Joy to the World: Fourth Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation.

The rivers in south central Nebraska are running freely as the year ends. I stopped today and listened to the sound of the river and watched the water flow. With the sun shining on it, this was a place to find joy.

Joy to the world! the Savior reigns; let us our songs employ,

While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains, repeat the sounding joy.

Holy Innocents: The Most Vulnerable

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)  .  According to Lesser Feasts and Fasts, Augustine of Hippo called these children “buds, killed by the frost of persecution the moment they showed themselves.”

As climate change takes its toll with extreme weather, flooding, famine, and the spread of tropical diseases, many children in our world have their lives cut very short, buds killed in this case by the frost of the world’s indifference the moment they showed themselves. MediaGlobal reports that children are the people most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, citing a recent Climate Vulnerability Monitor report that says that 99 per cent of climate change deaths occur in developing countries, and that of those deaths, over 80 per cent are children. Children are especially vulnerable to climate change because they are more vulnerable to malnutrition, cholera, diarrheal disease, dengue, and malaria.

Last summer, Josette Sheeran, executive director of the UN World Food Program, said that the famine in East Africa was “the children’s famine” because “the ones who are the weakest are the children and those are the ones we're seeing are the least likely to make it.” This famine was caused by a severe drought and exacerbated by the political situation.   The U.S. estimated at the beginning of Augustof this year that 29,000 Somali children under the age of five had died in the past three months; at the same time the U.N. said that 640,000 Somali children were “acutely malnourished”.

The people with power in this world – the political leaders, the economically comfortable, the corporate heads – differ from Herod, of course. No one intends to cause the death of thousands of children; the objective 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 huge profit producing and selling carbon intensive energy resources or something dependent on them. Children are the collateral damage of our failure to address climate change, just as children are so often the collateral damage of wars.

But even Herod himself didn’t care one way or the other about the children who were slaughtered. His objective was to eliminate one child; the others were collateral damage to his cause. When we look the other way and refuse to acknowledge what is happening as a result of our failure to 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 or the grief of Rachel.

Joy to the World: Third Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation. (See yesterday's post .)

Today I found ducks making a joyful noise on a partially frozen lake. There are usually plenty of mallards around this park in the winter. Today I was pleased to see a couple of wood ducks among them. The ducks were active today: flying, splashing, and swimming around, then resting on the ice along the open water. 

Joy to the World!

Let heaven and nature sing…

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

(Hymn 100)

The beautiful skies of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in Nebraska echoed our joy in the celebration of the birth of Christ, the Incarnation of God come to live among us. The Christmas Eve sunset, the stars in a clear sky on Christmas Eve, and the abundant sunshine on Christmas Day gave us light during the darkest time of the year, helping us to understand John’s Gospel (John 1:5): “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

We Episcopalians celebrate Christmas for twelve days. With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation. During a walk today, I was surprised by a hawk that flew out of a nearby tree and glided on the steady southwest breeze.

Our Christmas Gospel from John (John 1:1-14) begins by articulating the connections among God’s creation of the world, Christ, life, and light:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

The wonders of the world around us not only help us stay connected to joy; they also remind us that God is God, the creator and sustainer of all that is in the entire universe.

He rules the world with truth and grace, and make the nations prove

The glories of his righteousness, and wonders of his love.

How Can This Be?

Fourth Week of Advent

The Gospel reading for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Luke1:26-38, is also one of the readings in today’s Daily Office lectionary. This passage, the story of the Annunciation, bears repeating well! There is great mystery in this holy conversation between the angel Gabriel and Mary; there’s a mystery in the sense of knowledge beyond our capacity to reason in the beginning of the Incarnation, and there’s mystery in the sense of something we simply don’t know with certainty when we consider the different ways in which we might read Mary’s responses to Gabriel’s words.

Mary asks, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?”  This is sometimes interpreted as Mary asking a question about the mechanics of Jesus’ conception, but given the rest of the conversation, considering this a sort of “That’s interesting; how will this work?” question doesn’t quite fit. Perhaps it’s more of an exclamation of wonder. We ask/exclaim “How can this be?” when we see or experience all sorts of things we don’t understand. That exclamation doesn’t mean we necessarily expect to receive an answer, or even that we think an answer is possible. It means that we have met up with something we recognize as being beyond our comprehension. We might say “How can this be?” when we receive very joyful news or when we are taking in a landscape of exceptional beauty; we might also ask “How can this be?” when we receive bad news or witness a catastrophe.

