Do we want to be made well?

 Acts 16:9-15; Revelation 21:22-22:5; John 5:1-9

Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia v. EPA was a prime example of putting lesser interests before the urgent task of doing all we can to mitigate the existential threat of climate change, a threat that looms ahead so large that it already shades our daily lives. As I worked in my garden weeding and watering and worrying about what lies ahead for our nation and our planet, I remembered this question from John 5:1-9: Do you want to be made well?

The parish where I serve, Church of the Resurrection in Omaha, worshiped outdoors on Rogation Sunday, May 22. I preached, using the texts for the Sixth Sunday in Easter (Year C) and focusing on that passage where Jesus asks the question that we might ask ourselves anew in light of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling. Do we want to be made well?

This question lingers in my mind not only because of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, but perhaps even more so because of the reaction to it even by people who question the ruling. This SCOTUS decision, while affecting everyone, was spoken of as a political loss or a bad precedent apart from, and often with no mention of, its heartbreaking effect on all living things. It seems that we simultaneously don’t understand the magnitude of what is unfolding as the planet warms and also lack the imagination or initiative to make large-scale changes that would mitigate climate change. Like depressed medical patients, we know something is wrong, but don’t want to hear the diagnosis or do anything to feel better. (And maybe everything else going on from the pandemic to gun violence to the erosion of our democracy has us collectively in this mental state.)

Rogation Sunday comes to us in the Episcopal Church from the English tradition of processing around the boundaries of a village’s fields and pastures, marking the boundaries — a useful practice in a time when few people could read — and blessing the land while praying for a good growing season. Here’s the body of this reflection on boundaries and being open to Jesus’s offer of healing. 

When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, [Jesus] said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” (John 5:6)

Our Scripture readings this morning are those for the Sixth Sunday in Easter, but happily for our Rogation Sunday observance, they contain images that resonate with being outdoors. 

There’s a place of prayer by the river outside the city gates in today’s reading from Acts.

In Revelation, we heard about the light-filled holy city, not up in the clouds, but right here on earth. The river of the water of life flows right down the main street, with fruit trees growing together along the riverbanks. Scientists have in recent years begun to understand that trees thrive in community, communicating with and supporting one another through fungi along their root systems. it’s a lovely image to contemplate as we sit here under our own beautiful trees!

Our Gospel lesson also provides an image of water, but this one works differently. The pool by the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem was supposed to contain healing water that became effective when the waters were stirred up or troubled. The belief was that the first person to get in the pool when the water was stirred up would be healed. That’s why the man who has spent his days lying by the pool for 38 years hasn’t been healed yet. With no one to help him get into the pool and an inability to move quickly, he never got in the pool at just the right time. But our Gospel lesson in the end isn’t a story about inaccessible healing water — about what doesn’t work — but about Jesus’s power to heal. 

Jesus comes along and asks an important question, “Do you want to be made well?” It’s always best to ask, to find out if the man truly wants to be healed but has never been able to access healing, or if the explanation he gives Jesus is closer to an excuse for not leaving what may have become a comfortable routine after 38 years. A key moment in this story is when, after acknowledging the bleak reality of his situation, the man affirms his desire to be healed by trusting Jesus when Jesus tells him to get up, pick up his mat, and walk. The inaccessible water cure wasn’t working for him. Jesus offers a real choice, a choice between drifting along accepting the only daily routine the man could imagine after all those years and accepting instead a new way that offered hope and true healing.

“Do you want to be made well?” is a good question for all of us to consider on Rogation Sunday as we tap into the tradition of marking boundaries and asking for God’s blessing. Alongside our Scripture texts this morning, what theologians sometimes label the text of the natural world  — our observations and reason — science — can help us think about boundaries and our desire to be made well.

