St. Francis: Joy and Compassion

St. Francis found joy in all of creation, and this St. Francis Day in Nebraska is the sort of beautiful October day that makes it easy to rejoice in creation along with Francis. Nights are cold and crisp, while clear blue skies bring the sun's warmth during the day. I’ve seen humans and other animals basking in the sun, catching all the warmth we can before cooler days set in.

Several parishes have a tradition of blessing the animals – dogs, cats, hamsters, and sometimes more exotic creatures -- either at a separate service today or during Sunday services. We enjoy stories about St. Francis and the animals, and appreciate the reminder that God loves our animal companions just as we do. Francis loved not only the animals, though, but all of creation. Perhaps we should bless our chrysanthemums and cottonwood trees and our rocks and roses along with the animals.

Francis expressed this joy in his Canticle of Creation, sometimes known as the Canticle of Brother Sun. We Episcopalians know this canticle as Hymns 406 and 407, “Most High, omnipotent, good Lord”.

Joy in creation is one strand of the life of St. Francis. An equally strong strand is his teaching of compassion for the poor. The Old Testament reading appointed for the Feast of St. Francis, Jeremiah 22:13-16, is about humility. It reminds us that God is more interested in justice and righteousness, in how we treat the poor and needy, than whether we are able to have luxurious homes. The two strands are easily intertwined, as finding joy in the everyday wonders of creation opens our hearts to compassion for all creatures, including our sisters and brothers in the human family.

Joy in God’s creation and compassion for the poor are two elements of environmental stewardship. We work for a sustainable environment because we know the poorest people in the world usually suffer first and worst from any sort of pollution or climate change, but we also work for a sustainable environment so that we can preserve those animals and plants and places through which we encounter God in God’s creation.


Blessed St. Francis Day! Enjoy the beauty of creation and the sunshine!

If only we had known...

Coral Reefs, the Rich Man's Cry, and the MDGs

Luke 16:19-31

“Ensure environmental sustainability” is the seventh of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) . Ensuring environmental sustainability and the other goals are all pieces of addressing extreme poverty in our world. A sustainable, stable environment is key to the other goals: to ensuring access to clean water, to fighting diseases such as malaria, and to making it possible to grow food and have plentiful supplies of fish. Climate instability in the form of more extreme floods, droughts, and severe storms both exacerbates poverty and makes the effects of poverty even more severe.

Yesterday the UN concluded a summit on the MDGs, a summit that many in the Episcopal Church followed with interest because of our 2003 commitment  to endorse and support these goals.  Devon Anderson and Bishop Ian Douglas of Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation released a statement exhorting us to prophetic action on behalf of the MDGs – on behalf of the people whose lives hang in the balance – pointing out that where secular leaders run into political problems at home if they push for the sort of effort it will take to reach the goals by the target year of 2015, the church is freer to act.

Against this backdrop and with this Sunday’s Gospel, the story of the rich man and Lazarus, in mind, news this week about the plight of coral reefs illustrates why Christians should be especially concerned about environmental issues and what unique perspective the church has in all of this.

On Monday, the New York Times under the headline Extreme Heat Bleaches Coral, and Threat Is Seen reported that the extreme heat so far this year is affecting coral in various locations “from Thailand to Texas”. The coral’s bleaching indicates that it is going into a sort of survival mode. If the stress continues long enough, the coral dies. A report yesterday from NOAA says that coral bleaching is also likely in the Caribbean this year.

Coral reefs are an essential part of ocean ecosystems; coral reefs provide habitat for other living things, including fish. The NOAA report explains that the decline and loss of coral reefs throughout the world “has significant social, cultural, economic and ecological impacts on people and communities.” As the New York Times article points out:  “In dozens of small island nations and on some coasts of Indonesia and the Philippines, people rely heavily on reef fish for food.”

