Third Sunday after Epiphany, Year B
It’s been a couple of weeks since the last Green Sprout’s
post. A combination of family obligations, travel, and a painful shoulder that
has made writing difficult is mostly to blame for so much time passing between
posts, but it’s not the entire reason for the lack of posts.
While time has passed, I’ve been thinking about time in relation
to global warming, struggling to process where we find ourselves in January of
2012 and how to begin to articulate a response. We know how urgent this crisis
is, yet our actions and those of our leaders seldom reflect that urgency. We
know that our present course leads in this century to mass extinctions of
species, to mass migrations of people from areas of flood, drought, and famine,
to increased risk of tropical diseases, to major cities dealing with rising
oceans, and to island nations disappearing. We know that our present course
eventually leads to the end of life as we have known it, bringing a sobering
eschatological element into the discussion.
By the end of 2011, we knew we were running out of time on
climate; we knew we were up against what some had begun calling a “climate
emergency”. This blog’s December 20 post, How Can This Be? , summarized some of the factors that were causing us to realize that global
warming was an even more pressing issue than we had known it was at the
beginning of the year. Yet while climate experts continue to publish information
pointing to the urgency of the situation and the need for the world’s leaders
to address it in significant ways very, very soon, even those leaders who
acknowledge the problem speak and act as if we had all the time in the world in
which to act.
Earlier this month, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the symbolic Doomsday
Clock one minute closer to midnight, putting us at five minutes until midnight.
The move was made not only because of
lack of progress on nuclear weapons reduction and proliferation, but also because
of “inaction on climate change”.
The reluctant prophet Jonah (Jonah 3:1-5, 10) warns the Ninevites that God will destroy the
city in forty days. Much to his surprise, the Ninevites heed the warning and
repent. Seeing their penitence, God spares them. The Ninevites might very well have
either ignored Jonah and denied the truth of what he told them, or believed him
but decided their doom was inevitable and so did nothing. In our world, there are people in denial
about global warming, people so deep in despair that they see no point in
acting, and others who continue to work to address the issue even though we don’t
know how effective our efforts will be. If we truly see what is happening,
working to change things is a form of repentance. It’s the right thing to do. (As Bill McKibben has said, “The only thing
for a morally awake person to do when the worst thing that’s ever happened is
happening is try to change those odds.”)
Psalm 62 reminds us that power belongs to God. “For God
alone my soul in silence waits” because God is the only thing worthy of our
complete trust. Working for a healthier planet while all the power and money of
fossil fuel corporations seems to be working in the opposite direction is
discouraging, but compared to God’s power, their power is nothing. “On the
scales they are lighter than a breath, all of them together.”
Paul’s words in First Corinthians (I Corinthians 7:29-31) remind us to put first things first, to “deal with
the world” as if we have no dealings with it, to put the urgent matter before
business as usual. This is something to consider, given that so many of the
arguments in our country against addressing global warming have to do with our
inability to consider giving priority to anything over business as usual.
In our Gospel passage from Mark (Mark 1:14-20), Jesus says that “the time is
fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near”, then goes about ministry in a
very concrete, straightforward way. He approaches ordinary men who are fishing
or mending nets and invites them to follow him. They in turn will go out to
invite others to join them in following Jesus. We in Nebraska learned this past
year about the power of ordinary power doing ordinary things – speaking with
neighbors, writing letters to elected officials and hometown newspapers,
telling our stories and the story of our land and water – that resulted in something
extraordinary: keeping the Keystone XL pipeline out of the Sandhills. When we
realize that we are living in an extraordinary time, our best response might be
to go about what needs to be done in a fairly ordinary and straightforward way,
relying on ourselves and other ordinary people to do the work and to invite
others to join us.
This week’s lessons point to this: The best way for
Christians to live in a time like this is to live in hope with our eyes wide
open. That means learning everything we can about what is happening,
acknowledging the truth of the situation, and doing all we can to serve God,
all of God’s children, and all of God’s creation.
