Water

Despite the less liquid form of H2O covering much of Nebraska today -- and doing that beautifully -- I’ve been thinking about water for several days. Last Sunday we remembered the Baptism of Jesus, and many parishes had baptisms that day. The prayers of thanksgiving over the water in our baptismal service remind us that along with being essential to life, water has great spiritual significance.

Personally Challenging Task

In the week leading up to the First Sunday after Epiphany (The Baptism of Our Lord), stories were popping up in the news about floods in Australia and South Africa . The floods in Australia were fairly well-covered in the news; fewer people here heard about the ones in Eastern Cape Province and KwaZulu Natal. The same week, I came across more information about the plastic in our oceans – both the extent of the pollution and more evidence that plastic is entering the food chain. Not having a lot of time to sit and process all of this, I simply didn’t write the post during the week. When Saturday came, it was even more difficult to focus on something this complex after news of the shootings in Tucson.

Since then, I’ve been looking at why it was so difficult to put these pieces together. Thinking about water brings together two environmental phenomena that I find very difficult to really comprehend because of the scale of the phenomena and the unthinkable nature of their consequences: the effects of climate change on people and other living things, and the extent of plastic pollution and its own effects on people and other living things. Thinking about the waters of baptism, reflecting on the relationship between the physical properties of water and its spiritual significance for us, is a whole different exercise when done with an awareness of the environmental realities with which we now live.

With this next Sunday’s Gospel (John 1:29-42 ) beginning with John talking about the Baptism of Jesus, the blog plan for this week is to talk about floods in this post, plastic and water in the next post, and perhaps be able after that to put together at least some of the pieces in relation to the waters of baptism.

Floods

This morning there were new headlines: Dozens missing from flooding in Australian valley and 13 Dead After Heavy Rains in Brazil. No single weather event can be connected to changes in the climate brought about by global warming; floods happen and have always happened. But two things indicate an overall connection: first, the record-breaking rainfalls and severe storms that have caused the flooding are exactly what scientists have told us will happen as the earth’s atmosphere warms and holds more water vapor; and second, there have been multiple floods in the past year with the phrases “record-breaking rainfall” and “catastrophic flooding” attached to them. If we were experiencing weather phenomena within the old norms, we wouldn’t be breaking so many records.

Remember the July floods in Pakistan? In early December, a reporter for the British Telegraph reported on current conditions in the flooded areas . A recent PBS NewsHour report tells more about the aftermath of the flooding and other water issues there:

If we find it difficult to imagine what is happening in faraway places, we might look closer to home and re\member the floods in Iowa last summer. A report on the impacts of climate change on Iowa was released January 1. It’s a good report for Nebraskans to look at to help us think about how we might best live in the next several years, and it does a good job of laying out the connections between global climate change and local weather trends. Increased precipitation and flooding is discussed in this report. An Iowa State University press release about the role of some ISU researchers in the study notes that the university itself was flooded in August 2010.

Along with concerns about flooding caused by increased precipitation and severe storms, global warming brings coastal flooding from sea level rise. Flooding of both kinds is expected to increase in the years ahead. Disaster aid to victims of floods is the sort of charitable work that churches have historically done. One consequence of increased flooding will be an increased need for aid.

I suspect this is one piece of the connection to the waters of baptism. We who have made a covenant to "seek and serve Christ in all persons" should think about how we would respond to increased flooding both close to home and far away.

Epiphany

The Green Sprouts blog first appeared two years ago on the Feast of the Epiphany. In our diocese, awareness of environmental issues and efforts to be better stewards of God’s creation have increased over the past two years. As we celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany today and move into the weeks following Epiphany, we talk about Christ’s revelation to the world and about Jesus’ ministry of healing and reconciliation, and also about how we can help bring Christ's healing and reconciliation to the world.

If your parish has taken some steps to practice better environmental stewardship or to educate your parish or your community about environmental issues, if you have begun advocacy around an environmental justice issue or found ways to enrich your worship through connections to the natural world, please send a note to deaconbetsy@windstream.net so we can share what you are doing with other parishes in the diocese. In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing how things unfold at St. Stephen’s as we apply for the GreenFaith Certification Program and, if our application is accepted, begin doing the work to complete the program and become designated as a GreenFaith Sanctuary. (See the 10/14/10 post New Green Opportunity for Parishes for more about the program.)

