Part 1 of 3. Gospel for Proper 25A.
34When the Pharisees
heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35and
one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36“Teacher, which
commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37He said to him, “’You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with
all your mind.’ 38This is the greatest and first commandment. 39And a
second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40On these
two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:34-40)
Faithfully loving God and our neighbors has been a challenge
for Christ’s followers ever since he said these words. In the 21st century we
have two comparatively recent circumstances to take into account in attempting
to follow these commandments.
First, we live in a truly global community. Increased travel
and communications, and especially the sorts of communications and relationship
building possible through the internet, have brought us to a very different understanding
of what it means to love our neighbors. When a newsworthy event happens
anywhere in the world, we know about it immediately. When there is some sort of
disaster, the world can respond immediately.
Second, our climate is changing rapidly and significantly. A
warmer global atmosphere holds more moisture. This means there is less moderate
precipitation; instead, there are at the same time both areas hit by heavy precipitation
and areas of drought. Sea levels are rising, the ocean is becoming more acid,
and coral reefs are dying. Changing temperatures bring changes in insect and
disease patterns.
Just this week, exceptionally heavy rains from Hurricane
Jova and a tropical depression hit Mexico, parts of Central America, and
southern Haiti, affecting around 100,000 people. The Episcopal News Service reports on
the flooding in El Salvador, which Anglican Bishop of El Salvador Martin Barahona has described as “a
catastrophe unparalleled by other disasters” in El Salvador’s recent history.Episcopal Relief and Development reports:
In El Salvador, the hardest hit country, the Lempa and Grande rivers overflowed onto already-saturated ground. The severe flooding that resulted has killed more than 30 people and destroyed more than 18,000 homes. An estimated 65 people have also died in Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Costa Rica.
This is one example of the way increased precipitation can
affect our neighbors. The church in El Salvador and Episcopal Relief and Development
are responding in the name of Christ by helping people who have lost their
homes. As we will see in tomorrow’s post, this flooding is one of many
climate-related events affecting people right now. Every day we fail to address
climate change, the chance of these sorts of disasters affecting more and more
people increases.
In the introduction to Moral
Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, authors Kathleen Dean Moore
and Michael P. Nelson describe a typical suburban autumn evening with people
outdoors doing common things: a teenager driving a car, a little girl playing,
someone using a leaf blower. After describing the scene, they say:
The scene feels odd, almost fictional, the way life goes on. It seems almost as if we were watching a herd of dinosaurs grazing on giant fern-trees, oblivious to the shadow of the asteroid that will strike Earth and forever change the conditions under which they will live – or die.
For some reason, even though we know what is happening in
our world and know that we have very little time to change the way we do things
so that the changes future generations face might be more bearable, life goes
on pretty much unchanged. It’s as if we don’t realize what is happening or don't care.
Even those of us who care passionately and are intentional about keeping up with
the issues of global warming and climate change find it easy to slip into
acting and speaking as if nothing is changing. In a poem entitled Warsaw on the Eve of My Departure[i],
poet Aaron Zeitlin wrote about the days before he left Warsaw in another
situation where reality was difficult to grasp, knowing that the time for Jews
living in Warsaw was short. He wrote: Everything
that you own and that you see / a desolate darkness will soon envelope. / A
voice tells you so, but you forget…You do and do not feel from day to day how
final is / the city. In a similar way, as accelerated and increased climate
change approaches, we both do and do not know what is coming; we both do and do
not feel the finality of the changes taking place on our planet.
In the next couple of posts on this blog, we will look at
the climate change situation and how it affects our neighbors near and far,
some of the questions this raises for Christians and the institutional church
in particular, and the question of how to talk about what is happening in a meaningful
way. The larger question asks what keeps us from doing the work we need to do to ensure our survival and that of our neighbors.
I’m suggesting that the time has come
to make sure that the reality of climate change becomes part of our
conversation any time we in the church plan for the future and talk about doing
ministry. To avoid the topic intentionally for fear of upsetting people, or to let
it slip out of our minds, or even to give it a quick nod before turning to our
usual business is to ignore our neighbors and to deceive ourselves if we think
our own lives as individuals and as a church will continue in familiar ways for
many more years.
We need to talk now about mitigation of climate change,
considering where and how we might decrease our carbon footprint as the church
and how to help individuals learn good environmental stewardship. We can figure
out how to gear up to provide disaster relief as the frequency and severity of
floods, fires, droughts, and storms increase. And the church especially needs to be thinking
about how to meet people’s spiritual needs as the crisis becomes harder to
ignore and people cope with a crisis different from any other in human history.
What spiritual practices will be helpful? What language will we use to talk
about it? How do we stay faithful and
find meaning in the years to come?
[i]
Zeitlin, Aaron. Poems of the Holocaust
and Poems of Faith, ed. and trans. By Morris M. Faierstein. iUniverse:
2007, p. 1.
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