Holy Innocents 2021: Covid and Climate Change

Today the church remembers the Holy Innocents, the children who died when Herod ordered the slaughter of all children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or younger (Matthew 2: 13-23).

Holy Innocents 2021 comes with news of a Covid surge from the omicron variant causing a sharp increase in pediatric hospitalizations. Covid vaccine is now available for children who are at least five years old, but the youngest children cannot yet be vaccinated, pediatric vaccination rates are low, and unvaccinated children living with unvaccinated adults are at especially high risk. The urgency of protecting our children has reached far too few parents, and the failure of our leaders to require vaccinations or mandate mask-wearing or do enough in any way to protect children and others has not only directly made our children vulnerable, but has contributed to a misguided idea that Covid isn’t dangerous for children. Churches that gathered families for unmasked Christmas services and children’s programs bear responsibility also, again not only for the children directly infected from such gatherings, but from the unspoken message that it’s okay to gather as if our wish that this pandemic were over had magically become a reality.

Holy Innocents 2021 comes also after a lackluster COP26 gathering in November made little progress toward mitigating climate change. In an interview by KK Otteson published in The Washington Post , Greta Thunberg says:

Right now, what’s holding us back is that we lack that political will. We don’t prioritize the climate today. Our goal is not to lower emissions. Our goal is to find solutions that allow us to continue life [as it is] today. And, of course, you can ask, “Can’t we have both?” But the uncomfortable truth is that we have left it too late for that. Or the world leaders have left it too late for that. We need to fundamentally change our societies now. If we would have started 30 years ago, it would have been much smoother. But now it’s a different situation.

Greta Thunberg is one of the younger climate activists who know that climate change will be a dominant force for the rest of their lives because of our failure to recognize the danger and address it responsibly before we got to this point. When I read about expected changes in sea level rise and loss of species and food production as the earth continues to warm, I often imagine a baby born this year and how old that baby will be as these changes, challenges, and catastrophes unfold. (When my heart can bear it, I calculate how old my own young grandchildren will be as these changes occur, and try to imagine how their lives might be impacted.) 

Throughout this pandemic, I’ve sensed parallels between our response to climate change and our response to Covid. The parallels are becoming starker and clearer as 2021 comes to a close and our remembrance of the Holy Innocents points to how little children have mattered to too many powerful people throughout history. 

What do the two crises have in common? A few of the parallels are a desire to hold suffering —especially the suffering of the most vulnerable people in our world — at a comfortable arm’s length, an inability to acknowledge and grieve the enormity of the loss of life (both human and nonhuman), a puzzling concession to people who bully us with their “right” to spread disease or pollute the atmosphere with greenhouse gases or otherwise undermine the public good with their own willful ignorance and greed, and an overall failure to love our neighbors as ourselves and to care for the little ones — the most vulnerable ones — in our communities and our world.

The people with power in this world and those of us who passively allow them to continue doing what they do differ from Herod, of course in this: No one intends to cause the death of thousands of children. The objective instead is to maintain political power or a sense of “normalcy”, which rightly or wrongly is taken to entail inadequately addressing a difficult problem. The objectives are to accept (and not look to closely at) a high number of hospitalizations or deaths for some people so that others can have a sense of “getting back to normal” and to ignore the effects of climate change so that we older people can continue enjoying the sorts of comforts and conveniences to which we are accustomed while allowing the wealthiest among us to make huge profits producing and selling carbon intensive energy resources. We don’t intend to harm the children; children are simply the collateral damage of our failures with respect to Covid and climate change, just as children are so often the collateral damage of wars. 

However, we do have something in common with Herod: Herod didn’t care one way or the other about the children who were slaughtered. His objective was to eliminate one child; the others were collateral damage to his cause. When we look the other way and refuse to acknowledge what is happening as a result of our failure to really see and work to end the Covid pandemic and 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 or the grief of Rachel or of mothers throughout history who have seen tyrants treat their children as expendable, as collateral damage to their own selfish schemes.

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 your in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Collect for The Holy Innocents, The Book of Common Prayer)

Lord, have mercy on us.

Falling stones and failing climate policies: a reflection

The COP26 climate conference is finishing its second week, and the negotiators for the nations represented are trying to reach an agreement. In the first week of the conference, delegates and heads of state talked about the need to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C.; this second week was when they discussed how to get where we need to be. So far, the sorts of agreements reported to be under consideration fall far short of the goals set forth during the first week of the conference. The Church should be watching this closely, and we should be talking about what is happening this Sunday and throughout the months ahead.

