Sermon Title: "Oil and Evil in the World"
Date: June 13, 2010
Minister:  The Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  Psalm 8

This is not the sermon I planned to preach today.  I did my homework, as usual, last Monday at home.  I selected the Gospel lectionary reading, had some thoughts on how to approach it, even found a prayer that fit the theme.  Then I watched the evening news on television.  And the theme of my sermon changed from a lectionary text to a current event.

That night’s news, and every morning and evening news since, has been dominated by the worsening condition in the Gulf of Mexico and the adjacent shorelines as millions of barrels of crude oil and methane gas escape from a broken wellhead one mile below the surface of the ocean.  Newscasters, Coast Guard members, fishermen all show pools and globs of oil washing up on fragile wetlands and on pristine beaches.  The livelihoods of thousands who make their living on the seas, or distributing seafood, or in the tourist industry are threatened.  Over 600 oil soaked pelicans have died and 350 dead sea turtles have been found.  Countless dead fish float amidst the oily muck.  And that’s only what we see on the surface.  One scientist said he’s not as worried about what we see—it can eventually be cleaned and restored.  It’s what’s below the water, all the way down to the ocean floor that concerns him most.

Now I need to offer full disclosure here to my petroleum engineer friends present and to this congregation as well.  Don’t think this sermon is a diatribe against the “evil oil” industry.  For his entire working career, my father was a petroleum engineer for Richfield Oil Corporation, which became ARCO, which is now owned by BP, or British Petroleum.  He was responsible for drilling the below-ground wells by the Reef Restaurant, as well as on the rigs off shore of Ventura and Santa Barbara.  For six summers during college and seminary I worked in those same oil fields around the Queen Mary.  My college and seminary education, and college tuition for my two sisters, was paid from my father’s earnings in the oil industry.  And until her death, my mother’s health insurance was issued as a widow of a BP retiree.  I was also in college at UC Santa Barbara in 1969 when the offshore oil blowout spoiled the beaches around Santa Barbara with three million gallons of oil, helping jumpstart the environmental movement.  It was not a popular time to mention how my father earned a living.

Psalm 8, which I selected for today, is a favorite of many and for good reason.  Our view is drawn first to the far-flung expanses of space and the mighty power of God whose glory lies beyond even that, and then we turn our attention to the tiny little human beings that God created to inhabit this one small planet.  Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, whose 1968 pictures of our lovely, fragile planet became famous as “Earth Rise,” said:  “[The earth] was the only color we could see in the universe...We’re living on a tiny little dust mote in left field on a rather insignificant galaxy.  And basically this is it for humans.  It strikes me that it’s a shame that we’re squabbling over oil and borders.”

Deep into another year of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, we long for the peace that came over us as we saw, for the first time, the inexpressibly graceful pictures Anders took forty years ago of our blue, swirling oceans and clouds, fertile land and fragile yet enduring atmosphere.  We saw ourselves in the vast expanse of space, hanging there, small and vulnerable, held by the tender hand of God.

We may be small, but we are mighty, too, as we’ve seen by the immense damage we’ve done to the earth in spite of our newfound appreciation for its beauty and its vulnerability, forty years ago.  The explosion 55 days ago on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed eleven people, and the massive oil spill that followed threatens many more along the coast:  these are a painful illustration of the power of humans to wreak havoc on creation.  We continue to use up every resource we want, even if we have to blow up mountains in West Virginia to get our hands on what remains.  We continue to burn fuel and fill the air with toxins, raising the temperature of earth and bringing down icebergs and glaciers, igniting wildfires on both coasts and stirring up weather patterns that make the evening news night after night.  If it’s true as the Psalmist wrote that God has put “all things under our feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the bird of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas,” then that must include the polar bears that are suffering, the species that are becoming extinct, and the rain forests that are being cleared.

If indeed we have been made “a little lower than God,” if we can use the wise minds God gave us, then we ought to be able to correct that which we cause in the first place.  The oil spill in the Gulf is not a natural disaster like an earthquake, hurricane or tornado—disasters that insurance companies regrettably term as “acts of God.”  The oil spill is an environmental disaster.  It was caused by the failure of an industry to have sufficient means to cap an oil spill a mile below the surface.  It has been said that if this blowout had occurred on land, it would have been long ago corrected.  Humans can get to that.  But we cannot work a mile underneath the ocean surface.

Someone here said of my sermon title, “Oil and evil sound very much alike.”  Oil itself is not evil.  It is created by the natural decay process over a period of eons.  When I had a summer job in the oil fields, one of my co-workers, who took a very literal view of the Genesis creation story, believed that the Earth was created just four-thousand years ago.  I responded, “The oil we’re pulling out of the ground took a lot longer than four thousand years to create.”

Natural disasters are devastating due to the damage and often lives lost, both of humans and wildlife.  Environmental disasters are just as devastating, though they are usually caused by humans—not intentionally in most cases.  They are often accidents caused by mistakes, and in the case of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, by the failure to have adequate means to correct something that just might happen too deep to fix—a worst-case scenario come to pass.

There is another type of disaster in the world, and that is deliberately caused by evil.  Let us take the destruction of 9/11 in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania as an example.  After much planning, evil men deliberately took over command of four passenger jets and flew them into objects until all aboard were killed, as well as thousands of innocent people in the World Trade Towers and Pentagon.  If we compare the Deepwater Horizon blowout to the ongoing flow of evil in the world today, we are reminded of how hard the political and religious leaders of the world are struggling to contain those who have only evil and destruction on their minds.  These are people who think it’s okay to sacrifice the lives of innocents, and who would not hesitate to deliberately pollute water systems or destroy infrastructures that would bring not only inconvenience to millions, but certain death.  It’s an awful thing to understand that our world is inhabited by human beings capable of this kind of evil.

What are Christians called to do?  What can we do?  In the first place, every precaution should be made in advance to prevent accidents, disasters, as well as evil from occurring. 

• Buildings in earthquake zones such as ours need to be built in a structurally sound manner. 
• Structures that might burn should be equipped with fire escapes, extinguishers, alarms and sprinkler systems. 
• Automobiles should be built as crash-safe as possible. 
• Oil rigs, on land or in the sea, should have failsafe systems to cut off the oil supply if some disaster or accident should occur.
• Every other industry, whether working above ground or deep within mines, must take every precaution for the safety of its employees.
• Airline security—irritating as it is for those of us who do not pose a threat—should be as rigid as possible to prevent a repeat of 9/11 ever happening again. 
• Bartenders, party hosts and police departments should be vigilant to prevent drunken drivers from being behind the wheel and possibly taking innocent lives. 
• Churches, temples, mosques should be diligent in encouraging people to live upright, moral, life-respecting lives. 
• The church at every level and denomination, as well as schools and any organization that works with children and youth, must work diligently to protect those who are entrusted to its care, and keep them free from abuse, molestation and unwanted advances.

Little noted is verse 2 in Psalm 8:  “Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger.”  We are the ones in positions of responsibility, with educations, with wisdom borne out of life experiences, who are to protect others, to look out for them, and to be caretakers of this world God created, God placed us in, and I believe God expects us to leave in good condition for those who follow us.  That applies to every one of us, whether we drill for oil, or use oil.  Let us do all we can to protect this earth and all of God’s creatures who dwell therein.