We don’t have village boundaries here where we’re gathered today, but we do have property boundaries and personal boundaries and, less well known but of primary importance, planetary boundaries. Johan Rockstrom and other scientists have looked at what it takes to maintain a “safe operating space” for humankind, a planet where humans — and the diverse network of other living things on which our lives depend — can thrive. They came up with a set of planetary boundaries in nine different categories. The idea is that in each of these nine categories, there is a safe zone — a stable place where we can thrive, a danger zone — a place of instability, and, beyond that, a point of no return — a place where we have marched right on through the danger zone boundary and done irrevocable harm to the systems on which we depend. 

There’s a Netflix film called Breaking Boundaries about their work. It’s sobering because we are far into the danger zone in some areas, but it’s also hopeful. As David Attenborough notes toward the beginning of the film, knowledge of the boundaries “gives us hope because they show us how we can fix things.” 

Several of us are old enough to remember when our knowledge about the dangers we faced from destruction of Earth’s ozone layer resulted in global policy changes about the use of ozone-depleting chemicals. That global cooperation pulled us back into the safe zone of that boundary before we barreled all the way through the danger zone.

But we aren’t doing so well in other areas, such as climate change and loss of biodiversity. The possibility of our national and global  political leaders cooperating on pulling us back into the safety zone in these areas seems less possible — though not impossible — than it did back in the 1980’s when we did the right thing about the ozone layer. 

Do we want to flourish on a healthy planet? Do we want to be healed? Then we must acknowledge collectively, in our political institutions, our churches, and our economic lives that there is something that needs healing. A look at the top news stories each day and a listen in to our conversations with one another reveal a big hole where acknowledgment of the danger of environmental collapse should be heard.

*******

The man by the pool had his hopes so focused on the water in the pool that he nearly missed Jesus, the source of real healing. Later in this chapter of John’s Gospel, when the man is walking around carrying his mat on the Sabbath, the religious authorities ask him why he is carrying something on the Sabbath, and he says the man who healed him told him to do it. They ask who healed him, and the man doesn’t know who it was. The man hadn’t been looking for any source of healing other than the pool and hadn’t paid much attention to anything else.

This man had drifted along for 38 years doing the same thing day after day even though it wasn’t working. It was all he could imagine. We are doing the same thing with our planetary sickness, as it were. We say we want to be healed, but we don’t change anything. We passively accept the story we’ve been told about where we should focus our hopes, and we nearly miss Jesus and the life-giving alternative that his way offers us.

If you listen to our national conversation, our parallel to the pool by the Sheep’s Gate, our idea of where our hopes lie, has to do with The Economy (with a capital E), a longing to return to a near mythical business as usual. If we could just get the system running a little better, we think, everything would be fine. And so year after year we chase after the same thing: the same systems of profit and loss, wealth for a few and, increasingly, poverty or near-poverty for way too many, winners and losers,

and ever increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. 

“The Economy” in the sense of business as usual tends to sort us into groups. This is contrary to God’s kingdom, where there are no barriers between Us and Them. An economy, on the other hand, a more just economy that emphasizes the common good rather than wealth and power for a few, one that provides renewable energy,  accessible healthcare, and robust public transportation, can bring us together rather than tearing us apart.

We aren’t making the immediate and full-scale change from fossil fuels to renewable energy because we cling to the old Economy. Too many decisions around Covid have placed the Economy ahead of the welfare of the groups of people — based on income, age, ability, and race — no surprises there — who then become more vulnerable to the disease. The Economy was a big piece of the Confederacy’s rationale for slavery. Now it’s the rationale for an unlivable minimum wage and a lack of benefits, including medical care, for many workers.

Business as usual isn’t working for us, just as the pool wasn’t working for the man lying on his mat. And this misplaced faith is worse than useless, because it keeps us from fixing things, from doing very doable things, to prevent environmental collapse and a whole host of other problems.