As the atmosphere and oceans get warmer, people who rely on reef fish for food will have less to eat.  As governments and peoples fail to address climate change, there are real consequences for real people. Aid programs have long operated on the principal that it’s better to teach someone to fish than simply give someone a fish, but if there aren’t any fish to be caught, it’s an entirely different situation.  People who live in island nations and along coastal areas already know how to fish; a sustainable environment would continue to make fish available.

Some folks say that it’s difficult to care enough to act when we don’t actually see the people who suffer from our inaction.  Certainly most of us are more compelled to help someone suffering right in front of us than unknown people we don’t see or know. But this inclination doesn’t determine our actions; we have the ability to think and understand the ways our actions affect others. The fact that a gut reaction spurs us to action more quickly than does a reaction that originates in our understanding doesn’t excuse us from acting.

The rich man in the Gospel story begs Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his family of the consequences of living selfishly and ignoring the invisible poor. Jesus has Abraham give this reply: “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”  They already had the information they needed to do the right thing but found reasons not to act; more information would only generate more excuses.

This story suggests an image of us middle class Americans sometime in the not so distant future realizing what our inaction has done to the Earth and its inhabitants, wishing that someone from the future could have come to us in 2010 when every other issue – religious, political, or personal -- seemed more important than climate change. If only someone had told us what was happening, if only we had known…

But we do know. We have incredible access to news reports and scientific reports, to books and videos; we have lots and lots of information. We have Moses and the prophets and the Gospel; we have the leadership of the Episcopal Church encouraging us to act. Yes, it’s overwhelming sometimes; yes, it takes some effort to look beyond our own daily lives; but Jesus calls us to lay aside our excuses and act out of love.

God and Wealth

All God’s Children was a post on this site a little over a year ago. It talked about the hope that a climate bill could be passed yet that fall before the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December, and talked about the reason Christians should be concerned about the passage of a climate bill or the chances of a significant agreement being reached at Copenhagen: the effects of the carbon that we as a wealthy nation produce will be for the most part be felt first and the worst by some of the poorest people in the world.

A year later, the United States Congress has still not passed a climate bill, and little progress was made at Copenhagen.  Last year’s hopes were not fulfilled.  One of the principal reasons Congress hasn't moved on climate legislation is that fear of immediate negative economic effects keeps us from seeing the long-term positive effects of climate legislation. Even people who understand the science and have concern for those who stand to suffer the soonest from climate change shy away from effective action if they think their own costs for energy or taxes might go up.

“You cannot serve God and wealth,” says Jesus at the end of this week’s Gospel lesson (Luke 16:1-13).   The lesson from Amos is similar: God sees people who observe the letter of the Law, but who care more for their own wealth than they do for the poor; they “trample on the needy”, selling them out for silver or even for a pair of sandals.

That post a year ago ended with this: “We have much to gain for ourselves by turning to new energy technologies and capping our carbon output, and, just as importantly, we have much to gain for the poorest people with whom we share the Earth.”  Our immediate economic concerns and fears keep us not only from caring enough about the poorest people in our world, but also from seeing where our choice to ignore climate change will leave us in the long-run.

A year from now, our Gospel text from Matthew 20 will end with Jesus saying, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” What will we be able to say next September about our consideration for our poorest brothers and sisters?

To see what Episcopal Relief and Development is doing to respond to the record flooding in Pakistan, click here. 

To donate to ERD’s relief efforts in Pakistan or other places affected by natural disasters, click here. 

Jeremiah and the Monarch

Proper 19C

“A hot wind comes from me out of the bare heights in the desert toward my poor people…I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void…I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled. I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert.”

These words are from Sunday’s lesson from Jeremiah 4, one of the Revised Common Lectionary lessons for this coming second Sunday in September. This week coincides with the fall migration of monarch butterflies in Nebraska.  This migration doesn’t get as much attention in central Nebraska as does the spring migration of the sandhill cranes, but most years it is a marvelous event to observe.  The butterflies traveling from Canada to Mexico are not the individuals that left the forests of Mexico to fly north; these butterflies are at least a couple of generations removed from those, yet these fall butterflies find their way back to the ancestral winter home. The size and seeming fragility of these beautiful creatures makes their long journey all the more amazing!

