Australia: Prayer and Action and Apocalypse

The new year has begun with news of the growing Australian wildfires, with thousands of people fleeing the fires and heading to beaches for safety and evacuation and an estimated 480 million animals dying in the fires so far. Headlines about the fires in recent days have described the fires as ‘apocalyptic’; The Times of London on December 31 said “Thousands trapped on Australian beaches by ‘apocalyptic’ fires”, while a New York Times article  bears the headline “Apocalyptic Scenes in Australia as Fires Turn Skies Blood Red”. 

While it’s understood that this use of the term ‘apocalyptic’ does not line up formally with the theological sense of the term, it’s an apt word for what is happening in Australia for the people whose world as they have known it does seem to have come to an end. When your home, your land, the familiar plants and animals are all gone, it feels like the end of the world, and it is certainly the end of a way of life in a place that is forever changed. These fires have taken hold at the end of the hottest year in Australian history, with the average 2019 temperature 1.52 degrees C hotter than the long-term average temperature. Australia is experiencing the effects of climate change on a big scale. 

Maybe we need a new term for this sort of “apocalypse”. Instead of talking about the “end times”, we could talk about “death times” or a time of loss on a scale most of us can’t imagine. It is not only the death of individuals, both human and non-human, that makes us reach for the language of apocalypse to describe it, but also the threat of losing entire species as bigger areas come under threat on a continent that is known for its unique fauna and flora. 

How can we in the Church respond to a climate-fueled tragedy of this scale? As with any loss, we can acknowledge it and talk about it, making it clear that we do see what is happening to a nation that is one of our closest allies. Many Americans seem only vaguely aware of what is unfolding in Australia as 2020 begins. Ignoring the suffering there goes against the command to love our neighbors; moreover, not learning from this tragedy and continuing to let climate change accelerate at a rapid pace puts others — and at some point, ourselves — in danger of other large-scale losses.

The Episcopal Church’s online resources for Creation Care  include some practical, close-to-home actions we can take. These resources are a great starting point, especially commendable for helping us to think more intentionally about caring for God’s creation. Yet we know that even our best efforts at stewardship and conservation as individuals and parishes, while good and worthwhile, aren’t enough to make enough of a difference.  

What then should we do once we have seen and acknowledged the damage not only of the fires in Australia but of the past year’s fires in California, the losses here in Nebraska and so many other places around the world from flooding, the end of traditional ways of living as permafrost melts in the Arctic and sea level rise threatens island nations? 

The temptation is to do nothing in the face of such a great threat because our efforts seem so small and futile. However, the Gospel lesson for today’s Daily Office holds a different suggestion for us. The lesson is John’s version of the feeding of the five thousand (John 6:1-14). In John’s telling of the story, Jesus asks Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” Philip responds by saying that the challenge is too great. In saying “six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little”, Philip basically says that the problem is too big for them to address. Then Andrew says, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish.” Andrew immediately adds, as if to show that he understands the impossibility of feeding all these people, “But what are they among so many people?” What I love about John’s version of the story is imagining the boy calling Andrew’s attention to what he has to offer. When small children hear that someone needs help, they are often eager to offer their help even when the adults in the room think that the child has nothing significant to offer. I imagine this boy overhearing the conversation about finding food for all these people and saying, “Look! I have some barley loaves and two fish. You can have those to help feed the people!” 

While Philip and Andrew made it clear that they were too sophisticated to take the boy’s offer seriously, the fact that the child offered what he had made all the difference. It was all that Jesus needed. This suggests that rather than do nothing about climate change because nothing we can do seems big enough, we should instead humbly offer what we have: our ability to stay informed and talk about what is happening, our acts of stewardship and conservation, our phone calls and letters to elected officials, our ability to organize or attend meetings and rallies and marches to call attention to climate change and call for significant policy changes to address it, and our prayers. I’ve seen several poignant requests for our prayers from Australians via social media this past week. We may feel like our prayers are insignificant — and there has been some public shaming of people who offer “thoughts and prayers” when more seems to be in order — but some of the people in the middle of these fires want us to offer them anyway. 

Our prayers and our actions seem so small, but we don’t know how they will be used, how they will combine with the efforts of others, how we might eventually change the hearts of the people with the power to make the large-scale societal changes that can mitigate these disasters in the long-term. 

Please pray for Australia, for its people, plants, and animals, and for our global climate. And please act in accordance with these prayers, offering in faith whatever actions each of us can offer. 