We as the Church as well as individual followers of Jesus must decide whether we continue to trust and enable the powers that be — business as usual — or follow Jesus in a more focused way than we have in the past. This is, I think, the root of the tension in the Episcopal Church as we continue to navigate and, I hope, find our way out of these turbulent years in our nation. Our ability to thrive, to have abundant life, depends on our marking and choosing to stay within our planetary boundaries, and that’s incompatible with choosing business as usual instead of Jesus’s vision of God’s kingdom.  The Episcopal Church’s historic deference to wealth and privilege while Jesus waits for us to follow the healing ways of God’s kingdom is as useless to us as the Sheep’s Gate pool was to the people languishing beside it.

*******

Our sign out here on 30th Street describes Church of the Resurrection as a “culturally diverse family united in God’s love”. As we live into that vision our parish lives into being a little piece of God’s kingdom. God’s kingdom brings us together instead of keeping us apart. 

I suspect more and more that the unity of God’s kingdom is not only God’s dream for humankind in all of our wonderful diversity, but for all living things. The old Man vs. Nature idea goes out the window when we consider our place in the web of life. When studies of animal behavior show planning, logical thinking, and, most of all, compassion among other animals that we used to think were so different in kind from ourselves, when we find evidence of trees living in complex forest communities, that’s reason to suppose that the kingdom of God would have us living not only as a human family but as a widely diverse community of living things united in God’s love. 

Do we want to be made well? Let’s mark our planetary boundaries well and thoughtfully, let’s pray for God’s blessings, and when we get discouraged, let’s remember the promises embedded in today’s Collect: God’s promises exceed all that we can desire, God has prepared for us such good things as surpass our understanding. 

When we focus on following Jesus instead of the things that aren’t working for us, we can thrive in ways we can’t even imagine. 

Preached by Archdeacon Betsy Blake Bennett at Church of the Resurrection, Omaha, Nebraska, May 22, 2022

All the Angels / All the Birds

 September 29

Saint Michael and All Angels

Morning Prayer

The Psalm appointed for the Daily Office today (Psalm 8) tells us that we humans are just a little lower than the angels, that we have been given mastery over everything God created, including “the birds of the air” and “the fish of the sea” — all the living things in all the places plants and animals can live.

Today, September 29, in the early morning I saw the headlines about the declaration of the extinction of the ivory-billed woodpecker, the collective death of every last one of these birds that were called the “Lord God Bird”. (The Washington Post reporter, Dino Grandoni, explains that the name “Lord God Bird” comes from the reaction of those who saw this big, beautiful bird: “those blessed to see it blurted out the Lord’s name”.) 

The same article also tells me that the scientist who wrote the report declaring the Lord God Bird extinct cried, and that 22 other living things were removed from the endangered species list because none of them can be found in the wild. 

This is a pivotal week in the United States in many ways, a standout week even during a period of weeks on weeks and months on months of pandemic in the shadow of climate change, all complicated by the attempts of white nationalism and authoritarianism to rise again (as if the resurrection applied to fascism). There are plenty of unanswered questions, incomprehensible events, complex proposals, and truth-revealing testimony to give us pause, more food for thought than any one of us could ever consume. This early morning, though, I wonder chiefly about two things.

I wonder about angels on this feast of Saint Michael and All Angels. 

The Psalm seems to assume some sort of familiarity with angels. Do we want to know our place in the world? It’s a little lower than the angels, explains the Psalmist. I have no firsthand knowledge of angels. Considering angles is a little like considering alligators and bears for me, in that I’ve read accounts and seen some pictures and, I think, would know one if I saw one, and part of me would like to see such a thing for myself, and part of me knows how frightened I would be if I saw one “in the wild”. What would it be like to see an angel? What sort of experience is that? What sort of knowledge is knowledge of angels?

I also wonder about what sort of “mastery” we humans have demonstrated when that over which we were given mastery is dying, when we have destroyed that which was entrusted to us. The master of a ship does everything possible to avoid wrecking the ship, the headmaster of a school has a duty to oversee the health of the institution and the welfare of the children in the school. We seem to be more than “a little lower” than the angels; we seem to have failed at serving as masters. What does it mean for us to given “mastery” over the other living things?

