About 5 years ago two young members of this parish made a formal request of the Corporation of St John`s that a bicycle stand be erected on church property for the use of church members and others coming here for worship and other events. They were both students. Indeed, along with the request came a cheque toward the cost of this.

Five years later we still have no bicycle stand. As a Corporation, while we support the initiative, we have yet to implement it. During that same period of time there have been countless hours of discussion in this parish about the parking lot. Indeed, at one point, the entire proposal for the renovation of the this building and the development of the parking lot seemed to depend on whether our plans included space for our cars.

During our negotiations with Mr Bill Teron establishing the terms of St John`s agreement with him to sell our parking lot, St John`s lawyer, Janet Bradley, asked us quite seriously if we were filly aware that we are making provision to pay some $600,000 in order to maintain a level of church parking under the proposed condominium development. Our response was, "yes, that is what St John`s people want". Over half a million dollars so our cars can come and praise the Lord!

Yes, we must have the parking. St John`s people are not prepared to be inconvenienced by the real shortage of weekday and Sunday parking near this church. And it is a very real problem. Public transportation, especially on Sunday, is so inadequate and cumbersome that most people will not or cannot use it. The problem of St John`s Church is just one small piece of an overall urban transportation problem which faces everyone.

The June 6th issue of the Ottawa Business Journal carried a front page article entitle "Green Power: continuing congestion has real economic impact". In this article Daniel Spence, sustainable transportation co-ordinator at Ottawa`s EnviroCentre, a non-profit organization that provides environmental services to the public, private, and voluntary sectors, pointed out that "according to 2003 municipal statistics, each car trip costs the individual and corporate taxpayers 43 cents more than a trip by public transit. It costs big money to build city streets-anywhere from $900,000 to $2 million per kilometre plus the cost of land. Currently more than 185,000 car trips are taken every afternoon during rush hour in Ottawa. By 2021, 400,000 more people will live in Ottawa, many owning cars" The article then goes on to talk about the City of Ottawa`s Transportation Demand Management plan as a long term strategy for dealing with an insufficient budget to fix the reads needed to accommodate the growing economy, population, and number of cars.

But clearly, the problem is not just a transportation management issue or a budget issue. The problem is total urban planning issue largely driven by unsustainable public expectations about urban growth and private vehicle access.

I use this close-to-home example as one piece of the environmental crisis which faces planet earth. I believe it is a good example because it touches us very directly as members of St John`s and plays directly into the way in we believe we need to act in order to maintain our membership. It has directly influenced how we have planned the renovations presently under way.

Our lifestyle is wedded to our private vehicles. Everything from urban planning is still largely done in relation to the needs of the owner of the private vehicle. We love our cars and we hate our cars. They cost us as fortune but they represent independence. Many of us do not see viable alternatives to our private cars. And in many cases, there are no alternatives.

And yet we also know that the burning of fossil fuels, of which the automobile is the single largest consumer, is a direct contributor to environmental degradation. We are literally killing ourselves with our cars. For the first time since the beginning of planet earth human beings are having an unsustainable impact upon the very biosphere which gives us life. We all know it.

True enough, there are some nay-sayers to the idea that human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels, is the primary source of damaging climate change. But the vast majority of the scientific community supports this contention and the recently signed Kyoto Accord, is an international strategy to address this environmental crisis.

We all know that we are part of the problem- but do we know how to be part of the solution? I believe that our faith tradition as Christians can provide us with both the belief system and the motivation to part of the solution. And that is why St John`s will offer to you, over the course of this summer, a study and sermon series which we have entitled "The Web of Life Series".

Today is the first sermon in this series. The series will touch upon, in a very introductory manner, the interface between Christian spirituality and ecology. Today we start with the biblical understanding of creation.

Speaking generally, most Christians if asked the question, "what is your religion about?" would answer with some version of, "My religion is about God`s plan of salvation for humanity".

This is a perfectly good answer. But it is one which demonstrates a particular kind of blindness which does not serve us well and is, in part, the cause of the environmental mess we face.

Our entirely human-focussed understanding of revelation ignores the fact that God is first of all Creator. During the last two centuries the worldview which placed Earth as the centre of God`s creation and humankind as the only really important part of planet earth has been challenged. We know now that Planet Earth (our biosphere) is one infinitesimally small bit of the creation and we know that humankind has existed for less than 5% of the life of the Earth. Theology which ignores the facts cannot serve us now or in the future.

