Good Friday Grief

Our observance of Good Friday brings us into the reality of grief. Through the Good Friday liturgy, we deepen our sense of Jesus’s suffering and of the profound grief of his mother and his followers. Jesus’s trial and crucifixion happened long ago and far away, but because Jesus is for us a very real presence whom we name as both Lord and friend, the story touches us deeply.

Often as we allow ourselves to enter into the story and share in the grief of his followers who witnessed this event firsthand, we find ourselves connecting this deep, cosmic grief — our sorrow at the brutality that nailed God Incarnate to a cross — to our own personal experiences of loss and grief. Sometimes we experience a connection with a familiar grief around the death of a loved one, while other times we are surprised by what surfaces. Sometimes we find ourselves consciously grieving a loss we had kept at arm’s length, something we weren’t even conscious that we were grieving. 

Some of us are conscious of our grief around the losses of life and place connected to climate change. Psychologists are aware of a growing number of people experiencing grief connected to climate change. The combination of species extinction with the loss of human lives to climate-related floods, storms, and fires is layered in with all the other global concerns that are connected with grief: the pandemic, the loss of life and the lack of humanity in Russia’s gruesome attack on Ukraine, gun violence here in the United States. 

I know that few people I’ve talked to since the most recent UN IPCC working group report came out have heard anything about it, and I’ve noticed that the floods in South Africa — the result of the “deadliest storm on record” in South Africa — haven’t received much coverage in the United States. However, since the same global changes that contribute to the large-scale catastrophes being experienced now and forecast to occur in the future to some degree — depending on how well we respond to the warnings in the IPCC reports — also contribute to changes close to home, I expect there is some degree of awareness even if we ignore the bigger picture when the seasons seem “off” or the weather seems “really strange”. 

Good Friday focuses on Jesus’s death on the cross. The full meaning of the Easter message of hope, of love having the final word, depends on Jesus death being real. If we try to deny his death on the cross, the Easter message is diminished. Good Friday invites us to experience our grief so that we might fully live into the salvation story we proclaim at Easter.

Acceptance of the realities that bring grief near is a necessary part of healing. Certainly we will not begin to heal our biosphere until enough people feel the grief of what we are losing. For me, and I suspect for others who pay attention to climate change, the death of Jesus on the cross is connected with the unnecessary deaths resulting from catastrophic events related to floods, storms, drought, and melting ice, with the loss of entire species, and the loss of places and nuances of seasons that will never again be the same in our lifetimes. Good Friday teaches us that we can somehow bear the grief, that it’s okay to open our eyes and see the reality all around us.

Maundy Thursday

 Love in a profit-driven system

We call today Maundy Thursday because we focus on Jesus’s last evening with his disciples when he washed their feet after supper and then gave them the commandment — the mandatum — to love one another.

Our Maundy Thursday Gospel (John 13:1-17, 31b-35) also tells us that before the Last Supper had begun, Judas had decided to betray Jesus. Matthew (Matthew 26:15) says that Judas had agreed to betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. 

Hearing the story of Judas’s betrayal alongside the biblical account of Jesus’s last evening with his disciples, including the commandment to love one another, makes me wonder how Judas could have valued Jesus’s life so little. How could Judas betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver? How can any of us place a price on the life of another person? When we have a choice between loving one another or getting some money, why do we so often choose money? 

The most blatant examples in our modern world of selling out someone’s life for a profit aren’t a temptation for most of us. We would never think of trafficking another person for a handful of money or hiring ourselves out as hitmen. However, we are tempted to tolerate, and sometimes even advocate for, policies that put a price on human life.

Not very far into the Covid pandemic, as vaccinations were just becoming available, there was some discussion about whether older Americans should be willing to sacrifice our lives for the sake of the economy. This rested on the premise that the main reason for businesses shutting down and for workers and students being told to stay home was to protect the people most vulnerable to dying from Covid — the elderly and people with certain underlying medical conditions. Those advocating sacrificing us for the sake of the economy were engaged in a more sophisticated form of placing a price on the lives of other people. Even now, with vaccinations available to everyone age 5 and above, economic concerns are driving decisions that set aside practices that decrease the spread of Covid even though our youngest children remain unvaccinated and adults with certain medical conditions are similarly vulnerable. We are placing a price on the lives of our little ones, choosing money instead of love.

