For those who want to save their life
will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of
the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the
whole world and forfeit their life?
The Gospel
passage from today’s Daily Office lectionary, Mark 8:34-9:1, has stayed with
me all day. Having completed training for the Climate Reality
Leadership Corps just last week, the realities of climate change – both the
current scientific consensus about what is happening and the ways in which
climate change is already affecting people and other living things around the
world – are more present in my thoughts than ever. Had I not been reading the
above sentences in their Gospel context, they might be taken as very fresh and
relevant questions in the context of our environmental challenges. Those who
want to cling to a comfortable and familiar way of life thinking that will
shield them from reality will lose that life, and those who let go of their old
way of life, of our old consumer culture and notions of success, for the sake
of sustaining all living things in God’s creation will find a deeper life. For
what good does it do us to have all the stuff in the world and destroy the web
of life on our planet?
Even though
that’s what I first heard in this passage today, I dismissed it because when
Jesus said these words, he was talking about something entirely different. This
passage from Mark is about the possibility of losing your soul, your core or
essential self. What good does it do to gain power or wealth or success in some
arena and lose who we really are in the process? True life, says Jesus, is
setting aside all of the things on which we usually focus our efforts in order
to focus on Christ and his gospel.
I know all
of that, but the way these words first grabbed my attention this morning stayed
with me. An old school friend wondered on Facebook about where all the
grasshoppers had gone. In our childhood in northeast Ohio, grasshoppers were
plentiful; he said that when his Ohio grandchildren saw a grasshopper on a trip
to West Virginia last year, they asked what it was. Other people from various
places commented about missing monarch butterflies and crickets and a couple of
wildflowers. Their disappearance is about habitat loss as well as climate
change, still another way that our way of life is causing the web to unravel. Then
later on in the day I read about NOAA releasing
its 2012 State of the Climate report, full of news about rising ocean
temperatures, rising oceans, loss of Arctic sea ice, and a continued overall
warming trend.
“What will
it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” I began to
wonder about a connection between losing our souls and losing the web of life
that supports us. Our way of life, a way of life that has brought many of us
comforts and conveniences that previous generations could not have imagined, has
caused the web of life in which we live to begin unraveling. We are not
separate from “nature”; when everything else is suffering, we are suffering,
too. And if everything else dies, we will die, too.
We are,
after all, creatures of the earth. Genesis 2 talks about the human being, adam, being created from the soil, adamah, inextricably connected with the
earth, dependent on air and water and food from other living things to stay
alive. We depend on animals and plants for more than food and ecosystem
balance, though; they are our companions on this planet. The IUCN Red List of endangered species
contains photographs of some of the animals and plants that are not flourishing
today. A look through the pages of the Red List website is sobering. The
prospect of losing these other living things to whom we are connected is very
sad indeed. Their loss touches our souls because their lives and ours are bound
together. Losing all of this means losing our souls, our very lives.
Right now,
human beings are destroying the conditions necessary for human life to
flourish. We can forfeit our souls, life itself, and continue with business as
usual, or we can let go of all of that and change the way we live so that we and
future generations can live. For what good does it do us to have all the stuff
in the world and destroy the web of life on our planet?
