At 3:05 this morning, as wind lashed rain across my roof, a number of my appliances beeped loudly. The cat that was curled up next to my head jumped up in alarm. As did I. The clock on my bedside table was flashing 12:00. The power from the grid had gone out—some tree somewhere had fallen across a power line—but the power to key components of my household immediately switched over to the lithium battery that is charged by the solar panels on my roof. I turned on the light, read for a few minutes, and went back to sleep. When the grid came back online around 5:30, everything switched back to being powered by the grid. End of crisis.
Welcome to Sun Day. I ordered up a nice sunny day for the occasion. You can see what kind of pull I have on high.
We are joining with churches and secular groups all across the country this weekend to celebrate energy generated by the sun and other non-fossil-fuel sources such as wind, hydropower, and geothermal energy. And we’re going to unpack why switching to cleaner energy is a theological act, a radical act, and a life-affirming act.
We begin with Psalm 19, which gives us a wonderful celebration of creation, including this description of the sun:
In the heavens God has set a tent for the sun,
5 which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy,
and like a strong man runs its course with joy.
6 Its rising is from the end of the heavens
and its circuit to the end of them,
and nothing is hid from its heat. (Psalm 19:4b-6)
You can hear the joy in that description. The heavens are telling the glory of God. All of creation sings God’s praises, just by being its beautiful, awe-inspiring self.
The psalm continues with praise for God’s law as presented in scripture, using six metaphors for God’s teachings: laws, decrees, precepts, commandment, fear, and ordinances. This psalm captures celebration for what has been called God’s Big Book, meaning creation, and God’s Little Book, meaning the scriptures. We celebrate both: creation, because it strikes awe in our hearts, because we are a part of it, because it provides everything we need; and scriptures, which give us a frame through which to understand how to act in this creation. We need both, and they work together.
Perhaps you have a favorite sunrise experience, and I hope you will share them with each other after worship this morning. Here’s one of mine: When I went to Iona, Scotland in 2022, I woke up very early one morning, crept out of the hotel as quietly as possible, hiked up the main road a bit past centuries-old Celtic crosses, cut across a field, and scrambled up Dun I, the highest point on this tiny island. I sat there looking out at the neighboring islands and, over the course of an hour, watched the sun rise, its rays filtering through backlit cloud banks and spilling onto the nearby hills and valleys, lighting up patches of water and then shifting. It was a moment of great peace and wonder, of feeling part of the larger creation and also the centuries of history that have played out in that place. Sunrises, especially from a high vantage point, are so awe-inspiring.
We hear that same awe and joy in Mary Oliver’s poem, “Why I Wake Early”:
Hello, sun in my face.
Can’t you feel it already?
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and crotchety –
best preacher that ever was….
[Mary Oliver, “Why I Wake Early,” in Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 171.]
She feels held “in the great hands of light” and says in response, “good morning, good morning, good morning. / Watch, now, how I start the day / in happiness, in kindness.”
So why celebrate Sun Day at this particular time? And how is it possibly a radical theological act?
You may not know it, given the politics of the present moment, but this planet is going through an energy revolution, moving away from the old technology of burning fossil fuels and shifting to the new technology of solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal heat, and other green energy strategies. That is, the rest of the planet is surging forward in this transition. Here in the United States, rebates and other incentives for installing solar panels and buying electric vehicles are about to expire, because they interfere with Big Oil. And Big Oil has deep pockets, has politicians willing to spout the gospel of fossil fuels. This year, the Arctic wilderness in northern Alaska has been proposed to be stripped of protections and plundered for oil. Other areas sacred to Indigenous tribes are being put up for auction to oil companies so they can drill, baby, drill. A wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island was handed a stop-work order when it was 90% complete, for no reason other than that it competes with fossil fuels. We export fracked oil and gas around the world. But fewer countries want to depend on our fickle, flip-flop, whiplash policies for their fossil fuels. They are exploring other, more dependable, options.
So while our country is busy doing an about-face on clean energy, in May, China put up a gigawatt of solar power every eight hours and is installing lots and lots of batteries. China is manufacturing electric vehicles and selling them all over the world. Indonesia has set a goal of installing 100 gigawatts of solar energy in the next five years. Saudi Arabia is investing heavily in solar power and electric vehicles. Oman aims to have 100% renewable energy by 2050. In 2024, Europe made more energy from green sources than from coal. In Europe, you can go to the equivalent of Best Buy, purchase a few solar panels, and install them on your apartment balcony following instructions from YouTube. Pakistan is similarly installing a lot of solar panels. [Data comes from Bill McKibben webinar, August 2025.]
