Joe Bautista addressed Luke 12:13-21 this week, along with some references to Eccliastes. He began his sermon time by asking our youth about their understanding of climate change. And Joe relates that we have the highest rate of extinction in our age than any period in the history of the planet.

So Joe goes to Luke with the question of what the bigger barn might be for us today — in the parable of the farmer that builds a bigger barn because he has too big a harvest for his current one.

While the farmer could have shared with others who were suffering, Joe sees the barn as hoarding nature’s bounty, overworking the land, or an edifice that severs his relationship with nature.

There are many causes of global warning, but one is humanity’s turning away from nature and too far toward technology. Too many of our advances of modernity take from the earth in ways that degrade. “The history of global warming is humanity thinking that he’s smarter than nature — that his technology can do better things that nature can do. And as we began valuing nature only as a resource for all the things we need for modern life, we began objectifying her…. We forgot that via nature we were privileged to see and experience God as God really is: awe inspiring, benevolent, generative, creative, and someone to be feared.”

If we could see humanity’s smallness in relation to nature’s bigness — could that kind of fear free us from our techno-industrial hubris?

Hear these thoughts and more in the sermon audio below.

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