit will not be one that reflects the liturgical season.  It will be one that reflects a much deeper, much broader truth than even Lenten purple can do.  We will hang this image of the earth on our pulpit.  With it, we will remind ourselves of the long view: that all we have, all we hope, all we were, or are, or will ever be, is contained here, on one planet.  We will hang it and remind ourselves that God so loved the world, God so loved this world, that God came to live on it as Jesus Christ, and so redeemed it.  We will hang it there to remind ourselves that though the flood is real, so too is God’s love, so too is resurrection, and so too is hope.

May God be with us.  Amen.

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[1] Wikipedia: named storms.   www.wikipedia.com

[2] An Inconvenient Truth. Paramount Studios, 2006.

[3] Ibid.

[4] US Predicting Steady Increase for Emissions.  New York Times 03 March 2007.