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.

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.

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. 

Praying the Earth's News: March 23, 2017

We pray this week for people affected by floods and fires that have been made worse by warmer global temperatures, and we pray for our planet and the future of the human race as warming takes us into “uncharted territory”.

Almighty God, in giving us dominion over things on earth you made us fellow workers in your creation: Give us wisdom and reverence so to use the resources of nature, that no one may suffer from our abuse of them, and that generations yet to come may continue to praise you for your bounty; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Collect For the Conservation of Natural Resources (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 827)

Please pray for:

People in Peru affected by severe flooding.  Unusually intense rainfall — “the deadliest downpours in decades” according to this story from Reuters — has resulted in severe flooding in Peru. More than sixty people have died, and the rains and flooding are expected to continue. 

People affected by wildfires in the Great Plains. Fires in the Great Plains have contributed to a “furious start” to the wildfire season in the United States. Dry conditions and very warm late winter temperatures contributed to the fires. Ranchers lost cattle to the fires, leading ranchers to call the fires “our hurricane Katrina”. Here in Nebraska this week, a wildfire near Lake Mcconaughy burned 800 acres and destroyed eight homes.

The earth as we enter “uncharted territory”. The Guardian reports on a World Meteorological Association report on the 2016 global climate, which reports that we have reached a level of warming that takes the planet into “uncharted territory”. NASA reported that on March 7 sea ice extent at both poles reached record lows. The need for action on climate change has never been clearer, but political prospects for such action in the United States at least look slim.

O God our heavenly Father, you have blessed us and given us dominion over all the earth: Increase our reverence before the mystery of life; and give us new insight into your purposes for the human race, and new wisdom and determination in making provision for its future in accordance with your will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Prayer For the Future of the Human Race (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 828)

As we pray for others, 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)

How are the scallops?

The Feast of Saint James the Apostle

St. James Day is here again — time for this blog’s annual look at ocean acidification and its effects on shellfish. The concerns we had last year are still there, but one year farther into increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere that produce both global warming and ocean acidification. The data from the Mauna Loa observatory shows the carbon dioxide concentration for June 2016 averaging 406.81 ppm; the concentration for June 2015 was 402.80. Scientists think that we have now passed 400 ppm permanently; it will never be near the target of 350 ppm in the lifetime of anyone now alive.

Americans are bombarded with political messages this summer as the two major parties hold their conventions. So far, very little has been said about climate change, and its evil twin of ocean acidification seems to be off the political radar screen for the media, an awful lot of politicians, and many voters. Next Sunday’s Gospel lesson (Luke 12: 13-21) warns us against greed, against the accumulation of wealth and possessions with thought for nothing else. The reality of the unsustainability of our world gets dwarfed again and again by our greed, our desire to accumulate more while ignoring — remaining ignorant of — the price we will pay and that our children and grandchildren will continue to pay.

How are the scallops and other shellfish? They are threatened by our failure to put strong controls on carbon dioxide emissions. 

The Paris talks we were anticipating at this time last year are history. The challenge now is to make the targets from these talks more than a nice ideal. The challenge is to take climate change and ocean acidification seriously and to have the will to do what we need to do to significantly and rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This St. James Day is a good time to commit ourselves to advocacy for meaningful public policy to get us — and the shellfish and other living things — a chance at a sustainable future.

Here is last year’s post for the Feast of St. James:

St. James Day and the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Since the scallop shell is a symbol for Saint James, this blog has taken the feast day in the past to look at the future for sea scallops given the increasing acidification of the world’s oceans. [See St James, Scallops, and Drought from 2012 and Feast of St. James: Scallops and their Companions from 2015.] The same carbon pollution that contributes to global warming is also increasing the acidity of the world’s oceans, changing the chemistry of shell production for scallops, oysters, clams, and other shellfish. 

So how is our fight against ocean acidification going? How are the scallops this day, this year, and how are they likely to be in the future? 

When I looked over information about ocean acidification and shellfish from the past few months, the answers to these questions did not surprise me, yet I can’t comprehend them. The scallops are not doing well, and they are likely to do worse in the future. Moreover, the economic impact of the loss of shellfish seems to be growing more apparent to more people. Yet ocean acidification is increasing, not decreasing. We know it is happening, we know a lot about the harmful effects of ocean acidification, but we haven’t done anything significant to stop it. Because we allow all sorts of short-term concerns to prevent significant action on global warming, it’s not surprising that we treat ocean acidification, its evil twin, the same way. But why do we do that? Why do we prioritize our immediate, short-term comfort and our fear of change over the preservation of life? That’s the part I don’t comprehend. 