People who write about climate science have been sharing recent news about methane bubbling up through the thawing permafrost in the Arctic, releasing into the atmosphere carbon that has been buried for 30,000 years. The thawing of the permafrost is the result of global warming; the effect of the methane being released is expected to be increased and accelerated warming. As noted in an article in the New York Times  about the scientists studying what is happening as the permafrost melts, “in the minds of most experts, the chief worry is not that the carbon in the permafrost will break down quickly… but that once the decomposition starts, it will be impossible to stop.”

In recent weeks, we have seen a report from the International Energy Agency telling us that we have five years to begin addressing climate change in a significant way before it becomes irreversible; we have seen the climate summit in Durban fail to put anything in place to do that work within the next five years; we have started becoming aware of the extent of the carbon being released as the permafrost melts. The past month we in the church have been observing Advent, preparing our hearts to meet Christ anew. As Christmas approaches, Christians who are aware of what is happening to our environment are preparing for our celebration of God coming to live among us while painfully aware of what we have done and continue to do to the world in which Christ was born. We have simultaneously the hope of Advent, the discouragement of knowing what is unfolding around us, and the despair of the silence that all too often is the reaction to this news.

A reflection by Christina Villa  published yesterday on the United Church of Christ website looks at those times when personal loss leads us to say with regret that Christmas “will be different this year”. For people who have been directly affected by the storms, floods, droughts, and fires associated with climate change, Christmas will indeed be different this year; for others of us, the simple awareness that the security of climate stability is ending gives a different feeling to Christmas this year. Christina Villa concludes that those years when loss or hardship makes Christmas feel different can be years when we understand something of the deeper meaning of Christmas:

Christmas is about the coming of love and light into the world, which we would not need to celebrate if life were free of loss and darkness.  That's what makes Christmas a serious holiday. It's not all tinsel and eggnog. Jesus, a messiah bringing love and light into the world, was also "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief," says Isaiah, putting it mildly. The serious mystery of Christmas is God's answer to the losses we accumulate, the best answer we have and the very one we need. 

I read about the melting permafrost and ask, “How can this be?” If this is a question about the mechanics of it all, scientists can give me the answer: The carbon released by the burning of fossil fuels has raised that earth’s temperature enough to allow the melting of the permafrost. But if it’s an exclamation to indicate that the full implication of what is unfolding is beyond my comprehension, then Christmas is exactly what I need. When we meet something like this, we don’t need Christmas as a pleasant distraction. (I suspect if we look to the celebration of Christmas as a pleasant distraction to get our minds off our worries, we will come up empty.) We do need Christmas as the answer, as the opportunity for a deep encounter with love and light in a world where we sometimes run into greed and darkness.

Mary put her trust in what God was doing even though she couldn’t understand the mystery of it all. Trusting God didn’t keep her from the sorrow of seeing her son on the cross, but it allowed her to witness the joy of Easter. Trusting God won’t keep us from the very real consequences of our actions, but it can help us walk through this with meaning and hope.

Waiting

Durban climate talks

This is the nativity scene my great-grandmother bought piece by piece at a dime store sometime before 1950. A couple of things have been replaced over the years; a palm tree made of some sort of mystery material totally disintegrated after a couple of years of summer storage in Nebraska.  It is obviously worn; with its yellow sheep and Mary’s numerous chips, it’s not as beautiful as the nativity sets I see in other people’s homes, but it has a lot of meaning for me. As long as I can remember, I have helped set this up sometime during Advent. We keep the baby Jesus elsewhere until Christmas Eve, when we place a small spray from the Christmas tree in the manger and lay the baby there.

Advent is a time of active waiting. We set up our nativity scene and wait for the arrival of the baby. We engage in spiritual disciplines – special readings or intentional quiet time or prayer walks – to help make our hearts ready for a true celebration of the Incarnation.

Today we hope to go out and find a Christmas tree. Today is supposed to be all about getting the room ready for the tree, bringing the tree home and setting it up, and beginning to decorate it. We will probably get this done, but the start of all of this has been delayed because of the news coming from the climate talks in Durban.

