Month's End: Pentecost and Praying the News

The last Sunday in May was Pentecost this year. Pentecost is a fitting time not only to look back at the gift of the Holy Spirit at the Pentecost described in Acts 2:1-21, but also to consider how the Spirit calls and empowers the church today to share the Gospel.

Our Psalm on Pentecost Sunday (Psalm 104:25-35, 37b) praises God for the earth and for the great variety of creatures  – “O Lord, how manifold are your works” – and for God’s provision for creation. It’s a picture of the abundance and biodiversity we would expect to find in the unspoiled creation of a gracious and loving God.

The Epistle lesson from Romans 8:22-27 describes human beings and all of creation waiting together for redemption. Paul talks about hoping for things we cannot yet see, because “hope that is seen is not hope”.

Surely the Spirit calls us in the church to be part of God’s redeeming work for the earth as well as humankind. The world described in Psalm 104 is a picture of the Reign of God, where even the Leviathan, the serpent of the sea, is something good and playful. One way to tell whether a push or pull toward action is of the Spirit is to look at whether it works for or against the restoration of God’s creation. Even when hope seems slim, we are called to trust in God’s power and do the redemptive work of the Gospel.

Some of the news stories from this past month were so devastating that we might very well find it difficult to pray in response to them. Where do we begin? Our spoken prayers can seem inadequate. St. Paul says (Romans 8:26): “We do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” I ask your prayers for some of the situations that leave us at the point of placing much hope in the deep prayer of the Spirit

Acceptance our repentance, Lord for the wrongs we have done: for our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us, Accept our repentance, Lord.

From the Litany of Penitence (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 268)

Please pray for:

The future of life on the earth as greenhouse gas levels rise.  Many scientists consider 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to be the upper limit of safe levels of the gas for life as we know it. Today there were reports  that monitoring stations this spring across the Arctic are measuring more than 400 ppm. Worldwide, levels average around 397ppm. May also brought a report from the International Energy Agency(IEA) that CO2 emissions reached a record high of 31.6 gigatonnes (Gt) in 2011. This is a 1.0 Gt increase over 2010 levels.

Wisdom to find just and compassionate ways to address the economic consequences of climate change. We are beginning to understand more about the way climate change will affect us economically. Some are beginning to talk about what scientist and climate writer Joe Romm calls “Dust-Bowlification”, the expectation that the sort of aridity associated with Dust Bowl may spread from Kansas to California by mid-century, endangering agriculture and food security. CBS News ran a piece on assessing the risk of climate change that explored some of the economic effects we have already seen.

People exposed to toxic chemicals. Discussion of the proposed Safe Chemicals Act  has brought our attention to our exposure to toxic chemicals. For example, an article today reports  that chemicals like fire retardants are being detected in common foods. Young children are especially vulnerable to the effects of these chemicals.

Grateful hearts.  Along with some record-breaking heat and severe weather, May has also brought some beautiful days to be outdoors in Nebraska. May we continue to find joy and meaning in God’s creation and give God thanks for the goodness of God’s creation.

We might also pray for our own hearts to be open so we can see the needs in the world around us and gladly respond to those needs:

O heavenly Father, who has filled the world with beauty; Open our eyes to behold your gracious hand in all your works; that, rejoicing in your whole creation, we may learn to serve you with gladness; for the sake of him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Prayer for Joy in God’s Creation (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 814)

Seasons: Loving our Neighbors

Thursday was the sort of early spring day we in Nebraska have been awaiting all winter. The sun was shining, the wind wasn’t particularly high, we could see bits of color where crocuses and snowdrops were starting to bloom, and birds were singing. The Earth calendar says it’s now officially spring; the church calendar says it’s still in the Lenten season that started back in snowy February. And despite the warmth of the late March sun, the air is still cool and there’s another chilly rain coming, reminding us that it’s still very early in the spring. I heard someone this week remark that though spring is now here, she wouldn’t feel as if we were fully in springtime until Easter; once Easter arrives, we know that spring is really here and the heaviest winter clothes can be put away for several months.

