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.

IPCC report: Seeing our neighbors and following Jesus

Mark 10: 17-13

This past week the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report on global climate change. While not surprising for people who have paid attention to previous reports from the IPCC, this report brought with it a much more dire look at our future that has made more people pay attention to the report and understand the urgent need for big changes in the ways we produce and use energy. The prognosis is grim even if we do our best, but our future with dramatic and large-scale changes that mitigate the amount of global warming is a much better future than what we face if we continue with business as usual. According to the report, we have about ten years to turn things around.

This week we also watched Hurricane Michael rapidly grow in intensity over abnormally warm water and bring terrible destruction to the Florida panhandle before continuing into the Carolinas and Virginia with more destructive winds and heavy rains. In case we lacked the imagination to understand the sorts of consequences we face if we fail to mitigate global warming, we had an immediate example with Hurricane Michael. 

In the Church, our Gospel lesson today was the story of the rich man asking Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. (Mark 10: 17-31) This man had scrupulously observed the religious law. He had done everything just right to ensure both spiritual and financial well-being. However, he evidently sensed that something was missing, and so he sought out Jesus and humbly asked him if there was something else he needed to do. Jesus told him he lacked one thing. Jesus told this man who was so focused on his own welfare that he needed to sell his possessions, give the money to the poor, and then follow Jesus. Instead of being preoccupied with his own welfare and comfort, he needed to see and serve his neighbors and then follow Jesus. 

In preaching at Church of the Resurrection in Omaha today, I mentioned the IPCC report and talked about the extraordinary times we are living in, suggesting that this story from Mark’s Gospel can help us figure out what to do in the 21st century just as it spoke to the people of Jesus’s time. The contrast between the culture in which we live and the kingdom of God is at least as glaring for us as it was for the people in Jesus’s time. 

The point isn’t that all of us need to sell everything we have, but that we need to put our focus elsewhere. Jesus calls us to look up and out from our own lives so we can see our neighbors and the needs of others, and Jesus calls us to follow him. In today’s world, seeing our neighbors near and far will make it readily apparent that we can’t go on living the way we are living, that we all will have to support changes in business as usual in order for more of us to make it through this century with enough of the basics like food, water, shelter, and basic infrastructure to live good lives.  

We don’t know where Jesus will lead us in the years to come as our culture either changes and adapts or falls apart, but we do know that there are many, many people in the Church who are studying Scripture and listening in prayer and speaking with our wisest teachers and trying to figure out together what it looks like to follow Jesus in these challenging times.

We live in a consumer culture that isn’t working well for us either spiritually or materially. The planet simply cannot sustain the drive to economic growth dependent on us buying more and more stuff, and our souls suffer as well until we ground our priorities in Jesus’s teachings rather than the teachings of our consumer culture. The culture tells us that money can buy happiness — or at least numbness to the pain — while Jesus tells us that the happiness of material success is nothing compared to the joy of following him and giving to others.

While I know some other preachers today talked about the IPCC report and the climate crisis, I also suspect that it went unmentioned in more pulpits. If we are following Jesus and focused on our neighbors near and far, we have to pay attention to these global changes and the effects they are having and will continue to have on people. 

Mark writes that when Jesus told the rich man what he needed to do, the man went away grieving “for he had many possessions”. As a parishioner pointed out today, we don’t know if he went away sad and then kept living as he had lived, or if he went away sad about the big change in his life he was about to make.

If we look away from the climate crisis and fail to advocate for the systemic changes needed to create a more livable world for all of us, we will be like the rich man in the parable if he chose his old way of life over eternal life. If, though, we acknowledge how hard the task ahead is but then go ahead and work at doing it, we will assure our own joy in following Jesus starting now and help assure a greater chance at a sustainable life for all living things on our planet in the future.

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Click here to contribute to Episcopal Relief and Development’s Hurricane Relief Fund.

Click here to read the IPCC’s panel Summary for Policy Makers of last week’s report about the impacts of global warming above 1.5 degrees C. 

Cruelty or Compassion

End of the Day, Feast of St. Francis, 2018

My heart has been heavy this year on the Feast of St. Francis. After looking at today’s main news stories this morning, I went outside — where the temperature had dropped some 50-60 degrees since yesterday afternoon — thinking that breathing some fresh air and moving around doing some garden clean-up would make things brighter. I was working on a flower bed that surrounds our small statue of St. Francis when one of our resident cottontails hopped out from under a bush. It surprised me, though, by not hopping away as they often do when we startle them. Instead, it hopped to a spot a couple feet away from me and then stopped and simply watched me.

This bunny’s lack of fear reminded me of the stories of wild animals and birds approaching him. The animals and birds seemed to sense that Francis was compassionate, that near him there would only be kindness and not the cruelty other people sometimes aimed at wild creatures. 

