A Creation Poem
Rolled into Creator’s hand,
a widow’s mite of stardust, sea salt and
baptism, a whisper of air,
a Tongue as of fire, then time…to rest and bake and allow the Yeast to rise; this parable of universal dimensions, or of earth, or of humanity, or of love; God so imagined, and it was so, and so you are…
Prayer Card Made by Rev. Krehl Stringer,
Fergus Falls, MN
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Photos & Videos from the EcoFaith Retreat
Members from the EcoFaith Network, leadership team, and representatives from several Minnesota synods gathered September 10th-11th at Camp Hiawatha.
We shared stories, challenges, grief, laughs, and much more during the retreat. See some photo highlights below and videos of why people are engaged in EcoFaith here.
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Creation Stories from Congregations |
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Breathe. Grieve. Gather. Commit. Act.
Creation Care Article
Written for Concordia Lutheran Church, Duluth
September 2021 Newsletter
EcoFaith Network NE MN Synod
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Recently you may have heard news stories about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) 2021 Report. You can find the report at https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/.
According to Earth Ministry (Washington State’s Interfaith Power and Light (WAIPL)
organization): “The results are harrowing; intensifying climate change is unavoidable and
humans are ‘unequivocally’ to blame.”
How are we to respond to such catastrophic news in the midst of a summer filled with pandemic
news, heat waves, floods, and fires? I sometimes feel like it would be easier to bury my head in
the sand and pretend that none of this is happening. Fortunately, there are other options which
were included in an email I received from WAIPL titled “Breathe, Grieve, Gather, Commit: A Response to the IPCC report.”
The first step is to Breathe. Reflect, pray, and allow yourself the time to just be in the stillness of God’s creation. While the information presented in the report is alarming, we have time to read, meditate, think about, and process this information before acting. I find myself returning to this step frequently.
Read the whole article here.
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Kristin M. Peterson is a retired Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College instructor, where she taught courses in music and philosophy, including Environmental Ethics and Introduction to Sustainability. She is a member of Concordia Lutheran church and has been a co-leader of Concordia's Creation Care team since 2008
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Congregational Waste Reduction
St. Andrew's Lutheran Church-Mahtomedi,
St. Paul Area Synod Care of Creation
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One of the first big projects St. Andrew's Environmental Stewardship Team wanted to tackle was getting rid of all the styrofoam in the church. This felt like a monumental task for a
megachurch, long before there were compostables readily available. The first order of business was to provide receptacles for sorting the variety of waste from an event. Members of the team wrote grants and worked with Washington County and the waste haulers to come up with the three-bin sorting receptacles that are now found all over campus: Recycle-Organics-Waste.
Once those were in place, it was time to tackle the Styro-Beast. We took the time and effort to show the congregation what the weekly waste looked like coming from our church each and every week - bags and bags and more bags of mostly Styrofoam cups from the coffee service after church. It was ugly! The team initially provided the extra funds required to switch to compostables, until the upgrade was written into the church budget. Eventually, the switch was made, and we haven't looked back! It has spread from cups to bowls and then plastic cups and more. Eventually, we realized that we needed to address the vendors bringing waste onto our campus, The attached vendor requirements have been developed by the team with the church staff, and we are making our way towards being a zero waste facility that we can all be proud of!
Here are the community guidelines St. Andrew's created around zero waste.
Submitted by Laurie Windisch
Laurie and her husband Mark Windisch serve on the St. Andrew’s Environmental Stewardship
Team. They are active members of the St. Paul Area Synod Care of Creation Work Group.
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Creation as
Singer of Lament
Romans 8:20-22
Sometimes, as I read about the many environmental crises that face us, I honestly believe I can hear the creation crying. In most of the laments in Scripture, humans cry out to God in faith and in despair asking God why the divine promises are so long in coming. Creation does not have a strong voice in these biblical laments, though Psalm 19 says that the heavens proclaim God’s handiwork though no voice is heard.
Indeed, at a recent retreat at Camp
Hiawatha, the Ecofaith leadership teams of NE MN and St. Paul synods held a service of lament in which we sang Psalm 13 as a lament of creation. We heard the cries of the surrounding trees, birds, and waters and, in this hearing, we understood ourselves to embody the “enemy” of the lament – those who, while seeming to be friends, are rather the very bearers of destruction and abuse.
At such times, the words of Romans 8:20-22 give voice to the cry:
...for the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail until now…
The whole creation groans in travail. How should we respond to lament of the other? First, we should hear the groaning, listening with empathy and compassion. And then we should join in the groaning. Let the lament of creation become our own voiced lament. Let us add words to the groaning. Finally, let us take on the suffering of the other. Let us acknowledge and correct our complicit. And, in so far as we are able and with God’s help, let us alleviate the pain.
Here is the service of Lament mentioned above for your use in worship.
By Dr. Diane Jacobson, Professor Emerita, Luther Seminary
Retired Director of the ELCA Book of Faith Initiative
Member, LeadershipTeam of the EcoFaith Network NE MN Synod and
the St. Paul Area Synod Care of Creation Work Group
Mother of Zipporah, the singing dog
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Creation Advocacy
Standing with Creation
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"...In a world increasingly threatened by more severe weather, species extinction, and ecological collapse, not just our ways of life but religion itself is in need of conversion. It’s a hindrance when religion sees creation solely as a means to serve humanity, when it forgets its inherent goodness before we came on the scene, when it does not name as sinful our over-consumptive patterns of life and when it denies scientific consensus about what we’re doing to the planet. It is detrimental when religion sees salvation narrowly in terms of human souls or escaping the earth and it is more faithful to scripture when it sees all creation as a recipient of God’s covenant concern, God’s promised care and redemption.
