Earth Day 2026: “One Earth, One People, One Love”

 

Earth Day 2026: “One Earth, One People, One Love”

It was 1990. I was rector of St. Peter’s, Monroe, CT. And I was recruited by the Reverend Roger Alling to join the Stewardship team of the Diocese of Connecticut. The diocese had just moved to a voluntary Allocation to support diocesan mission. The first-year results were just in as I arrived, and something like 90% of the goal had been pledged voluntarily. Which I thought was incredible! Not so, however, the diocesan leadership. Nor did the bishop like the fact that Roger had linked Stewardship of the Earth as part of his efforts to move us all to a more wholistic understanding of Stewardship. He felt that this was a distraction, and wanted more emphasis on just money. Soon Roger was soon looking for another job. In retrospect, how incredibly short-sighted of the bishop. For as we witness dwindling populations of bees, responsible for meeting our job description as humans to be “fruitful and multiply, agriculture as we know it is in crisis.

 

The same can be said about air pollution, water pollution, clear cutting of forests, especially in the Amazon rain forest (called “the lungs of the world”), climate change, the increase in severe weather. Put this all together and it does not take a stable genius to see that unless we take our role as caretakers, stewards, of God’s Earth and everything, every creature, every plant therein, not only will we not be able to be fruitful and multiply, there will be no air to breathe or food to eat. No amount of money can possibly make a difference. Roger was right, even visionary, to see the linkage between financial stewardship and stewardship of the Earth – the Whole Earth.

 

The Bible agrees. On Easter morning we saw Mary Magdalene, who after discovering the tomb of Jesus was empty, becomes manic to find her Lord. Suddenly she bumps into someone she supposes to be the gardener. Gardeners are caretakers of creation. In fact, Jesus is the gardener, who had been raised from the dead to redeem all of creation. Jesus, who uses a gardening metaphor to describe our relationship to him. He is the vine. We are the branches. We are to bear much fruit – fruit of his Father’s kingdom. Fruit of compassion for all living things and all living creatures. Jesus knows well that the Sinai Covenant goes in to great detail on how to farm and care for the land – including such provisions as to let the land, like all of us, have a periodical Sabbath; a time not to be planted; time to restore itself, which many settlers of this great land did not understand. In the move westward they over planted the land resulting in the great Dust Bowl. They had depleted the very soil upon which being fruitful depends. The indigenous people of the land had known better.

 

The covenant also originates the idea of “not cutting corners.” This was an early agricultural practice ordained by God at Sinai, not to reap the corners of a field, nor to reap the two rows nearest the roadway. This was so that sojourners, strangers, resident aliens fleeing famine or repression in nearby lands, could reap a little something to eat while trying to get established in their new homeland. The story of Ruth, a Moabite gentile, arguably the most beautiful story in the Hebrew Bible, illustrates this command not to cut corners! Jesus allowed his own disciples to reap from the corners or along the roadside, even on the Sabbath! As farmers, as gardeners, we are ordained as having been created in the image of the God who gives us all the resources of this fragile Earth, our island home in an otherwise hostile universe. We are ordained to be compassionate in our care of the Earth so that we might love one another and be compassionate to others who might be in need. Jesus reinforces this by linking abiding with him on the vine, like a tomato or a squash, so that we might be connected through him to the source of all life and light, that we might live out of his new command to love one another as he loves us – offering his own life on our behalf so that we might live into the dream of God of a fruitful world of fruitful people living in peace, justice, and harmony with one another – all others, no qualifications, no prerequisite requirements, for we are all one. On 9/11, Alice Walker, author and disciple of Thich Nhat Hanh, calmed herself with a mantra she devised: “One Earth, One People, One Love.” Thus grounding herself in the spirit of connectivity of all things Jesus talks about as he urges us to abide with him and his Father like fruit on a vine. [John 15:1-11]

 

It is often noted that the Bible begins with a tree, the Tree of Life in the Garden, and ends, on its final page, with the Tree of Life we hear about in the Revelation of John: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” [ Revelation 22:1-5] I think we all could agree that there is a deep need for the healing of nations here and now. Which means there is a deep need for Stewardship of the Earth if such a Tree in such a garden is to survive being clear cut for industrial and commercial purposes. The Tree of Life forms the bookends of the entire Bible, so essential is it to the healing of nations, or what Pope John Paul II would call “world peace.”