Francis sensed the interconnectedness among all things that the modern study of ecology has demonstrated. That interconnectedness in the natural world is paralleled by interconnectedness of events and issues in the economic and political spheres that may at first glance seem unrelated. There are many important issues demanding our attention right now, but all of them — including our failure to address climate change in a significant way — are interrelated. Environmental concerns tend to get pushed aside given other immediately compelling issues, but our welfare depends on not losing sight of the state of the biosphere both for its own sake and because of the way it connects with all the other concerns before us. 

The welfare of the birds is something to consider as we remember St. Francis. BirdLife International’s 2018 State of the World’s Birds report describes a “steady and continuing deterioration” in the state of the world’s birds. Even some of the world’s most well-known bird species are declining, and this should concern all of us: “These statistics aren’t just bad news for birds, they are also warnings for the planet as a whole. The health of bird species is a good measure of the state of ecosystems in general.”

One of the news stories I read this morning bore the discouraging heading Climate scientists are struggling to find the right words for very bad news. Reporting on the 48th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Washington Post reporters Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis report on our increasing understanding that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C. is essential to avoid global catastrophe and the IPCC’s task of communicating their knowledge and helping the world’s nations come to agreements that allow us to do this urgent work in a fairly short amount of time. 

Other news stories today were about the confirmation process for a new Supreme Court justice and the related issues around women’s rights and the #MeToo movement that have been highlighted by this process. And there were stories about other things such as the immigrant children who have been separated from their parents, gun violence, and ongoing wars and civil disturbances. 

Given all of that, here is what struck me as especially insightful on this day when we remember St. Francis. The Atlantic published a piece by Adam Serwer called The Cruelty Is the Point. Serwer suggests that the many events and current policies which seem cruel aren’t cruel as an unintended consequence of some noble goal, but rather that the cruelty — and the bonding around the “joy” of inflicting cruelty among supporters of current policies — is the point. In reading it, I thought about our lack of concern for the birds and other living things, the indignation of many Americans at the thought that we might choose to change the ways we produce and use energy so that people in other places might live, and the cruel things said and shouted at women in recent days who dare to speak their truth. It’s all of one piece, and that one piece couldn’t be further from the compassion that St. Francis embodied and taught.

Deeply rooted kindness, heartfelt compassion, simple Christian love are the antidote to cruelty. Animals do sense which people are kind like Francis and which people are cruel, and when we humans are paying attention we do a good job of sensing that, too. Francis was known for his devotion to God and his compassion for all living things. Strengthening our own devotion to God and our own capacity for compassion are the essential elements to ready ourselves for the work that lies before us for our nation and for every living thing with which we share our planet.

Feast of St. James: Scallops and their companions

Carlo Crivelli (circa 1435–circa 1495)

July 25 is the Feast of Saint James the Apostle. The scallop is closely associated with St. James — see  Shell of St. James in the Wikipedia article Scallop for possible explanations of the connection —and are traditionally eaten on the feast day, often in the delicious classic dish Coquilles St. Jacques that bears the name of the saint. 

Two years ago I wrote a post St. James, Scallops, and Drought about the stress ocean acidification places on populations of scallops and other shellfish and how the acidification of the oceans connects to other stresses on on other ecosystems. What do we know about this in 2014? 

This has been a difficult year for scallops and the scallop industry in the northwestern United States and British Columbia. In February of this year, the death since 2009 of around 10 millions scallops before they could be harvested resulted in layoffs of workers. (See the CBC article Acidic ocean deadly for Vancouver Island scallop industry.) 

The Seattle Times has put together the Sea Change report, an excellent written and video report that describes what is happening in the Pacific Ocean, showing the connections between what is happening to seafood in the Pacific Northwest and what is happening to coral reefs off the coast of Papua New Guinea and the primary protein source for people in the region. The threat to the Pacific Northwest seafood industry and the people who depend on that for their livelihood is tied to a lessening food supply for rural people on South Pacific islands. 

The same carbon pollution that contributes so much to global warming is the cause of ocean acidification. A side bar to the report notes that we add “the equivalent of a hopper car of coal — about 100 U.S. tons — into the ocean every second.” Even if we set the huge challenge of global warming aside, what is happening to our oceans is reason enough to shift quickly away from the use of fossil fuels as our primary energy source. 

In an announcement last Friday from U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, we learned that the eastern coast of the United States will be opened to oil and gas exploration and to seismic surveys using “sonic cannons” to locate deposits under the ocean floor. (See Obama opens Eastern Seaboard to oil exploration from the Associated Press.) Environmentalists object to the sonic cannons because they harm marine life. Harming marine life in order to make more fossil fuels available, thus increasing the acidity of the ocean and the temperature of the planet, seems especially evil.

