Let Justice Roll Down: An Earth Week message from Patricia K. Tull
Click here to see the video on the PW YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ0RSO0WZzY
April 24, 2025
My dear friends, I am speaking to you on an event-filled week in 2025, in hope that you will share this video or its message with your Bible study groups for consideration.
This past Sunday, Christians around the world celebrated Easter, the day of resurrection, the day when we affirm our belief that evil and death do not have the last word over us, nor over our world.
Preaching at a small church in southern Indiana on Easter morning, I talked about how for some of us, Easter Sunday was real in the present, in our hearts and in our experience. But some of us, for a variety of reasons, are still experiencing the in-between, Holy Saturday, grieving, not knowing what is next. Yet we walk forward in faith, prayerfully eager to help bring forth the dawning of our new Easter morning.
On Monday, we woke up to the news that Pope Francis had died. He had chosen his papal name Francis in 2013 in honor of St. Francis, the patron saint of creation. True to his background as a scientist, in 2015 he issued the first papal encyclical speaking directly to people of faith throughout the world about climate change and its effects on the earth’s poor, Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home. If you haven’t studied Laudato Si before, I highly recommend giving it a read. It’s available by download as a pdf. Pope Francis’s memorial service will be this coming Saturday, and we will no doubt hear in coming days so many reminders of all that he has done not only for Catholics but for the church universal and all peoples of faith, struggling peoples, and the earth itself.
And then Tuesday marked the 55th anniversary of the first Earth Day, which began in 1970 with 20 million Americans, 10% of the U.S.’s population at the time, Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, urban and rural dwellers, all calling for environmental protections. In recognition of this movement, President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, and a bipartisan congress passed many far-reaching acts to protect clean air, clean water, endangered species, and more.
As you all most likely know, all these celebrations of our faith, the earth, and its advocates are occurring in a context in which this very Environmental Protection Agency is being, if not dismantled entirely, then at least seriously impaired from working for its original purposes.
Environmental Justice, one of the EPA’s hallmarks, has been scrubbed from its website and from its agenda. On our current president’s first day, the U.S. was once again withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords with nearly 200 other nations who, thank God, continue to be united in the effort to combat climate change. Protections to public lands, to our beloved national parks, and to our tribal partnerships on those lands, have also been damaged, along with aid to the poor, hungry, and sick around the world and here at home.
Yet most Americans still believe we must address the climate crisis and protect our environment. Today more urgently than ever, we Christians as well as other people of faith and good will around the world are heeding the call to care for our earth, and not only the earth itself for its own sake, but for the people of the earth who are most affected by human harms to creation—the poor both in the U.S. and abroad, people of color, children and elders, and our descendants who are not yet born.
Over the past year and a half, as I have been traveling around the country and speaking to many of you about environmental justice, I’ve heard both of your global concerns for the climate and of many local concerns that you all have raised: a pipeline that threatened the water sources for poor African Americans in Memphis, which was successfully opposed; the threat of a mining company near the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia and Florida; wildfires and their havoc out west, the devastating effects of Hurricane Helene in North and South Carolina. I have also heard so many of you saying that this year’s Bible study has galvanized you to act, furthering environmental justice where you live. I’ve seen not just interest but passion in your eyes.
So now, as many of you are about to conclude your study, I invite you to carry on. You have doubtless considered several possible actions that you as an individual and as a group can take. I ask you not to wait, but in your next meeting, if at all possible, to make your plans for moving on. You probably won’t begin with a crystallized plan. You may simply want to agree on an upcoming date to meet again. And you may, as individuals or family members, make some choices on your own that the whole group doesn’t take up together.
There are no simple or easy answers. The needs are so urgent that it will take large changes to get from where we are to where we need to be. But we have strength in our faith, our numbers, and our conviction, to do large things.
One way to organize your brainstorming could be around the four areas of church life that Presbyterian Earth Care Congregations follow, thinking about elements of environmental care and environmental justice that we might introduce in our church’s worship, our church’s educational programming, our church’s mission outreach, whether local or global, or our church’s use of its facilities, its building and grounds.
In my blog post for Lesson Nine I offered some resources that you might find helpful. You can find it at the Presbyterian Women website. You’ll see there some reminders and some resources. First, a discussion of the Spectrum of Allies, a tool for activating ourselves and those around us in hope that by doing so we will effect real and lasting change.
Second, you’ll find a link to Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s TED talk, How to Find Joy in Climate Action. I recommend viewing it together and drawing out the Venn diagram she recommends to find what she calls our superpower. If you have already done this individually, you might consider drawing this out for your congregation, to help define its own unique superpower.
And last, I recommended Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s recent book, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith. She encourages us to build up our spiritual muscles to do bold things that we don’t think we can do. I read it with a friend in February, discussing it all the way through, and I’m rereading it now.
I will be working on a way to collect and display your projects so that you can see in one place what other Presbyterian Women are doing. So as you make your plans, let me invite you to communicate with me directly by email at this address: trisha@inhabiting-eden.org. Here are some things you can include: your group’s name, contact persons with their email addresses, a brief description of your project, and later, as they become available, photos and stories from your projects. If you want to make a pledge to act but don’t know what precisely you wish to pledge yet, write to me also and I will continue to encourage you.
And last, I am often asked about hope. I’ve answered it in various ways, but I believe it comes down to this: trying to act because we feel hopeful, or WHEN we feel hopeful, is really not very sustainable. The virtues we need most to reacquaint ourselves with, and to grow in, are not a hopeful outlook, but rather courage and perseverance. So I want to offer you two of my favorite thoughts about this.
One is from a woman named Mary Annaise Heglar, from the National Resources Defense Council. ”What if hope isn’t what leads to action, she asked. “What if courage leads to action and hope is what comes next?”
And the second quote comes from the Quaker writer and thinker Parker Palmer. He said that hope is holding a creative tension between what is and what could and should be, and each day doing something to narrow the distance between the two. You’ll notice that the common theme between these two thoughts is action. If we are active, in whatever way we find we can be, we won’t have time for despair. It’s only when we don’t do anything that we begin to believe that others too are not solving the problems, and then we bury our heads in the sand.
Two of Jesus’s parables express the miraculous growth of God’s realm among us, comparing it to a tiny grain of seed that grows into a mighty tree, and to the yeast that leavens bread and makes it rise. I know many of you have, like me, seen that miracle in your daily lives of gardening and baking:
“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” (Matt 13:31-33)
As I said in the blog post, “I pray that you will all and each find your way into spurring on the environmental justice movement where you live, and will find hope and joy in the very acts of helping save life for our neighbors.” Thank you, friends, for this remarkable year of study together. May God bless you all.
Patricia K. Tull
Author of the 2024–2025 PW/Horizons Bible study, Let Justice Roll Down: God’s Call to Care for Neighbors and All Creation.
************
This message is a special Earth Week blog.
Let Justice Roll Down is the Presbyterian Women in the PC(USA), Inc. Bible study for 2024-2025. Go to presbyterianwomen.org/bible-study/justice to find more resources and purchase Let Justice Roll Down to study along with us. Call 800/533-4371 or order online.
