Extraordinary Hope in Ordinary Time: Tipping Points, Extinction, and Conversion

“Ordinary time” is what we call the part of the liturgical year between Pentecost and the beginning of Advent. This long, (liturgically) green season that stretches from late spring to late autumn is “ordinary” because most of the Sundays are named using ordinal numbers — e.g. this Sunday will be “The Second Sunday after Pentecost”. 

Outside of the church, ordinary time (or ordinary times) simply refers to a time when nothing particularly unusual or noteworthy is happening. Some stretches of summer days can feel very ordinary; for some, those long, ordinary days  when we have a bit more time to relax and simply live are the best thing about summer. 

But if we are paying attention, we know that despite appearances, we are living in anything but ordinary times. Recent climate reports tell us that we have passed the point where global warming can be prevented and are well into a series of feedback loops that point to catastrophic consequences beginning in this century unless we act very quickly in very significant ways. Biologists talk about a sixth great extinction, with a new study saying that species are now disappearing from the earth at a rate ten times faster than what they had though previously, which means that “plants and animals are becoming extinct at least 1,000 times faster than they did before humans arrived on the scene.” (See World On Brink Of Sixth Great Extinction, Species Disappearing Faster Than Ever Before) 

Trinity Sunday is the first Sunday in the ordinary time after Pentecost. Our first lesson last Sunday morning was Genesis 1:1-2:4, the familiar “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth..” creation story. It names God as Creator and emphasizes the goodness of creation, repeating the sentence “And God saw that it was good”, until the work of creation is done, when “God saw everything that [God] had made, and indeed, it was very good.” (Genesis 1:31) I decided to put my copy of the text in our bulletin aside and simply listen as the lesson was read; it is one I know well and one I enjoy hearing as it describes an ordered unfolding of the richness and diversity of creation. 

As I sat and listened to the lesson, I pictured the oceans with “swarms of living creatures”, the plants, the land animals, and the birds. I intended to sit back and enjoy this poetic listing of so much of what makes the world beautiful and life-giving, so much of what I love, but instead, I found myself holding back tears. 

I’ve read the climate reports, and I’m reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. I know where we are now, where we are headed, and that the sea creatures, land animals, birds, plants, and humans are all in various degrees of danger of disappearing. It is heart-breaking, especially in light of God’s pronouncement that it was all “very good”, and especially in light of Genesis 1:28, when God put humankind — us — in charge of God’s good creation. 

We who are alive today are living in a time so un-ordinary as to be nearly inconceivable even as we live in the midst of this reality. These times require from all of us an extraordinarily profound repentance and a deep change of life and heart. We have passed some tipping points. It is too late to prevent or reverse a troubling increase in global temperature, and it is too late to save us from some destruction from sea level rise. However, it is not too late to do everything we can to mitigate the destruction and to live as people who are sincerely repentant for our failure to rule wisely over God’s creation. 

Recent weeks have brought signs that conscious recognition of our situation and a willingness to turn ourselves around and make some changes may be increasing. The Turning Point: New Hope for the Climate is a new essay by Al Gore written for the July 2rd-17th issue of Rolling Stone. In it, Sen. Gore begins by laying out the reality of where we are today, noting that as a result of the recent climate reports coupled with the news of the irreversible collapse of a portion of the West Antarctic ice sheet, “many — including some who had long since accepted the truth about global warming — had difficulty coming to grips with the stark new reality that one of the long-feared ‘tipping points’ had been crossed. And that, as a result, no matter what we do, sea levels will rise by at least an additional three feet.”

However, he offers signs of real hope, signs that we may be at a “turning point”, what we might call a point of conversion. He points to a big growth in the use of solar power worldwide, to a greater willingness for governments to put limits on carbon emissions, and to signs that September’s UN Climate Summit and the 2015 climate negotiations in Paris will produce something significant. (He notes that many regard the Paris negotiations as “the last chance to avoid civilizational catastrophe while there is still time”.) And he compares all of this to other movements for social change, quoting poet Wallace Stevens: “After the final ‘no’ there comes a ‘yes’/And on the ‘yes’ the future world depends.”

Closer to home is the reality of the series of tornadoes, storms, and flooding rains in parts of Nebraska this week and earlier this month coupled with a sign of our willingness to begin turning around: a report from Friday’s Omaha World Herald on OPPD’s plans to reduce carbon emissions and increase energy efficiency. 

We do live in extraordinary times, but everything depends on something Christians know in our bones: the ‘yes’ that is the the beginning of a deep conversion, a willingness to transform our hearts and our lives so we are more closely aligned with God’s will. Sometimes our hearts have to be broken before we are able to let go of our old lives and allow that transformation to happen.

This Sunday’s Gospel lesson (Matthew 10:24-39) ends with this: “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” We will find our lives, intertwined as they are with the lives of all other creatures, when we let go of a way of life that is no longer life-giving and say ‘yes’ to something new.

Seasons: Loving our Neighbors

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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