The jolt came at 4:31 a.m., accompanied by a loud CRACK. I know exactly what time it was, because when I awoke, my eyes flew wide open to the digital clock on the nightstand. I had a second to register the time - and then the power went out and the screen went blank.

I had never been in an earthquake before. But I had read enough earthquake preparedness handouts to know that I had about ten seconds to take cover. After a futile second or two of trying to crawl under the bed, I made a mad dash for the dining table down the hall.

No sooner had I crawled under the table than the shaking began. It was though a giant had picked up the building and had started shaking it. And it was as though he were shaking it in two directions – up and down and side to side, all at once.

The noise was unbelievable. To this day, I don’t really know if it was from the earth itself, or merely from all the furniture being bounced up and down. The rumble was accompanied by the sound of breaking glass, as the cupboard doors flew open and dishes and glassware poured out of them and crashed on the floor. Crouched in the fetal position in my nightclothes, I resigned myself to the realization that this was the way I was going to die.

And then, within a minute, it stopped. It had been the longest minute of my life, mind you, but the main shock was over. In disbelief that I was still alive, I staggered out from under the table and looked around at the chaos. Blessedly, the roof and walls were intact. But my carefully arranged apartment was a shambles, with furniture, books, and dishes strewn everywhere. I never spent the night in that apartment again. By the end of the year, I had moved three times.

This was Los Angeles’ Northridge Earthquake in January of 1994, about 6.7 on the Richter scale. It happened almost exactly a year after I had come to LA, as the minister of the UU Church of Studio City, and the epicenter was 8 miles from my home. It was not The Big One that everybody talked about, but it was big enough. And until Katrina, it was the costliest U.S. disaster.

This year, of course, Katrina relegated Northridge to the minor leagues. What we experienced was substantial enough - but it was nothing compared to the devastation and suffering following in Katrina’s wake. Even so, I find myself taking Katrina very personally. In the marrow of my bones, I carry at least some tiny sense of what displaced and traumatized people are going through right now.

Aside from scale, one can make many contrasts between Katrina and a medium-sized earthquake. One obvious one is the difference in the degree of human culpability. I suppose one could argue that people should never have started living on land as riddled with faults as California is. But then, of course, we’d have to look hard at Boston, whom some consider overdue for a quake.

Apart from that issue, the Northridge Earthquake could safely be considered a “natural disaster.” One can and should cooperate with nature – by strengthening buildings, by bolting bookcases to the wall, and by having good disaster plans. Beyond that, there’s no way to prevent them.

In contrast, the more we learn, the more we realize the extent to which Katrina was a human-made disaster. To be sure, it was triggered by a natural disaster - but it was magnified many times over by human failure, and, dare I say it, racism and criminal negligence. What we are seeing now, on the scale that we are seeing it, happened not because of a hurricane, but because people with the power to prevent the disaster could have acted, and did not. Of course, that doesn’t even get into what was done – and not – once the disaster had been set in motion.

Long before Katrina, I had planned to preach on the topic of earth stewardship – part of Tom Wintle’s plan to make “Stewards” the theme of the month. After the disaster hit, I was at first tempted to dismiss my chosen topic as irrelevant. But then I quickly realized how on point it is.

Perhaps some of you have had a chance to look at Jared Diamond’s new book, Collapse (Viking Press, 2005). It’s fascinating, but slow going because it’s so rich in factual detail. I confess I haven’t read the whole thing – I read the first few chapters before jumping to the last one.

The book, as its title suggests, is about societal collapse. Diamond analyzes the environmental factors that led to the collapse of various societies in the past – from Easter Island in the South Pacific to the Norse settlement on the coast of Greenland – and then examines their relevance for today. He ends on a note of hope that people will wake up and develop the political will to turn things around. But before he gets there, he paints a chilling picture – one that we’ve heard before, but perhaps not in as comprehensive and urgent a fashion.

To summarize Diamond’s message: We human beings – especially First Worlders – are living a lifestyle that is sustainable at most for another 25 or 30 years. Our destruction of natural resources, our depletion of non-renewable ones, and our poisoning of the planet, combine with unchecked population growth elsewhere in the world to create a ticking time bomb.

Native Americans espouse the principle that in every decision, the wellbeing of future generations must be taken into account, even unto the seventh generation. But on our current course, we’re not even taking our children’s generation into account! Thirty years from now, our kindergartners will be 35. Our eighth graders will be 43 or 44, just moving into the age where people become national leaders. What kind of a world will they be facing?

Diamond says, “…because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world’s environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies” (2005:498).

It is unsettling to think that Katrina’s devastation might be only a forerunner of things to come. But what happened in the Gulf Coast, and especially in New Orleans, takes “collapse” out of the realm of the past or future, and hurls it into the present.