Compassion and Climate Chaos

Lent 3C: Suffering and Blame

In a post at the beginning of Lent, I shared my plan to read David Wallace-Wells’s book The Uninhabitable Earth alongside our daily lectionary readings and Lenten prayers. This being the Lenten wilderness, I didn’t know what I might encounter along the way since by definition the wilderness has no set paths to follow and no guarantees of what we might find. Along with other Nebraskans, not long into Lent I found myself in unfamiliar territory.

On Thursday, March 14 in Nebraska, blizzard conditions followed heavy rains as air pressure dropped in a “bomb cyclone” event. With the ground still frozen hard and more snowpack than usual melting, rivers and creeks flooded and huge chunks of ice got pushed into areas near waterways, resulting in great destruction in both rural areas and towns. Roads and bridges were badly damaged or destroyed, making areas already cut off by floodwaters even more isolated from aid. 

In the days since, we Nebraskans have greatly appreciated the assurance of prayers from people in other places, just as we have appreciated all sorts of practical help, such as money to help with flood relief, farmers from other states bringing hay to feed Nebraska livestock, and skilled volunteers simply showing up to help. And Nebraskans have been helping their neighbors and encouraging each other as communities begin the process of clean-up and rebuilding. Among the shock and sorrow at the losses resulting from the floods, the compassion people have given to other people and to animals has been a bright light showing the way forward and drawing us together. 

However, compassion has not been a universal reaction to our suffering. In this Sunday’s Gospel reading (Luke 13:1-9), 

Jesus is asked whether people who died in terrible ways were worse sinners than others; in other words, Jesus is asked whether people who experience unusual suffering somehow especially deserve their suffering. Today we might ask, do bad things really happen to good people? (Yes, they do.) Yet even if we know perfectly well that terrible things can happen to people who personify faith and kindness and moral goodness, we still in our culture — perhaps especially in our recent history — have a tendency to look for someone to blame when things go wrong. When we assume someone is to blame, and especially when we make an assumption, conscious or unconscious, that the someone who is to blame is probably the very person who is suffering, compassion dwindles. 

Jesus’s answer to this question about sinners getting what they deserve is basically that we are all sinners, all in need of repentance. If bad things happen only to people who have sinned, we are all in trouble. 

We know that the more our planet warms, the more extreme weather events we will have as a result of climate chaos. Spring flooding is not atypical in this part of the United States, but floods of this magnitude are atypical. (See, for example, the article Climate change’s fingerprints are on U.S. Midwest floods: scientist from Reuters.)   It is fair to say, then, that our failure to stop climate change when we could have done so or our failure to mitigate climate change now that it is upon us contributed to this disaster. If we are invested in the blame game more than we are invested in Jesus’s Way of Love, it’s an easy step to go from acknowledging our collective failure to looking for specific people to blame for that failure and hoping to see them suffer.

Those of us who made the mistake of reading the comments on articles about the destruction here in Nebraska learned that while many people in other places had a compassionate response to our suffering, many others had no compassion for Nebraskans because we have elected political leaders who refuse to do anything to address climate change. The general tenor of these comments was that the writer didn’t feel sorry for us at all because we had brought this all on ourselves by electing the wrong sorts of people, that we got just what we deserved. (On top of being mean-spirited, these comments seemed to me especially ill-conceived given the obvious contribution of Nebraskans to stopping the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.)

Our world needs people whose first impulse is compassion rather than placing blame; as we experience more and more of the results of climate chaos, our world needs Jesus’s Way of Love perhaps more than ever before. The basic foundations of human civilization are endangered by climate instability. Such a critical point of history requires us to demonstrate the best human values and to resist the temptation to divide further into warring factions. Hope for our world in an era of environmental collapse depends on compassion for one another. That compassion, that ability to care, will, I think, yield our best outcome in generating the political will to act to mitigate climate change as well the best outcome in responding to what David Wallace-Wells calls the “cascades” of challenges and disasters resulting from climate chaos. 

Do we need to elect leaders who make addressing global warming a high priority? Yes, we do. Should people and animals who live in places that don’t elect such leaders — and right now that would be most of the United States since it’s pretty obvious from looking at legislative records and listening to campaign rhetoric that few of our leaders of either major party see climate change as a top priority or have any grasp of the size of the challenge before us — be left to suffer on their own when floods, tornadoes, droughts, or wildfires happen? No. For Christians, such a lack of compassion would simply be against everything that Jesus taught. We don’t require a moral litmus test in order for people to access basic necessities. 

