This past Sunday many of you gathered in Fullerton Room to watch the documentary “The Return of the River,” the story of the removal of hydroelectric dams along the Elwha River in Oregon to allow the native flora and fauna as well as the indigenous community to return to the fullness of life that they had on the Olympic Peninsula for generations.
My favorite part in the film was the footage of someone speaking against the dam’s removal by asking, “Who are we to play God with the river?” Of course, she didn’t understand the irony of her reluctance to return the river to the way that God had originally created it.
This week and this month, we celebrate Earth Day. In one aspect Earth Day is a secular acknowledgement of the ways that all people need to think and act differently to be able to preserve our planetary inheritance. But Earth Day has a theological component for us as Christians as well, as we consider what it means to fulfill God’s mandate to care for the created world.
Over the past year the BMPC Environmental Justice Committee has launched a new priority and opportunity on our church campus to consider not what it means not to “play God” but to help return our little corner of creation back to the beauty God originally created it to be.
Our Plant Native/Native Plant Initiative is all about encouraging and equipping us as a church to plant native trees and plants in the beds at the church and in your flower beds and yards at home.
There are wonderful resources on our church website to help get you started this spring to create what naturalist Doug Tallamy calls a “Home Grown National Park.”
This Sunday at 11:15 a.m. we are delighted to welcome Master Gardener Leslie Bass to give us tangible and simple way to start this work or to even expand the wonderful native planting that we know many of you are already doing. We hope to see you there.
May we all use these warming days of new blooms and new life as a moment to reignite a new hope in our capacity to return our own spaces, homes and community into a beautiful reflection of God’s good creation.
