"Now the green blade rises from the buried grain" | |
An online publication of the EcoFaith Network NE-MN Synod with Saint Paul Area Synod Care of Creation | |
Election Resources from Interfaith Power and Light | |
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EcoFaith and Hunger at NE MN Synod Walking Together
October 12, Lutheran Church of the Cross, Nisswa
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The annual Walking Together event will take place Saturday, Oct 12th at Lutheran Church of the Cross in Nisswa, MN. Doors open at 8am, with the festivities beginning at 9am. Our theme this year is Walking Together: 50 Years of ELCA World Hunger, as we highlight and mark the ministry of ELCA World Hunger over the past 50 years. The EcoFaith Network will present a workshop at the event.
We invite you to spread the word, share widely with your church, utilize the graphics and information below in your congregational communications, and come celebrate with us all that God has done through ELCA World Hunger and the Northeastern Minnesota Synod!
Learn more and register here
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Creating a Pollinator Garden at Our Saviour's Lutheran, Stillwater
by Don Schuld, Saint Paul Area Care of Creation
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Since the formation of the Care of Creation team in 2019 at Our Savior's Lutheran Church in Stillwater, Minnesota, the goal has been to install a rain or pollinator garden to manage parking lot runoff. Initial plans for a rain garden faced delays due to city street reconstruction, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a new adjacent senior facility. By January 2021, the team committed to developing a garden, but city delays and financial constraints led to a switch to a pollinator garden in early 2023.
A 1,500 square foot area was chosen, and with the help of the County Watershed District, plans were redrawn, and a $750 matching grant was secured. Despite challenges with weed suppression, the project moved forward with additional fundraising, including a $1,000 donation from the Stillwater Sunrise Rotary and $1,400 from congregation contributions.
In April 2023, soil preparation began, followed by planting over 1,100 native flowers and grasses in June. The garden was blessed by the congregation in July, and it has already shown colorful blossoms. The successful project has inspired further efforts to reduce lawn turf around the church.
Read the full article here
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Your Congregation can Become a Pollinator Sanctuary! | |
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In fall 2023, the staff of Camp Onomia began to prepare for a garden as a teaching tool for campers and other guests, to use the food grown, and support local pollinators. Camp Onomia is an ELCA camp in the NE-MN Synod located in Onamia, MN.
In the winter, seedlings were grown inside and then planted in the spring. Leah, one of our summer staff members, took control of maintaining the garden, and compost bins and a rain barrel were added.
Camp Onomia reports that "Campers have loved being able to find, pick, and taste items such as beans, cucumbers, and basil!" The camp hopes to expand composting and pollinator habitat and evaluate waste in the future as a part of their Creation Care ministry.
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Lake Superior Harvest Festival
September 7, Duluth
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The Duluth Harvest Festival is celebrating its 30th Anniversary this year! The festival will be held at Bayfront Park on September 7th from 10-4. The event organizers describe it as "A family-oriented event featuring a huge farmers market, live music all day, expanded Energy Fair experience, nonprofit exhibitors tent, educational demonstrations and much more!"
Learn more here
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Deep Roots Festival
Saturday, September 24, Frazee, MN
Deep Roots Festival is a community celebration that increases our connection to local foods and the farmers and growers who make them in the Lake Agassiz Region. There will be food tours, classes, vendors, art, and more!
Learn more here
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Apply for a NE-MN Synod EcoFaith Microgrant | |
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Each year, the EcoFaith Network provides microgrants to congregations, camps, and campus ministries in the NE-MN synod for projects related to creation care. Projects in a variety of areas are eligible for funding in pursuit of the following mission goals addressed by EcoFaith Network efforts: worship, education, congregational life, buildings and grounds, community action, and other creation care centered activities. Grants are available in amounts between $100-$1000.
Applications received at the beginning of a month will be reviewed and acted on by the EcoFaith leadership team before the end of that month.
Learn more and find application materials here
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This Month's Green Tips
Here are Laura Raedeke's Green Tips from Lutheran Church of the Cross, Nisswa
June 2024 Was the 13th Consecutive Month to Set a New Average Temperature Record: What This Means for All Living Beings, Including Us.
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Worshipping with the Whole Creation | |
Green Blades Preaching Roundtable | |
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The Green Blades Preaching Roundtable weekly reflections by a variety of preaching writers on the ecological implications of each Sunday’s lectionary.
The writing schedule for the Green Blades Preaching Roundtable in 2025 is now open. Please email revkristinfoster@gmail.com if you would like to write for a Sunday. Here are the guidelines for writing reflections.
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15th Sunday after Pentecost
September 1, 2024
Kristin M. Peterson, SAM
Bethlehem, Twig, Minnesota
Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9
Psalm 15
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Sunday, September 1st is part of our Labor Day weekend. It is a time where one can look back over the events of the summer or look forward to the preparations for fall including the start of school, a time to harvest, and a focus on stewardship.
One source from Sundays and Seasons was a commentary written by Douglas Moe on the James text in The Lectionary Commentary: Theological Exegesis for Sunday’s Texts, edited by Roger E. Van Harn (522-525). For Moe, the focus of this reading is on how the gifts received from God are to be put into God’s service in specific and practical ways. We are reminded to be doers and not hearers. That God’s word, law, covenant is now written not on stones but in our hearts. God’s word brings new life when it is planted in our hearts. God’s word brings blessings, but it also brings demands.