And for anyone, even those who live by an “eye for an eye” blame game ethics, the ethics of blame and self-righteousness makes no sense since we don’t (at least at the moment) live in a country in which the red people all live in one place and the blue people all live in another place — not that political affiliation really tells you anything about any given individual’s concern about climate change.  

Jesus answered a question about why he made a practice of sitting down to eat with known sinners by saying, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” (Matthew 9:13) Now in this era of climate chaos we still need to learn what it means to show mercy to people in need rather than demanding moral purity. 

The Diocese of Nebraska has published a suggested list of links to agencies accepting monetary donations for flood relief along with thanksgiving for your prayers:

The Diocese of Nebraska Flood Relief & Support Fund  

American Red Cross of Nebraska and Southwest Iowa  

Episcopal Relief and Development  

Responding to the New Normal: Sunday and Beyond

I’m writing this midway between Sundays, and between hurricanes for the mainland United States. Hurricane Irma has already done incredible damage in the Caribbean, and today we will see it continue its path to more islands while we watch to see which way it turns. Floridians are preparing for possible landfall of this huge hurricane. We pray for everyone in its path and everyone on the islands already hit, while prayers and aid continue for communities on the Texas and Louisiana coasts.

Along with hearing early reports of the catastrophic damage left by Irma on its first hits in the Caribbean,we have for weeks now found ourselves in the midst of an extraordinary confluence of events this late summer of 2017.  Fires burn in the western United States, people with DACA  status (and their families, friends, schools, and employers) face uncertainty that was not there before, and the hate on display at the August 12 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville remains largely unaddressed. And there’s so much more, but while all of this is interconnected, this post is meant to address two things: how these hurricanes and fires are changing the way many people in our communities and our pews think about climate change, and some thoughts about how the church at its best might respond to that.

What we see going on here in the U.S. is what we knew we would be seeing at some point this century. The devastation caused by storms made more severe by warmer seas and a warmer atmosphere and by fires made worse by above average temperatures and lack of rain is similar to what people in some other parts of the world have already experienced. Now, though, we are seeing it on a big scale in our own country. What we have known as an abstract probability is now visible, and the size of the disasters and the sort of effect they can have on our lives is suddenly very real. For people who weren’t sure whether climate change would really make things that much different from what they were in the past, that skepticism seems like a naive hope that has been extinguished. 

However, along with being better able to grasp how climate change can affect us, we also know that scientists tell us it will get even worse unless we act with urgency to make very significant changes in the ways we produce and use energy. We have a taste of what to expect, but even while we are trying to comprehend what is happening now, we are also getting a clearer picture of our future if we continue on our current trajectory. That picture is very distressing.

What will we do in our churches on Sunday? Our usual responses to disasters are to offer prayers for the victims (if we remember to insert them into the Prayers of the People) and perhaps to have an announcement of some sort about where to send money for disaster aid. (If we think about it early enough in advance, we might include the bulletin inserts from Episcopal Relief and Development.) Both prayer and traditional disaster aid are very much needed now, and including these usual responses is a good place to begin with our response to what is happening. Bidding prayers for everyone involved and encouraging donations to reputable aid agencies is the minimum for this Sunday. 

But we in the Church need something more this time, something that differs as much from our normal practice as the succession of Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma (and possibly a third storm, Hurricane Jose) and their scale differs from the historical norms for hurricane season in North America. Here are some things the Church can do this Sunday and beyond to help people who are trying to come to grips with the reality of the changes in our world. 

Clergy and lay leaders need to know what is happening outside of the church walls. We need to find out what is going on in the places that have already been hit by these hurricanes and what is going on elsewhere in the world — e.g. the fires in the west, the flooding in southern Asia — so that we can find compassion for the people, places, and nonhuman living things suffering from the effects of climate change. Short term, that means keeping up with the news. Long term, it means study about climate change and about the theological underpinnings for response to widespread destruction. The prophetic books of the Bible and commentaries on the prophets is a place to start for the latter. There is more information about climate change available in the mainstream media than there was in the fairly recent past. (This increase in coverage is timely as much of the information on government websites has been removed.) In addition, some specialty websites like the climate section of Think Progress and the Climate Central site provide current information. The New York Times this week offers an interactive tool to help readers understand the concept of a carbon budget and the limits that the laws of nature place on our policy decisions about carbon pollution.

