I was eight-years-old the first time I remember learning about recycling. My family attended Good Shepherd of the Hills, a small ELCA congregation in Southern California, and representatives from a local environmentalist group came to a congregational forum after worship one week to teach us about recycling.

I don’t remember what they talked about, but I remember that we came home from worship that day with a set of brightly colored stickers identifying “paper” “plastics” and “aluminum” that my parents let me place on new garbage cans that they had purchased just for the occasion. I thought that was cool. Then my dad installed a new “can crusher” on the wall of our garage so that we could crush aluminum cans before putting them into the trash can labeled “aluminum” and I thought that was even cooler. I don’t remember thinking too much about what recycling had to do with God or church at the time, but through that congregational forum, my parents began to teach me a habit that has since become a ritual.

It wasn’t until I was twenty-years-old, in seminary, however, that I remember associating recycling and other environmentally friendly practices with “creation care.” In “The Shorter Pauline Letters” at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC), Dr. David Rhoads first introduced me both to the practice of Narrative Criticism and to the practice of printing my school assignments on the back of scrap paper that I had already used. One more habit became a ritual.

By the time I was twenty-years-old I understood, of course, that the principles of “reduce, reuse, and recycle” weren’t just novelties, but essential to the ecological well-being of our world. And, thanks to professors David Rhoads, Barbara Rossing, and others at LSTC, I had also begun to understand the theological imperative for us as Christians to care for and be good stewards of the world that God has made. However, it has taken me some time longer to connect that ecological stewardship with another theological imperative–love your neighbor as yourself.

This summer, I developed another ritual related to ecology: praying in worship for those with housing insecurity and others who cannot afford air-conditioning. I have long practiced a similar prayer cycle in worship, alongside practical actions such as blanket and coat ministries and the staffing of emergency shelters in the wintertime; however, as climate change continues to bring hotter and more dangerous summers, I’ve slowly become aware of the equal need for tangible weather-related relief for at risk neighbors in the summertime as well.

At the same time, this summer we have been inundated with news about weather-related disasters including tornadoes, hurricanes, and torrential floods both close to home and far across the globe. And the connections of these disasters with global climate change due to a lack of creation care is unavoidable.

While the ecological harm of a melting ice caps, polluted lakes and oceans, or a thinning atmosphere may be difficult to see, the human impacts of children unable to attend recess because of air quality alerts, families displaced from their homes because of flooding, and neighbors hospitalized from heat stroke because of record temperature highs are all around us.

As Christians, the call to love and serve our neighbors is not only ritual for us, but, indeed, Jesus’s clearest imperative. How, then, can we respond in these times that call both for stickers and reused notebook paper and so much more?

Resource Suggestions for Digging Deeper

- A Kid's Guide to Saving the Planet: It's Not Hopeless and We're Not Helpless

- Before the Streetlights Come On: Black America’s Urgent Call for Climate Solutions

- Love Your Mother: 50 States, 50 Stories, and 50 Women United for Climate Justice

and more!