Sept. 7, 2025: Peace with Creation

Old Testament Reading: Isaiah 32: 14-18
The Gospel:  John 14: 15-17                     

When the pandemic shutdown happened in 2020, I suddenly went from being a high school classroom teacher to an online teacher, something I had never been before. My students had never been online learners before either. It was a struggle to figure out how to continue the learning in this new way while we also worried about the world and what was happening. For our final English project that year, several months after being sent home to learn, I asked my students to consider the positives. Their final project was called The Silver Linings of the Pandemic Museum Exhibit Project. For this project, they had to consider how their lives, or the lives of others might have improved during this time, how the planet might be better off from this brief break of busyness or how the community had shown resilience, creativity or a greater sense of caring. 

My 75 9th-grade students responded beautifully with artwork, poems, song lyrics and letters to the editor that they submitted to The Vermont Historical Society, The Vermont Folklife Center, The Woodstock History Center or The Vermont Standard Newspaper. On the whole they depicted a sense of gratitude to the essential workers but also for time to exercise, time to reflect, time to be with family, and time to observe nature. Some created photo collages of themselves outdoors hiking, biking, or building forts. Others wrote poems or song lyrics about the earth getting a breather with fewer carbon emissions, of people coming together even when they had to be apart, about people just caring more.  This portion of a song lyric from one of my former students captures a bit of this:

With Packages left at the door
Friendly waves just happen more

It takes a wave to break a wall
Who knew unmasked that it could fall
 
In this together is what I see
everyday the world connects like what we knew we could be.

Looking back on their projects five years later, I see hope, the kind of hope expressed in the Isaiah scripture from today. When humans step back, when the cities are deserted, God’s creation takes over - wilderness creeps in like vines on an abandoned building. Creation begins anew, as the cycle of life continues without our interference. Sometimes the earth, like us, just needs a breather, a reset. 

During the pandemic shutdown, with fewer cars on the road and reduced industrial output, emissions of air pollutants dropped dramatically around the world. Nitrogen dioxide (NO2), primarily from vehicles and power plants, declined by 20–35% globally. In some major cities like New York and Delhi, the reduction in air pollutants like fine particulate matter (PM2.5) was even steeper, with drops reported as high as 50–70%. There was a 7 % drop in Greenhouse gas emissions and less noise pollution. Many Rivers were cleaner. Mountain lions were seen roaming the streets of Santiago, Chile, and wild goats wandered into a Welsh town. While these changes were temporary and we certainly do not want to go through a pandemic like that or a shut down again, we as humanity, were given a chance to see the impact we make on the world.

We had a chance to see the spirit being poured out on us to take stock of our individual and collective lives and the impact we make: good and bad. 

This was a chance to see that changes we humans make have an impact, a pretty immediate one in some cases. We can live in peace with creation and we need to. 

Isaiah 32:14-18 envisions a peaceful Creation where God’s people really live ONLY when justice is achieved. “The Lord’s justice will dwell in the desert, God’s righteousness lives in the fertile field (Isaiah 32:16). In the words of South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “Hope is being able to see that there is light - despite all the darkness.”

Isaiah continues, “My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings and in quiet resting places.” God created an earth with all that we need and with an incredible resilience to recover when we become greedy and use too much of its resources too quickly.

But we cannot keep doing that. We have to learn to live in balance, in peace with creation, listening to the earth and working with her rather than trying to subdue her.

We do not need a pandemic shutdown to make positive changes in caring for God’s creation. John reminds us that we show our love for God by keeping the commandments and Jesus reminded us that the greatest one is to love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and the second, to love your neighbor as yourself. Loving God and your neighbor means loving and respecting the planet that sustains us and all the people on it. We do this by living more lightly on this earth and in cooperation with it through renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power and by collecting and throwing away less stuff.

If we truly breathe in the peace of this earth, the peace of the Holy Spirit with us, guiding us, we will indeed breathe out and act in love for this earth and all the creatures on it. Amen.

(Note that this sermon was shorter than usual, as Jordan Fields, PhD in Environmental Science, spoke briefly on the outlook for rivers and floods in the future in Vermont afterward.)

Pastor Michelle Fountain

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