Care for Creation: Life Below Water

Young at Heart Message

Today we are continuing our sermon series on Care for Creation by talking about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources.

From the report of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, “oceans, along with coastal and marine resources, play an essential role in human well-being and social and economic development worldwide. They also help regulate the global ecosystem by absorbing heat and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and protecting coastal areas from flooding and erosion.”
 
Humans seem to enjoy exploring the depths of the sea, but most of us never get to explore much beyond perhaps snorkling in the ocean.

Certainly some people have the ability to go deeper, diving into oceans or exploring ocean caves.

But most average people will only ever explore the depths of the oceans through documentaries or other second-hand accounts of life under water.

Even those of us who live near fresh water sources - a river, lake, or stream – won’t ever explore the depths of those bodies of water in a way that would allow us to truly understand them.
 
There are many movies that explore what it might be like to live under water, or what it means to rely heavily on the water.

Disney, for example, has put out several animated movies over the years about ocean life.

While these movies don’t necessarily give an accurate picture of what under-water life is like, they do help kids to understand that life below water is vastly different than life on land.
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A few examples of these movies that are made for kids include:
 
The Little Mermaid: This movie was created in 1989 and it dabbled in the lives of mermaids, which are fictional ocean dwellers.

Now of course, those of us who have seen this movie know that much of it is not real.

But it does bring to light some known impacts on the ocean, despite the fantasy theme.

For instance, Ariel, the main mermaid in the movie, has an obsession with living on land. But what prompts this obsession?

She finds and collects “human stuff” that ends up in the ocean.
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She has an entire cavern filled with things she’s found from above the depths of the ocean.

As you can see, she has fishing nets, candles, mirrors, clocks, chests, etc.

Now, much of what she’s collected may have come from shipwrecks, but the implication here is that a lot of stuff from us humans ends up in the ocean eventually.

Disney doesn’t make a statement about the negative impacts of human waste on the oceans in 1989, but we can see that it was something that people were at least aware of at the time.

Some of the stuff we create ends up in the ocean, where it impacts ocean life.
 
In 2003, the movie Finding Nemo was released by Disney and Pixar, and in 2016, they released the movie Finding Dory as a follow-up to the original.

The story of Finding Nemo is about how a little clownfish named Nemo is captured by a diver, separated from his family, and taken to live in an aquarium in a dentist’s office.
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All of the fish in the aquarium dream of breaking out of the aquarium and living back in the open ocean again.

​While not explicitly about the impact of humanity on ocean life, both movies do address some of these concerns.

Finding Nemo, for example, depicts images of overfishing when Dory and Nemo end up getting trapped with a massive school of fish in a commercial fishing net.
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Dory and Nemo end up helping all the fish escape by telling them all to swim down, putting too much pressure on the net and causing the fishing equipment to break.

​Finding Nemo also depicts images of the pet trade and the impacts to ocean life, along with the effects of boat traffic on the ocean.
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Finding Dory explicitly depicts concerns about plastic waste when Dory gets tangled in a plastic 6-pack ring at the beginning of the movie.

​Also in 2016, Disney released the movie Moana, which is a tale about a Polynesian tribe of people who live on an island surrounded by the ocean.

The tribe is not a specific tribe – rather, it is a fictional tribe based upon Polynesian peoples across the Pacific Ocean.
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The premise of the movie is that the people on the island discover that their food supply is dying out – their trees are not producing fruit, and the fish have left the lagoon, moving further into the ocean where the people cannot access them.

Moana is more of an environmental allegory that illustrates the breakdown of humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

It also depicts the ways in which humanity can impact ocean life, though it does this by demonstrating what happens when humanity disconnects from the natural world and favours greed and environmental exploitation over connection and care for the environment.

All of these examples show us how children are exposed to these environmental concerns in ways that help them begin to think through these issues.
 
Movies like these seek to entertain, but also cultivate an awareness of the ways that humans impact the environment and especially the depths of the ocean.

For those of us who don’t live near the ocean, it is hard to truly understand the impact.

We can only be aware of the impacts of our world on the oceans and marine life through hearing it from others, reading about the impact in the news, or visiting the ocean and witnessing changes ourselves.
 
The Message

What does the Bible say about about life below water?

Today we heard two passages – one from Genesis and one from the Gospel of Matthew.

In Genesis 9:2, God gives us more than just plants to eat.

After the flood, humans are given permission to use what lives on the earth for food – everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea.
 
This passages reminds us that not only do we have a responsibility to the things above water, but we also are responsible for life below water.

Bodies of water have their own mystery and power, as has been explored through the movies mentioned earlier as well as so many other streams of media.