A new report on research done jointly by NOAA, the University of Alaska, and an Alaskan shellfish hatchery indicates that without mitigation, the ocean waters they studied in Resurrection Bay may not be able to support shellfish hatcheries by 2040, only 25 years from now. Ocean acidification and warming waters also threaten the lobster industry in Maine. Another study released this year looked not only at the vulnerability of the shellfish but also at the social vulnerability of the coastal communities that will be most affected by the loss of shellfish. Several coastal states are looking at changes in policies to mitigate the effects of ocean acidification on the shellfish industry and the communities that depend on the industry economically. 

It’s all very discouraging. However, Joe Romm reported yesterday on the probable end to the global coal boom. China’s use of coal has helped fuel the coal boom, but now awareness both of the health effects of carbon pollution coupled with a growing awareness of the threat of climate change to China’s future has resulted in policy changes to transition away from coal-intensive industries in particular and energy-intensive industries in general. Joe Romm’s post suggests that China’s transition to cleaner energy sources should in turn make clean energy sources more available to developing countries. All of this makes real progress from the Paris climate talks a little more possible: “The Paris talks should also make obvious to all what the world’s top climate scientists and governments already know and have stated publicly: The world has to go to zero total carbon pollution long before 2100 and indeed as close to 2050 as possible — before actually going carbon negative.”

While the focus of the Paris talks is mitigation of climate change, a serious commitment to decreasing carbon pollution will mitigate the evil twin of ocean acidification as well. Will it be enough? Is it worth the attempt?  The Gospel lesson this Sunday morning is John 6:1-21, which includes the version of the miracle of the loaves and the fishes in which a boy offers his five loaves and two fish, an offering that seems too small to feed the crowd but ends up being sufficient. All we can do to save the shellfish and keep climate change somewhere below the catastrophic category is to offer what we have, to make the attempt and find out later whether the attempt was enough. 

We have about four months until the Paris climate talks begin. We can offer our prayers and advocate with our nation’s leaders for a truly significant commitment to phase out carbon pollution soon enough to make a real difference. And even though it's difficult to think about, we can make the effort to learn more about what is happening, talk about it, and pray and reflect on it, and then perhaps find it within ourselves to make it clear to all those in power that preserving life, including preservation of as many ocean species as possible, takes priority over our short-term concerns and our fears of change. 

Following Jesus No Matter What in the Anthropocene

Merry Christmas!

I'm sharing the sermon I preached this morning. When I considered the Prologue to John this year, it was in light of the Paris climate talks, the unholy silence around climate change in this nation, and thinking about a new grandchild growing up in this strange new world. This morning was also our annual carol sing at Church of the Resurrection; knowing that, some familiar carols were part of my reflection, too.

Christmas I 2015
John 1:1-18
Preached by Archdeacon Betsy Blake Bennett at Church of the Resurrection, Omaha, Nebraska, December 27, 2015

What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Merry Christmas! I’m awfully happy to be here as we continue our celebration of Christmas, especially since the Christmas Eve snowstorm prevented us from getting from Hastings to Omaha on Christmas Eve. The silver lining of missing our Christmas Eve celebration here was that we got to spend some of our Christmas Eve with our three-month-old grandson, James. And Christmas is one of those “no matter what” times — whether it happens for us in a traditional setting or under unplanned circumstances or in an entirely new setting, whether we are in a happy time in our lives or a sad time, Christmas happens. Just as real babies get born under all sorts of circumstances, the baby Jesus gets born on Christmas Eve no matter what.

New babies can bring lots of joy to a family and a community. No matter what else is going on, a baby refocuses our thoughts and emotions for at least a while. When a baby looks at us and smiles, it’s nearly inevitable that we find ourselves smiling in return.

I think one reason we love the familiar Christmas story that we read on Christmas Eve from Luke’s Gospel is that we can identify with the joy of a baby being born “no matter what”. And we relish seeing our own much-loved children re-enact the story in the Christmas pageant. We hear about the shepherds and the angels and know this was an event for the whole world, but we also see the intimate joy of Mary and Joseph tending to the new baby. We push aside what we know is coming — the flight into Egypt, Herod’s slaughter of the Holy Innocents, and the Cross — and focus on the joy and wonder of the baby lying in the manger.

