In my lifetime I have seen a marked shift in the conversation about the environment. As a child I watched my grandfather pour turpentine through the grate next to the curb in front of his house. That grate connected with a sewer that eventually emptied itself into the Mississippi River. “The solution to pollution is dilution.” That was the way of thinking for many, still is the train of thought, for most of the world. If we can dilute it enough so that we no longer see it, smell it, or have to deal with it then the pollution has disappeared. Our own branch of the Chicago River, the one that flows through this campus was part of this same train of thought.
By the late 1800’s there was massive population growth in Chicago and a significant increase in industrial and commercial development. The waste produced by people and industry was dumped directly into the river and soon there were visible signs of pollution and the river was given names like “the stinking river” and “the bubbling river”. At that time the river flowed directly into Lake Michigan which allowed sewage and other pollution into the clean-water source for the city.
Chicagoans were increasingly concerned about threats the river posed to public health and came up with a novel solution. They would change the directional flow of the river, create an additional manmade channel and reroute their pollution away from them and into the Mississippi River so that they wouldn’t have to suffer it’s affects any longer. The thinking was that all that pollution would eventually find its way into a bigger body of water, the Gulf of Mexico and the solution to pollution would be dilution.
The ugly underbelly of our western success is that it has produced an unbelievable amount of pollution. And the insidious thinking that has gone along with it is “out of sight, out of mind”. We continue to produce massive amount of pollution and as a general rule we either reroute it so that we won’t have to suffer the effects of it or we bury our garbage in the earth and landscape over the top of it.
Throughout this year we have been digging deeper into the principles of shalom. Shalom, as most of you know, is the Hebrew word for peace but it is bigger than just feeling peaceful. Achieving shalom is about living in such a way that we are in right relationship with God and right relationship with one another. Shalom is a plural word and in order to live in such peace we must learn to live in a corporate and plural manner. Shalom requires that we think not just about ourselves but about the implications of our ways of living upon all other living things. If we want to experience shalom we simply cannot dilute our bad behavior or bury it under a bed of flowers.
In his book, The Green Revolution, Ben Lowe calls the Christian community to the restoration of shalom. “Because shalom was lost from all of creation, it must now be restored to all creation, human and nonhuman. Right relationships must be restored between God and us, within our relationship to ourselves, between us and each other, between us and nature, and within nature itself...Injustices have been committed against God, the earth and one another, and these wrongs must be righted if there is to be any true and lasting shalom.”
We will be gathering in the green space for our chapel service this morning where we will be in full view of the North Branch of the Chicago River. We invite you to join us as we consider our commitment to the restoration of all creation and the hope of shalom for the entire earth. Ben Lowe will be bringing God’s word and challenge to us this morning and we will be joining together in the planting of our newest tree on campus.