One of the most sobering pieces of this report is that the sorts of changes scientists are finding in the Pacific are happening much sooner, at a much faster rate, than predicted:

“I used to think it was kind of hard to make things in the ocean go extinct,” said James Barry of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. “But this change we’re seeing is happening so fast it’s almost instantaneous. I think it might be so important that we see large levels, high rates, of extinction.”

Globally, we can arrest much of the damage if we bring down CO2 soon. But if we do not, the bad news won’t stop. And the longer we wait, the more permanent the change gets.

“There’s a train wreck coming and we are in a position to slow that down and make it not so bad,” said Stephen Palumbi, a professor of evolutionary and marine biology at Stanford University. “But if we don’t start now the wreck will be enormous.”

You might think that would lend the problem urgency. So far, it has not.

St. James was a fisherman. He and his brother John were mending their nets when Jesus called them to follow him. The Eucharistic reading for the Feast of St. James is Matthew 20: 20-28. In this passage, the mother of James and John asks Jesus to give her sons places right next to him in his kingdom. Jesus replies, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?”, and the brothers reply, “We are able.” 

Jesus asks whether they are able to stick with following him when discipleship becomes even more difficult. Can the Church stick with following Jesus when the right thing to do is to work for an end to our reliance on oil, gas, and coal? Can we stand up to the considerable power and clout of the fossil fuel industry in order to safeguard the welfare of the ocean on which the lives of humans and marine life depends? 

Counting the Cost

Proper 18C

“Which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it?” In Sunday’s Gospel lesson from Luke, Jesus says that people who want to be his disciples need to consider the cost of discipleship and make sure they are ready to pay it. What if someone begins a building project without first determining the cost and making sure there is enough money to finish the project? Jesus says people will ridicule such a person.  

Consideration of cost is closely related to consideration of consequences. What are the consequences of beginning to build something without calculating the cost and checking the bank account? It’s exciting to start a new building project, but down the road the consequences of failing to calculate the cost can take away the initial pleasure.

Contemporary Analogies

If Jesus were speaking today, he might use other examples of the wisdom of counting the cost of something before we act. We could think about weighing the costs and benefits of using single-use plastics – shopping bags  cups, and eating utensils – or of using chemicals to produce lush lawns, or of the cost of our ways of producing and using energy.  Energy from coal and oil is a luxury to which we have become accustomed, but the effects of carbon emissions on the global climate  show the long-term costs to be unbearably high. 

Suppose that in today’s world, Jesus might use – or we disciples might use – the cost-of-energy analogy. We might talk about the wisdom of figuring out the long-term cost of our energy policies and making sure we have policies in place that make it possible to sustain climate stability and the basic necessities of life. We could talk about the cost of making environmentally-sustainable changes and compare it to the higher cost of refusing to make any significant changes in the way we live, especially in the ways we produce and use energy.  And then we might say that following Christ is like that, that it requires us to look at our lives and consider the cost of following Jesus versus the cost of not following Jesus. Discipleship is costly, and some people decide that the cost is too high. Those who follow Jesus, though, know that the rewards far exceed the cost. 

Flipping the Analogy

Here’s something else to consider: we can flip the analogy. Instead of using the cost-of-energy analogy to help explain the nature of Christian discipleship, we can use a discipleship analogy to give us some insight into energy and climate issues.  Christians – those who intentionally follow Christ – know that there is a cost in terms of our time, our money, and our freedom (in the narrow sense of that word), but we also know that the joy of following Christ far surpasses the cost.  Christians should be able to understand the long-term benefits of making some sacrifices now that would allow us to shift to a sustainable green economy, because we know that what looks like a huge sacrifice to others in our culture is a very light burden to those who know the love of Christ.

Given that the analogy works both ways, it suggests that Christian discipleship and environmental stewardship are not necessarily completely different enterprises. An essential piece of following Christ today, in fact, is caring about people who stand to suffer the most as the world’s climate changes. Christian discipleship requires our being willing to sacrifice our own conveniences and luxuries when doing so will help us shift toward a more sustainable world for everyone.

The Cost of Sustainability

In the second half of his book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Bill McKibben talks about what sustainable ways of living might look like on this essentially new planet that he says we have brought about through climate change and other effects of our current way of life on the environment. It would look different, and there would be a cost of sorts, a loss of some things we take for granted, some luxuries we perhaps now mistake for necessities. But the cost of making these changes – and making them soon – is negligible compared to the cost of doing nothing.

