Easter Greetings from Greenpeace The Episcopal Church ™

The Most Rev. Katherine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church ™, gets in touch with her inner Gore and writes us, her flock, about an upcoming holiday:

Your Easter celebration undoubtedly has included lots of physical signs of new life -- eggs, flowers, new green growth.

And bunnies? You forgot the bunnies, Kate. What says new life more than cute fuzzy creatures who have sex a lot? And we all know that sex is so important to The Episcopal Church ™ that they will stop at nothing to be "inclusive” of all kinds of sex.

As the Easter season continues, consider how your daily living can be an act of greater life for other creatures.

Like bunnies?

How can you enact the new life we know in Jesus the Christ? In other words, how can you be the sacrament, the outward and visible sign, of the grace that you know in the resurrected Christ? How can your living let others live more abundantly?

Warning! Warning, Will Robinson! Obligatory “it’s-our-fault-there-are-any-problems-in-the-world” statement follows. (It’s our “tradition” that's at fault, you know….)

The Judaeo-Christian tradition has been famously blamed for much of the current environmental crisis….

So? The auto industry has been famously blamed for keeping a 200mpg car off the market. The government has been been famously blamed for 9/11. Since when does the notoriety of something make it true? And what about the Moslem tradition, or the Hindu tradition, the Shinto tradition? Have they done no harm the environment?

…particularly for our misreading of Genesis 1:28 as a charge to "fill the earth and subdue it."

No, No, Kate, we didn’t misread it. That’s what it says.

Our forebears were so eager to distinguish their faith from the surrounding Canaanite religion and its concern for fertility...

I thought you said all that fertility was a bad thing, Kate?

...that some of them worked overtime to separate us from an awareness of "the hand of God in the world about us," especially in a reverence for creation. How can we love God if we do not love what God has made?

Good question. And that fits in with your pro-abortion stand how? Are babies not made by God, Kate?

We base much of our approach to loving God and our neighbors in this world on our baptismal covenant.

Really? So I guess this bit is obsolete in our hip, with-it, new church:

VI. Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation.
Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation. In the name of the Holy Scripture we do understand those canonical Books of the Old and New Testament, of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church.

Yet our latest prayer book was written just a bit too early to include caring for creation among those explicit baptismal promises.

"Bonnie Anderson? Get me re-write!!"

I would invite you to explore those promises a bit more deeply -- where and how do they imply caring for the rest of creation?

Is your entire theology based on the "promises" of only one of the eight questions in the baptismal covenant? What about believing in the apostle's teaching, resisting evil, repenting, proclaming the Good News of God In Christ? Isn't all that in your beloved covenant?

We are beginning to be aware of the ways in which our lack of concern for the rest of creation results in death and destruction for our neighbors.

So every time we eat a Big Mac from a drive-thru, someone in Bangladesh dies? I had no idea. I guess it really is all our fault.

We cannot love our neighbors unless we care for the creation that supports all our earthly lives.

I couldn't agree with you more, Kate, but I don't know what you mean in the spiritual sense. I smell more than a wiff of activism in your words. So recycling and driving less isn't enough? Unless we pop off a check to PETA, or calculate our carbon footprint, or write our Congressman, or worship the Millennium Development Goals (peace be upon them), we're not following Christ's Great Commandment?

We are not respecting the dignity of our fellow creatures if our sewage or garbage fouls their living space.

And what if the intellectual sewage and relativist garbage embraced as theology by so much of the leadership of The Episcopal Church ™ fouls the dignity of my living space? Or more importantly, the dignity of my worship space? You worried about that, Kate?

When atmospheric warming, due in part to the methane output of the millions of cows we raise each year to produce hamburger, begins to slowly drown the island homes of our neighbors in the South Pacific, are we truly sharing good news?

The thought of Pacific islanders drowning in a tsunami of cow farts is too much for me to bear, Kate, especially at Easter (that is why you wanted to talk to us, isn't it?). So I'm trying to eat those farting cows as fast as I can. Rare. With sautéed mushrooms, steamed broccoli, and a good Bordeaux. For the environment, of course.

The food we eat, the energy we use, the goods and foods we buy, the ways in which we travel, are all opportunities -- choices and decisions -- to be for others, both human and other.

Huh? Am I to be for human others; or other others? Or both? Or neither?

Our Christian commitment is for this -- that we might live that more abundant life and that we might do it in a way that is for the whole world. Abundant blessings this Easter, and may those blessings abound through the coming days and years.

And a Happy Earth Day to you, too.

UPDATE: As usual, Chris Johnson at theMCJ does a much better job of taking Schori's "message" apart, and brings up a brilliant point - for Christians, Easter celebrates the most important event in our Faith - the reserrection of Jesus Christ. But the leader of our Church uses it as an opportunity to "invite" us to reflect on........ reducing cow farts. This says volumes about the Christian theology (or lack thereof) being pushed by the current leadership of The Episcopal Church ™.