Joy to the world! The
Lord is come: let earth receive her king;
Let every heart
prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.
With “Joy to the world” in our hearts and minds, I invite
you to join me in looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for instances of the joy
that runs through all of creation, especially through experiencing the beauty
and wonder of God’s world.
Today was another unusually warm one, with temperatures in
the upper 50’s. What snow we had is gone, and ice continued to melt. While the
fields and pastures are their usual winter browns and grays, the dominant color
in the Nebraska landscape as we drove east today was blue: blue sky all around,
occasionally reflected in rivers, ponds, and streams where enough melting has
taken place for open water to match the blue of the sky.
This evening the wind has shifted to the northwest, and the
weather forecast says that our warm days are coming to an abrupt end overnight.
There was joy in the break from the seasonal “bleak midwinter”. There will also
be some joy in temperatures closer to the norm for this time of year, a return
to those wintry days that will make the spring that much sweeter.
Joy to the world! The
Savior reigns; let us our songs employ, while fields and floods, rocks, hills,
and plains, repeat the sounding joy.
Today is the Feast of the Holy Innocents. Below is a reposted reflection on the day from last year. Children remain especially vulnerable to the impacts of pollution and climate change. The future of every child in the world is threatened by climate change, and we continue to place a low priority on addressing that threat. Last year's reflection ended with a video of the The Coventry Carol in honor of the innocents who died in Typhoon Sendong in the Philippines in 2011. This year I've shared another video of The Coventry Carol to honor the innocents who died this year in Typhoon Haiyan and in wildfires, floods, tornadoes and hurricanes and other extreme weather events this year.
***
We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. Collect for Holy Innocents, Book of Common Prayer, p. 238
Pollution and the effects of climate change impact children especially hard. Pollutants generally do more damage to developing bodies; dehydration from diarrheal diseases caused by lack of clean water is especially dangerous for infants and young children. According to World Health Organization information about climate change and health, “children – in particular, children living in poor countries – are among the most vulnerable to the resulting health risks” from climate change”. Among these risks are extreme heat, malnutrition, lack of clean water, impacts of natural disasters, and increasing risk of diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and diarrheal diseases.
Today the church remembers the Holy Innocents, the children who died when Herod ordered the slaughter of all children who were two years old or younger (Matthew 2: 13-23). Augustine of Hippo called these children “buds, killed by the frost of persecution the moment they showed themselves.”
As air and water pollution and climate change take their toll of young lives, many children in our world never get a chance to be more than buds, buds killed in this case by the frost of the world’s indifference the moment they showed themselves.
The people with power in this world – the political leaders, the economically comfortable, the corporate heads – differ from Herod, of course. Their intention isn’t to cause the death of thousands of children; their intention instead is to maintain political power by not addressing a difficult problem, or to ignore the effects of climate change so that we can continue enjoying the sorts of comforts and conveniences to which we are accustomed, or to make a profit producing, selling, or investing in fossil fuels. Children are the collateral damage of our failure to control pollution and address climate change. There is no intention to harm, but instead of an intention to protect children, there is indifference and denial.
When we look the other way and refuse to acknowledge what is happening as a result of our failure to control pollution and address climate change, we aren’t really all that different from Herod. And the grief of the mothers of today’s innocent victims is no different from the grief of the mothers of Bethlehem some two thousand years ago.
***
Here is the Coventry Carol in honor of all the innocents killed by greed and indifference:
Joy to the world! The
Lord is come: let earth receive her king;
Let every heart
prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.
With “Joy to the world” in our hearts and minds, I invite
you to join me in looking each of these twelve days for instances of the joy
that runs through all of creation, especially through experiencing the beauty
and wonder of God’s world.
Temperatures above 50 degrees today in our part of
Nebraska along with a good dose of midday sun helped it feel very comfortable
outside despite a fairly good breeze. In the afternoon, we walked at a lake where whatever ice
had formed earlier was melting. Leaves that had been caught in the top of the
ice when it had frozen had absorbed enough heat from the sun to begin melting the
ice around each leaf.
It’s such an elegantly simple example of something all of us
who have lived with ice and snow know, that darker surfaces absorb heat from
the sun and speed the thawing of ice and snow around them. This is why the
melting of Arctic ice has produced a feedback loop that has accelerated the
melting: as ice melts, open water is exposed. The open water absorbs heat from
the sun that would be reflected by ice. As more heat is absorbed, the melting
of the ice is accelerated.
There’s some joy in knowing that we understand a lot about
the science of climate change. Should the powers that be ever decide to do
something significant to mitigate climate change, scientists can help to maximize
that effort. But the beauty of each little depression slowly growing as the sun
shone was the surest and most immediate joy, wonder enough for today.
Joy to the world! The
Savior reigns; let us our songs employ, while fields and floods, rocks, hills,
and plains, repeat the sounding joy.