 

On the Celebration of the World Day of Peace, January 1, 1990, the Holy Father wrote: “In our day, there is a growing awareness that world peace is threatened not only by the arms race, regional conflicts, and continued injustices among peoples and nations, but by a lack of respect for nature, by the plundering of natural resources, and a progressive decline in the quality of life. The sense of precariousness and insecurity that such a situation engenders is a seedbed for collective selfishness, disregard for others, and dishonesty…. Today the ecological crisis has assumed such proportions as to be the responsibility of everyone…This not only goes hand in hand with efforts to build true peace, but also confirms and reinforces those efforts in a concrete way. When the ecological crisis is set within the broader context of the search for peace within our society we can understand better the importance of giving attention to what the earth and its atmosphere are telling us: namely, that there is in order in the universe which must be respected, and that the human person, endowed with the capability of choosing freely, has a grave responsibility to preserve this order for the well-being  of future generations. I wish to repeat that the ecological crisis is a moral issue.” The ecological crisis is a theological and moral issue.

 

The Bible and the Christian Church, the Body of Christ on Earth, has always maintained a commitment to our Stewardship of the Earth.

Bishop Irenaeus (120-202) said, “The initial step for a soul to come to knowledge of God is contemplation of nature.”

A Jewish midrash on Psalm 117 in the second century read, “The sending of rain is an event greater than the giving of Torah. The Torah was a joy for Israel, but rain gives joy to the entire world, including animals and birds.”

“The whole earth is a living icon of the face of God,” wrote John of Damascus (675-749).

John Scotus Eriugena (810-877), “Christ wears two shoes in the world, scripture and nature. Both are necessary to understand the Lord, and at no stage can creation be seen as a separation of things from God.”

Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), “If we learn to love the earth, we will find labyrinths, gardens, fountains, precious jewels! A whole new world will open itself to us. We will discover what it means to be truly alive.”

T.S. Elliot (1881-1965), “A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God.”

Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1931-2021) wrote, “The first law of our being is that we are set in a delicate network of interdependence with our fellow human beings and with the rest of God’s creation,”

 

Finally, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, in remarks at the Symposium on Religion, Science, and the Environment, in Santa Barbara, California, said this:

“How we treat the earth, and all creation, defines the relationship that each of us has with God… To commit a crime against the natural world is a sin. For humans to cause species to become extinct and to destroy biological diversity of God’s creation … for humans to degrade the integrity of Earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the Earth of its natural forests, or destroying its wetlands … for humans to injure other humans with disease … for humans to contaminate the Earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life, with poisonous substances, these things are sins.” The actions of humans against the vitality of the Earth is sinful.

 

I have long felt that we lost an opportunity in the Diocese of Connecticut when Roger Alling’s urging us to get serious about caring for creation was seen as impinging on a need to focus on the stewardship of money. Two-and-one half decades later, it looks like a tragic decision to take raising money more seriously than the Stewardship of God’s Earth, and everything therein. As we ponder once again some of the images of planet Earth taken from the perspective of the dark-side of the moon by the crew of Artimis II, perhaps there will be a renewed understanding of just how unique our planet is, and how vital its care is to human life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the diversity of all creatures who play significant roles in maintaining the environment.

 

Ellen Davis, a professor of Old Testament at Duke University, a friend and colleague, points us to look at the image of God’s loving care for creation as depicted in Psalm 65:

…your wagon tracks overflow with richness.

The pastures of the wilderness overflow,

the hills gird themselves with joy,

the meadows clothe themselves with flocks,

the valleys deck themselves with grain,

they shout and sing together for joy (vv. 11-13)

 

Davis concludes, “What an astonishing picture of God’s care for the world. The Creator of heaven and earth viewed as a hardworking but gratified farmer, hot and dirty no doubt, driving home a wagonload of grain. Certainly, such a surprising image of God has something vital to say to us who are formed in God’s image. In a word, the psalm has power to humble those who read and pray it, to root us in the soil on which life depends. The psalm is an icon, a powerful and holy image of the God given, exacting, and ultimately joyful work of earth care. God does it, and so must we.” (Knowing Our Place on Earth: Learning Environmental Responsibility from the Old Testament)

 

Every day must be Earth Day – The Earth’s Day. One day a year is wholly inadequate to remind us of our ordained responsibilities as those creatures created in the image of god to care for and preserve the fruitfulness of our true home – the Earth, God’s creation and everything therein. Every day we must remember, there is only One Earth, One People, One Love.

Amen.