Meanwhile, as we celebrate Epiphany, remembering the wise men following the star and Christ being revealed to the world, the last paragraphs of that first Green Sprouts post articulated some of the reasons for us to pay more attention to God’s creation and to be intentional about caring for the environment:

People who pay attention to the sky, the changing seasons, the incredible variety of life on our planet Earth, often experience joy and wonder and wholeness. Spending time outdoors paying attention to God’s creation leads us to open our hearts in gratitude. We don’t need to be able to name these experiences as ‘God’ for them to have a deep effect on us, and for us to know they point to something more. Those of us who do use traditional religious language describe such experiences as ways to connect with God. Being outdoors and taking the time to look around and listen is one of the most accessible doors or openings to the Holy. Such experiences not only give us a sense of God’s presence, but they often change us in profound ways.

As we talk about the light of the Epiphany star and connect it to the light of Christ in the world, the hours of daylight in the northern hemisphere are slowly increasing. On the plains, the angle of the sun and the weather conditions on some days combine to produce beautiful colors in the sky at sunrise and sunset. Cold, clear nights result in starry skies that make it easy to imagine following a special star night after night to see where it leads.

Launching this blog seems to me like a fitting way to mark the Feast of the Epiphany. Environmental issues directly affect the traditional social concerns of the church such as poverty, disease, hunger, and social justice. During Epiphany, the Church talks about bringing Christ to the world, about revealing Christ’s power to bring healing and wholeness. To bring Christ to a world where environmental issues have come to be understood as fundamental to all our economic, social, and political concerns, the Church needs to bring these issues into the center of our conversations and our work.

Christmas Hope for the New Year

While it’s the end of 2010, in the church calendar we are in the middle of Christmas.  That means that when we look back at this year that is coming to an end, we in the church are looking back through the eyes of people who are celebrating the Incarnation. We stand in a place of comfort, joy, and hope, a place that celebrates the coming into the world of the true light that the darkness cannot overcome.

Looking back over this blog for the past year, there was a combination of information about what was happening to our environment along with posts that celebrated the ways we find God through the wonder of God’s creation and posts that talked about hope. Sometimes specific human actions, such as the 10/10/10 work day (see 10/10/10 and Gratitude and Grace),were signs of hope for us in the past year, and other times the hope was of a more subtle but more profound nature.

In July, there was a post called Hope talking about the feelings of peace and joy in God’s creation on a summer's morning and the hope those brought with them contrasted with the feelings of helplessness and discouragement brought on by the knowledge of our failure to care for creation and the despair those brought with them. Looking back at what has happened to our planet this past year from the perspective of Christmas brings up the same sort of contrast. The seeming disparity between our Christmas celebration and this information** is brought home in this video called Peace on Earth:

Where is hope and joy in this? The temptation to despair when faced with such information during Christmas must be similar to what Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was facing when he wrote I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.  Longfellow’s response was to keep listening and hear that God is alive and “the wrong shall fail, the right prevail”; the response was to remember that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.

This response doesn’t mean that we ignore the facts and indulge in fantasies that somehow the harmful effects of pollution, overuse of resources, and climate change will magically disappear. It does mean that we have the hope – and the promise -- of God being with us. The July post about hope ended with this:

Hope is not denial of reality. Hope is not pretending that our actions, the way we live our lives today, don’t have very sobering consequences. And hope is not thinking that God will suspend the laws of physics and chemistry and make those bad consequences miraculously disappear.

Hope is trust that God will be with us as we walk into the future we are creating. Hope is confidence that if we turn toward God, abandon our "arrogance and folly", and treat God’s creation with reverence, we have a future; hope says that no matter how difficult the future may be or how different from the present with its many comforts, our lives and our relationships with God, with one another, and with creation will still have meaning.

Gratitude can call us back to hope from despair. A beautiful summer’s morning in Nebraska can open our hearts to that gratitude that leads us to hope.

The beauty of the sun shining on the snow on New Year’s Eve in Nebraska and the wonder of Christmas can also open our hearts to gratitude that leads us to hope. 

Maybe 2011 will be the year that the world’s leaders begin to really understand what is happening on this planet and begin significant actions to ensure an environment in the future that can sustain human civilization. Or maybe the world’s leaders will continue to postpone and avoid the politically difficult decisions that action requires, and instead there will be enough grassroots understanding and effort – including the efforts of the church -- to make real progress. And maybe we will continue much as we have, with many people working very hard for the environment, but not enough to make a significant difference for our future. Whatever 2011 brings, God will be with us as walk through it.