We should be watching and speaking because those who pay attention to the issue of climate change and know where we are headed are among our members and live in our wider communities. If the Church is aware of a longing among people in our communities to hear messages of deep hope amid profound grief and despair, and if we can take the focus off our parochial concerns — parochial in both senses of the word — and offer both words of hope and comfort and the means for public lamentation, we can help carry Christ’s light into the world in this moment. 

We in the Church should be watching and speaking because each fraction of a degree of global warming brings with it an increase in the number of people needing the sort of help faith communities have traditionally helped provide; increased climate change means more people without adequate food or clean water, more people who have lost their homes, more disease, and more refugees whose lands have become uninhabitable. The church has always provided help to people who are hungry, homeless, sick, or who have become refugees looking to settle in a new place. Our own relief efforts and advocacy for better governmental and community wide services for people in need must expand in anticipation of the climate chaos ahead.

We should be watching and speaking because a failure to talk about the climate crisis and the seriousness of our situation this Sunday or in the weeks, months, and years ahead is an admission of the failure of the Church to love God, love our neighbors, and love God’s creation. As our governments miss one of the last opportunities to mitigate climate disaster to a degree that allows us to imagine a continuing “normal” state of some kind for human civilization, the Church has a window of opportunity to decide and declare whether we stand on the side of the powers-that-be in the corporate and political sphere, the powers that put a short-term satiation of their own goals and desires above the welfare of everyone else and even above their own long-term well-being, or if we stand on the side of the well-being of humanity as a whole, which is interconnected with the well-being of all living things. 

We in the Church should be watching and speaking because the destruction of the temple foretold by Jesus in Sunday’s Gospel lesson (Mark 13:1-8) can help us reflect on the aspects of climate change that are more immediate for some of us: the effect of climate change on our own church buildings, our own homes, our own neighborhoods, and the livelihoods that sustain our faith communities. What might we do when severe storms, extreme temperatures, and a declining ability of or inclination for people to spend money repairing, revamping, or rebuilding church buildings make another way of being the church a necessity rather than a choice? How can we start creating a more sustainable way of being the Church now? 

Perhaps most importantly, we should be watching and speaking and praying and advocating for more significant climate action because love for our neighbors matters, truth matters, and justice for people forgotten by the wealthy and powerful matters. We should be watching and we should be talking about what we see, because a church that fails to speak, a church that has lost its courage to declare love, truth, and justice, is a church that has lost its very soul. 

All the Angels / All the Birds

 September 29

Saint Michael and All Angels

Morning Prayer

The Psalm appointed for the Daily Office today (Psalm 8) tells us that we humans are just a little lower than the angels, that we have been given mastery over everything God created, including “the birds of the air” and “the fish of the sea” — all the living things in all the places plants and animals can live.

Today, September 29, in the early morning I saw the headlines about the declaration of the extinction of the ivory-billed woodpecker, the collective death of every last one of these birds that were called the “Lord God Bird”. (The Washington Post reporter, Dino Grandoni, explains that the name “Lord God Bird” comes from the reaction of those who saw this big, beautiful bird: “those blessed to see it blurted out the Lord’s name”.) 

The same article also tells me that the scientist who wrote the report declaring the Lord God Bird extinct cried, and that 22 other living things were removed from the endangered species list because none of them can be found in the wild. 

This is a pivotal week in the United States in many ways, a standout week even during a period of weeks on weeks and months on months of pandemic in the shadow of climate change, all complicated by the attempts of white nationalism and authoritarianism to rise again (as if the resurrection applied to fascism). There are plenty of unanswered questions, incomprehensible events, complex proposals, and truth-revealing testimony to give us pause, more food for thought than any one of us could ever consume. This early morning, though, I wonder chiefly about two things.

I wonder about angels on this feast of Saint Michael and All Angels. 

The Psalm seems to assume some sort of familiarity with angels. Do we want to know our place in the world? It’s a little lower than the angels, explains the Psalmist. I have no firsthand knowledge of angels. Considering angles is a little like considering alligators and bears for me, in that I’ve read accounts and seen some pictures and, I think, would know one if I saw one, and part of me would like to see such a thing for myself, and part of me knows how frightened I would be if I saw one “in the wild”. What would it be like to see an angel? What sort of experience is that? What sort of knowledge is knowledge of angels?

I also wonder about what sort of “mastery” we humans have demonstrated when that over which we were given mastery is dying, when we have destroyed that which was entrusted to us. The master of a ship does everything possible to avoid wrecking the ship, the headmaster of a school has a duty to oversee the health of the institution and the welfare of the children in the school. We seem to be more than “a little lower” than the angels; we seem to have failed at serving as masters. What does it mean for us to given “mastery” over the other living things?

