Looking Toward Holy Week 2022

 Monday of this week, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the conclusions of Working Group 3, the group of scientists looking at what humankind needs to do to reduce the effects of climate change. 

From one perspective, the report was hopeful, as the group did indeed list specific actions we can take and a timetable of when we need to have these actions in place in order to escape the worst consequences of climate change. From another perspective, the report was disheartening, emphasizing the urgency of making big policy changes and the nearly unthinkable consequences of failing to act quickly. 

The UN News published this article — UN climate report: It’s ‘now or never’ to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees — summarizing some of the key points and the comments of UN leaders.

The next three years are critical, and we know the world is occupied with other matters — matters both significant and trivial — that make it hard to imagine that the world’s governments and corporations will make the large-scale changes that the challenge demands. And yet, we also know that even if it is unimaginable, it is still possible.

The timing of this report in relation to the church calendar called me to reflect on places where the elements of both our hope and our despair about climate change intersect with some of the themes of the texts and liturgy we will be meeting during Holy Week. Climate change is one of several big, serious issues that make this point in history more challenging than most, and all of these issues are intertwined with one another. We come into this Holy Week different people in a different church than we knew in years past, a church coming to grips with an ongoing pandemic, national and global political instability, a new awareness and admission of racism, and, underlying it all, a knowledge that seasonable weather as we knew it when the 1979 Book of Common Prayer first appeared is becoming rarer even as destructive storms, droughts, and fires increase. 

Even people who never read or hear the often buried news stories about the IPCC reports know on some level that something is different, something is off. There is unacknowledged, often unconscious grief; there is anxiety; there is a yearning for hope, for a feeling that we can do something meaningful to meet this crisis. 

I know that for me, any attempt to skate through Holy Week and Easter without engaging this crisis at least in my own reflections as I prepare, if not also in my preaching and conversations during the week, would result in a failure to share the Good News with a world more in need of good news than ever. In the days ahead, I hope to share some of those reflections as we prepare to tell each other again the story that has formed us into a people of hope in the face of despair, of love in the face of hate.