Tuesday morning I found a monarch butterfly resting on the screen door between our kitchen and the porch where I sometimes eat breakfast. The butterfly stayed where it was, occasionally opening its wings, while I ate breakfast and snapped some photos of it. After breakfast, while I was reading the Daily Office and also looking ahead to the lessons for Sunday -- including this passage from Jeremiah -- it was still keeping me company.  

It was still there when I had to leave; by lunchtime, it was gone. I looked at my photos of this single butterfly and started watching for more monarchs. According to Monarch Watch from the University of Kansas, we should be beginning the peak monarch migration period for Nebraska; in my 25 years in Nebraska, I’ve learned to watch for the monarchs in early September. The year I had a garden bed full of tithonia (Mexican sunflowers) I couldn’t count the number of butterflies hanging on the plants over Labor Day weekend! Most years, once we spot the first one, there are usually several more passing through that day. When no more came along Tuesday or Wednesday, I started to wonder where the others were!

Monday’s Lincoln Journal Star  carried an AP story  about backyard volunteers helping to track numbers of fireflies in North America; the Journal Star’s headline for the story was “Are fireflies on the verge of just fading away?”  Remembering that headline, I became more curious about what we might know about the monarchs.

Milkweed: the breakfast of larval survivors

There is indeed concern about the monarchs. They are one of the World Wildlife Fund’s endangered species   A USA Today article from last March, “Monarch butterflies, battered by weather, no longer rule”   talks about severe weather in the form of hailstorms and heavy rains in their winter home taking a toll before the northward migration even started.  It quotes Lincoln Brower, a monarch specialist at Sweet Briar college, listing three specific environmental pressures on them: 1) illegal logging in Mexico that has destroyed some winter habitats for monarchs, 2) severe weather caused by climate change, 3) fewer milkweed plants in the Midwest because of herbicide use on corn and soybean fields (the larvae eat only milkweed).  A July population update on the Monarch Watch blog  sounds a hopeful note that the population might recover some; one factor is that heavy rains in Texas this year have increased the number of milkweed plants there.

I hope to see more monarchs in the next few days, and to see them again next year and all the years after that. It’s very difficult to imagine that the day could come in our lifetimes when they would no longer show up in Nebraska in September. But we haven’t cared very well for God’s creation, and there are natural consequences to that lack of care. As a nation, we continue to ignore climate change, allowing lawmakers to get away with dodging this difficult issue and failing to figure out ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As a people, we continue to focus on short-term economic goals without thinking about the effects of resulting changes of habitat and climate on creatures like butterflies.

The words I read from next Sunday’s Jeremiah passage while sitting with this lone butterfly still speak to us today. Jeremiah was speaking about the approaching invasion of Judah; he spoke of the invasion and the desolation of the land as judgments of God against God’s disobedient people. The environmental pressures on butterflies and other living things on the Earth aren’t a judgment or punishment meted out by God, but the natural consequence of our failure to care for the Earth as God commands us to do. God doesn’t need to make our land desolate to wake us up; we are already doing that.  Earlier in this chapter from Jeremiah, we find this (Jeremiah 4:9): “On that day, says the Lord, courage shall fail the king and the officials...”  The king – the monarch -- in Jeremiah’s time ignored all the prophetic warnings; when the time came to act, courage failed the leaders. Our leaders seem to be ignoring the warnings from the scientific community, and seem to lack the courage to lead us in addressing global warming.

Sunday’s Gospel lesson (Luke 15:1-10) reminds us that every single human being is important to God; God cares very much what happens to each one of us. Surely the God who cares for all of us, the God who cares for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, cares about what happens to the butterflies.

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. 