I have specially chosen today`s bible readings today to remind of us that God is our creator and that small as we are we are important in God`s plan.

You see, the entire revelation of God in the Bible is book-ended, one might say, by the fact of human creatureliness.

The first book of the Bible, from which we drew our first reading this morning, is the familiar creation myth as it is described in the second chapter of the Book of Genesis. The last book of the bible, the Book of Revelation, is God`s vision of a new creation. Creation begins and ends God`s revelation to us in the Bible.

In Genesis we read of God`s creative act- not a factual or scientific account- but a spiritual or mythical one- in which God places humankind squarely within the rest of the created order but with a special vocation:

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it Genesis 2:15

According to this second creation story in Genesis, God created humanity to serve the Garden of Eden and in return the garden serves the web of life. For the most part, it is far easier to show that we have exploited the garden, not served it, as we will pay the consequences of this sin.

Then at the end of the Bible we find the The Book of Revelation in which God speaks of a new creation which is God`s ultimate plan,

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. Rev. 21:1-3

In Psalm 8 we hear the psalmist praise God as creator: the first evidence of God`s glory is creation itself,

O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth (Psalm 8:1)

And, finally, in Matthew`s gospel, Jesus himself draws upon nature to emphasize God`s care for us. If God watches over the sparrows of the air and the lilies of the field then surely we can expect that God will watch over us as well.

Even though our forebears in the faith had no conception of universe as we do they did understand that God places humankind within the web of all life, within the context of God`s total creation. One might strongly argue that we have forgotten that we are created within this web and we have forgotten that it is God`s plan that we find our fulfilment and salvation within it.

Our ultimate fulfilment, salvation if you like, as human beings takes places within the created order that, it seems to me is why the entire focus of our salvation is upon resurrection. For too long Christian theology has despised the world and taught that ultimately our salvation can only happen elsewhere, that is, in something called "heaven" beyond this evil place called earth.

Our tradition has done this even though Christianity insists on the idea of the resurrection of the body. It is the focus of our greatest feast and buried solidly in every major creedal statement. Resurrection is that a gem of Christian mystery to which we mumble assent during the creed and about which we fuss so much intellectually. And yet, at the very least, does not this teaching simply remind us that salvation is not something which happens outside of God`s created order but as part of it? There is no such thing as a human being that has no body- we are creatures- and God will provide us with a new body just as God, in the Book of Revelation, will bring about a new heaven and a new earth - a new creation. We never cease to be creatures whether we be in this life or another.

That is about as much theology as it is feasible to jam into this brief homily. But I hope it is enough for you to be able to go away this morning with this one key teaching of our faith tradition: as human beings we are part of the vast order of God`s creation and it is within that creation that ultimate fulfilment will be found.

One of the reasons why I love to read the theology of Diarmuid O`Murchu, the theologian whom we have invited to teach at St John`s this fall, is because his whole theology explores and expounds this idea.

And to me it is not just an interesting idea but much more. It is the very spiritual resource we Christians need to address the problem of our lifestyle and how we can turn it from being destructive to creative.

The environmental crisis is first and foremost an ethical and spiritual one. Technological fixes alone cannot save us from the path of destruction which humanity presently walks. The first and most important step must be a transformation of mind and spirit.

And that is what religion is for. And that is why the role of faith traditions is so utterly key in addressing the environmental crisis. Every single person and institution in society has a part to play and faith traditions must pull themselves up to the table.

It is such a pity that our church is caught up in such controversy about sex-its like rearranging the deck chairs as the Titanic sinks. What possible use will sex be if we are all to sick from environmental degradation to have it!! How important will sex be if the entire human race is rendered sterile by pollutants.

On this lovely summer`s day, I leave you with with words of warning and of encouragement. The words of our offertory hymn this morning were written by a former rector of this church, Herbert O`Driscoll: let us leave this sanctuary today to enter into God`s wider sanctuary, the world, with his refrain in our hearts:

O God, beyond all face and form,
you willed it that creation`s night should blaze,
and chaos still its storm, and birth a universe of light.
All things below, all things above,
are formed of your eternal love.

Book of Common Praise, Hymn 412
Anglican Church of Canada, 1998