Similarly, our willingness to choose short-term profit over life itself underlies the political and economic policies that have brought us to such an urgent place in the work of keeping our planet habitable. (See UN climate report: It’s ‘now or never’ to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.) A 2019 study found a shocking loss in bird populations in North America; we have lost 1 in 4 birds in the past fifty years. Climate change coupled with habitat loss and other environmental stressors has us in the midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction, with accelerated loss of both plant and animal species. Our lives, of course, are intertwined with the lives of all other living things. We are placing a price on the lives of all living things — ourselves included — choosing money instead of love.

In the Gospel account, Judas realizes too late the reality of what he has done. He had allowed the lure of an immediate profit to take his focus from what he knew deep down was the right and loving way to live. It was too late for Judas. While the distortion of our priorities has resulted in much permanent loss, it’s not too late for us to change course and give love priority over immediate profit. In the long run, societies that value the welfare of all living things will be better off than societies where some people make big profits while others, both human and non-human, suffer. 

We can create new systems that prioritize life over short-term economic gain. We can love one another.

Palm Sunday 2022: Silencing truth

Luke 19:28-40

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

According to Luke's Gospel, Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey and people shout, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" But right away, some of those with religious power in Jesus’s day tried to silence the truth that Jesus lived and taught, the Living Truth that is the Christ. 

History shows us that those in power will go to great lengths to hide the truth if the truth might get in the way of what they want. Sometimes they silence the truth directly, by forbidding speech — “Teacher order your disciples to stop” — or censoring the written word. Often there will be active promotion of the opposite claim, the lie, in a way that makes people question the truth. Russia’s campaign at home to convince people that Russian soldiers are conducting a “military exercise”, not a war, combines the tactics of forbidding the truth to be published or spoken with an advertising campaign. 

In the United States, the truth can simply be buried when major media outlets ignore it. On Wednesday this week climate scientists around the world protested to being attention to the urgent message in the IPCC report that was released on Monday. You may not have heard about this, as it was covered by few major news outlets. I knew about it because I follow climate scientists on social media. Climate scientist Peter Kalmus wrote a moving piece for The Guardian about the frustration — the desperation — of trying over and over again to get us to pay attention to the facts about climate change that should be spurring us to immediate large-scale action. How do we counter indifference and purposeful silence?

Jesus said that if his followers who were calling out “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” were silenced, all of creation down to the stones, the earth itself, would cry out. Nature has been crying out close to home for Americans this week, with another round of violent storms in the southeastern United States and dangerously high winds and wildfires in the Plains. 

Many people affected by these storms won’t connect them to climate change, and it’s not possible to connect any particular weather event to climate change. What we do know is that overall, warmer global temperatures result in the sort of instability that products violent storms and high winds. And what I’ve discovered in talking with people who aren’t particularly attuned to climate change is that they do know that something is different, something is “off”. Older people are eager to tell you what they have observed about changes in storm patterns and planting seasons and bird migrations in their own lifetimes. The people I talk with might not say the words “climate change”, but because they observe what happens outdoors, they are aware of climate change on some level. 

The hymn “My song is love unknown” (#458, The Hymnal 1982) breaks my heart open every year as I listen to music during Holy Week. The words, written by Puritan minister Samuel Crossman in the 1600’s, name the mix of grief and love in the Passion Gospel that is typically read after the Liturgy of the Palms in Episcopal Churches. The third verse of the hymn says:

Sometimes they strew His way,

  and His sweet praises sing;

resounding all the day

   hosannas to their King.

Then 'Crucify!'

    is all their breath,

 and for His death

    they thirst and cry.

We often act irrationally when we are grieving. We deny the grief, even the truth of the cause of the grief, at the same time that our knowledge of the grief and loss we are denying runs deep. 

As Holy Week progresses, we turn liturgically from the hosannas of Palm Sunday to the demands for Jesus’s crucifixion, and to his trial, the mocking and torment, the carrying of the cross, and the crucifixion of Jesus, the Christ, the incarnation of truth and love. As the story continues, the truth is not completely lost. One of the men crucified beside Jesus, the centurion keeping guard, and the women who had followed him from Galilee and stayed where they could stand in witness all see and acknowledge the truth. The story we tell during Holy Week can help us see more clearly what is happening now in the world around us and discern how to serve in the name of Christ at this weighty moment in history.

