Text — Matthew 3:13-17

Why did Jesus go to experience a baptism of repentance?  Does this mean that Jesus wasn’t so perfect after all?

We tend to associate the word “repent” with a guilty conscience and that’s not an incorrect meaning, but it’s only part of the meaning. The Greek word for repent, metanoia,  means “a change of mind.”  Maybe Jesus’ repentance wasn’t that he’d done something wrong and felt guilty about it.  Maybe it was just time to live his life in a new way.  Jesus’ baptism, in three of the four gospels, marks the beginning of his public ministry.

There are many times for all of us when we need a change of mind — in our growing up, in our schooling, in our relationships, in our work, in our eating and exercise habits, in whatever we’re striving for.   We realize that we’re not getting it quite right, we’re stuck, or on the wrong track, or going where we don’t want to go, and so we decide to go a different way, or go the same way but with a new way of thinking.

This is never easy.  One of the most important things we get out of church is knowing that we’re not the only ones to go through these changes.  Misery loves company.  Misery can be healed and helped by the right kind of company.

Whole societies go through changes of mind too.  Last Sunday, our 2^nd hour program was a conversation about the war in Iraq.  Whatever we may have thought of this war at the beginning, most of us seemed to feel it’s going badly now. As a nation, we’re going through a change of mind on that subject.

After we talked about the war for a while, we turned to the question of why we’re in Iraq in the first place.  Here again, I can’t speak for everyone, but I’d say there was fairly general agreement it has a lot to do with the fact that Iraq has the world’s 2^nd largest reserves of oil. This led to a conversation about our energy appetites, to use a polite phrase. 

We like our cars and air travel, which makes up about a third of our energy bill.  Another third goes into buildings, constructing and heating and fueling them with electricity.  And another third goes into growing and transporting food.  We like to have strawberries in January.  This means putting the strawberries on an airplane and flying them thousands of miles.

This subject of energy is one I’m very interested in.  A big part of the Jonah Center vision has to with more efficient use of energy and with renewable energy, energy that doesn’t come from fossil fuels.

I know you didn’t come to church expecting a talk on energy economics, but I’m going to ask you to bear with me for a few minutes because this is a morally loaded subject.  In your bulletin, you see a graph inserted, and you’re probably wondering what that’s all about. 

Most of our stored energy for cars, trucks, electricity, and heating comes from oil.  That graph shows the amount of oil in billions of barrels (and the equivalent amount of natural gas) taken out of the ground every year for the past 45 years.  As you can see, during the sixties, the curve shot up at an accelerating rate.  Just after 1970, you see the first slight drop in production.  That was the Arab oil embargo. 

I can’t go into every little dip and rise in that curve.  The point is, oil production has gone up, a lot, by about 600% since 1950.  This increase in supply roughly follows the demand for oil.  Oil is produced because someone wants to buy it.  The question is: will this line showing global oil production and global demand just keep going up, forever?  As far as the eye can see, there will be more people, wanting more heat, more cars, and more gadgets of every kind.  Where is this energy going to come from? 

On the very bottom part of your graph you see another line, a very gradually rising line, peaking just before 1970 and then going slowly down every since. That line shows oil produced in the United States.  As you see, production peaked a long time ago.  The same is true in Russia, Europe, and the Middle East whose oil production reached their peak more recently. So far, oil from a few Africa nations and natural gas from Canada and from offshore wells have been able to keep the overall energy supply going up.

But most experts seems to believe that oil production has already peaked in the world overall and that oil plus natural gas will peak in the next decade or two.  China’s fuel needs are speeding up the arrival of that peak.  When the total amount starts going down, will the demand for oil go down too?  I doubt it.

Toward the end of our discussion last Sunday during 2^nd hour, after we bemoaned our dependency on oil, the conversation became very interesting because it became very honest.

The formal session ended; we started putting away the chairs.  The conversation moved into the hallway, and to the door, and into the parking lot, and continued by email throughout the day and into Monday. I’ve put together some of the things that were said in the course of that extended conversation. I’m not pointing any fingers and saying “shame on you” to anyone here.  Most of the things said here I’ve said myself.   This is just honest talk.

To present this in a somewhat playful way, I’m going to string together a series of statements from many people and present them as if one person were speaking. This will say something about our collective mind on the subject of energy and the prospect of avoiding energy wars in the future.

Dishwashers get dishes cleaner than hand washing does.  I use the drier because it’s less work and it makes the clothes fluffier.  I really enjoy a long, hot shower.  In the winter, I need to turn the heat up.  People don’t work efficiently when they’re cold.  I love my electric blanket.  If I took the bus to work, it would take twice as long.  It costs more to take the train to NYC than it does to drive and park.  Hybrid cars are more expensive.  Next month, we’re flying to Colorado to go skiing. If I didn’t have a 36” riding mower, I’d never finish cutting my lawn.  I need an SUV to pull my boat. 

I think you get the point.  Even we, who see the connection between the war in Iraq and oil, aren’t about to volunteer to use less energy to a significant degree.  We need to conserve, but even our best efforts at conservation aren’t going to be enough to solve the energy problems that lie ahead.

The day is coming fairly soon, in 10 or 20 years, when the amount of oil and natural gas pumped out of the ground will go down, and when that happens, the price will go up real fast and we’ll probably, finally, get serious about energy efficiency and renewable forms of energy.  The problem is, these technologies are a long way from being accepted, and some of them aren’t ready to be applied on a large scale.  Industries can’t develop and improve them because the cost of oil is kept artificially low by our government policies.  The oil industry receives huge government subsidies so that renewable energy sources can’t compete economically.

Last year, we had a speaker come to offer us a way to buy all our electricity from renewable energy sources by paying an extra $70 to $95 dollars per year. This is the green energy certificate program.  I can’t go into the details now.  It a way of creating a market for renewable energy to save us from economic and environmental damage in the future. Four members or families of First Church signed up and paid for that without much fanfare.  I know we can do better.  In April, CL& P is coming out with their own green energy certificate program so that you can buy green energy and pay for it on your regular bill. 

If you’d like to participate in or even help promote this green energy certificate program, write “green energy” on the ritual of fellowship pad and I’ll be in touch with you.

I read recently that if the entire fleet of cars and trucks in the U.S. improved their gas mileage by just 5 mpg, it would save the equivalent of all the oil we import from the Middle East.  When you need to buy another car, buy one that gets better gas mileage. 

It’s not as if using oil in the past was a sin from the very start.  The energy was there.  It fueled a lot of things we value, things that enrich our lives.  But now is the time for a change of mind.  Maybe not just the Jonah Center but our congregation could take a leadership role in Middletown.  We could put solar panels on the roof of the parish hall, or install a bio-diesel generator in the basement., or heat and cool the sanctuary with a geothermal well. We could be known as the “energy church.”  I like the sound of that.