Who has been healed?

Proper 10C (Post 2)

Today’s Gospel lesson (Luke 10:25-37), the Good Samaritan story, asks the question “Who is my neighbor?”  The answer to that question gives us reason to pay attention to the interconnections between ourselves and our sisters and brothers all over the world, and being intentional about tending to those interconnections so that we are good neighbors gives us reason to pay attention to the interconnections between human beings and everything else in God’s creation. (See yesterday’s post, Who are our neighbors?)

Awareness of these interconnections brings us to another question, though: If I am interconnected with everyone and everything, then healing of any person or any part of creation brings some degree of healing to me, too. If the Good Samaritan and the injured man are interconnected, then the Good Samaritan’s efforts to help the other man heal also brought some degree of healing to him. People who care for others in need know this; oftentimes a hospital room prayer for healing affects the person praying and others in the room as profoundly as the person for whom they are praying. Who, then, has been healed?

On July 5 and 6, people gathered near the tar sands mining area in Alberta, for a healing walk. (See healingwalk.org for information about the walk and pictures and stories from the event.) The walk was focused on healing the environment in this area of tar sands extraction and on healing the people who are suffering from the destruction and poisoning of the land, air, and water around the tar sands extraction area.

This week Caitlyn Vernon, the Coastal Campaigner from Sierra Club BC, wrote a post Heartbreak at the Edge of Canada’s Tar Sands, about her experience of the healing walk. After describing the environmental destruction she witnessed as she walked, she writes this:

Here's what I realized as the healing walk brought heart and hope to this bleak landscape: it's not just about offering our solidarity and support to the First Nation communities most impacted by the tar sands. The healing required goes much deeper than that.

Trees can grow back. Nature is amazingly resilient, given thousands of years. But the real question is, how do we heal ourselves, and our relationship to the world around us, so that we stop inflicting such devastation in the first place? We are all in this together.

Working to heal ourselves and our relationship to the world around us is a necessary piece of bringing healing to other people and the earth that sustains us all. One of the gifts people of faith can offer as we work to heal our planet is the gift of spiritual healing. We know something about this on a deep level. That knowledge is a necessary tool to bring true healing to the people and places nearest to the poison and destruction that endanger life on this planet, and in the end to all of us.

Yesterday evening brought news of the verdict in the Florida trial of George Zimmerman for killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The trial has shown us again how far we have to go in this country to heal ourselves of fear, of racism, of hatred. Something we know from ecological work – that we are all in this together – speaks to this situation as well. We don’t have to be residents of Florida or African-Americans or members of any other discrete group of people to feel a connection to this situation and to be in need of healing. We all recognize familiar elements in this tragic killing. If we are honest, we recognize ourselves someplace in the fear on all sides, in the racial and class divisions, or in the discomfort with people different from ourselves. As Caitlyn Vernon asked about the healing walk in Canada, we can ask ourselves after yesterday’s verdict: How do we heal ourselves, and our relationship to the world around us, so that we stop inflicting such devastation in the first place?

The dots between the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida and the destruction in Alberta aren’t hard to connect when we think about fear, greed, power, and the importance of loving our neighbors as ourselves. The Gospel’s power is that Christ’s healing love is as live-giving and important in Alberta and Florida in 2013 as it was in Jesus’ time and place.

Working for a sustainable and healthy world for ourselves and our neighbors now and in generations to come requires us to work to heal ourselves and to build healthier and stronger relationships with other people and the rest of creation. It requires us to do the joyful work of living into God’s kingdom, the realm of Christ’s love. That joyful work is what makes the yoke easy and the burden light even in the midst of death and destruction.

Good Samaritan window at St. Mark's Pro-Cathedral, Hastings, NE

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.

Synchronicity: Creation Care, Legislation, World Meetings, and the Gospel

Sometimes several things come together at once in a way that help us to see something we had overlooked or not seen clearly enough. For years, climate scientists have been warning us about global warming. For months, reports have appeared saying that the earlier predictions had been too conservative, and that climate change is happening more rapidly and dramatically than these scientists had expected.

Several things have happened in recent weeks that are helping more people become aware of the problem we face and the changes we could make that would lessen the severity of the problem. U.S. News has an article about the role of American religious groups in pushing for climate change legislation. Awareness of creation care as a fundamental piece of overall stewardship is growing. Out of that awareness has come action to urge the Senate to pass a major piece of climate change legislation this fall.

The timing of such a bill is important, as December brings the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen. You might recall from an earlier post that this conference is considered extremely important because of the point we have reached with climate change; this may be the last chance to begin to reverse climate change before its effects are devastating for life as we know it on our planet. There are more voices saying this now. In a piece called “Copenhagen or Bust” that appeared in the September 28, 2009 issue of Newsweek, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: “If we miss this opportunity, there will be no second chance sometime in the future, no later way to undo the catastrophic damage to the environment we will cause.”

Leading up to the Copenhagen conference, there was a UN Summit on Climate Change held in New York on September 22. This was the biggest gathering ever of political leaders to discuss climate change, indicating the growing urgency and awareness of the issue. One hundred heads of state and governments gathered for this summit. President Nasheed of the Republic of the Maldives was one of the people who addressed the gathering. His island country is facing the possibility of disappearing as the oceans rise. His words are sobering:


The Gospel lesson for September 20 (Mark 9: 30-37) ended up being especially appropriate for a week in which such things were discussed at such a high level meeting. Preparing a sermon for St. Mark’s on the Campus for that Sunday, I thought about the people living on low-lying islands, in far northern villages built on melting permafrost, in the lowest-lying coastal areas around the world where so many of the poorest people in the world live. “Today’s lesson suggests that good discipleship calls for us to ask the hard questions, to set aside our own desires for status and power, and to welcome – to notice and build relationship with – the people who are most easily pushed aside and overlooked in our world. A big piece of discipleship today involves good stewardship of the environment, because the first and worst effects of pollution and climate change usually fall on the most vulnerable people in the world.”

These weeks that lead up to Copenhagen have more Good News from Mark that can help guide our decisions and thinking about climate change: the rich man’s difficulty in letting go of his treasure so he can live into the greater treasure of the kingdom of God, the importance of serving others instead of lording it over them, and the commandment to love God and one’s neighbor. These passages help us to find our way in a world in which we Americans are the people with wealth and power, and others in the world stand to lose all they have if we misuse our wealth and power.

The importance of the growing role of religious groups in the conversation about the environment may end up being not so much the addition of more voices urging our Senators – and our representatives at Copenhagen – to take action, important though that is, but the reminder of why we should care, and the voice of hope that God will give us the will and the means to do the right thing once we make the decision to be better stewards of God’s creation.

Meanwhile, more talks leading up to Copenhagen are occurring in Bangkok this week. The Philippines and Viet Nam are dealing with big floods from Typhoon Ketsana, and more storms are forming that could hit the Philippines again. There has been speculation that these huge rains could be related to climate change. That’s probably no more than speculation, but the sort of damage and loss of life we are seeing do give us a glimpse of what the future holds if we do nothing to avert major climate change.


Given everything that is happening this fall – all of the above along with things like the good opportunities to connect with God's creation in Nebraska in the fall, and our approaching Annual Council in North Platte – the plan here at Green Sprouts is to increase the frequency of posts on the blog for the next several weeks. Please send along anything that you think should be included in our conversation.