Looking Toward Holy Week 2022

 Monday of this week, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the conclusions of Working Group 3, the group of scientists looking at what humankind needs to do to reduce the effects of climate change. 

From one perspective, the report was hopeful, as the group did indeed list specific actions we can take and a timetable of when we need to have these actions in place in order to escape the worst consequences of climate change. From another perspective, the report was disheartening, emphasizing the urgency of making big policy changes and the nearly unthinkable consequences of failing to act quickly. 

The UN News published this article — UN climate report: It’s ‘now or never’ to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees — summarizing some of the key points and the comments of UN leaders.

The next three years are critical, and we know the world is occupied with other matters — matters both significant and trivial — that make it hard to imagine that the world’s governments and corporations will make the large-scale changes that the challenge demands. And yet, we also know that even if it is unimaginable, it is still possible.

The timing of this report in relation to the church calendar called me to reflect on places where the elements of both our hope and our despair about climate change intersect with some of the themes of the texts and liturgy we will be meeting during Holy Week. Climate change is one of several big, serious issues that make this point in history more challenging than most, and all of these issues are intertwined with one another. We come into this Holy Week different people in a different church than we knew in years past, a church coming to grips with an ongoing pandemic, national and global political instability, a new awareness and admission of racism, and, underlying it all, a knowledge that seasonable weather as we knew it when the 1979 Book of Common Prayer first appeared is becoming rarer even as destructive storms, droughts, and fires increase. 

Even people who never read or hear the often buried news stories about the IPCC reports know on some level that something is different, something is off. There is unacknowledged, often unconscious grief; there is anxiety; there is a yearning for hope, for a feeling that we can do something meaningful to meet this crisis. 

I know that for me, any attempt to skate through Holy Week and Easter without engaging this crisis at least in my own reflections as I prepare, if not also in my preaching and conversations during the week, would result in a failure to share the Good News with a world more in need of good news than ever. In the days ahead, I hope to share some of those reflections as we prepare to tell each other again the story that has formed us into a people of hope in the face of despair, of love in the face of hate. 

Candlemas 2022: Shedding Some Light and Finding Some Hope

Call it Candlemas or the Presentation of Our Lord (as we do in The Book of Common Prayer 1979) or even, as most people in the United States do, Groundhog Day, this day forty days after Christmas and midway between the Winter Solstice  and Spring Equinox marks a subtle turning of the seasons. Even this year, when February 2 finds most of Nebraska in frigid temperatures and other parts of the Midwest and Plains under winter storm watches and warnings, there is a noticeable difference in the slant of the sunlight and the length of days that helps us know in our bones that spring is on its way. 

This day on the church calendar offers rich stories and prayers for reflection. Even though the church’s texts for the day have no immediate connection to concerns for caring for the planet or its people and other creatures, a subtle connection is there. I wonder whether these texts with images of fire and light connect so easily yet indirectly to caring for the earth because some old European calendars considered this the beginning of spring.

Today’s Eucharistic reading for the Presentation of Our Lord (Luke 2:22-40) tells the story of Mary and Joseph taking the infant Jesus to the temple. Simeon recognizes Jesus as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel” and blesses him, and Anna, an elderly woman who is a prophet living in the temple, begins to praise God and talk about the child.

Denise Levertov wrote a short poem called Candlemas. (Read the poem here, or find it in Levertov’s collection The Stream & Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes.) Speaking of Simeon, Denise Levertov wrote:

What depth 

of faith he drew on,

turning illumined

towards deep night.

Simeon’s turn towards the deep night brings us beyond his joyful declaration that he has seen the Lord’s salvation to his words to Mary: “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed…and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” It takes a certain depth of faith, a firm foundation, for Simeon toilet himself look beyond the wonder of the moment with this blessed infant to the difficult times Simeon sees in Jesus’s future.

Deep faith like Simeon’s offers a place to ground ourselves in times like ours. This week HBCU’s have endured threats of violence, we heard about books being banned from school libraries and classrooms, and even though the number of Covid-19 cases is finally heading downward again, deaths from the omicron surge continue. And, of course, we face the effects of climate change, which are both unfolding around us in ever more apparent ways and yet, because of their magnitude, exist nearly beyond our imagination. Awareness of the reality of what is happening as our world warms can result in feelings of hopelessness. This hopelessness slides easily into cynicism, a feeling that there is nothing to be done and no reason to do anything significant to try to change things. On the other hand, some people handle the situation by embracing false hope, either denying that anything significant is happening at all or supposing that a few changes here and there — but nothing that changes our way of life very much — will be sufficient to magically return our climate to stability. (False hope is the coinage of greenwashing and of political crumbs thrown to environmentalists.)