Wondering about these two things creates more questions as the morning quiet is broken by a raucous blue jay’s sustained call. The Psalm suggests a hierarchy with angels above us and birds below us, but this blue jay is high up in our hackberry tree, way above where I sit on my kitchen porch. What sort of hierarchy is this? I know Jesus supposedly said our lives are worth more than those of the sparrows, but this bird up above me is managing to survive and be exactly what a blue jay should be, and my heart — and I suspect Jesus’s heart — is broken by the knowledge that some of the birds and all the other birds like them are gone, forever gone. 

We, compared to this blue jay that seems alarmed about something, don’t seem to be managing very well the task of being human, of being just a little lower than the angels — whatever that means for those of us who have never seen an angel. We don’t even have the good sense to be alarmed about all the death around us. 

Humans and birds and what we are and why we are seem as mysterious as angels today. Sitting with mystery seems appropriate at the beginning of this day when we consider the angels and at this pivotal point in our history as a species and, more prosaically, as a nation when so much is at stake. 

Coming in the Name of the Lord: Thoughts on the Church's Unique Work in the Climate Crisis

 Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Mark 11:9)

At the end of this Palm Sunday morning, I joined a Zoom conversation with some members of First Congregational UCC in Hastings, Nebraska, at the end of their Lenten series about creation care. Their service included a sermon I had recorded earlier in the week. I’ve adapted the manuscript for that sermon here in order to share some of my current thinking about the wider church’s potential to respond in significant ways to the climate crisis.

It’s heartening to see more and more churches considering how this relatively new challenge of climate change fits into the work churches have traditionally done, work like serving people in need, providing Christian formation for our children, and, most of all, the essential work of discipleship, the work of worship, prayer, and study. In recent years, creation care has become an integral part of the social justice work in many churches.

While churches in the United States have a history of connecting an appreciation of nature with respect for God the Creator, especially through summer camps and occasional outdoor worship in the summer, our history of advocacy around policies regulating clean air and water is very limited. This is relatively new work for the church, and we have had to find our way forward while being pulled backward by a fairly recent narrative claiming that environmental efforts are a political hot potato best avoided, that a desire to keep our levels of pollution and our levels of climate change within the range that allows life as we know it to be sustained is, rather than an urgent concern for everyone on the planet, some sort of side issue that is either supported or opposed according to political affiliations. 

Unlike the sorts of social issues with which the church has historically engaged, climate change comes with an urgency dictated not by the limits of our energy and compassion, which too often have served to slow our efforts, but rather by the limits set by the laws of physics and chemistry, which should serve to accelerate our efforts. And so at the same time the narrative about care for the environment being a trivial political issue was pulling us back, the reality of how rapidly climate change is unfolding and what its effects actually look like has demanded we move ahead more quickly than many leaders in faith communities or in other sorts of institutions found comfortable or even doable. 

We are used to the church engaging in social issues very deliberately. We like to take small steps, doing just enough to stay engaged with an issue while not offending those who aren’t ready for change, and not putting too much time and effort into something many churchgoers see as an unnecessary extra. But because of those pesky natural laws, the luxury of making this work more palatable by advocating for small, incremental changes over many years is not available to us. As this congregation’s Lenten focus on creation care drew to an end, it was wonderful to learn about the efforts of this particular congregation.

We began Holy Week today with Palm Sunday. The Romans in Jesus’s time would process into the cities in their Empire with great pomp, especially after a military victory, the arriving dignitary accompanied by soldiers. Jesus arrives in Jerusalem armed with a heart of compassion and unconditional love, armed with the truth, grounded in prayer, and with deep discernment of God’s will in the week ahead. He is riding not on a warhorse but on a colt, a pile of cloaks for a saddle. More cloaks and leafy tree branches cover the road in front of him, serving both to keep the dust down and to show respect for this humble-looking man who arrives on a colt. And the people who walk ahead of Jesus and behind him are shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord, the one the crowd knows is from God. Christians — at our best — come in the name of the Lord, and groups of Christians who go to serve somewhere, perhaps on a mission trip to another country or somewhere in their own community to serve people in need do so in the name of Jesus Christ. Jesus entering Jerusalem, however, was the perfection of what it means to come in the name of the Lord: perfectly loving, perfectly faithful.