Solar energy is no longer alternative energy. It is the cheapest energy to install at this point, and it will keep working for decades. If this country wanted to get all its energy from solar, we would need to cover 1.5% of the land in solar panels. If you consider how many rooftops we have, we could find that space. We plant 60 million acres in corn, half of which is for ethanol gas to fuel our cars. By the time you figure in all the fossil fuels used to plant and water and harvest and process the corn into ethanol, there is a low energy return on energy invested. One acre of corn turned into ethanol will fuel a gas car for 25,000 miles. Sound pretty good. One acre of solar panels will fuel an electric vehicle for 700,000 miles. Sounds way better. As Bill McKibben says, “Clean electrons are our most valuable crop.”
Yes, we need to mine lithium, cobalt, and other minerals to use in batteries, and we need to do it as ethically as possible. But that mining is 1/400th of the mining and extraction for fossil fuels. And then lithium batteries work for decades, and when they’re done, they can be remade into new batteries, so at a certain point we won’t need to continue mining more lithium. Compare that to mining coal or fracking oil: you burn it today, and you have to extract more to burn tomorrow. We’ve run out of the easily accessed oil; nowadays we have to frack it, which is expensive, or drill deep into the ocean. To pull coal out of mountains, we just blow off the whole mountaintop and dump it into the valleys. And fossil fuels are big polluters: around the world, 9 million people a year die from breathing fossil fuel pollution particulates, and 90,000 of those people are in the U.S. If those statistics were for a disease, we would be outraged. We would be devoting massive amounts of funding to research for a cure. But we have been conditioned to think that this is just the cost of doing business.
John D. Rockefeller saw that if he could control fossil fuels, he would be both rich and powerful. The Koch brothers have operated on the same philosophy. So does Putin. So do some of the people in our government. But solar energy comes from the sun. Nobody owns the sun. Solar panels can be distributed throughout communities, not centrally controlled. And as I mentioned, they are no longer alternative energy but the cheapest form of energy to install. Over the years, they pay for themselves—and keep generating energy.
In our Bible study group on Monday evening, we talked about the passage in James that says, “Let your yes be yes, and your no be no” (James 5:12). Jesus calls us to live honestly, so that our Yes means something, and our No does as well. But we are also called to say Yes to honest systems and No to corrupt or damaging systems. No system is completely pure, but some are better than others. Clean energy has its own costs, but compared to fossil fuels it is head and shoulders better. So we continue to say Yes to clean energy and to do our best to say No to fossil fuels.
Imagine what geopolitics would have looked like over the past 70 or more years if sun and wind were our power source instead of oil. How many conflicts—Iraq, Iran, so many places—were fundamentally about protecting our oil interests? How many more wars are we willing to engage in to protect our “right” to extract the very last drop of oil from the earth and burn it? And then what, when it’s all gone?
Listen to the vision that Lester R. Brown cast, back in 2011, for a world running on clean energy:
In the new energy economy, our cities will be unlike any we have known during our lifetime. The air will be clean and the streets will be quiet, with only the scarcely audible hum of electric motors. Air pollution alerts will be a thing of the past as coal-fired power plants are dismantled and recycled and as gasoline- and-diesel-burning engines largely disappear.
This transition is now building its own momentum, driven by an intense excitement from the realization that we are tapping energy sources that can last as long as the earth itself. Oil wells go dry and coal seams run out, but for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, we are investing in energy sources that can last forever.
[Lester R. Brown, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 135.]
Transitioning away from fossil fuels is a theological stand. It casts a vision of a cleaner, healthier, more stable planet. We can’t all afford to make the switch all at once. So we do what we can: we carpool or take the bus or bike or walk, we combine errands all in one trip instead of many separate outings, we increase the insulation in our homes so that we’re not leaking heat but using it efficiently. We buy a hybrid electric or a fully electric vehicle. And if we can, we put solar panels on our rooftops, or we pay our utility provider a little extra for its green energy option. We write to our legislators to let them know we support clean energy and would like to see the incentives restored.
When we say No to fossil fuels, at whatever level we can, we say No to fossil fuel companies that want to tell us 90,000 American deaths a year is acceptable. We say No to politicians who are in the pockets of Big Oil. We take the radical stance that we as a planet can do better. We affirm that we will have cleaner air and healthier bodies without that particulate matter from fossil fuel pollution. We worship not human corrupt power but the God who created all that is, including the sun, including the sunrises that leave us saying,
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.
Amen.