Prayers in our public worship for disaster victims and their families and the people who are helping them recover can be coupled with prayers for our planet and our nation, as these disasters are part of a bigger picture. Several prayers in The Book of Common Prayer would be appropriate — e.g. Prayer 18 For our Country (p. 820), Prayer 41 For the Conservation of Natural Resources (p. 827), and Prayer 44 For the Future of the Human Race. 

The Church is already behind in preparing to meet (and beginning to meet) the spiritual needs of people who are starting to grasp the reality and scope of climate change. Other organizations can advocate for sound climate policy or send aid to victims, but the Church is the institution best suited to addressing the spiritual angst of people beginning to sense the scope of the destruction we have unleashed on our planet. A great start to this work in places that haven’t begun is simply to ask the hard existential questions that arise around climate change and sit prayerfully with them. If the Church’s spiritual leaders have at least reflected on the big questions we are starting to ask, we will be in a better place to speak with others about those questions.

Finally — and perhaps most importantly if we are to address the needs of people coming to church this Sunday after hearing news of Irma’s destruction only a week after hearing news about Harvey — we can preach it. Imagine walking into a church after listening to hurricane updates on your car radio and hearing a sermon that doesn’t acknowledge that there is anything out of the ordinary going on in our nation! (This is easy to imagine, as it is an all too common experience.) Name the reality; acknowledge the disasters and acknowledge that we are experiencing the effects of extreme weather resulting from anthropogenic global warming (climate change). And offer real hope, good news. We must be real both about the situation we are in and about what hope looks like in this situation. (Perhaps our hope is that we will be faithful disciples, treating others with love and kindness in chaotic situations. Perhaps our hope is that good people might persuade our leaders to act in significant ways so that we can mitigate the worst effects of climate change, or perhaps our hope is simply in the promises of Jesus that in the midst of destruction, we will find abundant and everlasting life.) Sharing real hope — hope that acknowledges the reality of our situation — keeps us going and in no way diminishes the severity of the situation; hope is what allows us to be honest about the problem at hand. 

My plea to the church is this: don’t let us down this time. If we want to avoid dealing with hard things, if we can’t bring ourselves to talk about the true scope of physical and spiritual suffering for fear of offending people in the pews, then we should simply admit that we cannot find the compassion to give priority to the victims of these disasters now or in the future. The disasters will continue, and at some point the Church will either be seen in our communities as a place where we can bring our deepest hopes and fears — and perhaps even the place where we can best bring our deepest hopes and fears — or as a place that doesn’t care and that doesn’t matter much in a changing world. 

Choosing Hope: Divestment from Fossil Fuels

But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.” They said to him, “Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?” And he said to them, “How many loaves have you? Go and see.” When they had found out, they said, “Five, and two fish.” Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. And all ate and were filled. (Mark 6:37-42)

Two weeks after the close of the 78th General Convention of the Episcopal Church, the Sunday lectionary has us pondering Mark’s version of the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. This story of Jesus taking what we can give and turning it into all that we need speaks to our situation today with regards to climate change. [See previous posts Loaves and Fishes and Environmental Impact Statements and New Questions for a New Time based on other John and Matthew's versions of the story.] 

All of us working to mitigate climate change and its effects know that what we can offer is not by itself enough to stop the catastrophe that seems to be slowly unfolding before us. Yet we offer what we can because our faith tells us that Jesus can use our efforts in ways that we cannot imagine; we offer what we can because hope is a Christian virtue. 

The vote for Resolution C045
in the House of Deputies

Two weeks after the close of General Convention, several of us who advocated for the Episcopal Church to divest from fossil fuels are still processing the success of Resolution C045 that calls on major funds of the Episcopal Church to divest from the fossil fuel industry and reinvest in clean energy. Part of my own processing is realizing the success of our efforts against the discouraging background of the daily onslaught of news stories about climate change and its effects. Since General Convention ended, the rather discouraging State of the Climate 2014 report has been published, fires continue to burn in western Canada and California, homes and lives have been lost in floods in Kentucky and southern Ohio, and a new study says that we are already in the "worst case scenario" for sea level rise. What does our action mean when compared to the enormity of the situation?

In the greater scheme of things, the amount of money to be divested and reinvested is not great. And the moral reach of the Episcopal Church in 2015 is not as great as it was a few decades ago; the pronouncements of the Episcopal Church do not carry the weight among leaders of government and industry that they once did. None of this, though, makes the passage of Resolution C045 insignificant. In the midst of our General Convention, we managed to have a conversation of sorts about climate change. We acknowledged the big hot elephant in the room and talked, first in the Environmental Stewardship and Care of Creation committee hearings and then, briefly but clearly, in both Houses of General Convention about what is happening and how the church might respond. When presented with a proposal to change our investment policy to reflect the realities of today’s world and our concern for people now and in the future who are negatively affected by climate change, we voted in favor of divestment.

