Crucifying Life

In the church during Holy Week we retell the Passion Gospel, reflecting on Christ’s arrest, trial, and crucifixion. We sing hymns and say prayers and hear sermons that call us to examine our own times of denial and betrayal of Christ, the times when our words or actions – or sometimes our failure to speak or act – have served to mock Christ or to drive another nail into him. In many churches, we will hear good reminders that when we join in acceptance of violence of any kind or fail to see and serve those in need we betray Christ himself and essentially deny our relationship to him.

What we will not hear in very many churches this week is the connection between our acceptance of the ongoing degradation of the earth and our apathy as witnesses to Christ’s Passion. We are witnesses removed by time but not necessarily by temperament from the events of Holy Week, and our Scripture readings and liturgies this week are meant to help us bear witness to Jesus’ crucifixion and the events leading up to it. How well we allow ourselves to see and speak of and act in response to what is happening fairly rapidly to our deteriorating biosphere, how well we witness to climate change and pollution, is connected to how well we serve as witnesses to the events of Holy Week.

We may hear this week that we are not very far removed from the frightened disciples and the fickle crowds, that to distinguish between them and us is an error. It’s not a surprising error since we tend to see ourselves – 21^st century Christians or Americans or whatever our primary identity – as a unique and exceptional group of people, as did so many groups of people before us. One of the lessons of Holy Week is that we all sin in ways that are at their heart neither unique nor exceptional, just an old, sad story.

We make similar errors in supposing ourselves to be outside the category of people who will be affected profoundly by climate change and in supposing ourselves and all of humanity to be separate from the other living things in Earth’s biosphere. If we continue to ignore the grim facts of climate change and act as if our duties to God and neighbor do not obligate us to address global warming, we mock Christ and drive the nails deeper into Christ on the cross because we crucify all living things – humankind and the web of other living things on which our lives depend.

I invite us to expand our view this year and consider all living things, ourselves and all the others who share our biosphere, as we experience Holy Week. Watch for posts here for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday to help in that reflection.

This verse from "My Song is Love Unknown" (sung in this video by the King's College Choir, Cambridge) expresses our tendency to be inconsistent in loving and following Christ:

Sometimes they strew His way,

  And His sweet praises sing;

Resounding all the day

  Hosannas to their King:

    Then “Crucify!“

    Is all their breath,

    And for His death

    They thirst and cry

(Source: http://www.hymnal.net/en/hymn/nt/96#ixzz2ytSPSv00)

Gospel Echoes in God's Beloved World: Truth-Telling

A benefit of reading the lessons from The Daily Office lectionary first thing in the morning is that those passages from Scripture often give an amazingly fitting framework to the rest of the day. Today was one of those days when the themes of the Gospel lesson helped reveal a pattern in things that came up during the day, especially issues related to the environment.

The Gospel lesson today was John 3:16-21:

 ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

 ‘Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.’

God’s love for the world and God’s lack of condemnation for the world are clear themes here. I’m drawn in this passage to the idea that we make our own mess when we love “darkness” – evil – more than the good light. What we do in the light is visible to all; when we choose evil, we try to hide our actions from others and even from ourselves. Looking at this passage with others later in the morning, we talked about transparency and truth-telling.

During the course of the morning, I did some checking on the story of the contaminated water supply in and around Charleston, West Virginia. While residents are being told the water is now safe for most people to drink – pregnant women and children being the exceptions – there are reports that the smell of the contaminant is still present in the water and many people are wary of drinking it or using it for washing dishes and themselves. Straight answers are hard to come by.

I saw the usual stories about climate change: a draft UN report says that delay in acting on climate change has brought us to the point where “another 15 years of failure to limit carbon emissions could make the problem virtually impossible to solve with current technologies”; a drought emergency exists in California, possibly the worst drought since record-keeping began there; Australia began 2014 with the continuation of an extreme heatwave. I wondered again how we can know these things and continue to live as if nothing is happening.

