As the week progresses, Jesus gathers with his disciples for the Last Supper. He is then arrested, scourged, tried and finally crucified. Talk about the best of times and the worst of times, this week was surely both of those for him.

I can’t help thinking that on Palm Sunday Jesus at least had a good idea that Good Friday was on the way. That’s what makes the story meaningful. He knew what was to come and, rather than side step it, chose to do what he knew he had to do. He didn’t simply meet his fate–he created it.

The topic of our sermon this morning was chosen by Bill Brach. He purchased the opportunity to select a sermon theme at last year’s service auction. Those of you, who know Bill, know him to be a passionate champion of justice for some very critical social issues. A few months ago, Bill gave me a copy of Ed Ayers book, God’s Last Offer: Negotiating for a Sustainable Future. "These are the most important issues today," Bill said. "I want you to do the sermon on this."

A promise is a promise and a debt is a debt. "OK," I said. "God’s Last Promise it is." I can’t tell you when I’ve read a more frightening and even depressing book as this. I’ll try to be neither frightening nor depressing in the fulfillment of my obligation to Bill and to you all. But in all honesty, I will hope it to be alarming, because he was right. These are the most pressing issues of our day.

Ed Ayers is the editor of World Watch magazine. His work has also been included in several other well-respected publications. He is well versed with the current news from the world’s scientific community. And he brings us a message we can ill afford to ignore: the future of our world is in jeopardy, and only we can save it.

The book begins with the recounting of an incident that took place in Australia just over two hundred years ago. For millennia the Aborigines there used small canoes for fishing off the eastern coast of the continent. They had no contact with white people until April 29, 1792, when the British ship, Endeavor, under Captain James Cook, sailed into a bay encountering a group of the natives. It was the first known contact between Australians and Europeans. A botanist, James Banks, was a passenger on the ship who made a detailed entry into his journal describing the encounter.

One might think that this would have been an astonishing event for the natives. An enormous structure, larger than anything they’d ever seen, came sailing right into their midst. Banks wrote, "…The Australians took no notice. They displayed neither fear nor interest and went on fishing."

Historian Robert Hughes speculates that the ship was something so huge, complex, and unfamiliar as to defy the native’s understanding. It’s unlikely that there was anything in their experience even to make them see it as a boat.

In fact, when the Europeans saw that there was no hostile response to their arrival, they lowered landing boats and began rowing ashore. That’s when the natives recognized something they were familiar with. Most of the Aborigines bolted into the trees except for two that stood their ground, shouting at the invaders.

The warning to us is that we, too, are facing a threat so enormous, so beyond our previous experience, so alien that we are unable to have any regard for its consequences. We don’t even recognize it as a threat.

For some time now, we have been aware that our natural resources are depletable, and that we are capable of poisoning the land and the air and the water. We have not been though, and are not still fully cognizant of the rate of depletion nor of the level of poisoning. Ed Ayers identifies four mega phenomena that are currently spiking in their intensity. They are already altering life on earth. If they continue unchecked, they could destroy life as we know it.

The four megaphenomena are: the rise of carbon gas emissions; the rate of biological extinctions; the unsustainable rate of consumption; and the exploding rate of human population. Each of these threats alone represents a substantial danger. The synergistic complexity of them acting in concert though, creates an even greater and more perilous state, perhaps so unimaginable that we can’t see it, or that we simply refuse to.

The Carbon Gas Spike:

We’ve all heard far more than we might like about global warming. Is global warming real or isn’t it? That’s the question often posed by the press, the press, which by the way, represents a perspective of the world condition sanctioned by its corporate sponsorship.

The question of global warning does not exist in the world that scientists view. To them, global warming, as a result of astronomical increases in the emission of CO₂ into the atmosphere is a clear reality. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change), a body of over 1000 scientists representing 98 countries, warns that this is not only a reality but, "…a problem of enormous consequence."

The concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere increased somewhat at the dawn of civilization over previous eras. Even then though, it remained fairly constant, at a moderate level. There was no significant increase between the end of the first millennium and the end of the 18^th century. But between the year 1800 and today, the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere has increased by a staggering 74%, from 280 parts per million to 380.