Along with divestment/reinvestment, another successful resolution that came out of the Environmental Stewardship committee was Resolution A030 that creates an Advisory Council on the Stewardship of Creation with work at the provincial level to develop theological resources and networks for practical application to help us respond to climate change. 

We offered what we could at General Convention, knowing that even when the challenge seems beyond our ability, Jesus can take what we freely give and use it to provide just what we need even when we can’t imagine what that provision might look like. Choosing to divest from fossil fuels was both a sign of our hope and a catalyst for future hope.

Given the challenges before us, we could easily have been cynical rather than hopeful. We could have ignored climate change completely. Opponents of divestment offered arguments that we should keep our “place at the table” in the fossil fuel industry even though the nature of the industry is the extraction and processing of the fossil fuels that are killing us. Following that advice, we could have clung to our current investment policy while telling ourselves that it was for the sake of advocating for something — for the fossil fuel industry to do something other than what it does? —and not because of our own fears. We could have looked at the enormity of the challenge of climate change and decided it was beyond our abilities to do anything at all, choosing to put our energies into the church’s internal concerns rather than into serving the world in Christ’s name. But we chose hope and we chose faith in Jesus. 

Hope during these challenging times looks like General Convention. In all sorts of areas, we chose to follow the Gospel as best we know how; we chose to give Jesus what we have in faithful expectation, in hope, that Jesus, working through us and through what we offer, “can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine” (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 102). 

Part of the joy of participating in General Convention this year was the lack of cynicism and the spirit of hope grounded in faith in Jesus. I’m still processing all that we did in Salt Lake City, but I know that my hope for the church and for the world was shored up mightily by what we did there.

Abandoning Business as Usual?

A resolution calling on the Investment Committee of the Executive Council, the Episcopal Church Pension Fund, the Episcopal Church Endowment Fund, and the Episcopal Church Foundation to divest from fossil fuels and reinvest in clean renewable energy is on today’s priority calendar in the House of Deputies at the Episcopal Church’s General Convention. The House of Bishops has already passed Resolution C045.

This has been an amazing General Convention so far, with signs of a sea change in the Episcopal Church. Many people have a deep desire to be the church in the world rather than simply hoping that the world might stop by some Sunday morning and see how pretty our buildings are. Getting serious about our response to climate change is a big piece of being the church in today’s world.

Yesterday I came across a post written two years ago, Discipleship and Abandoning Business as Usual. While the Sunday lectionary is not this year’s, and the specific examples of current effects of climate change and the political conversation are different, I’m sharing it because it still speaks to what we are about today at General Convention.

Please pray for the members of the House of Deputies as we continue our work on all sorts of resolutions, and especially pray for us to find the wisdom, courage, and love to end the practice of profiting from the destruction of life on this planet.

Discipleship and Abandoning Business as Usual

Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9: 61-62)

As we prepare for our Sunday Gospel reading of Luke 9:51-62, we are hearing about record high temperatures and dangerous heat in the southwestern United States, the most recent widely publicized effect of global warming in the news in our part of the world. In India this week, there were mass cremations of hundreds of people who were killed in floods and landslides two weeks ago. Officials there predict that the final death toll will be more than 1000 people. In Canada, the city of Calgary is beginning what promises to be a long clean-up from flooding. According to this report from the CBC, “the province faces a potentially decade-long cleanup effort that could cost $5 billion by BMO Nesbitt Burns estimates.” President Obama gave a long-awaited major speech about climate change this week.

The reality of climate change is becoming clearer as both the increase in extreme weather events and the necessity of preparing for and mitigating its effects become more visible. “Business as usual” is not a realistic option any more.

Continue reading…

Fossil Fuel Divestment: God or Wealth?

Jesus talks about the uses and misuses of money throughout the Gospel. In the Gospel passage for today’s Daily Office (Luke 16:10-17), Jesus points out that a slave can’t serve two masters and then says, “You cannot serve God and wealth.”

When I read that passage this morning, I immediately thought of the post Divest from fossil fuels: An appeal to the Episcopal Church that The Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas posted on her Reviving Creation blog this week. This post displays and refutes the common arguments against the Episcopal Church divesting from the fossil fuel industry, and then sets out some the reasons why it is especially right for followers of Jesus to now let go of our investments in an industry whose very purpose is now understood to be at odds with the flourishing of life on our planet.