But despite that refocusing and those blessed moments of pure baby joy, families throughout the ages, including Mary and Joseph, also have moments of concern. What sort of life will this baby have? What will the world be like as he or she grows? Can we provide what the baby needs? Many families today share the same concerns as those of other generations — the old global problems of war, poverty, oppression, prejudice, and violence. One of the most theologically significant aspects of Luke’s nativity story is God becoming incarnate in the form of an infant, completely vulnerable and dependent and endangered by the forces of evil in this world. God enters into our vulnerability and into the dangers of human life. We and our children are not alone.

Today we have a new concern, accelerating global warming and the effects of the climate changes that result from global warming. The challenges of climate change exacerbate all those old concerns, increasing tensions that lead to violence and war, making life harder for people who already struggled to have the necessities of life, and making those inclined toward oppression of people who differ from their immediate circle more likely to act on their prejudices.

Before Christmas the world witnessed an incredible gathering of world leaders in Paris to work on an agreement for the nations to act together to basically cut our losses with regard to global warming. From the point of view of the world of diplomacy and political relationships, the conference was a big success. Nations pledged reductions in carbon emissions, and small steps were taken toward righting the injustice faced by the Climate Vulnerable Nations, a group of smaller island nations and developing nations who face many of the worst consequences of climate change first despite having done the least to cause global warming. However, climate change is as much a problem to be solved by science as by politics, and from the point of view of what we know about predictions for our future paired up with various levels of emissions, the problem is far from solved. And the steps taken toward righting the injustice consist mostly of recognizing the injustice — a significant political step — and expressing a hope that the larger nations who emitted most of the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere while becoming wealthy will contribute money to help developing nations transition to clean energy sources and handle the damage already done. It’s a step forward, but I don’t know how much comfort recognition of my plight and a hope that someone might help me out would be if I lived on Kiribati or some other low-lying Pacific Island watching my crops die as salt water infiltrated my land. Because the laws of physics demand more of us in this case than do the old political play books, this major gathering of the world’s leaders is hard to evaluate.

Here, though, is perhaps the strangest thing about the Paris climate talks: After they finished and the world leaders and diplomats went home, we in the United States didn’t hear very much about them. Since the talks ended, debates for the Presidential candidates of both major political parties have been broadcast. Both debates were supposed to be about national security and relations with other nations. None of the moderators at either debate asked a single question even touching on climate change. It was as if nothing at all was happening to the climate and as if this big gathering of the world’s leaders had never happened. For a grandma hoping for some global stability as her grandbaby grows up, the all too common silence around this issue from the news media, political and religious leaders, and people who discuss every current event except this one is shocking.

It’s a whole new world, and many people feel less secure and more vulnerable than ever.

This Christmas passage from John’s Gospel can take us from the realization of our vulnerability to a realization of the fullness of life that Christ brings to us, a fullness of life that restores our hope and confidence. John’s Good News of the Divine Word, the light that shines in the darkness, is that God is indeed right here with us no matter what. The Word became flesh and lived among us, pitched his tent among us. Every place — this church, this neighborhood, this city, Syria, Kiribati, the Arctic Territories, Paris, every place — is holy ground.

A sense of sacramental living is part of our Episcopalian ethos. Sacramental living is living as if we might touch and connect with the Holy in every part of our everyday lives. It’s why we believe a small piece of bread and a sip of wine can be for us the Body and Blood of Christ. It’s why we use water for baptism, oil for healing, and a Bishop’s hands for confirmation and ordination. These ordinary, everyday things help us experience the Holy. How can this be? John tells us that God is right here with us, nearer to us than our own heartbeats, closer to us than our own breath. If we respond at all to God’s love, we will be living sacramentally, living in such a way that we expect to find God around every corner, waking up in the morning in eager anticipation of the possibility of an encounter with Jesus. And if we are in a world so valued by God and suffused with God’s loving presence, then we will live in a way that values all of creation, not just our favorite little corner of creation. And we will value the living things in those places, most certainly including our sisters and brothers whose very existence is too often forgotten or ignored.

Knowing that God has come to live among us as one of us also lifts us to a place of strength and courage. Fear and that nagging feeling of vulnerability tempt us to divide the world into us and them, where ‘us’ means good and ‘them’ means bad. When we know that the Word, the Christ, has come to live among us and we see the light shining in the darkness, we see how silly so many of our divisions are. We have the strength and courage to live in our culture without buying into the powerful cultural forces that would keep us divided from one another.

Knowing that Christ is among us and that the simplistic division of Us from Them is not reflective of the reality of God’s kingdom, we also find the strength and courage to speak the truth instead retreating into a fearful or embarrassed silence. We can act boldly out of love for one another and for all of creation, no longer shrinking back. We can share Jesus’s truth and love with a world that sorely needs to hear words of love instead of words of hate and words of truth instead of silence. We find the strength and courage to follow Jesus no matter what.

