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.
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