When we show up in the name of the Lord, we present ourselves to the world as followers of Jesus, as people trying to follow his perfect example as best as our imperfect selves can. 

This congregation learned a lot in recent weeks about creation care and climate change and ways we can best respond to it, and many of us in the church have learned enough in recent years to be able to give some meaningful thought to the direction in which we wish to proceed. What’s next? The images and story of Palm Sunday, of Jesus coming into Jerusalem in the name of the Lord, might point us in a direction for the church’s response to climate change. What does it mean for us to come in the name of the Lord at this point in human history?

Palm Sunday show us Jesus entering Jerusalem in a way that is both significant and humble, a way that makes us aware of his authority and power while also reminding us that it’s a mistake to confuse his authority and power with that of the secular officials. Jesus’s authority comes not from military and political structures but from God. It’s both easily ignored and discounted by the secular authorities and also more powerful than the secular authorities can imagine. 

Some reading this may still be wondering about whether the church should direct time and resources toward responding to climate change, while others may be wondering about how the church might best continue that work.

Why should Christians care about climate change? Jesus’s power is love. The reason the church has always cared for people in need is because Jesus taught us to follow his way of love. Climate change is destroying people’s homes and well-being, from Pacific islands made uninhabitable by rising sea levels to Arctic villages built on permafrost whose foundations — and traditional ways of hunting and fishing — cannot hold as the ice melts; from the bitter cold that caused suffering and death in Texas just last month to the floods in Sydney, Australia, this week, as homes were washed away, thousands of people were evacuated from flooded areas, and spiders and snakes swarmed into homes to escape the floodwaters. As I write this post on Sunday evening, I’m seeing news of heavy rains and very destructive flooding in Nashville, Tennessee. 

Here in Nebraska, we may feel secure for the moment, far from seacoasts and experienced in dealing with all sorts of weather, but even if we live somewhere where we feel secure for at least the short-term, we cannot follow Jesus and ignore the suffering of our sisters and brothers. 

We should care about the integrity of God’s creation because God created all that is out of love. If we love God, we should love the gift of life and all that sustains it that God gave us.

What, then, can we do? There are so many wonderful ways we can practice better stewardship of our resources in our churches and our homes, and most of us are familiar with at least enough of these to begin putting some into practice if we haven’t already done so. Good and useful as it is to put some of these suggestions into practice, we need much more than solid individual stewardship to get us to a point of feeling more certain of a sustainable future. Advocacy — being in touch with our elected officials at all levels of government to encourage them to support legislation and policies to help improve the environment and mitigate climate change — is another area where we might put some time and energy. 

However, this Palm Sunday and Holy Week, I hope we can do something more, something bigger that only the church can do. Anyone can adopt better stewardship practices and advocate for better energy and environmental policies — and we need a lot of anyones to do just those things — but there is something more that only we as followers of Jesus can do.

We are truly in a time of  environmental crisis, of climate crisis, that’s happening along with and that intersects with other crises that also need attention. In this time of crisis, I believe that the church, the body of the followers of Jesus, is called to do something more than (and perhaps different from) what environmental organizations ask of us when they come to the church hoping we can help promote their efforts: 

We are called to deep prayer, acknowledging and offering to God our most terrifying truths about climate change and everything connected with it, and listening for God’s response.

We are called to proclaim God’s sovereignty over all of creation, to grow in our love for God’s creation and our ability to find God through the wonders around us, and to teach our children and others to love and respect and find joy in what God has made.

We are called to give voice to grief and lament, to help ourselves and our neighbors acknowledge the losses of human lives, of plant and animal species, and of places. The church knows how to help people process grief. We may not often acknowledge it, but there is grief not only about the incomprehensible losses of lives, income, and family celebrations from this pandemic we are still enduring, but also about the even bigger losses unfolding from climate change. But once we have given voice to our grief and lament, we are called to our most unique task.