If you are an Episcopalian, I urge you to read this post to the end:

Divest from fossil fuels: An appeal to the Episcopal ChurchMay 25, 2015
Next month, leaders in the Episcopal Church will gather in Salt Lake City for our triennial General Convention.   Among the significant decisions that will be made is a decision about whether to divest from fossil fuels – that is, whether to sell off holdings of stocks and bonds from the world’s leading 200 fossil fuel companies as identified by the Carbon Underground and to re-invest in the clean energy sector. (Continue reading…)

If you aren't Episcopalian, it also is very worthwhile as food for reflection on the broader issues underlying fossil fuel divestment for various institutions.

While other important issues in the Episcopal Church will most probably get more attention before General Convention and will be considered the “big questions” for Deputies and Bishops to consider this year, climate change is the issue that will matter the most to us by the middle of this century and beyond. It is important for Deputies, Bishops, and all of us to understand what is involved in either acting or failing to act, and to understand why divestment from fossil fuels is morally and spiritually important to the Episcopal Church. 

The meditation on today’s Gospel passage in Forward Day by Day asks “What would America look like if we took Jesus seriously when he tells us that we can’t serve God and wealth?” As we prepare for General Convention, we might reflect on what the Episcopal Church would look like — and what we would be doing now — if we took Jesus seriously when he tells us we can’t serve God and wealth. And when he teaches us to hear the cries of our brothers and sisters who are hungry, thirsty, or otherwise in danger because we are failing to act meaningfully on climate change. Or when he simply tells us to love our neighbors, giving the Samaritan — the person from outside our immediate circle — as an example of our neighbor.

Rogation Days: Praying the Bounds of a Warming World

The traditional English celebration of Rogation Days, the three days preceding Ascension Day, included a procession around the boundaries of the parish (often coextensive with the boundaries of a village). At stops along the boundaries, the congregation prayed for the welfare of the village and especially for a good growing season, and the priest blessed the fields. The procession stopped several times for these prayers and blessings, often at important landmarks along the boundaries of the parish. Along with an occasion for prayer and blessings, walking the bounds or beating the bounds also ensured a public memory and a clear public proclamation of exactly where boundaries lay. Ensuring clarity of the boundaries eliminated disputes and gave everyone a common understanding of the bounds of the parish.

The Book of Common Prayer for the Episcopal Church adapts the tradition to our time and place by focusing on traditional rural concerns for the growing season the first day, commerce and industry the second day, and stewardship of creation the third day. In this way, the custom of offering prayers and blessings on the Rogation Days has been preserved in a meaningful way for our context. But since we aren’t living in old English villages, the traditions of creating awareness of boundaries and blessing the bounds has been lost along the way. Some Episcopal parishes process around a neighborhood, community garden, or large church property or drive out into the country to bless a parishioner’s fields, allowing the tradition of praying these prayers outdoors with a festive procession to continue, but any “bounds” that are walked lack the importance of the boundaries that were both declared and blessed in earlier times.

In this era of accelerated global warming, however, we might begin a new Rogation custom of observing and praying the bounds or limits of our biosphere. Through our lack of awareness of the limits of the amounts of greenhouse gases that can be released into our atmosphere without jeopardizing life on Earth, we have made our bounds smaller. Each year the world fails to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions and acknowledge the laws of chemistry and physics that determine the limits of our biosphere for human life, we leave ourselves less room for solutions that allow us to continue to live and live well. Our inaction is pulling the bounds tighter, leaving us less and less wiggle room. 

During the Rogation Days, we might prayerfully study the current state of global warming and pray about the bounds or limits we discover. Here is a place to start, a post by Kiley Kroh on Climate Progress last week: Global Temperatures In April Tied For The Hottest On Record.

April may have brought mild temperatures to much of North America, but that wasn’t the case for the planet as a whole. Last month officially tied for the warmest April globally since recordkeeping began in 1880, according to data released by NOAA’s National Climactic Data Center on Tuesday.

This makes it the 38th consecutive April and 350th consecutive month with a global temperature at or above the 20th century average. The last time the planet experienced an April with below-average temperatures was 1976.

The post goes on to discuss the parallel rise in carbon emissions and expectations for future temperature rises. 

