Text for non-biblical second reading:
A reading from "Everything that Breathes Praises God", Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople:
Responding to the environmental crisis is a matter of truthfulness to God, humanity, and the created order. It is not too far-fetched to speak of environmental damage as being a contemporary heresy or natural terrorism. We have repeatedly condemned this behavior as nothing less than sinful. For beings to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation; for humans to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate; by stripping the Earth of its natural forests, or by destroying its wetlands; for humans to injure other humans with disease by contaminating the earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life with poisonous substances—all these are sins before God, humanity, and the world. We have tended to restrict the notion of sin to the individual sense of guilt or the social sense of wrongdoing. Yet sin also contains a cosmic dimension, and repentance from environmental sin demands a radical transformation of the way we perceive the natural world and a tangible change in the way we
choose to live.