At the world conference held in Kyoto, Japan, politicians–not scientists–wrangled over enforcing a five to seven percent decrease in CO₂ emissions. IPCC scientists assure us that in order to stabilize our global environment, there would need to be a cut of at least 68 to 80 percent of CO₂ released into the atmosphere.

What has been the effect of the carbon spike so far? Beyond the accelerated melting of the polar ice caps and the resulting rise in sea level, the results have been in the form of storms. Ayers writes, "The earth’s response to overheating is a disruption of its normal patterns of wind and precipitation, and the power of that disruption can be staggering." We have witnessed this disruption in the increased number of serious storms over the past several years, and in their increased intensity and destructiveness.

The Extinction Spike:

Extinction and adaptation are the two alternatives that face each species. Extinction has always occurred, but not at the alarming rate that Ayers identifies as the most dangerous of the four spikes. "Many species are disappearing without our ever noticing," he writes. "Yet, their disappearance threatens to unravel the web of life that sustains our everyday lives."

A graph of the extinction spike would stretch out horizontally in a straight line representing millions of years. There would be no significant rise in the rate of extinction until about 1500 AD when millions of birds, seals and porpoises began to be slaughtered by European hunters during the era of exploration. The next significant rise, the actual spike, begins following WWII where the line leaves its travel on the horizontal axis and shoots straight up the vertical.

Throughout all of time on earth until 1950, a total of about 1,000 species of plant and animal life had become extinct. In the past 50 years though, the same length of time as my own life, nearly 25,000 species have become extinct. That’s an exponential increase of 2,500%.

We are in the process of radically reducing the level of biodiversity that is so desperately needed to sustain life. The carbon spike is responsible for much of this loss. Global commercialization is another major factor.

When McDonalds and other fast food chains began to cover the globe, they demanded that in each country they entered, local farmers should abandon indigenous varieties of potatoes. They were replaced by the global standard–the Idaho russet–to uphold uniform procedures for processing French fries. This kind of practice has been replicated many times by many industries producing a precarious biological monoculture.

Extinction means gone forever. Even if we were to stem the tide, we have already lost thousands and thousands of possibilities for the manifestation of life, not to mention possible cures, foods or other benefits to humankind.

The Consumption Spike:

The third megaphenomenon is the consumption spike. One of its most pernicious elements, of course, is that, "…unsustainable consumption includes (many) forms of activity that to most of us seems perfectly normal." Though the consumption spike is the most visible, it is the most difficult to measure.

We are currently consuming genetic resources 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than evolution can produce them. Much of that takes place in the forest. We know from the press that we are consuming the world’s forests at a rate of one percent per year. Our consumption of fossil fuel does not only threaten the supply of gas and oil, it is the single largest cause in the rise of carbon emissions. At the current rate of acceleration, Ayers warns, "we’ll run out of time before we run out of gas."

Our consumption also includes the loss of topsoil through erosion, over cropping, urban sprawl and even irrigation. The average person in a German, Dutch or American household uses up 45 to 85 tons of natural resources each year. That’s the equivalent of 300 shopping bags per week, and much, if not most, of it ends up as municipal or industrial waste.

The Population Spike:

The final spike, which plays an integral part of the other three, is the population explosion. Lately, we’ve heard news reports about how the rising trend in population growth has turned around. We should be at zero percent population growth my midway through this century. What the news accounts fail to mention though, is that the world population will likely double between now and then.

During the next 50 years the population growth will impact heavily on rising CO₂ emissions. It will encourage extinction of even more species (including perhaps our own) and it will likely double even the currently astronomical rate of consumption.

Each of these four spikes has reached a level of unsustainability within only the last 100 to 200 years. The earth has already begun to recoil under the stress. And yet, most of us, most of humanity, continue to go on with business as usual.

