Worshiping Molech

Proper 8A

Genesis 22:1-14; Romans 6:12-23

Molech was an Ammonite deity who was thought to require child sacrifice. This week's lesson from Genesis (Genesis 22:1-14) about Abraham taking Isaac up the mountain because he has heard God tell him to offer Isaac as a burnt offering reminds us of Molech, first in the nature of the command Abraham hears, and then in the moment when God says, “Do not lay your hand on the boy”, revealing God to be very different from Molech and the other lesser gods.

It’s worth noticing that the same week our Old Testament lesson brings Molech to mind, we had news about the environment that once again told about the perils we and our children face in the fairly near future.

There was the summary report from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) which brought grim news about the deterioration of marine ecosystems. The report predicts that unless a massive effort is made to address the environmental stressors on the ocean, there will be a mass extinction of marine life sometime during this century. This is not good news for us, for our children, or for our children’s children, The same sorts of stressors affect the non-marine environment; these combined with the effects of the tragedy unfolding in our oceans do have and will have a profound effect on the world in which we and our children and grandchildren are living out our lives.

An article in Saturday’s New Zealand Herald, Toxic tide mankind’s next great threat, quotes a recent UN environmental program report known as Yearbook for 2011 describing plastics “lost” in the oceans as “the world’s new toxic time-bomb”. It seems that plastics floating in the ocean accumulate and concentrate chemicals we don’t want entering the food chain, such as PCBs and DDT. And as plastic photo-degrades, it eventually breaks into individual molecules of plastic that, invisible as they are, enter the food chain very easily.

These reports provide further evidence for what we already knew from looking at other forms of pollution and at climate change, its effects, and our failure to address the issue: we have chosen to sacrifice the lives of our children and our children’s children in the names of various gods -- gods of convenience and money and laziness and all sorts of sin -- gods too numerous to mention. These gods are today’s equivalent of Molech, deities that are not the true god but whom we mistakenly believe have so much power that we will sacrifice our children to them.

In this week’s lesson from Romans (Romans 6:12-23), St. Paul tells us “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Our understanding is that God offers us the gift of true life, ours for the taking, and that when we turn our back on that gift and instead choose to sin, putting all these lesser gods before our relationship with the Living God, the result of that is always death.

This understanding raises questions that should puzzle and disturb us more than the question of how Abraham could ever have set out in obedience to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice. Given a God who offers us the good gift of eternal life -- life at its deepest levels -- why do we ever choose anything other than God’s freely given gift? Why is it so hard for us to choose life for ourselves and our children? Why do we give everything in the world precedence over ensuring that we leave our children a planet that can sustain human life? Why do we sacrifice our children and our children’s children to these lesser gods?

If only we had known...

Coral Reefs, the Rich Man's Cry, and the MDGs

Luke 16:19-31

“Ensure environmental sustainability” is the seventh of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) . Ensuring environmental sustainability and the other goals are all pieces of addressing extreme poverty in our world. A sustainable, stable environment is key to the other goals: to ensuring access to clean water, to fighting diseases such as malaria, and to making it possible to grow food and have plentiful supplies of fish. Climate instability in the form of more extreme floods, droughts, and severe storms both exacerbates poverty and makes the effects of poverty even more severe.

Yesterday the UN concluded a summit on the MDGs, a summit that many in the Episcopal Church followed with interest because of our 2003 commitment  to endorse and support these goals.  Devon Anderson and Bishop Ian Douglas of Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation released a statement exhorting us to prophetic action on behalf of the MDGs – on behalf of the people whose lives hang in the balance – pointing out that where secular leaders run into political problems at home if they push for the sort of effort it will take to reach the goals by the target year of 2015, the church is freer to act.

Against this backdrop and with this Sunday’s Gospel, the story of the rich man and Lazarus, in mind, news this week about the plight of coral reefs illustrates why Christians should be especially concerned about environmental issues and what unique perspective the church has in all of this.

On Monday, the New York Times under the headline Extreme Heat Bleaches Coral, and Threat Is Seen reported that the extreme heat so far this year is affecting coral in various locations “from Thailand to Texas”. The coral’s bleaching indicates that it is going into a sort of survival mode. If the stress continues long enough, the coral dies. A report yesterday from NOAA says that coral bleaching is also likely in the Caribbean this year.

Coral reefs are an essential part of ocean ecosystems; coral reefs provide habitat for other living things, including fish. The NOAA report explains that the decline and loss of coral reefs throughout the world “has significant social, cultural, economic and ecological impacts on people and communities.” As the New York Times article points out:  “In dozens of small island nations and on some coasts of Indonesia and the Philippines, people rely heavily on reef fish for food.”

As the atmosphere and oceans get warmer, people who rely on reef fish for food will have less to eat.  As governments and peoples fail to address climate change, there are real consequences for real people. Aid programs have long operated on the principal that it’s better to teach someone to fish than simply give someone a fish, but if there aren’t any fish to be caught, it’s an entirely different situation.  People who live in island nations and along coastal areas already know how to fish; a sustainable environment would continue to make fish available.

Some folks say that it’s difficult to care enough to act when we don’t actually see the people who suffer from our inaction.  Certainly most of us are more compelled to help someone suffering right in front of us than unknown people we don’t see or know. But this inclination doesn’t determine our actions; we have the ability to think and understand the ways our actions affect others. The fact that a gut reaction spurs us to action more quickly than does a reaction that originates in our understanding doesn’t excuse us from acting.