We are called to proclaim hope through our faith in the resurrection. We are Easter people; we preach hope and believe in hope even when everything looks hopeless. The hope we are called to proclaim isn’t a false hope. It’s not thinking that everything will magically turn out all right in the end. Hoping for everything to stay as it is, as we’ve known it, is false hope at this point. 

But we can hope for something good that we can’t even imagine. As Paul wrote in his Letter to the Romans, “hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what is seen?” It’s what the philosopher Jonathan Lear terms “radical hope” — a sort of hope beyond hope. As Easter people, we live in radical hope. As followers of Jesus, we share that with the world.

Discarding the word ‘radical’ for the moment in favor of the perhaps less loaded word ‘deep’, I see the church’s call at this time as a call to deep prayer, deep discipleship, deep grief, deep faith, and deep hope, It’s a time for us to look beyond the institutional church and return to our ancient roots in the life and teaching of Jesus. 

What we in the church can offer during this time of environmental crisis is exactly what the followers of Jesus, from those who threw their cloaks down on that dusty road to all of us, have always had to offer: our prayers, our compassion, our hope, and ourselves, all sustained by our faith in the Easter promise of resurrection.

Praying the News

March 20, 2020

Ecosystems are by definition infused and intertwined with all the living things included in those systems.This year, the introduction of a new virus into humans has resulted in a major shift by causing a rise in human illness and mortality along with a rapid modification of several of our habits and activities in response to this threat. 

The interconnectedness of all people and of all living things on our planet has perhaps never before been so acutely understood as it is now. Acting as if care of creation and care of all the other things we hold dear are separate concerns has always been based on false assumptions that humans could somehow opt out of a world created to follow natural laws. (Our failure to reduce carbon emissions despite all we know about the physics of global warming illustrates the folly of these false assumptions.) Now more than ever we need to break out of the categorical boundaries that so often dominate our thinking and be aware of the whole of creation and our part in it (not our part apart from it). 

During the coming weeks and months of this pandemic, I’m renewing the Praying the Earth’s News posts that were a regular feature of this blog for a couple of years, paying particular attention to the connections among us and our global siblings and among we humans and everything else in creation.

O most mighty and merciful God, in this time of grievous sickness, we flee unto thee for succour. Deliver us, we beseech thee, from our peril; give strength and skill to all those who minister to the sick; prosper the means made use of for their cure; and grant that, perceiving how frail and uncertain our life is we may apply our hearts unto that heavenly wisdom which leadeth to eternal life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Prayer In Time of Great Sickness and Mortality (The Book of Common Prayer 1928, p. 45)

Please pray especially this week for:

Coronavirus patients in our own communities and around the world, and for everyone dealing with the effects of COVID-19.  This map from the Our World in Data  coronavirus website shows the spread of the disease from its beginning to early this week.  

The Centers for Disease Control website cdc.gov provides lots of useful information about the coronavirus, including this page with updates about the number of cases in each state. 

O God, the strength of the weak and the comfort of sufferers: Mercifully accept our prayers, and great to your servants who are ill the help of your power, that their sickness may be turned into health, and our sorrow into joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.Prayer for Recovery from Sickness (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 458)

Healthcare workers caring for coronavirus patients or preparing for a wave of hospitalizations in their communities. This story about the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha gives a look at what hospitals across our diocese are facing on some scale. All of our doctors, nurses, other healthcare workers, members of hospital staffs, and first responders will be working long hours under unprecedented conditions. 

Sanctify, O Lord, those whose you have called to the study and practice of the art of healing, and to the prevention of disease and pain. Strengthen them by your life-giving Spirit, that by their ministries the health of the community may be promoted and your creation glorified, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.Prayer for Doctors and Nurses, (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 460)

People who are unemployed or losing businesses or customers because of the pandemic.  Most of us have observed some piece of the economic impact either personally or somewhere in our communities. Here’s an overview of the wider socio-economic impact.