My family and I lived in New Zealand for four years before moving to south central Nebraska. With southern hemisphere seasons the opposite of ours, The Earth seasons and liturgical seasons are easily separated there; the Lenten journey begins in late summer and ends with an autumnal Easter. It’s easy for us in Nebraska to forget that our liturgical calendar that arranges the church seasons in close order with the Earth seasons in the temperate part of the northern hemisphere doesn’t work the same way for people in other parts of the world. Our own immediate weather and our own immediate liturgical experience are what we know most easily, but we need to look beyond them to begin to understand the experience of people in other places.


As Easter approaches, even this early northern hemisphere spring, this not-quite-fully-arrived spring, is a great contrast to the cold and snowy winter we had this year. Stu Ostro, Senior Meteorologist for The Weather Channel, said that the best word to sum up this winter in the United States is ‘relentless’ -- one storm after another, one cold front after another. In a recent blog post, he gives a good overview of this winter and talks about the various climatological factors that came together to bring us so much snow and cold. He gives a fairly detailed look at the role of El Nino, both in the ways in which this was a typical El Nino year and the interactions with other factors that made it atypical in some ways. There’s a good discussion of the NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation) and the AO (Arctic Oscillation), both blocking patterns that bring Arctic air much farther south than normal. These factors this year gave us more cold farther south than usual in the United States, while Canada had a warmer than normal year, witnessed by many of us when we saw the snow conditions in Vancouver during the Winter Olympics. Finally, he talks about the role of climate change in all of this, noting that as our atmosphere warms, we can expect “increased precipitation extremes”.

Canada wasn’t the only place warmer than normal the past few months. In the southern hemisphere, for example, Western Australia sweltered through its hottest summer on record. 

A draft paper from NASA concludes that “global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade, despite large year-to-year fluctuations associated with the El Nino-La Nina cycle of tropical ocean temperature,” and it predicts that a new record twelve-month global temperature will be set in 2010. In the Climate Progress blog, Joe Romm, quoting extensively from an e-mail message from climate scientist James Hansen, summarized some of the main points  for folks who don’t want to wade through the entire paper. As in Stu Ostro’s post, there is consideration of how various factors interact to determine both particular weather events and overall climate trends.

As Christians, we are called to love our neighbors; in this global village in which we all now live, loving our neighbors means caring about people all over the world as well as those who live in our own neighborhood, city, or state. Most of us are sympathetic to people in need in other parts of the world. We responded with great generosity to the survivors of the earthquake in Haiti, for example, and we are interested in knowing how the relief effort is going and what else we might do to help.

In the same way, it’s important for us to understand not only our own immediate weather and the personal and economic effects it has, but for us to be aware of the global climate and how that affects our global neighbors as well as ourselves. This week, a tiny island that was claimed by both India and Bangladesh disappeared , covered by the rising ocean. This island was not inhabited, but other nearby islands – and, very significantly, the coastal areas of Bangladesh – are. What lies ahead for these global neighbors?

As the Lenten season concludes with Holy Week, we might spend some time considering the global climate. Where are we headed, and what does it mean for ourselves and our neighbors? At this time, how can we best follow Christ, who taught us that in serving others we serve him? Looking past our own immediate experience of Earth seasons to enter into the experience of our liturgical season will help us first to look at the challenges our global neighbors face, and then to enter into the fullness of Easter and the fullness of spring with renewed hearts centered on serving Christ through serving our neighbors.

Extra Bits: Report on Climate Change Impacts

Yesterday the multi-agency U.S. Global Change Research Program released a report, “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States”. Nebraskans might be especially interested in the part of the report about predicted impacts on the Great Plains.

Major news outlets covered the story, but few featured it. It’s puzzling that we don’t pay more attention to this situation, which will impact everything else – human economy and activities as well as the ecology of other animals and plants -- as it unfolds. The report emphasizes the importance of acting now to minimize the impact of climate change. Here are links to a few of the media reports: The Associated Press, Nature.com ,The Seattle Times , U.S. News & World Report, and CNN.

The good news about the report is that it gives us a clearer picture of what we need to do to be good stewards of creation. More information helps us to focus our efforts, and also to see the importance and urgent nature of this work. Thanks be to God for the scientists who are studying climate change, and for giving us humans the intellectual tools to figure out how to proceed from here!