Apples and Manna

Donella H. Meadows was the founder of the Sustainability Institute and an important voice in environmental science.  Today for the first time I read something she had written.  The circumstances under which I read a brief but beautifully constructed reflection from Donella Meadows perhaps serve to illustrate the interconnectedness of all things that she described.

This afternoon I had the opportunity to spend a couple of hours on my own at the St. Benedict Center north of Schuyler. The spiritual directors commissioned in the Diocese of Nebraska gathered here today to check in with one another and then attend a retreat here this weekend.  The St. Benedict Center is set in a beautiful spot, and paths and the land around the retreat center are maintained in a way that makes it inviting and easy to get out and spend time outdoors.

I set out with my camera after lunch today to see what I could see. The orchard is a favorite place for me to walk; the change of seasons seems highlighted by the seasonal changes in the fruit trees. Today the trees were full of apples. They looked so good that I eventually picked one to eat, aware that I hadn’t done such a thing since childhood. It was one of the best apples I’ve ever eaten – fragrant, crisp, juicy, and sweet. Sitting on the grass savoring the apple, I felt a strong connection to everything around me and, through that, to God.

When I had finished my walk and returned to my room to rest a bit before the spiritual directors’ meeting, I picked up Earth Gospel, the book of daily prayers I’ve mentioned before in this blog. The midday reflection was this from Donella H. Meadows:

This fresh apple, still cold and crisp from the morning dew, is not-me only until I eat it. When I eat, I eat the soil that nourished the apple. When I drink, the waters of the earth become me. With every breath I take in I draw in not-me and make it me. With every breath out I exhale me into not-me.

If the air and the waters and the soils are poisoned, I am poisoned. Only if I believe the fiction of the lines more than the truth of the lineless planet, will I poison the earth, which is myself.

Today’s Gospel reading for the Daily Office was John 6:27-40. Jesus compares the manna in the wilderness to the bread of life, “the true bread from heaven”.  The apple itself fed my body; the experience of eating that apple fresh from the tree and then coming back to discover this piece of writing fed my entire being.


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Interpreting the Signs

The Gospel lesson for today is Luke 12:49-56. It ends with these words:

54 He also said to the crowds, ‘When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, “It is going to rain”; and so it happens. ⁵⁵And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, “There will be scorching heat”; and it happens. ⁵⁶You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?


Jesus was speaking about the signs of what was happening spiritually, signs that were there for the seeing but that people either could not or would not piece together. But God gives us all sorts of signs, all sorts of evidence of what is happening in every aspect of our lives. We can learn a lot if we open our eyes and ears to the signs around us and allow ourselves to see the realities -- the beauty and joy and the pain and sadness -- of our world.


This morning’s Gospel lesson along with our Epistle reading from Hebrews about the “great cloud of witnesses” tells us that Christ’s words weren’t meant to lull us into disengagement with the world around us, but rather to strengthen us to go out into the world in Christ’s name. Allowing ourselves to look and listen and see the signs around us is a necessary part of discipleship.

When I sit down at my computer to do online text study or make notes on the lessons during the week, I see news headlines. Throughout the past week, there were daily headlines about a pattern of extreme weather events that follow the predictions of climate scientists, I wondered about our inability or refusal as a society to piece together the evidence and do what we need to do to lessen the extent and effects of climate change.


Keeping in mind Jesus’ admonition to pay attention to the signs of our times, I'm sharing a list of some of the headlines I noticed this week:

• Huge ice island could cause threat to oil, shipping 
• Hundreds evacuated, 1 dead after flooding in Iowa
• Ames opens drinking water sites for residents
• China landslide: More than 700 people confirmed dead
• Smoke from raging fires coats Moscow
• One-fifth of Pakistan is underwater
• Severe thunderstorms hit areas of DC, MA, VA: Causes flooding, power outages
• Long hot summer of fire, floods fits predictions…

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(Added at 2:12 CDT)  Here's an additional headline fresh this afternoon from the Associated Press: "UN chief: Never seen anything like Pakistan floods".