I’ve been reading Verna Dozier’s The Dream of God: A Call to Return. As I took a break to read a bit more of it and looked at my notes, I noticed this passage that clicked with everything else:

Again and again God calls us to return. I think the calling still goes on today, but I believe the Christian church has distorted the call, narrowed it from a call to transform the world to a call to save the souls of individuals who hear and heed a specific message, narrowed it from a present possibility to a future fulfillment.

Today’s reading from John is one those passages that is often taken to be solely about individual salvation, about hearing and heeding a specific message, despite John’s clarity that this is about God’s love for the entire world and about the way that belief in Christ changes the way we act in the world, moving us from darkness into light.

Two recent New York Times stories that came to my attention later in the day echoed the themes of God’s call to live in the light, to choose to respond to God’s love by living in truth.

Nicholas Kristof reports on the results of an invitation for readers to suggest “neglected topics” that reporters have failed to cover sufficiently. The winner was the topic of climate change. Kristof observes that “You would think that we would be more attentive, with the federal government a few days ago declaring parts of 11 states disaster areas because of long-term drought. More than 60 percent of California is now in extreme drought.” He goes on to build a good case for us to start learning about, thinking about, and responding to what scientists know about climate change. He builds a case for bringing the topic into the light.

Skillful politicians and the powerful people who influence them have succeeded in sowing doubt where there is scientific certainty, of making it appear that there are two sides to the issue of climate change when there is in fact only one side with any sort of credibility. We shrug and take this as “politics as usual”, but it is in fact indicative of a spiritual failing among political and business leaders, reporters, and citizens who fail to question the falsehoods we are offered. The practice of Christianity and the unquestioning acceptance of lies are incompatible.

On Sunday, climate scientist Michael Mann’s piece If You See Something, Say Something argued that the crisis is at a point where climate scientists have a duty to enter public policy discussions and make clear what is at stake. He asks:

How will history judge us if we watch the threat unfold before our eyes, but fail to communicate the urgency of acting to avert potential disaster? How would I explain to the future children of my 8-year-old daughter that their grandfather saw the threat, but didn’t speak up in time?

Yes, it’s past time for reporters and scientists to end their silence. It’s also time for those of us who are Christians to honor the God who created and loves the world. It’s time for us to set aside our excuses for keeping ourselves in the dark about topics that are sometimes hard to understand and emotionally hard to accept; it’s time for us to accept Christ’s offer of true life and follow him into the light.

Holy Innocents

We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.  Collect for Holy Innocents, Book of Common Prayer, p. 238

Pollution and the effects of climate change impact children especially hard. Pollutants generally do more damage to developing bodies; dehydration from diarrheal diseases caused by lack of clean water is especially dangerous for infants and young children. According to World Health Organization information about climate change and health, “children – in particular, children living in poor countries – are among the most vulnerable to the resulting health risks” from climate change”. Among these risks are extreme heat, malnutrition, lack of clean water, impacts of natural disasters, and increasing risk of diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and diarrheal diseases.

Today the church remembers the Holy Innocents, the children who died when Herod ordered the slaughter of all children who were two years old or younger (Matthew 2: 13-23). Augustine of Hippo called these children “buds, killed by the frost of persecution the moment they showed themselves.”

As air and water pollution and climate change take their toll of young lives, many children in our world never get a chance to be more than buds, buds killed in this case by the frost of the world’s indifference the moment they showed themselves.

The people with power in this world – the political leaders, the economically comfortable, the corporate heads – differ from Herod, of course. Their intention isn’t to cause the death of thousands of children; their intention instead is to maintain political power by not addressing a difficult problem, or to ignore the effects of climate change so that we can continue enjoying the sorts of comforts and conveniences to which we are accustomed, or to make a profit producing, selling, or investing in fossil fuels. Children are the collateral damage of our failure to control pollution and address climate change. There is no intention to harm, but instead of an intention to protect children, there is indifference and denial.

When we look the other way and refuse to acknowledge what is happening as a result of our failure to control pollution and address climate change, we aren’t really all that different from Herod. And the grief of the mothers of today’s innocent victims is no different from the grief of the mothers of Bethlehem some two thousand years ago.

Here is the Coventry Carol in honor of the innocents who died in Typhoon Sendong in the Philippines in 2011.