**An update on the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (with the scientific consensus being that 350 ppm is the upper limit for a safe atmosphere for humans): at the end of November it was 388.59. The latest data from the Mauna Loa observatory can be found at CO2 Now.

Jesus Christ the Apple Tree

It’s Christmastime! We celebrate the Feast of the Incarnation with lots of appropriately embodied – incarnate – expressions of our joy: special foods, gathering with family and friends, the exchange of gifts, greenery and other decorations for our homes and churches. The sounds of Christmas music add to all of this.

The song “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree” has become part of the Christmas repertoire, but I’ve been listening to it off and on since August, when this song I barely knew came into my head after I spent some time in the apple orchard at the St. Benedict Center. I wrote about that experience in a post called Apples and Manna . The sense of connection with God and of spiritual nourishment from that experience must be something like the mystical experience the original author of this song describes. While the song is often sung at a faster tempo, the words are very clear in this clip:

The Christmas Gospel from John (John 1:1-14) begins with a very abstract concept: “In the beginning was the Word…”, but ends with the Word becoming flesh, becoming incarnate, and coming to dwell among us. The unseen and ethereal God becomes visible and tangible.

The birth of Christ was the Incarnation, but opportunities for little experiences of the incarnation surround us. The wonders of God’s creation – the plants and animals, the rivers and hills, and the skies and land themselves – are constant signs of Emmanuel, God-with-us. 

Merry Christmas!

Deeper Traditions

Fourth Sunday of Advent

Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus (Matthew 1:18-25)  tells the extraordinary story not only of Mary’s pregnancy and the birth of Jesus, but of Joseph’s reaction to the news. Mary's becoming pregnant while she was engaged to Joseph was not what he had expected. His righteous response, shielding Mary from public disgrace, was evidently enough out of the ordinary to warrant comment from Matthew. Then the most unexpected piece of Joseph’s story is revealed: in a dream, an angel speaks to him, and when he wakes up, Joseph does as the angel commanded him. Nothing in the story is what we would expect; nothing is customary.

The nativity story is Good News; it’s a story of something new and different, a story of new life coming into the world on a very deep level.

Despite our celebration of the birth of Jesus, we tend to cling to traditions, especially Christmas traditions. Every year, self-help writers encourage people to let go of customs or traditions that have become burdensome in some ways – a big holiday dinner or party, for example, that has become more work and expense than the hosts can bear -- and try something new that is more life-giving.

Thinking about our environmental footprint at Christmas involves thinking about our traditions. Choices about which gifts to buy, how (or whether) to wrap them, travel plans, food, and decorations all involve examining customs or traditions and considering changing them because we want something that matters more to us: a sustainable future, life itself.

The environmental challenges we face year-round call for us to examine our daily customs and traditions, our entire way of life, and find other ways to live that make new life possible. They call for us to let go of things that have become burdensome to all living things and try something new that is more life-giving. They call us to move from traditions on the level of familiar customs to traditions on the level of our most essential values.

A Climate Vulnerability Monitor report released earlier this month by DARA (Development Assistance Research Associates) analyzes the effects on various nations and peoples as the earth’s climate changes. (The summary of findings and recommendation from this report, found here, is very readable and provides a wealth of information.) One of the intents of the report is to lay out what’s at stake as we make decisions for the future. It provides the facts so we can make decisions about how to live. Standing on their own, the facts are grim, but the document also provides reason for hope, laying out how we might alleviate some of the suffering caused by climate change. Relatively simple things can address what the report says are now the primary causes of deaths related to climate change: malnutrition, diarrheal infections, and malaria.

During Advent, the lectionary reminds us of the prophetic message of justice for God’s people and restoration of the land. As the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change met in Cancun during Advent, there was some progress made, including establishment of a Green Fund  to help developing countries deal with the effects of climate change, and agreement on the frameworks for taking on the big question of how to reduce world-wide emissions of greenhouse gases. The lack of progress at Copenhagen a year ago coupled with the low expectations for the Cancun meeting led many to assess the meeting as a success.

Doing something is preferable to doing nothing, and making progress is something to celebrate, but it isn’t necessarily justice, especially not justice as described by the prophets. What counts as a success in the political world, or what we might see as a success because it gives some small glimmer of hope in the darkness, isn’t success by the standards of the prophets.

