Waiting in Hope (With Feathers)

Advent 2

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13)

Our God is the God of hope, and in Advent we wait in hope. Advent teaches us that even when the days seem dark, hope is as essential a part of our spirituality as are worship, repentance, and service to others.

There are signs of hope here and there with regard to the environment. People seem more aware of and accepting of alternative forms of energy; wind farms, for example, are becoming more common in our part of the country. Midlanders generally seem to be more aware of the need to recycle what we can and to use energy and water as efficiently as possible. In the work of our diocese, there seems to be an increasing sense of stewardship about the distances we travel to do our work; we more often make intentional choices about when we need to meet in person and when we can meet by telephone or video call.

 

On the other hand, there are less hopeful signs – the increasing rate of climate change and our increasing understanding of how short a time we have left to act , the increasing amounts of plastic in the oceans and the marine food chain, and the failure of policymakers in America (where the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming has just been eliminated) and other countries to address these issues and other environmental issues.

This year in Advent in Cancun – as last year during Advent in Copenhagen – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is meeting. Expectations are not high for significant agreements to come out of this conference, but there is hope of progress in some areas. No doubt the liturgical calendar has nothing to do with the scheduling of these meetings, but it’s interesting that Advent has become a time when we look for signs of hope that the nations might come to address the urgent problem of climate change to a significant degree. The expectations are low, but Advent teaches us to hope.

My brother, an historian specializing in American history, reminds me that in 1850, few “reasonable” people thought slavery would end in their lifetime, and that many serious writers in the late 1950’s saw no possibility of ending racial segregation for dozens of years. In some ways, these important societal changes happened just when things seemed least hopeful.

People of faith were instrumental in the abolition movement and the civil rights movement. Hope and faith go together. I’m no historian, but I wonder if the hopeful nature of people of faith was what kept these movements going against all odds so that when the time suddenly was ripe, there were visible advocates for these causes.

I’ve noticed flocks of geese and robins this week; I suppose they are beginning their journeys a bit late after the warmth of November. Meanwhile, juncos and finches have begun coming to my feeders more frequently.  Remembering Emily Dickinson’s words – “Hope is the thing with feathers”    -- the birds are a visible reminder both of hope and of God’s beautiful and wondrous creatures whose survival, along with ours, is at stake.

Climate Conferences and the Church

The United Nations Climate Conference opened in Cancun on Monday of this week. It’s been nearly a year since the last round of climate talks in Copenhagen. This blog’s post  at the beginning of that conference talked about finding hope in the midst of despair about the very real possibility that not enough would be done about climate change soon enough to avert global catastrophe. With the disappointments of the Copenhagen talks and recent scientific reports – e.g. “World could heat up 4 degrees C in fifty years” -- showing that climate change is proceeding more rapidly than predicted, the need for action has become even more urgent than it was a year ago.

Religious leaders in Scotland sent a letter to British Prime Minister David Cameron saying that the failure of western nations to help developing nations cope with climate change is a “moral outrage”  . The religious leaders have asked UK leaders to help ensure more successful talks this year in Cancun, saying that every day that passes without significant help sees lives "affected and even lost".  A World Council of Churches (WCC) delegation is in Cancun bearing the Christian message that humanity is called to care for creation and for the world’s most vulnerable people.

Frustration with the political failure in addressing climate change and its effects has led to increasing calls for grassroots action outside of the traditional political framework. In particular, some people are looking to the faith community to provide leadership as the moral dimensions of this crisis become clearer.  

An Episcopal News Service piece by The Rev. P. Joshua Griffin  tells about a gathering of Episcopalians and Anglicans to be held in San Pedro de Macoris in our companion Diocese of the Dominican Republic December 7-10. This gathering will address some of the moral questions around the intersection of poverty and climate change and begin discerning “how our church might model justice and global reconciliation given the harsh ecological realities facing our world.”

And there’s the question for all of us: how do we as a church model – and communicate – justice and reconciliation for a world very much in need of leadership in addressing climate change and its effects? In a world made much more complicated by climate change, how do we live out our baptismal covenant to strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being? 