The rich man in the Gospel story begs Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his family of the consequences of living selfishly and ignoring the invisible poor. Jesus has Abraham give this reply: “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”  They already had the information they needed to do the right thing but found reasons not to act; more information would only generate more excuses.

This story suggests an image of us middle class Americans sometime in the not so distant future realizing what our inaction has done to the Earth and its inhabitants, wishing that someone from the future could have come to us in 2010 when every other issue – religious, political, or personal -- seemed more important than climate change. If only someone had told us what was happening, if only we had known…

But we do know. We have incredible access to news reports and scientific reports, to books and videos; we have lots and lots of information. We have Moses and the prophets and the Gospel; we have the leadership of the Episcopal Church encouraging us to act. Yes, it’s overwhelming sometimes; yes, it takes some effort to look beyond our own daily lives; but Jesus calls us to lay aside our excuses and act out of love.

Jeremiah and the Monarch

Proper 19C

“A hot wind comes from me out of the bare heights in the desert toward my poor people…I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void…I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled. I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert.”

These words are from Sunday’s lesson from Jeremiah 4, one of the Revised Common Lectionary lessons for this coming second Sunday in September. This week coincides with the fall migration of monarch butterflies in Nebraska.  This migration doesn’t get as much attention in central Nebraska as does the spring migration of the sandhill cranes, but most years it is a marvelous event to observe.  The butterflies traveling from Canada to Mexico are not the individuals that left the forests of Mexico to fly north; these butterflies are at least a couple of generations removed from those, yet these fall butterflies find their way back to the ancestral winter home. The size and seeming fragility of these beautiful creatures makes their long journey all the more amazing!

Tuesday morning I found a monarch butterfly resting on the screen door between our kitchen and the porch where I sometimes eat breakfast. The butterfly stayed where it was, occasionally opening its wings, while I ate breakfast and snapped some photos of it. After breakfast, while I was reading the Daily Office and also looking ahead to the lessons for Sunday -- including this passage from Jeremiah -- it was still keeping me company.  

It was still there when I had to leave; by lunchtime, it was gone. I looked at my photos of this single butterfly and started watching for more monarchs. According to Monarch Watch from the University of Kansas, we should be beginning the peak monarch migration period for Nebraska; in my 25 years in Nebraska, I’ve learned to watch for the monarchs in early September. The year I had a garden bed full of tithonia (Mexican sunflowers) I couldn’t count the number of butterflies hanging on the plants over Labor Day weekend! Most years, once we spot the first one, there are usually several more passing through that day. When no more came along Tuesday or Wednesday, I started to wonder where the others were!

Monday’s Lincoln Journal Star  carried an AP story  about backyard volunteers helping to track numbers of fireflies in North America; the Journal Star’s headline for the story was “Are fireflies on the verge of just fading away?”  Remembering that headline, I became more curious about what we might know about the monarchs.

Milkweed: the breakfast of larval survivors

There is indeed concern about the monarchs. They are one of the World Wildlife Fund’s endangered species   A USA Today article from last March, “Monarch butterflies, battered by weather, no longer rule”   talks about severe weather in the form of hailstorms and heavy rains in their winter home taking a toll before the northward migration even started.  It quotes Lincoln Brower, a monarch specialist at Sweet Briar college, listing three specific environmental pressures on them: 1) illegal logging in Mexico that has destroyed some winter habitats for monarchs, 2) severe weather caused by climate change, 3) fewer milkweed plants in the Midwest because of herbicide use on corn and soybean fields (the larvae eat only milkweed).  A July population update on the Monarch Watch blog  sounds a hopeful note that the population might recover some; one factor is that heavy rains in Texas this year have increased the number of milkweed plants there.

I hope to see more monarchs in the next few days, and to see them again next year and all the years after that. It’s very difficult to imagine that the day could come in our lifetimes when they would no longer show up in Nebraska in September. But we haven’t cared very well for God’s creation, and there are natural consequences to that lack of care. As a nation, we continue to ignore climate change, allowing lawmakers to get away with dodging this difficult issue and failing to figure out ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As a people, we continue to focus on short-term economic goals without thinking about the effects of resulting changes of habitat and climate on creatures like butterflies.

The words I read from next Sunday’s Jeremiah passage while sitting with this lone butterfly still speak to us today. Jeremiah was speaking about the approaching invasion of Judah; he spoke of the invasion and the desolation of the land as judgments of God against God’s disobedient people. The environmental pressures on butterflies and other living things on the Earth aren’t a judgment or punishment meted out by God, but the natural consequence of our failure to care for the Earth as God commands us to do. God doesn’t need to make our land desolate to wake us up; we are already doing that.  Earlier in this chapter from Jeremiah, we find this (Jeremiah 4:9): “On that day, says the Lord, courage shall fail the king and the officials...”  The king – the monarch -- in Jeremiah’s time ignored all the prophetic warnings; when the time came to act, courage failed the leaders. Our leaders seem to be ignoring the warnings from the scientific community, and seem to lack the courage to lead us in addressing global warming.

Sunday’s Gospel lesson (Luke 15:1-10) reminds us that every single human being is important to God; God cares very much what happens to each one of us. Surely the God who cares for all of us, the God who cares for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, cares about what happens to the butterflies.

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.