News for the Poor

[Jesus] stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
   because he has anointed me
     to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
   and recovery of sight to the blind,
     to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ (Luke 4:16b-21)

With the publication this week of the 2nd edition of the Climate Vulnerability Monitor and concern about food prices rising because of the effects of extreme weather on food production, today’s Gospel lesson gives us a lens for hearing this news about the negative effects of climate change that are affecting the poorest people in the world first and worst.

After reading Isaiah’s words about bringing good news to the poor, Jesus says the scripture has been fulfilled in his speaking the words of the prophet. The prophetic message that God’s promise is to bring good news to the poor, freedom to captives and oppressed people, and healing of all kinds is fulfilled in the life of Christ.

The news in the Climate Vulnerability Monitor is not good news for the poor. It’s not good news for anyone, but especially not for people who don’t have much in the first place. In the summary of the study’s findings  is the statement “Climate injustice is extreme”. Another of the findings sheds light on what this injustice means in terms of human life: failure to act to stop climate change could cause more than 100 million deaths between now and 2030. More than 100 million deaths in the next eighteen years!

Oxfam International has prepared a report called Extreme Weather, Extreme Prices: The costs of feeding a warming world . The report talks about the effects of extreme weather caused by global warming on food production and food prices. Here in the United States, we are seeing the effects of this year’s drought on food prices. This report models the impacts of extreme weather events on the prices of key international staple crops in the year 2030. The report summary states that “our failure to slash greenhouse gas emissions presents a future of greater food price volatility, with severe consequences for the precarious lives and livelihoods of people living in poverty.” More bad news for the poor!

If Christ brought good news to the poor and if the Church is the Body of Christ, the Church is called to advocate for significant action to mitigate climate change beginning now. If we remain silent and complacent while millions of people die from the effects of climate change, we can no longer claim to have any good news to share.

Holy Innocents: The Most Vulnerable

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)  .  According to Lesser Feasts and Fasts, Augustine of Hippo called these children “buds, killed by the frost of persecution the moment they showed themselves.”

As climate change takes its toll with extreme weather, flooding, famine, and the spread of tropical diseases, many children in our world have their lives cut very short, buds killed in this case by the frost of the world’s indifference the moment they showed themselves. MediaGlobal reports that children are the people most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, citing a recent Climate Vulnerability Monitor report that says that 99 per cent of climate change deaths occur in developing countries, and that of those deaths, over 80 per cent are children. Children are especially vulnerable to climate change because they are more vulnerable to malnutrition, cholera, diarrheal disease, dengue, and malaria.

Last summer, Josette Sheeran, executive director of the UN World Food Program, said that the famine in East Africa was “the children’s famine” because “the ones who are the weakest are the children and those are the ones we're seeing are the least likely to make it.” This famine was caused by a severe drought and exacerbated by the political situation.   The U.S. estimated at the beginning of Augustof this year that 29,000 Somali children under the age of five had died in the past three months; at the same time the U.N. said that 640,000 Somali children were “acutely malnourished”.

The people with power in this world – the political leaders, the economically comfortable, the corporate heads – differ from Herod, of course. No one intends to cause the death of thousands of children; the objective 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 huge profit producing and selling carbon intensive energy resources or something dependent on them. Children are the collateral damage of our failure to address climate change, just as children are so often the collateral damage of wars.

But even Herod himself 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 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 or the grief of Rachel.

Deeper Traditions

Fourth Sunday of Advent

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. Mary's becoming pregnant while she was engaged to Joseph was not what he had expected. His righteous response, shielding Mary from public disgrace, was evidently enough out of the ordinary to warrant comment from Matthew. Then the most unexpected piece of Joseph’s story is revealed: in a dream, an angel speaks to him, and when he wakes up, Joseph does as the angel commanded him. Nothing in the story is what we would expect; nothing is customary.

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 birth of Jesus, we tend to cling to traditions, especially Christmas traditions. Every year, self-help writers encourage people to let go of customs or 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. Choices about which gifts to buy, how (or whether) to wrap them, travel plans, food, and decorations all involve examining customs or traditions and considering changing them because we want something that matters more to us: a sustainable future, life itself.

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.

A Climate Vulnerability Monitor report released earlier this month by DARA (Development Assistance Research Associates) analyzes the effects on various nations and peoples as the earth’s climate changes. (The summary of findings and recommendation from this report, found here, is very readable and provides a wealth of information.) One of the intents of the report is to lay out what’s at stake as we make decisions for the future. It provides the facts so we can make decisions about how to live. Standing on their own, the facts are grim, but the document also provides reason for hope, laying out how we might alleviate some of the suffering caused by climate change. Relatively simple things can address what the report says are now the primary causes of deaths related to climate change: malnutrition, diarrheal infections, and malaria.

During Advent, the lectionary reminds us of the prophetic message of justice for God’s people and restoration of the land. As the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change met in Cancun during Advent, there was some progress made, including establishment of a Green Fund  to help developing countries deal with the effects of climate change, and agreement on the frameworks for taking on the big question of how to reduce world-wide emissions of greenhouse gases. The lack of progress at Copenhagen a year ago coupled with the low expectations for the Cancun meeting led many to assess the meeting as a success.

Doing something is preferable to doing nothing, and making progress is something to celebrate, but it isn’t necessarily justice, especially not justice as described by the prophets. What counts as a success 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 success by the standards of the prophets.

Perhaps no convention or treaty or political action can accomplish what the prophets call us to do: change our behavior 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 have an essential spiritual component that only our most profound traditions provide. 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 really sink in, we may find our hearts 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.