The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!
I’m writing this after participating in the joyful
celebration of the Great Vigil of Easter at Church of the Resurrection in Omaha
this evening. Earlier today, I spent a couple of hours helping to staff Nebraska Interfaith Power and Light’s
table at the Omaha Earth Day celebration. Meanwhile, along with posts about
Easter celebrations and reflections on the end of Holy Week and the beginning
of Easter, my Facebook feed has been full of the news that the State Department
announced a delay in a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline permit. The delay
is at least in part due to a case Nebraska landowners brought against the
pipeline that is now going to the Nebraska Supreme Court.
Last April, Easter was on March 31. The post I wrote on the
blog that week talked about hope in the face of despair. Along with the
celebration of Easter, the occasion for this reflection about hope was a
planning meeting is to help pipeline opponents be well-prepared to testify at
the State Department hearings later in the month. That was a year ago; the
pipeline permit has still not been approved, and now we know there will be
another delay in a decision. This is good news that brings hope with it. With
that in mind, I hope you enjoy reading the post below from a year ago expressing
hope in our ability to stop the pipeline despite incredible odds being against
us.
Easter Week: Mistaken Identity, Keystone XL Pipeline, and Alleluias
In the Gospel lesson for the
Tuesday in Easter Week (John 20:11-18), Mary Magdalene is so caught up in her
grief over Jesus’ death and her despair over the disappearance of his body that
when she turns around and sees Jesus, she doesn’t recognize him. Instead, she
mistakes him for the gardener. She comes out of her grief and despair enough to
see what is right before her eyes when she responds to hearing the risen Jesus
call her by name.
We can get so deeply into grief and
despair that we miss signs of hope that are right in front of us. Just as the
mismatch between the sorts of hopes and expectations Mary Magdalene had
imagined and the reality of Jesus’ resurrection led her initially to fail to
recognize the wonderful reality standing before her, the mismatch between our imagined
expectations and a wonderful reality can keep us from recognizing that reality
even when it is unfolding. Those of us who pay attention to the degradation of
the earth and particularly to the discouraging math of global warming find
ourselves at times grieving the plants, animals, eco-systems, and way of life
we know and love that are beginning to disappear or change, and we can feel
despair when we see the enormity of the challenges we face compared to the lack
of political will to do enough soon enough to make much of a difference to a
our future.
One of the many joys of Easter in
our tradition is the restoration of the alleluias that disappear during the
somber Lenten season. Some parishes do a sort of ceremony of burying the
alleluias on Ash Wednesday to help children grasp something of our Lenten
practices. When Lent ends, our alleluias at the fraction and at the dismissal bring
notes of joy and hope and renewed energy that can remain with us as we go into
the week to love and serve Christ.
Most of us experience the return of
the alleluias as a welcome return to a spiritual norm of joy, while others,
especially in times when we have faced a great loss or difficult challenges,
when we are grieving or in despair, may find ourselves more in tune with the
quieter but no less faithful wilderness walk of Lent. But Easter comes along
whether or not we are ready for it, even when we are so deeply into grief or
despair that we can’t imagine finding hope or joy again.
Yesterday evening I attended one of
the planning meetings for people opposed to TransCanada being given a permit to
build the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to transport Alberta tar sands through
the central United States, including Nebraska, to Gulf Coast refineries. The
purpose of these planning meetings is to help pipeline opponents be
well-prepared to testify at the State Department hearings scheduled to be held
at the Heartland Event Center in Grand Island on April 18. The pipeline fighters face huge odds given
the money and political power of the oil industry. It’s one of those daunting
challenges that could make the alleluias ring hollow.
And yet when I listened to leaders
from the Sierra Club and Bold Nebraska , and when I heard the discussion by
those who plan to be at the hearings either to testify against the permit or to
support those testifying against it, it felt like an alleluia response. We know
that grassroots opposition to the pipeline has delayed its construction so far.
We know that landowners, environmental activists, people of faith, and others
will keep fighting the construction of this pipeline and the expanded mining of
the Alberta tar sands. There is something very good and life-giving here.
Even if President Obama denies the
permit to build this pipeline, the challenge of keeping greenhouse gas
emissions to a level that gives us a chance of a sustainable future is a huge challenge.
If our expectations and hopes are of a future that resembles today’s business
as usual, we may not recognize whatever signs of a realistic hope we might
encounter. That doesn’t mean that hope isn’t there; it doesn’t mean that grief
and despair are the only valid responses to our situation.
When Bill McKibben’s Do the Math tour visited Omaha, he said that he
became discouraged at first when people pointed out that he was involved in a
David and Goliath situation, but then he remembered how that story ends. Easter
tells us the end of the story, and it calls for an alleluia response.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!
****
For another dose of hope, come to Nebraska Interfaith Power and Light's conference on religious environmental work next Saturday at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln. The theme is Creation Care for Congregations. More information and online registration is available on the Nebraska IPL website.
