I love Medina. I can’t believe it’s been a year since we’ve moved into our new home. Sometimes it feels like we’ve been there forever, and sometimes it feels like we’ve just moved in.

I love your tree-lined streets. I love your parks. I love the Square. I love eating at the various local restaurants, and shopping at the local stores. I love that from our church, I can walk left to the library. Or I can walk right to burgers, pizza, coffee, and more books at Project Learn. I love our spot on the square.

I love the history of this place. One of you, when showing me the Square, said, “Yeah, we had some trouble with fire. The block burned down, and we had to rebuild. We called the first building ‘The Phoenix’ as we were rising from the ashes. Then another fire came through a few years later, so we rebuilt again. This time we called it ‘The Phoenix Block’ but this time we put a fire station at the end of it.”

“Wow!” I said. “When was this?” thinking it would be like 1960-1970ish.

“Around 1870,” they replied.

“What?! But you talk about it like you were there.”

“In a way, I was.” Was the reply. And yeah, I get that now. Your sense of community and history are palpable here. You remember and honor your ancestors as you push forward into an unknown future. It’s an amazing balance that I love.

And my family loves you too! Kate is always finding new places for us to explore. We were out at Whipps’ Ledges a few weeks ago, and my goodness it was breath-taking! And the kids LOVE their school. On the last day, they were acting strange. They were excited about summer, but sad that it was the last day. That is a testament to this place. My family loves Medina.

Yet…. And not to sound ungrateful… I have noticed one thing I don’t like about Medina. Just one tiny thing. We have a lot of litter.

We walk or bike the kids to school down Reagan Parkway. We have a beautiful wide path that’s safe. Yet after the winter thaw, we noticed all sorts of trash. Pop cans and beer cans. There was trash that made sense to be there: hubcaps and wiper blades as those can fly off vehicles. There was trash that made no sense: one single shoe, a 2-gallon Deer Park water jug. Kate, being the activist, declared we’d pick up trash on our way to and from school one day. We filled two trash bags full.

We have a beautiful town, and we’re covering it in litter. This is a symptom of a deeper problem: our general misuse, mistreatment, and outward blight of the earth.

When I was in grade school, we’d get the Scholastic News. I loved this little newspaper. It had the coolest stuff! In those pages, I read about the solar car race, the importance of recycling, and the Biodome. I read about climate change and how important it was to reduce, reuse, and recycle to combat it. I learned about the hole in the Ozone layer and how a chemical in our spray cans was causing it and how this chemical was outlawed and the hole began to repair itself much to the surprise of scientists.

The earth is a remarkable place! We’re learning all sorts of things about nature through science. We must remember that we come from the earth and will one day return to it, “from dust we came and to dust we shall return.” We forget this just as we forget that the landscape of this earth is not just here. It took millennia to come here. As John O’Donohue writes, “Landscape is the first born of creation. It was here long long before we were ever dreamed. It was here without us. It watched us arrive. To the ancient landscape, we must have seemed [alien.] Yet without landscape, no human could have ever come here; there would have been literally nowhere to put us.”[1]

John O’Donohue also asks, “How can people be so insensitive to the dignity and independence of landscape?” In other words, how can we litter? How can we poison our own drinking water? How can we mistreat the earth as we do? How can we remain ambivalent to the havoc we are wreaking?

My family just took a trip to the Wilds down by Cambridge, Ohio. There we saw many endangered species like the white rhino, the Bactrian Deer, and the African Painted dog. There is over 10,000 acres. An acre is about the size of a football field, so that’s 10,000 football fields. It was land that was once strip mined by the biggest moving vehicle made by humans, the Big Muskie. It could eat mountains. Built for the Central Ohio Coal Company in 1969, it was the largest single-bucket digging machine ever made. It could swallow 295 tons in one bite out of the ground.

After the land was stripped, the EPA declared that 6 inches of topsoil be spread and the land sold. So that’s what happened and it was donated to the owners of The Wilds. Having only 6” of dirt, no trees would grow. Only grass. So they started developing the land so that endangered animals, many of which live on grassland prairie or savannahs could come and live.  Now we can learn about these species and how best to save them… but we’re saving them from ourselves.

It’s the paradox of the Wilds. We harmed the land, to reclaim the land to save the species we’ve been harming to extinction. We are the ones who moved into their space, tore up and cemented over their habitats. We are saving them from us.

I’ve always been out in nature. Behind my mom’s house is a hill we’d play on as kids. There were all sorts of paths and places to hide and have adventures. I’d camp and earn nature merit badges with the boy scouts. My favorite was the survival merit badge where we had to live for a week in the woods with just a few items, a tarp, and our sleeping bag. It was awesome. I rode horses and tromped around the wilderness at our YMCA Camp. I love the stillness of winter, the blossoms of spring, the dappled sunlight of the leaves in summer, and blaze of autumn’s glory. I love nature documentaries.