Advent 1 Addendum

Friday’s post, “As in those days before the flood…” talked about links between today’s Gospel lesson (Matthew 24: 36-44)  and recent news about sea level rise. Today’s New York Times has an op-ed piece, “An Almanac of Extreme Weather, written by Jack Hedin, a farmer in southern Minnesota, that hits more immediately and closer to home for Nebraskans.

Mr. Hedin talks about the difficulties Midwestern farmers face as the weather becomes more severe; he especially talks about the recent changes in precipitation and increasing frequency of flooding. In the middle of the piece, he writes:

Minnesota’s state climatologist, Jim Zandlo, has concluded that no fewer than three “thousand-year rains” have occurred in the past seven years in our part of the state. And a University of Minnesota meteorologist, Mark Seeley, has found that summer storms in the region over the past two decades have been more intense and more geographically focused than at any time on record.

The weather in neighboring South Dakota was covered in another recent piece in the New York Times, “Storm Upon Storm for South Dakota”  from November 20.

Today’s piece about Minnesota talks about changes we can make in the Midwest to address climate change and try to preserve productive farmland for future generations. It’s a good fit with the First Sunday of Advent theme of being awake and prepared!

"As in those days before the flood..."

Advent 1A

Friday morning there was an interesting juxtaposition of news headlines with a small bit of the Gospel lesson for the First Sunday in Advent. The lesson is Matthew 24: 36-44. As Jesus talks about the need to be ready at all times for the return of the Son of Man, he compares the time when the Son of Man returns to the days of Noah: “For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man.” 

While Noah built the ark and made the other preparations God told him to make, other people went about their business as if nothing unusual were about to happen. Jesus says they were oblivious to the situation until it was too late, until the flood had come and swept them away.

Friday morning’s New York Times had a front-page story about residents of Norfolk, Virginia, trying to deal with rising seas. Even as residents try to address the specific problems with rising water in their own neighborhoods, many of them also realize that their needs are only a small piece of much bigger problems as the world gets warmer and sea levels rise.

Other recent news stories reported similar concerns in a variety of location: southern Florida, Alexandria, Egypt and the Nile Delta , the Galveston Bay region,  and the Bahamas.  Nebraska’s lack of coastlines doesn’t insulate us from the effects of sea level rise, as the economic consequences and population shifts will be felt everywhere. And the climate changes that are causing the rise in sea levels will have other, more direct effects on Nebraska.

On some level, all of these stories indicate that there seems to be some increase in awareness of what we are facing. But on another, deeper, level, there seems to be as little awareness as Jesus says there was when Noah was building the ark. This week's "Black Friday" shopping glut seemed to contrast the headlines. We will know that we are really beginning to understand what is happening when we act like people who are awake and prepared, when we begin to make significant changes to mitigate climate change and consciously adapt to the changes that are unstoppable.

For the beauty of the earth...

Happy Thanksgiving! Just around the time the Christmas shopping industry calls us to notice what we don’t have and to focus on things we really, really want, the national Thanksgiving holiday calls us to step away from our usual Thursday routines and focus on gratitude for what we already have.  The practice of gratitude is a basic spiritual practice; far from being the focus of one day each year, it’s an important part of daily spiritual discipline for many of us.

About half a century ago, before adults worried about whether children had what Richard Louv has termed nature-deficit disorder, my most constant experiences of gratitude came through nearly daily experiences of nature. Our church and Sunday school made little explicit connection between this and the things we talked about on Sundays; one of the few revelations of the connection was in the hymn “For the beauty of the earth” that happened to be one of our regular Sunday school songs. Here’s a lovely version of it:

Gratitude is basic to spiritual practice because it’s intertwined with love, hope, and faith. Thanking God for something brings us to an awareness of our love for God and for the things for which we are grateful; finding the gifts for which we are grateful helps us see bright spots of hope in any situation; and acknowledging the good things God has provided for us gives us faith in God’s goodness and love for us. Love, hope, and faith give us a good foundation for doing the work God calls us to do, including the essential and enormous work of restoring a sustainable environment on our planet.

It’s difficult to look at the harm we have done to the earth and at the big effort and change in priorities it will take for the course of things like climate change and plastic pollution of the oceans to be changed for the better. Giving ourselves time to notice and appreciate the wonders of God’s creation is a good antidote to the temptation of despair; gratitude is as essential a piece of this work as is the willingness to look at the problems we face.

Happy Thanksgiving! Many daily returns of the spirit of the day!