We need to put significant limits emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases around the world to mitigate global warming. We might acknowledge the need for those limits and pray about them. As temperatures rise we will experience all sorts of big changes that will place limits on human activity. Agriculture will be impacted, marine ecosystems will suffer, and people will need to leave places that become uninhabitable because of rising seas, extreme temperatures, or lack of water. These are our new bounds, the limits within which we will try to live and continue to love one another and love God. Prayer and mindful meditation about those limits is one of the great gifts people of faith can offer now.

If we pray about those bounds and find mindful acceptance of them, we may be able to find blessing there as well. A clear public proclamation of these limits coupled with a blessing of all living things inside these new bounds brings Rogation Days out of the realm of quaint Anglican history and into the heart of what Christ calls us to do today.

For stewardship of creation

O merciful Creator, your hand is open wide to satisfy the needs of every living creature: Make us always thankful for your loving providence; and grant that we, remembering the account that we must one day give, may be faithful stewards of your good gifts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit live and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 259, Collects for Rogation Days)    

Climate Update and Questions for the Church

Environmental Summary: Introduction

Both locally and globally, the church’s work and welfare is bound up with environmental stability. As part of my work in the area of environmental stewardship, I send periodic summaries or updates to Bishop Barker to help him stay informed about what is happening with the environment, and particularly what is unfolding in the world of climate science. We are sharing this summary more widely as there has been lots of new information recently that will continue to have big impacts on things such as food production, health, the world economy, and the spiritual needs of people in the 21^st century.

The original document from October 28, which begins below, includes information from the first part of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report around the physical basis for climate change. Since then, information from the upcoming second part of the report about the predicted impacts of climate change was leaked and shared in a November 1 New York Times article with the headline Climate Change Seen Posing Risk to Food Supplies. The article says that the second part of the report will tell us that food supplies are expected to decrease by 2% each remaining decade of this century. Elizabeth Kolbert posted Is It Too Late to Prepare for Climate Change? in response to the leaked information, writing: “The force of the report comes simply from assembling all the data in one place; the summary reads like a laundry list of the apocalypse—flood, drought, disease, starvation.” She goes on to talk about the even more dire impacts for non-human species of animals and plants. (Our lives are of course inextricably bound up with theirs, so these are indirectly dire impacts for humankind as well.)
Then Typhoon Haiyan came along and devastated the Philippines. Its wind speed at landfall was 195 mph, the strongest winds at landfall ever recorded. We can’t say what influence global warming does or does not have on any particular storm, but we do know that the overall pattern of severe weather is changing and that global warming provides the conditions in the oceans and the atmosphere that are known to amplify severe storms. At the UN climate conference now meeting in Warsaw, Philippine representative Yeb Sano gave an emotional plea to “stop the madness”. Knowing that people at home had no food after the storm, he vowed to fast during the climate talks until significant progress is made to help the nations most immediately vulnerable to the effects of climate change. 

October 28 summary

September was the 343^rd consecutive month with global temperatures warmer than the twentieth century average.

Two reports in recent weeks have given us updated information about climate change and predictions for the future.

IPCC Fifth Assessment Report

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 5^th Assessment Report for the group of scientists looking at the physical science basis for climate change got a lot of popular press for saying that there is a very high probability (approaching certainty) that climate change is for the most part the result of human activity. The version of the report published for policymakers is found here.

But there are other things worth the attention of non-scientists. One is the mention for the first time of geoengineering as a possible way to prevent catastrophic warming now that certain tipping points have either been reached or are soon to be reached. Along with the unknowns about the long-term effects of geoengineering – either finding a way to remove significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it or “solar radiation management” (constructing ways of reflecting enough sunlight away from the earth to cool the planet) -- this addition is noteworthy because it signals something about the critical nature of climate change at this point. Enough feedback loops are in play that even if governments and industries were inclined to make huge cutbacks in greenhouse gas emissions, there would still be some degree of temperature rise. And the political reality is that those cutbacks in emissions to any truly significant degree are not in the works.

Some other key findings were summarized well in Mother Jones magazine in an earlier article entitled 5 Terrifying Statements in the Leaked Climate Report.  The five, which the article discusses in some detail, are these:

·         We're on course to change the planet in a way "unprecedented in hundreds to thousands of years.

·         Ocean acidification is "virtually certain" to increase. 

·         Long-term, sea level rise could be 5 to 10 meters. 

·         This also implies a substantial melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

·         Much of the carbon we've emitted will stay in the atmosphere for a millennium…even after we've stopped emitting it. 