An ecological conversion is called for, echoing Pope Francis, Desmond Tutu, and leaders of other faith traditions. It means that living our human calling to be stewards and protectors of God’s creation is not optional; it is not secondary but an essential aspect of practicing faith today..."
Read all of Pastor Dave Carlson’s remarks at Code Read Climate Rally, Duluth here
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Faith Leaders Climate Letter to invest in climate action. Photo of Iron Range group delivering the letter to Senator Klobuchar's office to the right.
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Worship with the Whole Creation
Tools for Worship in Your Congregation
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Green Blades Rising Preaching Roundtable
October 10th-31st Rev. Kristin Foster
The first four Sundays in October move us slowly through the pivotal 10th chapter of Mark. Jesus is heading toward crucifixion in Jerusalem, that minor colonial outpost of the Roman Empire and the center of Temple religion.Roman military and political leaders are always on the ready to use violence to quell resistance to the Empire. The Temple leaders, knowing their powerlessness in the Empire’s grand scheme of things, try to protect their own place within Empire by guarding status quo.
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Someday that Empire will implode. It is not sustainable. But caught within it, in the immediacy of its tentacled power, its ultimate unsustainability may seem irrelevant to survival in the present. Moreover, the Empire was really good at doling out crumbs of rewards for those who accept its terms.
Why does this matter for us, as we preach amidst so many needs close at hand? How do we preach truthfully with the near horizon of accelerating ecological unraveling brought on by our own ‘empire’ or civilization?
Up here in northern Minnesota (even down close to the State Capitol), we live in a minor outpost of an ‘empire’ of industrial, petroleum-fueled, consumption-based civilization.
In this situation, will we take the role of Temple leaders, knowing the danger of challenging this ‘Empire’, simply trying to protect our place as church, help people when we can, and keep our worship traditions alive?
Or does Jesus call us to something else? What does it mean to follow Jesus in the context of the existential threat of climate disruption and ecological destruction?
In the Gospel readings for all the Sundays in October, we can learn, sometimes uncomfortably so, where our own following begins.
Read all of the October reflections here.
Children have not yet learned to limit their power to save.
How many were there that day? Three of us? Four of us? All five?
What was the year? How old were we?
Some stories, like gospel writing, do not need answers to those questions.
They breathe on their own, or, become part of the lungs we breathe with.
This one, this story, begins with that well-worn path down to the beach.
You remember how the largely scraggy trees made a temple there, how they met us on the way,
Read the rest of this beautiful poem mentioned about the Bartimaeus Oak here.
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We want to hear from you!
If you are interested in providing a roundtable reflection, email revkristinfoster@gmail.com
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This Month's Green Tips
Feel free to use these striking Green Tips created by two Synod members for your bulletins and general knowledge! These are meant to inspire earthkeeping action!
This month, Laura Raedeke green tips focus on water.
Here are Laura Raedeke's Green Tips Lutheran Church of the Cross in Nisswa and here are Steve Spigarelli's Green Tips from First Lutheran in Aitkin.
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Connections with Creation
October 3 – Lectionary 27/ Pentecost 19
Psalm 8 takes a sweeping view of creation with awe and wonder. The psalmist marvels at the cosmos and wonders at humanity’s place in it. Lest listeners misunderstand the use of the word “dominion” (v. 6, NRSV) in this text, we must distinguish it from dominate. The Hebrew word for the former conveys a sense of responsibility of all humanity to care for that which has been entrusted to us. Sometimes we have violated that trust, as the present ecological state of our world attests. Yet, “out of the mouths of infants and children” (v. 2, ELW)—youth—God speaks words of accountability. Consider, for example, teen climate activists such as Greta Thunberg, Xiye Bastida, Autumn Peltier, and Mari Copeny. Their protests and actions in their local communities are now mobilizing a worldwide movement of young people to fight for the planet they are inheriting. “For it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs” (Mark 10:14).
Read all the October Connections with Creation here.
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Read. Watch. Listen. Share!
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Book Review
The Right to Be Cold
by Sheila Watt-Coutier
The title of Watt-Coutier’s book might resonate with us who live in northern Minnesota, but
others might ask, who wants that right?
I heard Sheila speak at a Nobel Conference on climate change at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. She has been a powerful advocate for making the world aware of how the climate crisis we are in affects one particular people in one particular area of the world, northern Canada. As the book cover states: “One woman’s fight to protect the Arctic and save the planet from climate change.” Her influence has generated a foreward by Bill McKibben.
The thesis of the book revolves around the changes that climate warming has brought to the Arctic circle region of the earth and how it impacts the people that live there, primarily Inuit natives. The culture of those people that have adapted to the cold of the Arctic has drastically changed due to the Arctic warming faster than the rest of the planet, and modernity invading the region with mining, logging, and conveniences that have changed their way of life in ways not desired or asked for. Houses on permafrost now cave in. Seal and Polar Bear hunting is nearly impossible. As Sheila bemoans, the Canadian government is more interested in protecting the Polar Bear than helping her people cope with the changes wrought with climate change.
Read the whole book review here.
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This book review is by John Hanson, a retired pastor living on Turtle Lake, north of Grand Rapids, with his wife, Linda. He is a member of the NE MN Synod EcoFaith Leadership Team.
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We want to hear from you!
If you are interested in sharing anything with the network in the newsletter, email ecofaith@nemnsynod.org
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In Case You Missed These EcoFaith Events...
EcoFaith Summit
Here is the link for the full video recording of the EcoFaith Summit:
Here is a link to the playlist for all the pieces from the Summit:
Here is a description of the speakers.
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Click here to see previous
Green Blades Rising newsletters
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The EcoFaith Network NEMN Synod
Living out God's call to be stewards of the earth for the sake of the whole creation.
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