Deep faith offers an alternative to both cynicism and false hope. Deep faith turns to the darkness, the “deep night”; deep faith sees the reality of the loss of species and climate stability and acknowledges it. But instead of turning away or being swallowed by the darkness, deep faith allows us to be illumined and reflect some of that light into the reality of the world around us. 

Deep faith tells us that our prayers and our actions will have some profound meaning, that our efforts are worth something even if we don’t get the results for which we fervently pray. Deep faith assures us that God is good and all will be well even when we can’t envision what “all will be well” could mean in a rapidly warming world. 

Deep faith sustained Mary after Simeon told her, “a sword will pierce your own soul too” and in her future when she experienced the pain of seeing her son suffer.  It can be our sustenance in 2022 and in the years ahead. Being intentional about tending to our souls, to growing our faith deeper, is essential to the church’s response to environmental degradation and to all the other challenges that we cannot ignore if we follow Jesus’s commandment to love our neighbors.

****

This post is updated from one published on February 2, 2015.

Holy Innocents 2021: Covid and Climate Change

Today the church remembers the Holy Innocents, the children who died when Herod ordered the slaughter of all children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or younger (Matthew 2: 13-23).

Holy Innocents 2021 comes with news of a Covid surge from the omicron variant causing a sharp increase in pediatric hospitalizations. Covid vaccine is now available for children who are at least five years old, but the youngest children cannot yet be vaccinated, pediatric vaccination rates are low, and unvaccinated children living with unvaccinated adults are at especially high risk. The urgency of protecting our children has reached far too few parents, and the failure of our leaders to require vaccinations or mandate mask-wearing or do enough in any way to protect children and others has not only directly made our children vulnerable, but has contributed to a misguided idea that Covid isn’t dangerous for children. Churches that gathered families for unmasked Christmas services and children’s programs bear responsibility also, again not only for the children directly infected from such gatherings, but from the unspoken message that it’s okay to gather as if our wish that this pandemic were over had magically become a reality.

Holy Innocents 2021 comes also after a lackluster COP26 gathering in November made little progress toward mitigating climate change. In an interview by KK Otteson published in The Washington Post , Greta Thunberg says:

Right now, what’s holding us back is that we lack that political will. We don’t prioritize the climate today. Our goal is not to lower emissions. Our goal is to find solutions that allow us to continue life [as it is] today. And, of course, you can ask, “Can’t we have both?” But the uncomfortable truth is that we have left it too late for that. Or the world leaders have left it too late for that. We need to fundamentally change our societies now. If we would have started 30 years ago, it would have been much smoother. But now it’s a different situation.

Greta Thunberg is one of the younger climate activists who know that climate change will be a dominant force for the rest of their lives because of our failure to recognize the danger and address it responsibly before we got to this point. When I read about expected changes in sea level rise and loss of species and food production as the earth continues to warm, I often imagine a baby born this year and how old that baby will be as these changes, challenges, and catastrophes unfold. (When my heart can bear it, I calculate how old my own young grandchildren will be as these changes occur, and try to imagine how their lives might be impacted.) 

Throughout this pandemic, I’ve sensed parallels between our response to climate change and our response to Covid. The parallels are becoming starker and clearer as 2021 comes to a close and our remembrance of the Holy Innocents points to how little children have mattered to too many powerful people throughout history. 

What do the two crises have in common? A few of the parallels are a desire to hold suffering —especially the suffering of the most vulnerable people in our world — at a comfortable arm’s length, an inability to acknowledge and grieve the enormity of the loss of life (both human and nonhuman), a puzzling concession to people who bully us with their “right” to spread disease or pollute the atmosphere with greenhouse gases or otherwise undermine the public good with their own willful ignorance and greed, and an overall failure to love our neighbors as ourselves and to care for the little ones — the most vulnerable ones — in our communities and our world.