Heavenly Father, we remember before you those who suffer want and anxiety from lack of work. Guide the people of this land so to use our public and private wealth that all may find suitable and fulfilling employment, and receive just payment for their labor; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.Prayer For the Unemployed (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 824)

For the church as we find new ways to be the church and serve those in need. The Diocese of Nebraska is maintaining a list of remote resources https://www.episcopal-ne.org/remote.html offering alternative ways to worship and pray together during this time when we cannot gather in person. Several parishes are finding creative ways to continue their usual outreach ministries while maintaining social distancing, while this article from Wirecutter suggests five ways to help our communities at this time.

Everliving God, whose will it is that all should come to you through your Son Jesus Christ: Inspire our witness to him, that all may know the power of his forgiveness and the hope of his resurrection; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.Prayer for the Mission of the Church (The Book of Common Prayer, pp. 816-817)

As we pray for others, let us 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. As springtime arrives even during this pandemic, pray that we find refreshment and inspiration in the beauty of God’s creation:

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)

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. 

A Prayer for the Twelve Days of Christmas

Gracious God, you so loved the world that you sent us your Son to live in our world as one of us and teach us the ways of love. Help us through this Christmas season to find joy in the remembrance of his birth and joy in the world you created and love, seeing Jesus through all living things on the earth, and seeing your world through his loving eyes. We pray in the name of Jesus, the light who always shines in the darkness. Amen.

All In: Being the Church in Today's World

Oscar Romero said in 1979:

To try to preach without referring to the history one preaches in is not to preach the gospel. Many would like a preaching so spiritualistic that it leaves sinners unbothered and does not term idolaters those who kneel before money and power. A preaching that says nothing of the sinful environment in which the gospel is reflected upon is not the gospel. 

This morning I had the delight of preaching at my parish, Church of the Resurrection in Omaha. I didn’t preach a creation care sermon per se, but I did preach on the Gospel passage. (Mark 3:20-35), and climate change is a huge piece of the history in which we preach now. (Notice the CO2 number for May on the graphic to the right.) If we turn from trying to hold onto the past to trying to follow Jesus in the present, we will find ourselves responding in significant ways to climate change and its effects. 

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All In

A Homily on Mark 3:20-35

“When [Jesus’] family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” (Mark 3:21)

What must it have been like to be Mary, the Mother of Jesus!

This week began with the Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the day we remember the expectant mother Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth, who was herself miraculously expecting a baby. The Visitation is one of several days and seasons of the church calendar when we think about Mary.

We hear about and wonder about Mary the mother at Christmastime, when we tell the story of her going to Bethlehem on a donkey and then giving birth in a stable when she arrives. What was it like to be far from the comforts of home that night, giving birth, wondering at what the angel had told her and at the appearance of the shepherds? What did she feel as she snuggled her newborn baby?

We also think about Mary during Holy Week when we hear about her witnessing Jesus’ suffering and death. Mothers know that it is agonizing to know your children are in pain. How unbearable it must have been for Mary to watch her son beaten and humiliated and then hanging from the cross! 

The Feast of the Visitation looks back at a happier occasion. Elizabeth exclaims “Blessed are you among women…” and Mary replies with the words that we know as the Magnificat:

‘My soul magnifies the Lord, 

47   and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, 

48 for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.

   Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed.

…and

51 He has shown strength with his arm;

   he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. 

52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

   and lifted up the lowly; 

53 he has filled the hungry with good things,

   and sent the rich away empty. 

