Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
(A-cycle)  July 13, 2008

Many years ago, television carried a dramatic public service announcement. A Native American, right out of old cowboy movies, riding a horse, came over a hill to behold what should have been an awesomely beautiful landscape. Instead he saw land that had been turned into a dump, littered with trash and rusting old cars. In close-up, the camera caught a single tear running down his cheek.

I never forgot that public service announcement, and not just because the actor playing the American Indian happened to be named Iron Eyes Cody. I was reminded of it this week when I read the words of St. Paul: “all creation is groaning in labor pains until now.” When it comes to sin and redemption, we and the world around us are in it together.

I don’t know how much damage people were able to do to the environment in St. Paul’s day, but we have power they never dreamed of, power to poison our air and water, power to gouge and pit our hills and valleys, power to drain our soil of its fertility and turn it into a dust bowl, power to melt our polar ice caps and breach the ozone layer that protects us from the sun.

We human beings are the most dangerous of all species. Last week on 60 minutes, I saw a segment dealing with the slaughter of African gorillas. They had been trained to accept the presence of humans in their midst. Their reward was a hail of bullets. You might say this doesn’t concern us. We are not potential gorilla poachers. But we may have our own sins of which to repent.

In 2002, a whale washed up on the coast of Normandy in France. The cause of its disorientation and ultimate death seems to have been a ton of undigested packaging in its stomach, much of it in the form of plastic shopping bags. To pollute an ocean is no easy undertaking, but we seem to have done it.

Only recently have we become conscious of our responsibility to our planet. We are not just its users and consumers; we are also its caretakers. We should leave our environment better than we found it, in trust to our children and grandchildren. And we have the power to do that, too. Scripture speaks of the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. Only God has that capability, but God typically uses human instruments to accomplish his purposes. In the beginning, creation was a garden. It can be that again if we have the will to make it so and the love for this earth and its creator to motivate us. The labor and groaning of creation can lead to a new birth that truly reflects the beauty and glory of God.