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This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine – ever wonder why light is such a central part of religious images, from Cathedral windows to spirituals, from liturgy to lyrics? Light and faith are connected in ways as sparkling and multifaceted as a crystal chandelier. Light is wondrous, beautiful, mysterious. It transmits from one place to another. It is so often a gift, not something we have somehow earned or even deserve, but it brings joy to our hearts nonetheless. Without it, we stumble, or we stand frozen with fear. With it, we can go forth like a new day dawning.

This morning, I want to add another connection. For today, and in today’s climate, by which I mean climate of faith, political climate, and just plain how-hot-will-the-summer get climate climate, light can also signify our shared responsibility for the world around – and at the same time, our ability to respond profoundly, powerfully, faithfully to duty’s call.

But responsibility to what? Take a moment to close your eyes. Now, picture the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word "environment." Now raise your hand if there were any people in that picture. (very few hands get raised) That’s a problem, folks – we have somehow gotten to think that "environment" is something out there—wilderness and whales, rather than where we are, always – where we live, learn, work, play, grow, pray. We are not apart from but a part of God’s universe. This connection is both a scientific fact, and a profound spiritual truth. I must admit, I just don’t get much of the emotional fervor behind those wishing to ban the teaching of evolution. What is so scary about it? Think of it this we: we are related to not just everyone but everything around us, made of the same stuff, responding to signals from the same double helix that we all share at our core. Our world is so shaped that we can enter into the beloved community with the entire world, united before God. Despite our alienation from each other and from the world around us, God has opened a gateway for all of us to find our way home.

But the way we use power – political, spiritual, and electrical – is threatening the viability of that home. In this area, about half of our electricity comes from coal-burning power plants. And as that coal burns, each time we switch on a light, it causes three levels of pollution – the immediate, the soon, and the not-as-far-in-the-future-as-you-may-think. Immediate: tons and tons of soot, the worst of which are particles so tiny you can’t see them. But while some may say that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, in this case it is clear that what you can’t see can kill you – for this soot hastens the death of tens of thousands of Americans each year, causes and exacerbates lung diseases and asthma, and even contributes to sudden infant death syndrome.

The soon: every ton of coal contains a very small amount of mercury – but even these tiny amounts can be all too powerful. Once they drift back down, they wash into rivers, lakes, the ocean, where mercury is converted – another term with both scientific and religious implications – to methylmercury, which then works its way up the food chain. When pregnant woman eat fish that eat fish that eat fish, the mercury can cross the placenta and damage the developing brain.

And then we come to the effects of what we used to think was the good end result – carbon dioxide, a non-toxic gas that plants need for photosynthesis. But you can have too much of a good thing. Carbon dioxide is the most abundant of the so-called greenhouse gases, responsible for the greenhouse effect that makes life possible on earth. What’s the greenhouse effect? If you’ve ever entered a car that has been sitting in the sun with the windows rolled up, you’ve felt it. Some substance – including glass and the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere – let light through, but then trap some of the heat that results when that light is absorbed. Trap enough heat, and you change the climate.

Why does that matter? When you rev up the engine of the climate, all sorts of things happen. The rainy times get rainier and the dry ones drier, leading to more floods and more droughts. Peak summer temperatures will rise – and even the difference of degree during a heat wave can cause hundreds, even thousands of extra deaths, primarily among the elderly and the very young. Winters that have heretofore stopped the spread of diseases ranging from malaria to West Nile virus won’t do the trick anymore. And as glaciers and ice caps melt, ocean levels rise and ocean currents change. During the warmer periods of our planet’s past, the gulf stream has stopped – which would be bad news here, but an utter disaster for England.

Now that you may be feeling good and depressed, let me try to answer two other important questions – why should this be an issue for the faith community, and what can we do about it, questions whose answers are, I hope, linked. Why us? I mean, the concerns I have raised should be important to everybody, but why especially to people of faith? First of all, because, despite so much discussion around the last election, which somehow tried to reduce thousands of years of the most profound ethical and spiritual teachings in sound bites limited to pelvic politics, our faiths, whatever their differences, hold this much in common: We respect God and God’s handiwork, life all around us and including us – and we believe in the pursuit of justice. Indeed, the UCC has quite often taken the lead in what is sometimes called the cause of environmental justice – for while pollution does not discriminate, we tend to put things that pollute, from bus depots to power plants, in the backyards of those with the least power, into poor communities and communities of color. Furthermore, those with less power and wealth also have less access to things that can ameliorate the effects of either pollution or climate change. For example, some predictions show that if we do nothing about our use of coal and oil, sea levels will rise enough to put 1/3 of Florida underwater – and 1/3 of Bangladesh. Ask yourself, which country has the resources to take care of that population shift? If we believe in justice, we cannot abide the status quo, we cannot stand idly by the blood of our neighbors.

Furthermore, our faiths promote a variety of virtues that could be put to service in addressing these concerns. One of the most important, if not the most sexy, is prudence. We read in Deuteronomy (22:8) "When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, so that you do not bring bloodguilt on your house if anyone should fall from it."

Now what is that about? First, a parapet is not having two dogs. Rather, it is a small barrier placed at the edges of a roof – a flat roof as you might find in the drier climates of the Mideast, rather than our rainy climes and peaked roofs. Putting a parapet around those roofs is not worrying about an event unlikely to ever occur, for those roofs got a lot of use – for drying clothes, growing food, or just sunbathing, as Bathsheva was doing when David saw her from his roof. But it is a recognition that it is better to prevent a disaster than to try to clean it up after the fact. Once someone has fallen off, it’s a bit late to start worrying.

Finally, we bring that little but powerful light of hope. Today marks the end of Passover in the Jewish calendar, a reminder that Pharaoh, once the most powerful person on the planet, is long gone – but those he enslaved are yet singing songs of praise. We have witnessed unbreakable shackles broken, we have taken part in impossible marches of freedom that have split asunder countless Red Seas. Do not despair. As Rabbi Nachman, one of the great Hasidic teachers, used to say, the whole world, all of it, is a very narrow bridge. But the important thing is not to be afraid.

We can cross that bridge unafraid in part because we can take significant actions. Yes, to fully address the concerns of how we power up our society, we will need the federal government to take action. But in the meantime, there is much we can do in our own houses and our houses of worship – and that is why Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light was formed, to give tech support to these efforts to care for God’s creation. Specifically, we help congregations in four ways. We help them educate on these issues and incorporate them into worship services, but also the nitty-gritty of saving energy and buying clean energy. Congregations become partners with GWIPL when they pledge to do something in at least one of these four categories – changing the exit signs in this building to ones that save $75/year in energy costs, for example. I’m honored that Christ Congregational is one of original 13 founding partners of GWIPL – which should give an added incentive to you to take some actions of your own. Let me suggest two concrete steps. First, figure out which little light shines most in your house – and then change that bulb or maybe two or three to compact fluorescent bulbs. Second, if you haven’t already figured out what you want to do for Mother’s Day, try something different – buy clean energy for a month or six months or a year in her honor. If you want to learn more about these issues, you can also sign up for our monthly enewsletter either downstairs at the fair or on our website, www.gwipl.org These actions not only make a difference in and of themselves. But they also help transform the entire energy market, so that people can do the right thing without extra hassle and cost.

The Psalmist wrote: Or Zarua La Tzadik. Light is sown for the righteous. Picture that – planting seeds of light that flower when watered by righteousness. We can make this image come alive, if we use our economic and spiritual power righteously, if we use electrical power that is made with a concern for righteousness. We can plant the seeds of a better, cleaner, more loving future, where little lights will shine on and on and on.

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