Wondering about these two things creates more questions as the morning quiet is broken by a raucous blue jay’s sustained call. The Psalm suggests a hierarchy with angels above us and birds below us, but this blue jay is high up in our hackberry tree, way above where I sit on my kitchen porch. What sort of hierarchy is this? I know Jesus supposedly said our lives are worth more than those of the sparrows, but this bird up above me is managing to survive and be exactly what a blue jay should be, and my heart — and I suspect Jesus’s heart — is broken by the knowledge that some of the birds and all the other birds like them are gone, forever gone. 

We, compared to this blue jay that seems alarmed about something, don’t seem to be managing very well the task of being human, of being just a little lower than the angels — whatever that means for those of us who have never seen an angel. We don’t even have the good sense to be alarmed about all the death around us. 

Humans and birds and what we are and why we are seem as mysterious as angels today. Sitting with mystery seems appropriate at the beginning of this day when we consider the angels and at this pivotal point in our history as a species and, more prosaically, as a nation when so much is at stake. 

Coming in the Name of the Lord: Thoughts on the Church's Unique Work in the Climate Crisis

 Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Mark 11:9)

At the end of this Palm Sunday morning, I joined a Zoom conversation with some members of First Congregational UCC in Hastings, Nebraska, at the end of their Lenten series about creation care. Their service included a sermon I had recorded earlier in the week. I’ve adapted the manuscript for that sermon here in order to share some of my current thinking about the wider church’s potential to respond in significant ways to the climate crisis.

It’s heartening to see more and more churches considering how this relatively new challenge of climate change fits into the work churches have traditionally done, work like serving people in need, providing Christian formation for our children, and, most of all, the essential work of discipleship, the work of worship, prayer, and study. In recent years, creation care has become an integral part of the social justice work in many churches.

While churches in the United States have a history of connecting an appreciation of nature with respect for God the Creator, especially through summer camps and occasional outdoor worship in the summer, our history of advocacy around policies regulating clean air and water is very limited. This is relatively new work for the church, and we have had to find our way forward while being pulled backward by a fairly recent narrative claiming that environmental efforts are a political hot potato best avoided, that a desire to keep our levels of pollution and our levels of climate change within the range that allows life as we know it to be sustained is, rather than an urgent concern for everyone on the planet, some sort of side issue that is either supported or opposed according to political affiliations. 

Unlike the sorts of social issues with which the church has historically engaged, climate change comes with an urgency dictated not by the limits of our energy and compassion, which too often have served to slow our efforts, but rather by the limits set by the laws of physics and chemistry, which should serve to accelerate our efforts. And so at the same time the narrative about care for the environment being a trivial political issue was pulling us back, the reality of how rapidly climate change is unfolding and what its effects actually look like has demanded we move ahead more quickly than many leaders in faith communities or in other sorts of institutions found comfortable or even doable. 

We are used to the church engaging in social issues very deliberately. We like to take small steps, doing just enough to stay engaged with an issue while not offending those who aren’t ready for change, and not putting too much time and effort into something many churchgoers see as an unnecessary extra. But because of those pesky natural laws, the luxury of making this work more palatable by advocating for small, incremental changes over many years is not available to us. As this congregation’s Lenten focus on creation care drew to an end, it was wonderful to learn about the efforts of this particular congregation.

We began Holy Week today with Palm Sunday. The Romans in Jesus’s time would process into the cities in their Empire with great pomp, especially after a military victory, the arriving dignitary accompanied by soldiers. Jesus arrives in Jerusalem armed with a heart of compassion and unconditional love, armed with the truth, grounded in prayer, and with deep discernment of God’s will in the week ahead. He is riding not on a warhorse but on a colt, a pile of cloaks for a saddle. More cloaks and leafy tree branches cover the road in front of him, serving both to keep the dust down and to show respect for this humble-looking man who arrives on a colt. And the people who walk ahead of Jesus and behind him are shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord, the one the crowd knows is from God. Christians — at our best — come in the name of the Lord, and groups of Christians who go to serve somewhere, perhaps on a mission trip to another country or somewhere in their own community to serve people in need do so in the name of Jesus Christ. Jesus entering Jerusalem, however, was the perfection of what it means to come in the name of the Lord: perfectly loving, perfectly faithful.

When we show up in the name of the Lord, we present ourselves to the world as followers of Jesus, as people trying to follow his perfect example as best as our imperfect selves can. 

This congregation learned a lot in recent weeks about creation care and climate change and ways we can best respond to it, and many of us in the church have learned enough in recent years to be able to give some meaningful thought to the direction in which we wish to proceed. What’s next? The images and story of Palm Sunday, of Jesus coming into Jerusalem in the name of the Lord, might point us in a direction for the church’s response to climate change. What does it mean for us to come in the name of the Lord at this point in human history?