Perhaps no convention or treaty or political action can accomplish what the prophets call us to do: change our behavior so deeply that the earth, worn down like the poor by our greed and selfishness, can be renewed and restored.  These sorts of deep changes have an essential spiritual component that only our most profound traditions provide. These sorts of deep changes are embedded in the story of the birth of Jesus, the story we prepare to celebrate this week. If we stop and listen to Matthew’s account of the birth, letting the story really sink in, we may find our hearts prepared to embrace those deep changes with gladness. We may find Good News, a story of new life coming into the world on a very deep level.

Prophetic Voices: Dominican Republic

Today’s Episcopal News Service report from the Episcopal Climate Justice Gathering in the Dominican Republic focuses on the effects of climate change on the host country itself. The Diocese of the Dominican Republic  is one of our companion dioceses, which brings all of this closer to home for Nebraska Episcopalians.

Silvio Minier, who works for Oxfam in Santo Domingo, presented an overview of the local effects of climate change to the conference. The core of the justice concerns are evident in this paragraph of the ENS report:

"The Dominican Republic is the eighth country in the world that will be most affected by climate change," Minier said, adding that governments are not doing anything, and that the local environmental council has studied climate change's effects on the coast and tourism, but not on poor people and agriculture.

Lynette Wilson’s story for the Episcopal News Service, “Deforestation, intensive storms and floods show effects of climate change in Dominican Republic” can help us understand some of the challenges faced by the Diocese of the Dominican Republic. One way we can support our friends there is to pray and advocate for strong climate legislation and action in our own country, and for meaningful progress on a climate treaty as negotiations continue this week in Cancun.

Prophetic Voices for Environmental Justice

Advent 3A

According to yesterday’s Episcopal News Service release  about the Episcopal Climate Justice Gathering in the Dominican Republic this week (see Climate Conferences and the Church), the participants in the gathering came to a consensus that “now is the time for the church to reclaim and fortify its prophetic voice.” 

The voices of the prophets are a constant voice in our lectionary readings during Advent. In this Sunday’s reading (Isaiah 35:1-10), Isaiah connects justice and healing for the people with renewal and healing of the land. While the desert blooms and springs of water appear where there was parched land, the lame “leap like deer” and the “ransomed of the Lord” return to Zion.

Renewal of the land and renewal of the people are linked throughout Isaiah and many of the prophets. Care for the environment is not an isolated concern for the church; it is linked both in our tradition and in very real ways in our world with justice and well-being for people.

The focus of this week’s gathering in the Dominican Republic is climate justice, looking at the intersection between poverty and climate change. This blog and many others have highlighted the ways in which climate change, while eventually having huge effects on everyone on this planet, generally impacts the poorest people in the world first and worst. Rising sea levels, disappearing glaciers that served as water sources, and changes in conditions for agriculture and fishing all affect people who live along the margins both physically and economically in our global economy, people who live in the vulnerable low-lying areas where rich people don’t build their houses, people whose livelihoods depend on subsistence farming or fishing.

Environmental justice is at the heart of creation care; it connects directly to the promises of our baptismal covenant and to Jesus’ command to love our neighbors. Humans don’t live in isolation from other living things; wherever humans have caused harm to the rest of creation, the effects of that harm will eventually be experienced by humans. And sometimes issues that seem to be local and separate from justice issues for poor or marginalized people have a fairly direct connection.

In Nebraska, there has been much concern about the long-term effects of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline on the fragile Sandhills ecosystem and the Ogallala aquifer. If the pipeline is built and if there is a break in the line, people in Nebraska will be affected, and that is a very important concern. But right now, native peoples in Canada are feeling the effects of the extraction of oil from the land. At a press conference today the results of a new research report documenting the impact of contaminants and reduced water flow on the Athabasca River will be discussed; the changes in the river impact the rights by treaty of native people along the river to hunt, fish, and trap.

In this Sunday’s Gospel lesson (Matthew 11:2-11) Jesus asks “What did you come out into the wilderness to look at?..A reed shaken by the wind?...Someone dressed in soft robes?”, then answers that they came to see a prophet “and more than a prophet”. The one coming is more than a prophet, but speaks with a prophet’s voice for all people. Those who choose to follow Jesus choose to stand in the tradition of the prophets. We should expect to hear the church's prophetic voice whenever and wherever there is damage to the earth and harm done to God’s children.