Luke’s nativity story of the baby in the manger connects us with a vulnerable baby. This morning’s passage from John helps us understand why we have hope in that Holy Child and why we continue to have hope for all of our children. The Word that was with God and one Being with God from the beginning has come to live among us! We are not alone. We can look at the world’s biggest problems and get to work on them because Christ is here with us no matter what. And if we fail to do what needs to be done before it is too late, we still are not alone. The difficulties we will face if we continue doing too little too late will be spiritually bearable if we continue to have the courage to follow Jesus and live into God’s kingdom, loving one another and refusing the loud voices of our time that encourage us to ignore or even hate those Jesus calls us to love.

What do we do to honor the Baby Jesus?  We keep loving. We keep working for justice and peace. We keep speaking the truth into the unholy silences created by powerful people who lack the courage to acknowledge our real problems, and we refuse to be frightened by the straw men they create in an attempt to distract us from the work of God’s kingdom.

Jesus is sustaining us and giving us strength and courage to do our best for all of the children of the world. And so we sing “Joy to the world” in the face of fear and anger. We let our own little lights that Jesus gave to us shine in the night of ignorance and prejudice and greed. We have ears to “hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell”, and we “go tell it on the mountain and over the hills and everywhere” because the Word made flesh has pitched his tent among us all over the world.

We belong to Jesus. We know that the light continues to shine in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. This is our joy no matter what. Amen.

St. Francis: Action Grounded in Compassion

“What did you do once you knew?”

This year’s celebration of St. Francis falls at a time when there is growing awareness of climate change and its effects. The effects are all around us now, even if we don’t always articulate the connection between these effects and rising global temperatures. Global warming brings exceptionally dry conditions to some areas and torrential rains to others, while rising sea levels make coast flooding more frequent.

This week, heavy rains associated with Hurricane Joaquin are causing historic flooding along parts of the eastern seaboard in the United States. On Thursday, a rain-soaked hill in Guatemala collapsed in a landslide. CNN reports that at least 73 people died in the landslide, and hundreds are missing. And this same week, Ed Struck reports that rising temperatures, changes in precipitation, and increased lightning strikes are leading to ever-larger wildfires in the northern forests of Alaska, Canada, and Siberia. Some of the ecological effects of these fires are already evident; some of us in Nebraska remember some smoky days this summer from fires in Canada and the northwestern United States. Down the road, if these fires burn through the organic layers that protect the permafrost in northern regions, the carbon concentrated in permafrost will be released, accelerating global warming. 

St. Francis Day this year comes also on the heels of Pope Francis’s visit to the United States. During his visit, Pope Francis exhorted the American people and our leaders to pay attention to climate change and make the changes we need to make in order to allow us and all living things to thrive. His visit makes it easier, perhaps, for us to look beyond the blessing of pets to the deeper teachings of St. Francis that are so important for us to heed in the 21st century.

St. Francis’s compassion extended far beyond domestic animals. Most notably, Francis had compassion for poor people. Born into comfortable circumstances, he left all of that to live as poor people lived. Today we might say he stood in solidarity with the poor. His compassion extended to all living things: people, plants, water, the wind, the sun, moon, and stars. His compassion even extended to death itself, part of the great web and cycles of life. 

His compassion flowed out of his love for Christ. His grounding in Christ was evident in his loving restoration of ruined churches and in his creation of the first crèche to make the story of the Nativity more accessible to people. Francis did not neglect worship, and his attention to the words of Christ in the Gospel guided his heart and his mind, but he also did not neglect action in the world.  As Francis understood as a deacon, when the Gospel works long enough on someone’s heart and mind, the natural result is compassion that extends in an ever-widening circle.

The great work for Christians today is to extend that circle of compassion not only in wider and wider circles in today's world, but also to extend that circle to future generations. Compassion says that if we see the potential for living things to suffer now or 10, 20, 50, or 100 years from now, we should do whatever we can to alleviate that suffering.

What do we do? What response is one we would be happy for people who may be alive in 100 years to know about? What response is one we are happy for God to know about now?