In the literary magazine, Lapis, Bill McKibben writes:

"For an entire stratum of society around the world, abstractions like the economy have become more real to people than the physical world in which we live. It’s easier for them to visualize dangers to the economy than it is for them to visualize dangers to the planet." There has been no greater test of his theory than the market events of the last three days.

"The earth has always adjusted," we tell ourselves. And it has, but we’ve now removed its capacity to rebound. We could blame our governments. We could blame the businesses of global commerce. Heaven knows both of them are certainly culpable. Business spends billions of dollars each year to confuse and obscure the truth that would set us free.

The larger truth of the matter is though, we’ve grown comfortable: comfortable with our lifestyles; comfortable being shielded from the truth; comfortable denying the reality that a huge ship has pulled into the bay; comfortable denying that perhaps Rome is burning all around us.

I told you that I found Ed Ayers book to be quite depressing, but I’m not here today to bring you tidings of doom. Call me an optimist, but I think these times call for far more than resignation; now is a time for hope. We need hope and we need change.

We’ve had our glorious palm-waving ride into the city, Hosanah and all. Now it’s time to do the work that awaits us. We each have our own darkness to enter. Good Friday awaits each of us. How do we want to participate in its creation? How do we want the next chapter of the book of life be written? What is our vision for our children’s world and for their children?

I can’t believe that things are quite so bas a Mr. Ayers portrays them. But I have to believe that he isn’t very far from the truth. If we want to seek a sustainable future, we will need to rely on much more than human ingenuity saving us at the last moment. If we wait for the last moment, there will be no cause for hope. We do need lots of ingenuity, and right now. Even more, we need to own the world’s condition as being that of our creation.

It’s time now to rearrange our priorities so that commerce and industry, education and technology are tooled up to address these most urgent issues. It’s time for us to change our personal habits, our community policies and our national ambitions, now.

In the original Palm Sunday story, Jesus rode in the parade and then went into the Temple to look "around at everything" and as it was late he went out to do what had to be done. We are not asked to die. We are asked to live. It’s good that we come here, to our temple, to look inside and around at everything. It is late, and it is time for us too, to do what must be done in order to fulfill our divinity, in order to fulfill our humanity.

Ironically, in the Harvard Business Review, Robert Shapiro, Chairman of Monsanto Corporation wrote that the most fundamental issue facing us today is, living within [our] energy income, not expanding more energy than the sun provides. Also, not putting out waste products faster than nature makes them harmless."

Our own religious faith articulates such values in our principle that states, "We affirm and promote the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part." If we truly hold this value, what must we do in order for our values to be manifested in our deeds?

It means that we will take the time to relearn our connections with this earth and that we will teach and invite our children to do the same. It means that we will find and develop effective and efficient use of resources that can be regenerated, reused and recycled. It means that we will utilize personal energy wherever possible, that we will support efforts to cease reliance on fossil fuels, and that we will promote the preservation of precious topsoil.

It means that we will each take personal responsibility for public policy. We cannot afford for any one of us to stand back and say, "I’m not involved. This doesn’t affect me." We are all already involved. This affects each of us, as well as all our progeny. Together, we must steer a shift from an economy of liquidation to an economy of restoration. It’s up to each of us, individually, and all of us, collectively, to find and fulfill opportunities for change. Things cannot continue as they have.

Palm Sunday always makes me think of the Paul Simon song, Slip Sliding Away. "You know the nearer your destination, the more you’re slip slidin’ away," There is an urgent matter before us. Ed Ayers ends his book saying that God has made us another offer–but it’s the last one. We can take it, or leave it–literally.

He concludes, "Ironically, it can be only through the acceptance of this offer–to defend our world instead of ourselves–that we have any chance of saving ourselves and of regaining the sense of personal and family security we care about so deeply."

We are not asked to die. We are asked to live. It is good that we come here, to our temple, to look inside and around at everything. It is late and it’s time for us too, to do what must be done in order to promote life, in order to promote wholeness.

Denise Levertov writes:

We are called into life, not to abuse it, but to fulfill it. May we awaken to that call so that we might be worthy of this most wonderful gift that has been given us.