Yet our greed and waste is destroying our home. They say that by 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. The Great Barrier Reef is dying off because the water is warming. The seas are rising. Miami’s sewers aren’t working and instead of getting water out, it has become an avenue for the sea to come into the city.

In our greed, we are destroying the earth. Yet the worst part of this is, we act like it’s no big deal. Listen. The earth is going to be fine. It was here before us and will be after us. When we destroy it, we are setting fire to the house we live in. We are literally poisoning, burning, deforesting and killing ourselves. We are endangering our own species with our treatment of our home.

In our greed, we betray how smart we are as a species. We are capable, yet our greed gets the better of us and we strip mine. We poison our water. Flint Michigan still has no drinkable water. It’s been over 1,000 days. At the beloved YMCA Camp I grew up at and where I met Kate… they cannot drink the water because of the hydraulic fracking. The biggest expense of the camp is bringing in water so that kids can drink and shower.

We fail to recognize that our economy is only as strong as our ecology. We forget that economy has the same root word as ecology. From Greek: οἶκος, “house”, or “environment”; -λογία, “study of.”[2] Economy from Greek οίκος – “household” and νέμoμαι – “manage”)[3] To put it in layman’s terms, you can’t spell “economy” without “eco.”

Economy was how we manage our house. And our home is earth. How quickly we act like we’re disconnected from nature! This is our home, it’s the only one we got and it’s slowly starting to catch fire and we’re drowning in trash. The ancient Christian Mystics saw us as stewards of God’s creation, that we could co-create with God. It is this very idea that created the modern scientific method. The church birthed science due to its appreciation of God’s natural world.

Isaac Newton wrote more about the Book of Romans than he did about gravity. Gregor Mendel is the father of genetics and was a priest. Most of the first anthropologists who studied and named dinosaur fossils were Anglican priests.¹

Yet we have forgotten all of this. We are taking our world for granted and squandering God’s gift, we are mismanaging our house and our ecology and economy are struggling due to our short-sightedness. And all of this can be seen in litter around our great town that we love.

We even see it in our church. We are not immune. We have a great big blue trash can that says “We recycle” in Fellowship Hall and we use it for our trash. Less than 2% of Medina County recycles. Imagine if we could be the church that gets that number to 10%. Then 30%. Then 50%. Then 100%! Imagine if we lived into our spiritual forebears who saw creation as a gift, took inspiration from the landscape, and invented science! Imagine if we taught our children to love and be curious about the world, imagine where it would lead them! They’d be biologists and chemists, engineers, veterinarians, nurses and doctors! They’d be camp counselors and teachers. They’d honor God’s great gift to us, our world.

Consider these true stories: A kid in Argentina made solar panels from trash.[4] An 8-year-old Mexican girl who made solar water heaters from recycled plastic.[5] I once saw a video of a company using recycled plastics to pave a road.[6] Or those playgrounds that use recycled plastic to make benches and play structures, and recycled tires to be the padding and mulch to help kids land a little softer when they fall.

We can do amazing things when we set our mind to it. We can harness the wind and sun for power. We can light the darkness! Aren’t we called to be that anyway, spiritually? Imagine our world, it can be different than it is now.

Many of us had great-grandparents, grandparents, or parents that lived through the Great Depression. They used everything back then, they were very crafty. We can honor them by doing what Medina does best and I so love about it… honoring the past by going boldly into the future.

We can start by simply recycling our bulletins. We’ll have these bins around. We can start there. But we won’t end there. I’d love to see us start to reduce our use of paper products. To use sustainable and eco-friendly cleaning supplies. To switch over to LED light bulbs. Maybe even put solar panels on our roof. Less funds spent on utilities means more funds for mission, outreach, and programs. Who knows, with what we spend just on gas and electricity, we could hire an associate pastor.

In 2017, we spent $12,213 on gas and $13,697 on electricity. That’s $25,910! We could hire another pastor OR imagine what we could do! We could be the church that puts recycling bins next to the trash cans out on the Square! Talk about being ecologically conscious and loving your neighbor.

We all breathe the same air and drink the same water. Reducing and being good stewards of our usage is a form of loving our neighbor. Plants breathe in the air. There’s a spirit in the air. God is still speaking through nature. May we listen.

For the love of our town. For the love of our world. For the love of our children. For the love of God, let’s start taking intentional steps to love God’s gift of creation.

Works Cited

 O’Donohue, John. Four Elements: Reflections on Nature. Page 129.

 Wikipedia contributors, “Ecology,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ecology&oldid=844144777 (accessed June 5, 2018).

 Wikipedia contributors, “Economy,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Economy&oldid=844513519 (accessed June 5, 2018).

 http://www.euronews.com/2016/11/15/creating-solar-energy-from-trash

 http://remezcla.com/culture/8-year-old-girl-who-built-solar-water-heater-is-first-to-win-this-mexican-science-award/

 http://www.thedrive.com/news/9748/roads-made-of-recycled-plastic-are-being-tested-in-britain

¹For more on the relationship of faith and science, specifically these claims, check out Saving Darwin by Karl Giberson