Pastor's Letter

Dear Friends in Christ,

The ancient Greek historian, Xenophon, once wrote: "...the earth willingly teaches righteousness to those who can learn; for the better she is served, the more good things she gives in return." This is a comforting assertion. Unfortunately, its opposite is also true. The worse she is served, the more she becomes a curse in return. But this is not fair to Mother Nature. She is not the curse on our planet and its health; we are. A writer in the Post recently observed that we Americans are so focused on the war on Terror that we have failed to notice another war, our war on the environment, on our own habitat, that will probably have far more disastrous results for the future of the human race on this planet than all the terrorists put together.

At CTS, we insist on taking seriously the ELCA's designation of congregations as centers for moral deliberation in their communities. It is not our job to play fiddles (or is it harps? or organs?) while Rome burns. We must not allow ourselves to be relegated to being places of facile comfort or escape from a difficult world. It is fundamental to our ministry to raise the great issues of both personal and social morality in our time. This does not mean that we have all the answers. I surely do not. I have a point of view, one, I hope, that has been formed by my discipleship to Jesus, but also one that needs to be tested by other points of view. The important thing is that an honest and open conversation occur in which we can all—one hopes—be led to some serious ways of engaging serious problems.

As a Christian, I believe that greed, selfishness, human arrogance are the mega-problems beneath our environmental crisis. (They are the mega-problems beneath almost every human crisis.) Humans have been sadly ineffective in dealing with these big three. We could also add ignorance and anger to the equation, but Jesus, I'm pretty sure, would see ignorance and hatred as sub-categories arising out of our primal selfishness.

But—and this is Jesus' equally inextinguishable optimism, his refusal to give up on us—we are also beings created in the image of God, i.e. beings with a capacity for love, for goodness, for wisdom, for self-sacrifice for the sake of the common good. Our task as church is not merely to berate people for their failures and derelictions, but also to empower them to face and surmount our human problems and crises, the environmental crisis, but also the greed that fuels it. Love can heal our broken hearts.

The problems facing the world today are so overwhelming that there is a real temptation to despair. Despair can be almost comforting at times, it relieves us of the need to try to rebuild our world. But this is faithlessness and we must not give in to it. People know that our world is broken. They need today a faith that what we do for good can matter. We need to be congregations of hope in a hopeless world. The task is huge. We need to see it as a great adventure of the Spirit towards the repairing of the world. God will not do this for us, but he will do it through us. We must not lose heart. We must proclaim Good News. We are not bereft. With the gifts of faith, hope, and love we can do a new thing.

Yours in Christ,

--Pastor Bastien