The climate talks are basically in overtime. The Green Sprouts Wednesday post, Trampling on the Needy, talked about the disconnect between the United States proposal and the extent and timing of the need to address carbon emissions and climate mitigation in a significant way.

Exactly what is being proposed as the conference has gone into extra time isn’t clear at this point. Here is what we do know: unless something of real significance comes out of this, unless the nations of the world agree to do whatever we need to do in the next five years to assure climate stability, we will have gone past the tipping point and unleashed unthinkable consequences for the living things on our planet.

It’s very odd to be carrying on traditional Christmas preparations knowing that the fate of current and future generations – and the sort of world in which I enter old age – hangs on what is happening in a roomful of people in Durban today. People are suffering right now from climate change, and inaction will make things much worse. Here is a list of the “topeight climate disasters during the Durban climate talks” from Think Progress.

Today we can actively wait on the outcome of these very important talks. Please take some time today to pray for the climate negotiators and those whose lives will be most immediately affected by what they decide, including the people of Africa and of the world’s island nations. News and links to ways to take action are available easily on the internet. One site is tcktcktck.org . On Twitter, #COP17 can keep you informed.

Our Advent waiting isn’t just waiting for our Christmas celebration. It’s waiting and actively preparing for the coming of the reign of Christ. As I go about my Advent preparations, I’m thinking of what all of this will be like for me in twenty years, what it will be like for those who will be living on this planet long after I am gone. How will their Christmas celebrations look? What will their everyday lives be like? What am I and others of my generation leaving them other than some dime store figurines and traditions that need to be enfleshed by Christian compassion now if they are to have any meaning in years to come?

Trampling on the Needy

2020 Climate Treaty Proposal

Today’s Daily Office lesson from Amos (Amos 8:1-14) is an appropriate prophetic passage to respond to the news coming from the UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa. Some of us have been praying for this meeting , along with praying that our own hearts be open so that we can see the needs in the world around us and respond to them.

Much depends on the nations of the world figuring out a way for us to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the damage already done. The Jesuit magazine America has an excellent article Climate Change: A Life Issue  that looks at climate change, its very real effects on people in the world today, and its expected effects in the future:

In 2009, a study conducted by the Global Humanitarian Forum found that climate change was already responsible for 300,000 deaths a year, the suffering of 325 million people, and economic losses of over $100 billion. Over 90 percent of those persons most severely affected were from developing countries that have contributed least to global carbon emissions. In the coming decades, climate change can bring deadly famine, displacement and disease to large sectors of the human population and spawn mass extinctions of other species. In the long term, the climate could change so radically that the earth could no longer support human civilization. In this sense, caring for the climate and the biosphere is a paramount pro-life issue.

 

At the conference in Durban, the United States has proposed that a new climate treaty be negotiated that would take effect in 2020.  Jamie Henn of 350.org writes:

This isn’t just a delay, it’s a death sentence. Scientists have stated over and over that in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, emissions must peak by 2015 or 2020 at the absolute latest. (For a closer look at the scientific reasoning, read David Roberts.)It is especially callous and cold-hearted for the U.S. to be pushing the 2020 timeline here in Durban. Africa is already seeing the devastating impacts of the climate crisis, from the deadly drought still ravaging the Horn of Africa to terrible flooding, including here in Durban where heavy rains killed at least eight people just last week.

At the beginning of the meeting in Durban, Oxfam wrote a media briefing Extreme weather endangers food security: 2010-11: A grim foretaste of future suffering and hunger?.  This briefing outlines the relationship between the extreme weather events resulting from global warming and hunger.

“Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land,” writes Amos. Continuing, he describes the consequences God will send in response to callous disregard for the needy, including consequences for the earth itself. The response to our callous disregard for the needy is unfolding according to the laws of physics and chemistry. Our planet continues to warm, and while it is affecting the poorest people in the world first and worst, we will be affected by it also.

Please pray for a better outcome from this meeting. Pray for those suffering from the callous disregard of those with money and power. Pray for us to be able to see what is happening in the world around us. If prayer leads you to a desire to act, there is a petition to President Obama and our climate negotiators to sign here . The conference ends in two days.