Joy to the world! The
Lord is come: let earth receive her king;
Let every heart
prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.
Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation, is a joyous remembrance
of the Word made flesh. Christ is born in the world! The creation of God the
Creator becomes the holy dwelling place of the Incarnate God, affirming that
while God transcends all of creation, God is not removed from creation. God
chooses to be among us, and all of creation sings with joy!
With “Joy to the world” in our hearts and minds, I invite
you to join me in looking each of these twelve days for instances of the joy
that runs through all of creation, especially through experiencing the beauty
and wonder of God’s world.
Here are some of the joys I've experienced the first two days of Christmas.
Christmas Day: We gather green things and flowers to decorate our churches and homes at Christmas. This time of year in the cold parts of the world, flowers bring great joy to us. Church of the Resurrection in Omaha used poinsettias on the altar and a symbolic star above it all to bring some of the joy of the outside world into our sanctuary for Christmas Eve. At home, a gift of flowers brought us the joy of color and beautiful smells.
Second Day of Christmas: Mild weather in our part of Nebraska today made it easy to notice bits of green among the browns and grays that dominate our December landscape. A close-up of an ivy leaf shows a creamy white color and a surprisingly bright rose-colored stripe along with the green. This same ivy on our walls provides shelter for some hardy wrens that have been singing on sunny winter mornings.
Joy to the world! The
Savior reigns; let us our songs employ, while fields and floods, rocks, hills,
and plains, repeat the sounding joy.
This reflection for the Fourth Sunday
of Advent is a revision of a post
from December 18, 2010 that was written after the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Cancun that year. It also referenced the 2010
Climate Vulnerability Monitor, which remains a good resource to help in
understanding the effects of climate change on various parts of the world.
Matthew’s
account of the birth of Jesus (Matthew
1:18-25) tells the extraordinary story not
only of Mary’s pregnancy and the birth of Jesus, but of Joseph’s reaction to
the news. Joseph’s righteous response to Mary’s pregnancy was as plan to
dismiss her quietly and shield her from public disgrace; such a reaction was
enough out of the ordinary to warrant comment from Matthew. Then Matthew
reveals the most unexpected piece of Joseph’s story: in a dream, an angel spoke
to him, and when he woke up, Joseph did as the angel commanded him.
The nativity story is Good News; it’s a story of something
new and different, a story of new life coming into the world on a very deep
level.
Despite our
celebration of the newness of the birth of Jesus, we tend to cling to
traditions, often more so at Christmas than at other times of year. Every year,
self-help writers encourage people to let go of traditions that have become
burdensome in some ways – a big holiday dinner or party, for example, that has
become more work and expense than the hosts can bear -- and try something new
that is more life-giving.
Thinking
about our environmental footprint at Christmas involves thinking about our
traditions on a deeper level. Choices about which gifts to buy, how (or whether) to wrap them,
travel plans, food, decorations, all involve examining customs or traditions
and considering changing them because we want something that matters more to
us: a sustainable future, life.
The
environmental challenges we face year-round call for us to examine our daily customs
and traditions, our entire way of life, and find other ways to live that make
new life possible. They call for us to let go of things that have become
burdensome to all living things and try something new that is more life-giving.
They call us to move from traditions on the level of familiar customs to
traditions on the level of our most essential values.
This blog’s
post for Advent III talked about visions of hope and about some signs of change
that support us in our hope, from the shutdown of some big coal-fired power plants to the little wind- and solar-powered “energy barn” built in the path of the Keystone XL pipeline here in Nebraska. While these things alone don’t put much of a dent in global warming, they are a start, and they do give us hope that bigger things can done that could significantly mitigate global warming.
Doing something is preferable to doing nothing, and signs of hope are something to celebrate, but some welcomed steps in the right direction aren’t the same thing as justice, especially not justice as described by the prophets. For the people on islands that are threatened by sea level rise, for people trying to raise enough food to survive in places where the traditional planting and harvest dates no longer are reliable, or for people who have lost homes or loved ones to severe weather events, changes on a much deeper scale is needed. What counts as a successful nod to the climate crisis in the political world, or what we might see as a success because it gives some small glimmer of hope in the darkness, isn't necessarily success according to the standards of the prophets.
Real justice calls us to change our way of life so deeply that the earth, worn down like the poor by our greed and selfishness, can be renewed and restored. These sorts of deep changes require an essential spiritual component that our deepest traditions can provide if we will tap into them. These sorts of deep changes are embedded in the story of the birth of Jesus, the story we prepare to celebrate this week. If we stop and listen to Matthew’s account of the birth, letting the story reach our hearts as well as our ears, we may find ourselves prepared to embrace those deep changes with gladness. We may find Good News, a story of new life coming into the world on a very deep level.