A prayerful reflection on how we act with compassion in today’s world might start with this passage from Hieroglyphic Stairway read by the poet, Drew Dillinger:

Rogation Days: Praying the Bounds of a Warming World

The traditional English celebration of Rogation Days, the three days preceding Ascension Day, included a procession around the boundaries of the parish (often coextensive with the boundaries of a village). At stops along the boundaries, the congregation prayed for the welfare of the village and especially for a good growing season, and the priest blessed the fields. The procession stopped several times for these prayers and blessings, often at important landmarks along the boundaries of the parish. Along with an occasion for prayer and blessings, walking the bounds or beating the bounds also ensured a public memory and a clear public proclamation of exactly where boundaries lay. Ensuring clarity of the boundaries eliminated disputes and gave everyone a common understanding of the bounds of the parish.

The Book of Common Prayer for the Episcopal Church adapts the tradition to our time and place by focusing on traditional rural concerns for the growing season the first day, commerce and industry the second day, and stewardship of creation the third day. In this way, the custom of offering prayers and blessings on the Rogation Days has been preserved in a meaningful way for our context. But since we aren’t living in old English villages, the traditions of creating awareness of boundaries and blessing the bounds has been lost along the way. Some Episcopal parishes process around a neighborhood, community garden, or large church property or drive out into the country to bless a parishioner’s fields, allowing the tradition of praying these prayers outdoors with a festive procession to continue, but any “bounds” that are walked lack the importance of the boundaries that were both declared and blessed in earlier times.

In this era of accelerated global warming, however, we might begin a new Rogation custom of observing and praying the bounds or limits of our biosphere. Through our lack of awareness of the limits of the amounts of greenhouse gases that can be released into our atmosphere without jeopardizing life on Earth, we have made our bounds smaller. Each year the world fails to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions and acknowledge the laws of chemistry and physics that determine the limits of our biosphere for human life, we leave ourselves less room for solutions that allow us to continue to live and live well. Our inaction is pulling the bounds tighter, leaving us less and less wiggle room. 

During the Rogation Days, we might prayerfully study the current state of global warming and pray about the bounds or limits we discover. 

Here is a place to start. The preliminary monthly average of atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded at the Mauna Loa observatory for the month of April was 403.26 ppm. (The upper safe limit to sustain life as we have known it on this planet is 350 ppm.)  As carbon dioxide levels rise, global temperatures rise. The first three months of 2015 put us on track for 2015 to surpass 2014 as the hottest year on record.

We need to put significant limits on emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases around the world to mitigate global warming. We can acknowledge the need for those limits and pray about them. As temperatures rise we will experience all sorts of big changes that will place limits on human activity. Agriculture will be impacted, marine ecosystems will suffer, and people will need to leave places that become uninhabitable because of rising seas, extreme temperatures, or lack of water. These are our new bounds, the limits within which we will try to live and continue to love one another and love God. Prayer and mindful meditation about those limits is one of the great gifts people of faith can offer now.

If we pray about those bounds and mindfully accept them, we may be able to find blessing there as well. A clear public proclamation of these limits coupled with a blessing of all living things inside these new bounds brings Rogation Days out of the realm of quaint Anglican history and into the heart of what Christ calls us to do today.

For stewardship of creation

O merciful Creator, your hand is open wide to satisfy the needs of every living creature: Make us always thankful for your loving providence; and grant that we, remembering the account that we must one day give, may be faithful stewards of your good gifts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit live and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 259, Collects for Rogation Days)    

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This post is an update of my Rogation Days post from May 27, 2014.

Deep Faith and Candlemas Light

Call it Candlemas or the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple or even, as most people in the United States do, Groundhog Day, this day midway between winter and spring marks a subtle turning of the seasons. Even this year, when Candlemas finds most of Nebraska snow-covered and frigid, 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. And 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. [See Candlemas Light from 2011 about hope, or Mother Nature and Her Groundhogs from 2013 about embracing truth.] I wonder whether these texts connect in a nearly hidden way to caring for the earth because some old European calendars considered this the beginning of spring, but it's more likely that it is another instance where the Gospel message heard in our world points us to caring for all living things.

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 begins to praise God and talk about the child.

This year Daily Prayer for All Seasons  from the Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music has introduced me to a Denise Levertov poem called Candlemas. (Read the poem here.) Speaking of Simeon, Denise Levertov wrote:

What depth
of faith he drew on,
turning illumined
towards deep night.

Deep faith like Simeon’s offers a place to ground ourselves as we face the effects of climate change, which are both unfolding around us in our time and yet nearly beyond our imagination. Awareness of what is happening as our world warms can result in hopelessness as we are already past the point of no return even if we continue to work to mitigate warming and its effects. This hopelessness slides easily into cynicism, a feeling that there is nothing to be done and, hence, 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 in thought and/or actions that anything 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 keep everything much as it is now. (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 darkness and acknowledges it. But instead of turning away from the darkness or being swallowed by it, deep faith makes us able us to stare into the darkness and yet be illumined. It makes it possible for us to shed some of that light into the darkness around us. 