Politicians and others argue that we can’t do anything significant about climate change because the cost in terms of the economic categories we have traditionally used is too great. But in the long-run, of course, as seas rise, as some now inhabitable parts of our own country become uninhabitable deserts, as large number of people throughout the world become climate refugees, and as agriculture here and other places is disrupted by changes in the length of growing seasons, rainfall patterns, and insect populations, the cost of making some changes now will look small indeed to people who look back twenty, fifty, one hundred years from now and wonder why we weren’t willing to inconvenience ourselves a bit. We know the science, we have the technological know-how, but we lack the political will. If we choose to continue building this selfish tower of indifference, we might first calculate the cost and see if the work can be sustained. Otherwise, when the work can no longer be sustained (and science tells us that time will come), the ridicule of those who suffer the consequences will be the least of our worries. 

Learning Discipleship in the Grand Canyon

Sahra Harding, a third-year student at General Theological Seminary from the Diocese of Nebraska, gracioiusly agreed to write this week's post. Sahra shares some of what her experience living and working at the Grand Canyon this summer taught her about discipleship.

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This past summer I had the opportunity to work at the Grand Canyon with a program for college students called A Christian Ministers in National Parks. As team leader for 16 undergraduate students who are currently involved with Christian ministry, I led theological discussion and mentored those interested in pursuing the field professionally. We came from different denominations and regions all over the country. For three months, we offered daily sunset worship services along the rim of the Canyon. I also worked for the park in their gift store in customer service, which was a fantastic opportunity for informal ministry. During my two years in seminary in New York city I have been thinking a lot about what it means to be a disciple and uphold the principles of stewardship that are involved with that way of being. Working on a team, honoring God’s creation through regular worship, and sitting among the 180 million year old walls of the canyon taught me a lot about discipleship.

Living at the canyon lit all kinds of fires in my soul this summer. When walking bare foot on the bare earth, I felt the give in the dirt. I could sense the primal relationship we have with the dust, a truth about formation that we are reminded of each Lenten season. It is not the same experience of walking on the concrete, even with rubber soles; this just becomes two more layers of separation between who we are and the earth that created us. Being in constant movement and working to make Christ available to people through constant interaction requires a certain kind of energy. Of all the moments that spurred my growth this summer, both in the community, and when I was alone peering into the canyon, one in particular sticks out in my mind.

My final hike of the summer was to a site called Dripping Springs. This is a very difficult hike, more difficult than I expected. I was limited on time, and more than once I considered just stopping and turning back so that I would not be late for my afternoon obligations. Still, I was convinced I could make it if I just kept going and stopped standing still trying to peer ahead and find the final destination with my eyes, which could not be done, the Springs were that well hidden.

At one point the path changed and became much less clear. I suddenly heard someone yelling. I had not seen anyone on the path since I began walking; it is not a popular hike. I looked up to see a Ranger who was trying to call me back onto the path, which I had veered from without realizing it. She was headed in the opposite direction and had somehow spotted me losing my course. Hikers are frequently warned to not veer from the path because the Canyon is vast and steep and such excursions are often fatal. I worried that she thought I was being deviant. I quickly forgot my worry in the midst of my relief, though, because she gave me back a sense of direction. If she had not appeared right then, I would have surely gotten stuck and lost too much time to continue; I also might have run out of water and in that desert heat this is an ongoing concern. With help, I found the path again and started back up. Soon after she left, however, I lost the path again. I could hear the Springs, but I still could not see them. It seemed like the sound was coming from one direction, so I went that way figuring I didn’t need the path, but the further I went the harder it became to hear it and I soon found myself among a series of boulders that would be extremely difficult to get over. I decided I would have to climb straight up out of the pit and likely head back out of the canyon. It was steep and slippery with cactus everywhere, but I could not figure another way. Fortunately, at the top of the mound, I recognized the path again.

I found myself turning the whole adventure into a symbol for the journey of a disciple. This realization infused me with a sense of how often we try to find our way without consideration for the work that has been done before us for our sake and for the sake of all followers. Perhaps we do things without consideration of the impact it will have on what surrounds us. But the fact of the matter is that we do well to heed the instructions from those before us. We lose nothing in the journey because we are always the pioneer of our own soul. Christ is always waiting to be discovered in our midst, so why not permit ourselves to walk that way and save ourselves from unnecessary thirst?
When I came upon the Springs, the meeting was that much sweeter because I had joined the steps of so many to bring a sacred space into view; the site seemed full from that shared vision that so many diligent hikers had viewed, and now I had seen it too. A stream of water, the vitality of the earth, invited me to cool my face. The planet is not just a resource after all, not just some temporary holding cell for our souls to which we have no influence or connection; it is a living teacher and it speaks to us often. These times of global strain have made it clear to me that we must enter this cosmic conversation with the full force of Christian love and discipleship.