The people with power in this world and those of us who passively allow them to continue doing what they do differ from Herod, of course in this: No one intends to cause the death of thousands of children. The objective instead is to maintain political power or a sense of “normalcy”, which rightly or wrongly is taken to entail inadequately addressing a difficult problem. The objectives are to accept (and not look to closely at) a high number of hospitalizations or deaths for some people so that others can have a sense of “getting back to normal” and to ignore the effects of climate change so that we older people can continue enjoying the sorts of comforts and conveniences to which we are accustomed while allowing the wealthiest among us to make huge profits producing and selling carbon intensive energy resources. We don’t intend to harm the children; children are simply the collateral damage of our failures with respect to Covid and climate change, just as children are so often the collateral damage of wars. 

However, we do have something in common with Herod: Herod 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 really see and work to end the Covid pandemic and 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 or of mothers throughout history who have seen tyrants treat their children as expendable, as collateral damage to their own selfish schemes.

We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with your in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Collect for The Holy Innocents, The Book of Common Prayer)

Lord, have mercy on us.

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. 

Lenten Wilderness: The Uninhabitable Earth

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming, published two weeks ago, will help to shape my Lenten experience this year. In turn, I suspect my observance of Lent will color my reading of David Wallace-Wells’s blunt and lucid account of the present reality of climate change. My intention during Lent is to figure out every day what to give up or let go of to ensure time for a close reading of a chunk of this book along with a close reading of the Daily Office readings for that day and plenty of time for prayer. 

“It is worse, much worse, than you think,” reads the first sentence of The Uninhabitable Earth. 

“We confess to you, Lord, all our past unfaithfulness: the pride, hypocrisy, and impatience of our lives.” We pray this confession in our Litany of Penitence as one of many particular faults. All of the sins we confess on Ash Wednesday have some bearing on the particular sin that most directly speaks to the subject of The Uninhabitable Earth: 

For our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us,Accept our repentance, Lord. 

Yesterday’s familiar Daily Office reading from John’s Gospel (John 1:1-18) reminded us of the reality of the Incarnation, the Word that came to live among us in our world of earth, air, fire, and water. While some forms of piety emphasize a heaven / earth dualism during Lent, the reality of our faith and of our lives is that we are part of the world God created and pronounced good, the same world so deeply loved by God that Jesus, God Incarnate, came to dwell here with us. Whether we can understand it, and even if we deny it, the laws of chemistry and physics and our past and present actions are resulting in big changes that have forever changed life on our planet. And whether we can understand it, and even if we deny it, God’s love for us and for all of creation, the love that we know through Jesus’s love, is with us as we respond to the huge challenges we face. 

I’ve chosen to read The Uninhabitable Earth not despite the psychological and spiritual challenge of looking squarely at our present situation on this planet, but because of the enormity of that challenge. The temptation to look away is a true temptation, a temptation to sin. Our failure to acknowledge climate change as the central issue of our time — our practice of willful ignorance, of ignoring the very warm elephant in the room as we allow ourselves to be distracted by all sorts of craziness along with all sorts of other serious concerns that will only worsen as Earth’s temperatures soar — is more than an oversight. Our willful ignorance that results in human suffering and species extinction is a sin, and the only way to repent of willful ignorance is to seek knowledge. 

I have no idea what I’ll encounter in the practice of reflecting on this latest summary of our perilous condition alongside our daily lectionary readings and Lenten prayers, but when any of us chooses a serious Lenten discipline, we have no idea what we will encounter in our chosen wilderness. By definition, the wilderness has no set paths to follow, no guarantees of what we will find. 

In this age of global warming, we are all in the wilderness, all lost whether or not we realize it.  Choosing a forty day interior wilderness journey that acknowledges our material situation seems appropriate to me this year. I’ll post some reports along the way if I find something worth sharing.

Christmas: Wondering as We Wander

I wonder as I wander out under the sky

How Jesus my Saviour did come for to die

For poor on'ry people like you and like I,

I wonder as I wander out under the sky.

(Song by folklorist John Niles, inspired by a fragment of a folk hymn)

Christmas traditions run deep for many of us, yet despite the continuity provided by certain traditions, each year’s Christmas experience is unique. This year’s Christmas for at least a good chunk of Americans seems somewhat different as we are living through what feels like a new sort of moment in our nation’s history. The sense of instability has shown itself in recent days with a deep plunge in the stock market (heading toward possibly the worst December for the market since the Great Depression), a government shutdown, and the impending departure of Defense Secretary Mattis. Add the elements of environmental instability to this, with little encouraging news from either the scientific or the political spheres, and it’s no surprise that something feels different this Christmas. 