Read the full reflection here
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16th Sunday after Pentecost
September 8, 2024
Pastor Karen Behling (she/her)
Chippewa Falls, WI
Isaiah 35:4-7a
Psalm 146
James 2:1-17
Mark 7:24-37
Healing is a theme that runs throughout all these readings – the healing of human bodies, healing beyond inequities, healing that focuses on the most vulnerable amongst us, healing that brings us into life-giving relationships with one another. The final verses in the Isaiah passage invite us to look beyond humanity to include creation in this healing and to remember that life-giving waters are crucial to a hopeful future. This would be a great day for worship to include Thanksgiving at the Font.
Claimed by God in the waters of Baptism, we are sent out into the world to love and care for all created by God – all people, all creatures, all plants, all resources, all of creation. We are sent to do God’s work using our hands.
Read the full reflection here
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17th Sunday after Pentecost
September 15, 2024
Pastor Daphne Urban, Bemidji, Minnesota
Isaiah 50: 4-9a or Proverbs 1: 20-33
Psalm 116: 1-9
James 3: 1-12
Mark 8: 27-38 (esp. 31-38)
This Sunday’s scriptures are full of promises that shatter expectations. In verse after verse, story after story, God promises impossible things.
And the miracles keep coming. There is a miracle of a child born to Abraham and Sarah, who were just about to lay their retirement chair out on their porch. Instead, their long time prayer of having their very own child came true. They instead got to put a rocking chair in the house, Next to a crib, for their very own baby. A God miracle if there ever was one.
We also hear about the miracle of how suffering, death, and resurrection bring us into God’s kingdom and transform our lives! We hear about the miracle of faith that allows us to believe the unbelievable. And one of the best miracles to me is how God makes us, all of us, God’s own church, the very living body of Christ.
Read the full reflection here
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18th Sunday after Pentecost
September 22, 2024
Rev. Gary Hedding, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin
Mark 9:30-37
Jeremiah 11:18-20
Psalm 54
James 3:13-4:3, 7-8
The abundance of the earth has saved humankind from disease and famine. The topography of earth’s mountains, oceans, and canyons has rescued tribes with distance from the ruthlessness of other tribes. Still, we knowingly and unknowingly, with insolence and ruthlessness, pursue our own comfort and egos at the expense of the planet and its inhabitants. The planet is forced out of balance by human works. More species are brought to extinction. Creation sings this psalm to plead for God’s salvation and vindication - its right to exist. The hope of the psalm is the confidence and faith that God is creation’s helper and the upholder of its life. This confidence is rooted in the experience of five previous extinction events that looked like any one of them would finish life on this planet. God upheld life. As humans indulge in what some scientists deem the Anthropocene epoch - the next big extinction event - creation looks to the One who has saved it in the past. This time the cause of extinctions is not mindless. This time humankind can be moved by God to repent, to change our hearts and minds, so that life will be upheld and creation will give thanks to God again.
Read the full reflection here
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19th Sunday after Pentecost
September 29, 2024
Pastor Paul Brown, Immanuel, Princeton, Minnesota
Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29
Psalm 19:7-14
James 5:13-20
Mark 9:38-50
We are all part of a holy priesthood, having access to God, to perform the works of God in the world. Some would preclude others from such access, but the Spirit that was unleashed at Pentecost is at work, apart from any attempts to hinder it. The same Spirit that hovered over the face of the waters of creation continues to hover over the community of believers. The Spirit binds us together for the common purpose of ministering to others in need and as stewards of the gift of creation itself.
Read the full reflection here
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Connections with Creation
September
September 15 – 17th Sunday after Pentecost
The theology of the cross holds that Christians can encounter Jesus wherever there is suffering. As Christians in the age of climate crisis, we must urgently begin to understand that the cross exists wherever the earth is desecrated and wherever nonhuman creation faces extinction or suffering at our hands. There is no cheap grace in this crisis. While our endless consumption of fossil fuels and other materials has allowed us to “gain the whole world” (Mark 8:36), we are also forfeiting our lives and the life of nonhuman creation. Indeed, we humans are learning that we must be willing to let our old lives die if we wish to save the life of our planet.
Read all Connections with Creation for September and October
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Not the End of the World
by Hannah Ritchie
Review by Fred Quivik, Saint Paul Area Care of Creation
As the weather gets warmer and more extreme, with more numerous killing heat waves, floods, and devastating storms, folks can be immobilized by discouragement if we focus mainly on our understanding that humanity’s pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere continues to increase. Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World aims to relieve us from that discouragement by showing all the ways that humanity is now doing a much better job than is widely understood in addressing the monumental environmental issues that face us, including climate change. Not the End of the World does not suggest that we can now rest on our laurels – far from it! It does, however, show that we are finally doing quite well, and we need to keep working on it, on multiple fronts.
Read the full review here
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Through the College of St. Scholastica, Pastor Dave Carlson of Gloria Dei in Duluth facilitates two monthly book discussion groups, to which all are welcome:
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Religion & Science, Wednesday, September 18 - The Three Ages of Water: Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future, by Peter Gleick (2023). Meeting 8:00-9:00 a.m. via Zoom. Contact Pastor Carlson for the link or for more information, pastor@gloriadeiduluth.org
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Earth Harmony, Thursday, September 19 - Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists, by Leah Penniman (2023). Meeting 8:00-9:00 a.m. in person at Chester Creek Cafe in Duluth.
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Check out the Green Lectionary Podcast!
Creation Justice Ministries produces a podcast that it describes as "a conversation on scripture with a creation justice lens." Check it out here!
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Trying to figure out how Faith and Science work together every week?
Listen to The Faith and Science Podcast, following the Revised Common Lectionary each week and try to answer that question. It can be found at wherever podcasts are found or at
https://thefaithandsciencepodcast.podbean.com/
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Read. Watch. Listen. Share! | |
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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SPAS Care of Creation
We are called to care for God's creation as a central part of our Christian faith and identity.
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