This, my friends, leads us to this morning’s Gospel lesson, this part of Mark’s Gospel where people are telling Jesus’ family “He has gone out of his mind.”  I wonder what Mary thought of these reports. Mark reports that Mary and Jesus’ brothers went and stood outside of where he was and sent to him. Maybe they wanted to talk with him and see if he really did seem to be losing his mind. Or maybe Mary remembered the vision she had during her pregnancy that evoked the words of the Magnificat, the vision of Jesus bringing down the powerful from their thrones, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich — who would usually get the best of everything — away empty. This is a vision of Jesus turning the world upside down and inside out. Maybe Mary wanted Jesus to come home because she knew the way prophets were treated. She knew that anyone preaching the kingdom of God risked being dismissed as crazy as best and being ostracized or even killed at worst. Jesus was doing things and saying things that made the people in power uneasy. 

Where our translation says “He has gone out of his mind”, other translations say things like, “He has lost HIs senses” (NASB) or “He’s gone mad!” (Good News Translation). The King James Bible says a fairly restrained, “He is beside himself.” Similarly, The Message translation says, “They suspected he was getting carried away with himself.” 

Whatever words we say, these sorts of words are used to dismiss someone who makes us uneasy. Ideas that challenge us, things that are new or different from what we are accustomed to, get dismissed as “crazy”, and we think the people who propose these uncomfortable ideas or actions have gotten a little too carried away. 

Hearing people say such things about Jesus and his ministry, Jesus’ family goes out to restrain him. While we can understand why his family might want to restrain Jesus to protect him, as followers of Jesus, we certainly don’t approve of anyone — not even the Blessed Virgin Mary herself — trying to restrain Jesus from doing his ministry. And yet when we look at the Church as a whole, we see people who are supposed to be followers of Jesus trying to restrain the Church from continuing his work. 

If we follow Jesus, who came to bring God’s kingdom, to bring down the powerful and lift up the lowly, if we are going to live our own lives and our lives together as a church community in our own parish and diocese and denomination in ways that turn all the injustices of the world upside down and inside out, we will be unusual. We will be what folks in this part of the country call “kind of different”. If we do it right, all in with our hearts on fire with love for Jesus, we won’t get carried away with ourselves, but we will get carried away with Jesus, and it will seem too extreme to some people, including some in powerful positions.

In recent lectionary weeks, we’ve read about Jesus sending the Holy Spirit to guide us, comfort us, and help us. This summer is a critical time for our parish and for the greater Episcopal Church. It’s proving to be a critical time for this neighborhood and this city as we try to figure out how to ensure all of our neighborhoods are safe places to live, work, and play. And this year is a critical time for our world, perhaps the last chance for the world’s leaders to set business as usual aside and get things figured out correctly to prevent catastrophic climate change. 

In these critical times, let’s not dismiss the Holy Spirit when it leads us to do something that is new or unfamiliar or hard to understand. Let’s not immediately dismiss those who sound crazy or extreme to us but who might be speaking the Spirit’s words. And let’s especially not block the work of the Spirit by appealing to what the powers that be would like us Christians to look like and do. If all the world sees of Christians is our removing ourselves from the rest of the world for an hour, more or less, on Sunday mornings, if our purpose in coming to this holy table is “for solace only and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal” if we have church meetings and conventions where we worry about maintaining the status quo, Beelzebub, the personification of evil, rejoices because we are harmless to him. C.S. Lewis’s character old Screwtape himself couldn’t invent a better scenario than to have the church preoccupied with maintaining the status quo. 

Those who truly follow Jesus will not try to hold back the work of the Holy Spirit because it makes us uneasy. We will be open to whatever allows the Spirit to turn things upside down and inside out until Jesus’ work of reconciliation, justice, and radical love is completed. It might look crazy to us, it might puzzle us, and it will sometimes be very difficult, requiring us to tap into wells of creativity and courage and love we didn’t know we had in us until the Spirit led us to them. But given a choice between some craziness — Spirit-led work rooted in Christ’s love and infused with passion and creativity — given a choice between supporting that sort of craziness and blocking the work of the Spirit, followers of Jesus have no choice but to walk where the Holy Spirit leads us. 

As we prayed earlier, “O God…Grant that by your inspiration we may think those things that are right, and by your merciful guiding may do them.” And may God grant us wisdom, courage, love, and abundant joy as we find our way. Amen.