Two examples will suffice for the lessons Katrina teaches about earth stewardship. One of these is the apparent connection between global warming and the strength of hurricanes. A story appeared in the Globe just this Friday.

Over the last three decades, there’s been more than a 50 percent in increase in the number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes, and this corresponds to a one degree F. increase in the surface area of tropical seas. This doesn’t lead inexorably to the conclusion that “global warming caused Katrina.” But it should make us take notice.

The second example is wetlands protection. One of the things that made New Orleans so vulnerable to hurricanes is the gradual disappearance of its wetlands – bayous - over the last century. These used to provide a buffer – analogous to a “speed bump” - against storm surges, but now too many have been destroyed. Louisiana officials woke up to the problem in the 1980s, and repeatedly asked Congress for help in doing something about it – and were consistently turned down.

I cannot tell you how creepy it was this week to do a Google search on “Katrina” and “Wetlands,” and find a National Geographic piece whose lead described a New Orleans hurricane disaster scenario. At first, I thought it was a brand new article, written just for the web. But as I read on, I realized that some of the details were off. Reading further, I finally realized that this article had been written in 2004 - a prediction of what could happen because the coastal wetlands were gone.

Wetlands are crucial not only to flood and storm control, but also to the maintenance of water quality, and the support of both commercial and freshwater fishing. But human beings, too often, have seen them as useless wasteland, just begging to be filled in and put to “good use”, so called. Diamond tells us that, over time, the world has lost over half its original allotment of wetlands – we’ve lost an even greater percentage of these than we have lost our forests. And now, we’re learning the consequences.

At this point, you may be wondering what theology – the third part of my title - has to do with all this. In response, let me make two observations.

First, I believe that our ecological crisis is actually rooted in a spiritual one. Al Gore said as much in the early 1990’s, when he was Vice President, in a book on ecology. He characterized the spiritual crisis as one of addiction. “We are addicted to the consumption of the earth itself,” is the way he put it.

In turn, this addiction to consumption is a reaction to our estrangement from nature. In Gore’s words, consumption “distracts us from the pain of what we have lost: a direct experience of our connection to the vividness, vibrancy, and aliveness of the rest of the natural world.” In a way, consumption anaesthetizes us.

My second observation is this: I believe that one of the sources of our estrangement from nature is the prevailing outlook, over the last 500 years or so, of Western religion. By “Western religion,” I mean mostly Roman Catholicism and its Protestant offshoots. Since sometime in the 1400s, the Western religious outlook has tended to be very anthropocentric - human-centered. Instead of celebrating God’s creation in gratitude, it has tended to look inward, obsessing about human sinfulness. And instead of seeing humans as part of nature – “a strand in the web of life” – it has tended to pit us against it.

Nature has been seen as something to be dominated and exploited, rather than stewarded and cared for. In the process, it has become subject to what Morris Berman calls “disenchantment.” We have stripped it of its divinity. It has become an object, rather than a vital manifestation of a living God.

Not that religion is the only culprit here. For centuries, it had an ally in much of Western science and technology. Francis Bacon, regarded as the founder of modern scientific method, set the tone. He described nature as a woman, there to be captured and subdued. At one point, he addressed the “sons of knowledge,” saying: “I am come in very truth, leading you to nature with all her children, to bind her to your service and make her your slave.” Parenthetically, it’s interesting to note what was actually happening at that time to indigenous people in the New World and Africa. They, like women, were regarded as “close to nature.”

Our present crisis calls for nothing less than repentance and conversion. Obviously, it calls first and foremost for action. But I believe it also calls for a change in many of the assumptions that we have inherited. We must rethink our religious imagination. We must develop a religious vision that promotes cooperation with creation, rather than exploitation. And it almost goes without saying that such a vision must be developed in conversation with science, not in opposition to it.

But this vision doesn’t have to be articulated only in scientific vocabulary. As religious people, we have religious resources to draw upon to nurture our imagination. And perhaps surprisingly, many of these resources are available to us through Christian tradition. Some of them are part of our worship this morning.

One sourcebook is the Bible. We can start with the ringing affirmation of Genesis 1 – “and God saw that it was good.” Sometimes we may want to turn to fresh translations, as with the version of the Lord’s Prayer that we said at the beginning of this service. Other sourcebooks include Celtic and Byzantine Christianity, the medieval mystics, and even some neglected strands within Protestantism. We can bring all these to the table, in dialogue with people of other faiths.

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now” (Romans 8:22)…waiting for our redemption.

Maybe we can forge a vision that will lead to action, good all the way to the seventh generation.

Maybe we have no choice.