The King of All Creation

Archbishop William Temple was quoted in yesterday’s reflection in Forward Day by Day, a reflection from 1936 about the involvement of the church in what today we call social justice ministry:

The Christian’s duty in regard to slums is not merely to tell the inhabitants that their squalor is of small consequence because soon they will pass to the house of many mansions.

It’s easy to imagine that if Archbishop Temple were here today, he would tell us that our duty with regard to climate change isn’t merely to say that the effects of climate change on our planet won’t matter because our home is in heaven. 

In the great circle of the liturgical year, we come this Sunday to the Reign of Christ or Christ the King. The collect for Christ the King talks about all the peoples of the earth being brought together under Christ’s rule.  The kingdom is both the end of the story that we tell each liturgical year and the beginning, as the following Sunday we begin our preparations for the birth of the King in a stable.

Whatever other interpretations we might place on the Scriptural passages about the kingdom of God and the rule of Christ, it’s evident that when we truly believe that Christ is everything described in Colossians 1:11-20, we experience an inner transformation that re-orients us radically. In the words of this passage, such an encounter with the reality of Christ transfers us to Christ’s kingdom. This radical shift makes it possible for us to live into our identities as citizens of Christ’s kingdom even while we are living in Nebraska in 2010.

This passage from Colossians emphasizes that Christ is the king of all things, both on earth and in heaven. This Sunday we celebrate Christ as the “firstborn of all creation”; next Sunday we are preparing for the birth of Christ, for the Incarnation, where God’s love for creation brings God to be born as a human being, living as one of us on earth. 

Christ is not only the king of heaven, but also the king of all creation, both heaven and earth. How we treat one another and the environment that sustains life becomes doubly significant when we remember that the kingdom is both eternal and now, both infinite and right here. Paul tells us that Christ himself “is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

Honoring Christ and his kingdom as we do this Sunday entails honoring all of creation. Looking toward a time when all the peoples of the earth are brought together under Christ’s reign entails caring for our brothers and sisters in all parts of our world. We honor Christ as our King when we tend carefully to our connections through Christ to one another and to all of creation.

Catastrophe and Faith

Today’s Daily Office lessons include Habakkuk 3:1-18, which ends with these words:

¹⁷ Though the fig tree does not blossom,
   and no fruit is on the vines;
though the produce of the olive fails
   and the fields yield no food;
though the flock is cut off from the fold
   and there is no herd in the stalls, 
¹⁸ yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
   I will exult in the God of my salvation.

The prophet Habakkuk describes a catastrophic scene, a complete crop failure coupled with a loss of livestock. This description of desolation ends, though, with a strong statement of faith: despite this utter calamity, I will celebrate in God.

November tree

I rejoiced to see this passage this morning, as I was thinking about a sobering piece that Joe Romm posted on Climate Progress yesterday. “A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice” summarizes ten of the biggest stories in climate science in the past year. The picture that emerges from these summaries is a catastrophic one, with our only hope being a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions very soon. All of these stories will affect us in Nebraska in one way or another. Perhaps of most immediate concern to us in the Great Plains are these two: a prediction from the National Center for Atmospheric Research  of drought patterns fifty years in the future if emissions are not controlled, with our section of the country predicted to be experiencing a worse drought than we did in the 1930’s Dust Bowl days, and a prediction from the UK Meteorological office of average temperature increases between 13 to 18 degrees F. over most of the United States in the next fifty years if we keep on our current emissions path.

November daisies in Nebraska

It’s important to share this sort of information in this blog, but it’s also important to place it in a faith context that helps us figure out what to do with the information.  Christian hope in the face of news that could easily lead to despair has been the subject of several other Green Sprouts posts; a major contribution of religion to the discussion of environmental degradation is the ability to shine light into darkness, to bring hope where there is despair. And even when hope is hard to come by, there is still the hope that we can rejoice in God and as we rejoice to come to love God’s creation enough to save ourselves from total disaster.

A theme of Advent is the coming of the light into the darkness. As we move into Advent in the next couple of weeks, it’s a good time for Christians to take a deep and prayerful breath, look straight into the darkness climate scientists tell us we are entering, and bring some light into the darkness. Faith isn't denial of the darkness; faith is the ability to find God in the darkness.