How any of this will play out is unclear. We have solid science to help us see what will happen if we continue on our current path of environmental destruction, but even that is uncertain as the future direction of the human actions that have gotten us into this crisis are unpredictable and the exact nature and timing of global warming’s feedback loops are still only partially known. 

The American social and political traditions and the environmental stability that felt like givens to those of us born in the middle of the twentieth century are now unreliable. Having lost our way, we are wandering, searching, hoping for something we can’t quite envision. 

The Christmas story is about hope, about light shining in the darkness. Mary’s song — our Gospel for Advent IV — reminds us that God shows mercy for people who are poor and oppressed, that those who are suffering in the present moment have real hope that a more just order will be restored. 

The Christmas story is also about wonder — the wonder of God being born among us, the wonder of a young woman receiving a visit from an angel and of a new baby with seemingly ordinary parents being seen as a King, but telling us when he is grown that his kingdom is not like other kingdoms. There is starlight, angels singing to terrified shepherds, and other people amazed at what the shepherds told them. And there is Mary, treasuring the words of the shepherds and, as Luke tells it, pondering them in her heart.

The Christmas story is about experiencing wonder as we wander toward the Light. Wonder isn’t the whole story — Mary went through the very real experience of pregnancy and childbirth along with those reflective and even mystical experiences — but perhaps it’s a necessary ingredient that we neglect at our own peril.

The wonder of Christmas was brought home for me yesterday when I went to see my young grandchildren in their congregation’s Christmas pageant. My three-year-old grandson was an angel, with the only directions being to hang around with the older angels and be where they were. But despite the efforts of the grown-ups in his life and the influence of Mr. Rogers in teaching the difference between real life and make-believe, the idea of people in costumes pretending vs. seeing the real thing is still shaky for a three-year-old, shaky enough for the enacted wonder of the story to become real wonder. When Mary brought out a baby doll that had been hidden away and put the baby in the manger, my grandson looked and looked at the baby, hovering near the manger and watching over the baby Jesus. His sense of wonder was evident and contagious. The story is still new for him, and that helped me hear the story in a new way as well. 

There are many occasions for wonder in our own daily lives. We have seen an amazing moon the past couple of evenings, a moon with a special glow. That science can explain why this moon looks different from others doesn’t take away from its beauty or its ability to expand our thoughts beyond our ourselves and our daily tasks. There are glimpses of joy on the faces of people of all ages; there are the small gray and brown birds that appear from hidden places to feed at feeders, the occasional sound of a wren, and the quiet of fields and woods far from town, and the winter skies seen from those same rural places. There is ice forming and melting, there are snowflakes falling like little stars, and the sight of friends and family who have been away from home. Wonder — and its companion, joy — are there for the noticing. 

Wondering at the world around us and finding joy in God’s creation forms our hearts to love the world. We care for what we love, and the more connected we feel to other people and all of creation, the more easily we will see the way to live whole and holy lives even when the world feels unstable and fragmented. The world needs people who are whole and holy; God needs us to do the work of mercy, justice, repair, and love that will lead to a better world for all people and all living things. 

May Christmas wonder be yours during this Christmas!

Into the Darkness

Advent I

Perhaps it’s because Nebraska has had several snowy, wintry days already this year, or perhaps it’s because of the weight of the news about climate change. Perhaps it’s because the level of corruption, incompetence, and willful ignorance among some of our top elected officials is taking us farther from addressing global warming instead of bringing us closer to the sort of large-scale all-in effort needed to mitigate climate change and adapt to a warming world. Perhaps it’s that the scientific reports seem less abstract when we see photos of places destroyed by fires, floods, and sea level rise. Whatever the reason, as this Advent season begins, I feel more keenly than I ever have at Advent that we are journeying into darkness. 

We pray “Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light…” in our Collect for the First Sunday of Advent, and we use phrases like “dark times” to describe a difficult point of our personal or collective history. But non-metaphorical darkness, real darkness, can be a welcome time of sleep. It’s when we dream and re-energize our bodies for another day. Clear, starry skies on the darkest and coldest nights pull us into a world of wonder. Darkness is neither bad nor good, it simply is. 