Palm Sunday show us Jesus entering Jerusalem in a way that is both significant and humble, a way that makes us aware of his authority and power while also reminding us that it’s a mistake to confuse his authority and power with that of the secular officials. Jesus’s authority comes not from military and political structures but from God. It’s both easily ignored and discounted by the secular authorities and also more powerful than the secular authorities can imagine. 

Some reading this may still be wondering about whether the church should direct time and resources toward responding to climate change, while others may be wondering about how the church might best continue that work.

Why should Christians care about climate change? Jesus’s power is love. The reason the church has always cared for people in need is because Jesus taught us to follow his way of love. Climate change is destroying people’s homes and well-being, from Pacific islands made uninhabitable by rising sea levels to Arctic villages built on permafrost whose foundations — and traditional ways of hunting and fishing — cannot hold as the ice melts; from the bitter cold that caused suffering and death in Texas just last month to the floods in Sydney, Australia, this week, as homes were washed away, thousands of people were evacuated from flooded areas, and spiders and snakes swarmed into homes to escape the floodwaters. As I write this post on Sunday evening, I’m seeing news of heavy rains and very destructive flooding in Nashville, Tennessee. 

Here in Nebraska, we may feel secure for the moment, far from seacoasts and experienced in dealing with all sorts of weather, but even if we live somewhere where we feel secure for at least the short-term, we cannot follow Jesus and ignore the suffering of our sisters and brothers. 

We should care about the integrity of God’s creation because God created all that is out of love. If we love God, we should love the gift of life and all that sustains it that God gave us.

What, then, can we do? There are so many wonderful ways we can practice better stewardship of our resources in our churches and our homes, and most of us are familiar with at least enough of these to begin putting some into practice if we haven’t already done so. Good and useful as it is to put some of these suggestions into practice, we need much more than solid individual stewardship to get us to a point of feeling more certain of a sustainable future. Advocacy — being in touch with our elected officials at all levels of government to encourage them to support legislation and policies to help improve the environment and mitigate climate change — is another area where we might put some time and energy. 

However, this Palm Sunday and Holy Week, I hope we can do something more, something bigger that only the church can do. Anyone can adopt better stewardship practices and advocate for better energy and environmental policies — and we need a lot of anyones to do just those things — but there is something more that only we as followers of Jesus can do.

We are truly in a time of  environmental crisis, of climate crisis, that’s happening along with and that intersects with other crises that also need attention. In this time of crisis, I believe that the church, the body of the followers of Jesus, is called to do something more than (and perhaps different from) what environmental organizations ask of us when they come to the church hoping we can help promote their efforts: 

We are called to deep prayer, acknowledging and offering to God our most terrifying truths about climate change and everything connected with it, and listening for God’s response.

We are called to proclaim God’s sovereignty over all of creation, to grow in our love for God’s creation and our ability to find God through the wonders around us, and to teach our children and others to love and respect and find joy in what God has made.

We are called to give voice to grief and lament, to help ourselves and our neighbors acknowledge the losses of human lives, of plant and animal species, and of places. The church knows how to help people process grief. We may not often acknowledge it, but there is grief not only about the incomprehensible losses of lives, income, and family celebrations from this pandemic we are still enduring, but also about the even bigger losses unfolding from climate change. But once we have given voice to our grief and lament, we are called to our most unique task.

We are called to proclaim hope through our faith in the resurrection. We are Easter people; we preach hope and believe in hope even when everything looks hopeless. The hope we are called to proclaim isn’t a false hope. It’s not thinking that everything will magically turn out all right in the end. Hoping for everything to stay as it is, as we’ve known it, is false hope at this point. 

But we can hope for something good that we can’t even imagine. As Paul wrote in his Letter to the Romans, “hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what is seen?” It’s what the philosopher Jonathan Lear terms “radical hope” — a sort of hope beyond hope. As Easter people, we live in radical hope. As followers of Jesus, we share that with the world.

Discarding the word ‘radical’ for the moment in favor of the perhaps less loaded word ‘deep’, I see the church’s call at this time as a call to deep prayer, deep discipleship, deep grief, deep faith, and deep hope, It’s a time for us to look beyond the institutional church and return to our ancient roots in the life and teaching of Jesus. 

What we in the church can offer during this time of environmental crisis is exactly what the followers of Jesus, from those who threw their cloaks down on that dusty road to all of us, have always had to offer: our prayers, our compassion, our hope, and ourselves, all sustained by our faith in the Easter promise of resurrection.