One more thing to note about the IPCC report is that their findings are very conservative as the work is done by reaching consensus among scientists. Many individual scientists see things deteriorating more rapidly and more severely than the IPCC report indicates.

“The projected timing of climate departure from recent variability”:  Within a generation, sooner for the tropics

Camilo Mora and others from the University of Hawai’i published a report in the October 10 issue of Nature that predicts when various locations in the world will reach the point of climate departure from recent variability – i.e. when the average temperature of that location’s coolest year will be greater than the average temperature of its hottest year for the period from 1860 to 2005. In the University of Hawai’i press release about the report, Camilo Mora says: “The results shocked us. Regardless of the scenario, changes will be coming soon. Within my generation, whatever climate we were used to will be a thing of the past.”

This graphic from The Washington Post shows expected dates of this big change for several cities. If little changes, the average year for climate departure overall will be 2047 (yes, only 34 years from now); if greenhouse gas emissions were to be stabilized, the average year becomes 2069. Of particular concern to us in the Diocese of Nebraska given our companion dioceses in the Dominican Republic and South Sudan, tropical areas are expected to experience this change within the next decade. Chicago has a date of 2052 without mitigation and 2081 with stabilization of emissions.

With “business as usual”

http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/hot-spots/506/

With mitigation:

http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/hot-spots/506/

There is debate among environmentalists about exactly how dire all of this is: do we face a very changed world that still supports human life, or are we looking at total human extinction? (Guy McPherson is a scientist who thinks the most recent evidence points to the latter. While I’m not yet convinced, his moving reflection on how we live that is the second half of this short video (starting around 2:17) can really speak to either option.) 

That we are even asking the question, though, is certainly cause for theological reflection that may help the church be an effective pastoral presence as the reality of climate change breaks through to increasing numbers of people.

Effects on people living in poverty

The Yale Environment 360 Digest reports on a study by the U.K.’s Overseas Development Institute that says that increased extreme weather events will make poverty worse in parts of the world that already are among the poorest. The study suggests that aid money should be spent on reducing the risks to people from extreme weather events instead of only on humanitarian relief after a disaster.

As the church looks at ways to respond to the challenges of climate change, this sort of study should be useful.

And lest we think the phenomena of climate refuges and of climate change affecting the poorest people first and worst are things that happen only in other countries, the Huffington Post ran Life on the Edge of Climate Change this week. The author, Babs Roaming Buffalo Bagwell, is the senior public relations and media liaison for The Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians. She describes how climate change affects her community every day, writing: Some may be ignoring this reality, but we don't have that luxury. When the water's edge is at your doorstep, sea level rise and extreme rainstorms aren't political, they're personal.

What do we have for this? And what/how do we teach our children?

At our Annual Council Eucharist, Bishop Barker brought our environmental reality into the homily: “We are in fact living in a moment of unprecedented challenge and change for humankind.  We are hastening towards global environmental disaster.  In the lifetime of the youngest people now dwelling on earth, everything changes.” Bishop Barker’s question from the show The Book of Mormon – “What do you have for this?” – is a question that we might ask repeatedly as we learn about climate change and reflect on the church’s response to this most urgent and global issue.

As I was writing this summary, Wendy Bell, a Unitarian minister I met at the Climate Reality Leadership Training this summer, posted on Facebook that she had just read the most pessimistic climate report she had yet seen. A little later, she posted this question:

Ministers: If you had been a chaplain on the Titanic, how might you have understood your role? DRE's [Directors of Religious Education]: What would you have taught the children?

What are our roles as ministers – lay or ordained – in the Episcopal Church? How do we best live as the Body of Christ in a world that is in big trouble that is so seldom acknowledged? To use Walter Brueggemann’s term, how do we break through the numbness? And what do we do then?

And in light of what we know we can expect in their lifetimes, what do we teach the children? The latter is a huge question for the church that is seldom if ever discussed. What can we teach them about God and the world and their relationship with Christ and with one another that can prepare them for today’s world and for whatever the remainder of this century brings? How do we best model and teach the classic Christian disciplines of prayer, study, and love for God and one another so that our children are well-equipped spiritually to be the Body of Christ in a changed and changing world?

In many ways, it’s no different from what we’ve always done, preparing our children for whatever life might bring them. At this point of human history, though, when we know how fragile the future is for everyone (and when the adults in leadership positions are doing so little to ensure their future), it seems to be especially important to equip our children with the spiritual practices, traditions, and knowledge that will help them develop spiritually resilience that can last throughout their lifetimes.