However, when we aren’t safely tucked away in our beds or purposely star-gazing, darkness can be scary because we can’t see what is around us and may be disoriented. That’s when we long for a light in the darkness. A small flashlight on a walk back from star-gazing in an open field or seeing a farmstead’s yard light ahead when driving on a dark night can make a big difference. 

As we enter Advent this year, I’m keeping an image in mind of entering a quiet, restful darkness while knowing where to find some light when I need it. Maybe in the darkness, even if it's sometimes uncomfortable, we will learn something, dream something, that will help us see and participate in a new thing. In Advent, we contemplate the mystery of Christ as the one who was, who is, and who is to come again, the one that John’s Gospel describes as the Word who was from the beginning. “What has come into being in him was life,” writes John, “and the life was the light of all people.” We know where to find the light, and we also know that it’s both a necessity and a joy to pass through the darkness of Advent in order to more fully receive the light that always shines in the darkness, the light of Christ we celebrate at Christmas. 

This year, our spiritual journey into darkness seems an especially good fit for what we are experiencing in our daily lives, in this unique moment in the intertwined history of humankind and planet Earth, and in our current political situation. In the Gospel for the First Sunday of Advent, Jesus talks about our ability to see the signs of the season such as the sprouting of green leaves telling us when summer is near. We can read the signs of our times if we pay attention. Reports of daily eco-disasters and scientific reports show us different kinds of signs of the same reality. As we pay attention, the darkness can seem overwhelming. It’s disorienting because we are in an unfamiliar place. However, as we allow ourselves to see the signs and enter the darkness of our current situation, we are also entering the more familiar darkness of Advent, that darkness that is meant to help us see the Light more clearly. Even though humankind has never before been in this same place, we know how to do this because we know how to journey through Advent and we know the Light is near. 

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For a daily dose of wonder to help us reflect on our place in the vastness of creation, check out the 2018 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar.

Light in the darkness: What do we want?

Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.”  (Mark 10:51)

We Americans have had a harrowing week, the sort of week in which our Christian belief that light shines through the darkness becomes a matter of faith more than observation. But we do believe that the light shines in the darkness and that love is stronger than hate. Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s statement after the shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh expresses our faith and describes the response of prayer and action that translates our sympathetic and loving thoughts toward our Jewish friends into a real sharing of love.

Nebraska Episcopalians who attended our Annual Council in Gering this week had a little more than a day of renewing and beginning friendships, being with and listening to our current Bishop and the two Bishops who preceded Bishop Barker, hearing a strong witness to Christian discipleship from Dr. Tom Osborne, and worshipping together. We were in a strikingly beautiful part of our state under clear blue autumn skies. All of this was light in the darkness. When we left Gering on Saturday morning and started hearing the news of what had happened to another faith community in Pittsburgh, I was grateful for the renewal and strength we took away with us, because those of us who are trying to follow Jesus at this point in our history need strong faith and minds and hearts. 

The Gospel lesson for today is the story of Bartimaeus, a blind man who calls out “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” when he is told that Jesus is passing by. Jesus calls Bartimaeus over. Instead of assuming that what Bartimaeus needs most is to see, Jesus asks “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus is direct in his request: “My teacher, let me see again.” 

What do we want Jesus to do for us on October 28, 2018? Do we want an end to hate crimes and violence, or is there some payoff in personal status or social arrangements that makes us want a sort of half-healing where we gain some sense of protection while the currents of hatred and ignorance that fuel the violence continue? 

The week’s climate news was not only harrowing in its own right, but also very much connected to the other issues we are facing. The Red Cross president, Peter Maurer, talked about how climate change is exacerbating both domestic and international conflicts. [The Guardian: Climate change is exacerbating world conflicts…] Another article by National Geographic described the link between climate change and immigration from Guatemala. [Changing climate forces desperate Guatemalans to migrate.] Climate change is one of the societal global changes that feeds the racism and xenophobia that underlies so much of the politics of hate in the United States. 

What do we want Jesus to do for us? When we pray for our nation, do we pray for Jesus to help us find the strength and wisdom and courage to effect large scale economic and cultural changes, or do we simply long for some vague miracle that will make us safe? 

My plan for the next ten days includes standing in solidarity with our Jewish friends in Omaha, praying for real healing for our biosphere and our nation and for the strength, courage, and wisdom both corporately and personally to contribute to that healing, and keeping all of this in mind when I vote on November 6. 

We must become clear about what we truly want, and then ask Jesus for what we need to change our direction.