We also now know that underwater ecosystems are affected by what we do on land and in the air.

Caring for and helping to sustain healthy ocean life is a massive human responsibility.
 
Just because we were given the privilege of consuming living things on land and in the sea for sustenance and survival does not mean we have been given the right to abuse and exhaust these resources.

We also heard the passage from the Gospel of Matthew today in which Jesus calls his first disciples – all of whom were fishermen.

Other Gospel passages, including Luke 5: 1-11, depict fishermen who fish all night and catch nothing until Jesus tells them to cast their nets again.
 
In these passages, it is clear that even in Biblical times, the importance of life below water was known.

In fact, the Sea of Galilee is an incredibly important body of water throughout the Gospels and the life of Jesus.

It is also a central geographic location in the Gospels, and it carries deep spiritual meaning for those who live near it and rely on the water for sustaining life.

Fishing was also an important industry – fundamental to the agrarian economy of the region. Most people were connected to this industry in some way.
 
So not only did people rely on life under water for food, but they also would have understood the connection between water and its living resources.

They would have known the importance of preserving and not over-using the resources because of the direct impact on their well-being.

In Luke 5: 1-11, they fish all night and don’t catch anything. This would have been concerning and would have triggered an awareness of the importance of the connection they had to life below water – much like the people of the island in Moana would be very aware of this as well.
 
We are becoming more and more aware of the impact in our world on marine life as well, even if we do not live near the ocean.

News articles crop up regularly about the impact of plastics on ocean life, or the impact of the oceans on weather patterns.

Just the other day the BBC had an article about the combination of an immense Pacific Ocean heatwave plus a “super El Niño” having profound effects on US and Canadian weather over the coming year.

The impact of the rise in ocean temperatures is felt across the globe, not just in ocean cities.
 
News articles like this certainly give us cause for concern, and can often make us feel like there is little hope for change. But they also are cause for gratitude.

Indeed, we simply come to accept that the world is changing and there is not much we can do about it.

But there is still hope.

While seeing the barrage of articles about the changing environment, rising ocean temperatures, melting glaciers, etc. can feel scary and make us want to stick our heads in the sand, the fact that they are becoming more prevalent means we are becoming more aware.
 
And because we have become more aware, we have made changes, both individually and on a national scale here in Canada.

While we also know that there is more that we could do, it is helpful to name some of the ways we have already been working to do better recently.

There are many examples of things that Canadians do that I never thought about before I moved to Canada.

First of all, I am ashamed to say that I never reused plastic Ziplock bags before I moved here.

Now, I wash them and use them many times before they become unusable.
 
Composting was not a large-scale operation where I am from. If people composted, it was for their own personal garden.

And few people I knew did it.

But here, there is a municipal composting program and that is a pretty amazing thing!

People have also become accustomed to using reusable or compostable grocery bags rather than single-use plastic bags.

And, when you walk through the soda aisle, you see more cardboard holding packs of cans together than plastic.
 
We see more restaurants using compostable utensils and straws rather than single-use plastic utensils and straws.

I even noticed changes to packaging of some brand-name items at places like Costco to reduce the amount of plastic used in packages.

To-go containers at restaurants are now more often compostable or reusable.

And many of us have already made small changes in our lives to reduce our individual impact on the environment as well.
 
These issues are becoming more urgent, and we do still need to be aware.

We need to care and we must continue to work at it.

We are called to be stewards of this Earth. That is made clear in the very first book of the Bible.

Jesus reminds us, through the use of parables like the parable of the talents, that a steward is someone who is trusted to care for something responsibly rather than wasting or destroying it.

This is our call when it comes to the natural world - the land, the sea, and the creatures that dwell in both.
 
We are stewards of the earth. We are called to care for the earth, and for one another.

So when we hear about the scary things happening with regard to the environment, we must not stick our heads in the sand. Instead, we must approach these stories with gratitude that they make us more aware.

We must allow it to hurt our hearts a little bit. And then we must explore additional ways to take action.

We must talk about it with one another.

We must allow ourselves to be changed first, so that we can be the change that the world needs.
 
So, as you go into another week, I invite you to continue thinking about and wondering about these issues.

Reflect on the ways that life below water affects us, but also on the ways that we have an effect on ocean and under-water life.

We cannot exist without the vast and fragile ecosystems of life below water.

May we remember this as we continue to become more aware of our call to care for creation.

Amen.

Let us pray:
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God of the tides and currents, your pull on the earth is magnetic. When the tempest frightened the disciples, your Son, Jesus, awoke and calmed the waters around them. Tempestuous and tranquil waters - you offer us both. Let us tend to the waters and care for all that finds life within them. Amen.