Deep faith tells us that our prayers and our actions 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.” It can be our sustenance in 2015 and in the years ahead. Tending to our souls, to growing our faith deeper, is essential to the church’s response to environmental degradation. 

Epiphany: Leaving by Another Road

And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road. (Matthew 2:12)

Matthew’s story of the wise men following the star, finding Jesus, and honoring him as a king reminds us that we can learn a lot just by looking around — and up and down — and being aware of the world around us. The wise men read the natural signs. They followed a star that would have been visible to everyone who looked up at the sky, and yet they were the ones who saw it, had enough of a sense of wonder to realize that this star was something different and to reflect on its meaning, and got on the road to follow it. 

We are not surprised, then, to find that at the end of the Gospel lesson for Epiphany (Matthew 2:1-12), the wise men pay attention to a dream warning them not to return to Herod. No doubt these observant people, whoever they were and wherever they called home, had already noticed subtleties of Herod’s behavior and questions about the baby that made them open to receiving the dream and paying attention to it. Matthew tells us that their response to the information from the dream was to leave for their own country by another road.

We call these people wise men, but I wonder how many of their contemporaries considered them wise. When everyone else ignored an unusual star in the sky, the wise men noticed it and set out on what may have been a fairly long journey because they thought the star was a sign of an important event. They brought extravagant and somewhat odd gifts to a carpenter’s infant son, and they said this baby was a king. And on the basis of a dream, they ignored King Herod’s request that they return to him after they had found the child. Instead, they did something unexpected, returning by a different way. 

Today we have people who notice the natural signs of climate change — signs such as the melting of the Arctic ice, the calving of glaciers, the changes in planting and harvest times, changes in rainfall patterns — while most of us either don’t see these things or, if we do see them, don’t wonder at them or reflect on what these things mean for us. Realizing how important  it is for us to mitigate global warming and plan the best ways to adapt to the effects of climate change that are already set in motion, they try to persuade leaders to pay attention and act. Sometimes leaders in government, industry, and the church seem to hear them. Sometimes our leaders make good statements about climate change or give speeches or homilies that sound as if things might change. And yet the amount of greenhouse gas emissions continues to rise, and global temperatures rise in parallel. Our wisdom is lagging behind our commitment to expediency, and so the little we do is ineffective.

When I read the Epiphany Gospel this year, I was struck by the wise men returning by another road. Perhaps we need to set down a different road. In particular, it seems to be time for Christians to take a new road, aligning ourselves with the wise ones of our time instead of the ones in power who for whatever reason cannot or will not create the significant changes we need to make in the immediate future. It may be time for us to do things differently in our own churches, too. Greening our parishes, encouraging energy conservation, and writing op-ed pieces are all good things to do, and they continue to be good to the extent that they build awareness, but they are not enough.

Environmental stewardship in the church is much more often than not treated as a side issue, an extra something that we tack on to appease the environmental advocates or to show that we are up on contemporary issues. Even if we know in our heads that climate change threatens everything else we do — all of our financial stability, our programs, many of our buildings, and eventually the welfare of all of our people — we have not allowed that knowledge to penetrate our hearts or our guts, where our intuitions and dreams would show us a different way to go about being the church. 

When we can be in a worship service for an hour and never have any inkling from any of the prayers, announcements, or preaching that climate change is an issue, or when we can sit in committee meetings or church councils and never be asked to consider global warming as we plan, then there is a wide gap between what we know at some level in our heads and what has seeped in deeply enough to really change our direction. At the very least this century, the church should be aware that the work of caring for those who are poor, hungry, refugees, or in spiritual anguish will increase as the effects of climate change worsen and become more widespread, and we should be planning to act on that awareness. And to really be serving as Christ’s body in this world in this century, we should be leading by word and example to mitigate the extent of global warming, showing our awareness of what is happening to our world and making major shifts in our priorities that reflect a deeply felt knowledge of what is happening.

What does that different road look like for us? I suspect we may not know until we commit ourselves to taking it. We may need to make a new road by walking, by being intentional about remembering climate change and remembering the reality of today’s world whenever and wherever we do the work of the church. The old roads lead us back to the expediency of the status quo, and that is killing us. Like the wise men, we need to change course and choose a different road.