Gaining the world and forfeiting life

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?

The Gospel passage from today’s Daily Office lectionary, Mark 8:34-9:1, has stayed with me all day. Having completed training for the Climate Reality Leadership Corps just last week, the realities of climate change – both the current scientific consensus about what is happening and the ways in which climate change is already affecting people and other living things around the world – are more present in my thoughts than ever. Had I not been reading the above sentences in their Gospel context, they might be taken as very fresh and relevant questions in the context of our environmental challenges. Those who want to cling to a comfortable and familiar way of life thinking that will shield them from reality will lose that life, and those who let go of their old way of life, of our old consumer culture and notions of success, for the sake of sustaining all living things in God’s creation will find a deeper life. For what good does it do us to have all the stuff in the world and destroy the web of life on our planet?

Even though that’s what I first heard in this passage today, I dismissed it because when Jesus said these words, he was talking about something entirely different. This passage from Mark is about the possibility of losing your soul, your core or essential self. What good does it do to gain power or wealth or success in some arena and lose who we really are in the process? True life, says Jesus, is setting aside all of the things on which we usually focus our efforts in order to focus on Christ and his gospel.

I know all of that, but the way these words first grabbed my attention this morning stayed with me. An old school friend wondered on Facebook about where all the grasshoppers had gone. In our childhood in northeast Ohio, grasshoppers were plentiful; he said that when his Ohio grandchildren saw a grasshopper on a trip to West Virginia last year, they asked what it was. Other people from various places commented about missing monarch butterflies and crickets and a couple of wildflowers. Their disappearance is about habitat loss as well as climate change, still another way that our way of life is causing the web to unravel. Then later on in the day I read about NOAA releasing its 2012 State of the Climate report, full of news about rising ocean temperatures, rising oceans, loss of Arctic sea ice, and a continued overall warming trend.

“What will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” I began to wonder about a connection between losing our souls and losing the web of life that supports us. Our way of life, a way of life that has brought many of us comforts and conveniences that previous generations could not have imagined, has caused the web of life in which we live to begin unraveling. We are not separate from “nature”; when everything else is suffering, we are suffering, too. And if everything else dies, we will die, too.

We are, after all, creatures of the earth. Genesis 2 talks about the human being, adam, being created from the soil, adamah, inextricably connected with the earth, dependent on air and water and food from other living things to stay alive. We depend on animals and plants for more than food and ecosystem balance, though; they are our companions on this planet. The IUCN Red List of endangered species contains photographs of some of the animals and plants that are not flourishing today. A look through the pages of the Red List website is sobering. The prospect of losing these other living things to whom we are connected is very sad indeed. Their loss touches our souls because their lives and ours are bound together. Losing all of this means losing our souls, our very lives.

Right now, human beings are destroying the conditions necessary for human life to flourish. We can forfeit our souls, life itself, and continue with business as usual, or we can let go of all of that and change the way we live so that we and future generations can live. For what good does it do us to have all the stuff in the world and destroy the web of life on our planet?

Compassion for Us All

Proper 11C: Amos and Martha and Mary

Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.”… I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day. (Amos 8:4-6, 10)

Sunday’s reading from Amos (Amos 8:1-12) does not describe the people with power and money in Amos’s time in a flattering way. They walked all over poor people in order to advance their own enterprises. Far from enjoying the opportunity for rest and joy in God’s creation on the Sabbath, they were impatient for it to end so that they could get back to selling wheat and making money. While they followed the letter of the law by not working on the Sabbath, their hearts were centered on their wealth rather than God.

When we look at the people Amos describes as a group, it’s hard to find any compassion for them. They sound like arrogant, self-centered people who think their agenda is more important than the lives of those who have less than them and even more important than God and God’s commandments. But I wonder what it was like to be one of these people. A child growing up in a family and a community that has unholy priorities will learn the same twisted values as the generation before. Someone wanting to make a living and have a comfortable enough life could easily have gotten caught up in business practices that oppressed the poor out of fear that not participating in the same deceitful practices as others might put them at a disadvantage in the marketplace. Close attention to God’s word could have reminded people that their way of life was sinful, but the system that encouraged all of this taught people to care for the acquisition of wealth more than the word of God. Only those like Amos who managed to stay spiritually awake and focus on God’s could see this oppressive system for what it was. While everyone going along with the system could and ultimately would be held morally responsible for their actions, most of us know all too well how easy it would be to go along to get along.

Even while seeing from a distance how wrong this way of life was, we can then have some degree of compassion for them. If we are honest with ourselves, we can see that our own situation has a lot in common with theirs, giving us reason to feel empathy for these ancient people and reason to reflect on changes we need to make here and now.

Our culture holds up prosperity and comfort as ideals. A perfunctory practice of Christianity that ignores most of the teachings of the Gospel is encouraged in an attempt to support the pursuit of wealth and jingoism.

Just as poor people in Amos’s time suffered because of the pursuit of wealth by the powerful, the poorest people in today’s world suffer because of our pursuit of wealth. Greenhouse gas emissions, most of them historically from the wealthiest countries, have already produced enough warming to cause drought, record heat, epic flooding, and sea level rise that affects people in other places right now. Some people worry about climate change because of the effects it could have on their grandchildren, and that’s a legitimate and serious concern. But in many parts of the world, the suffering has already begun for other people’s children and grandchildren, and for adults whose seasons for planting and harvest have been disrupted, whose homes have been destroyed by floods, high winds, or rising seas, and whose risk of acquiring diseases like malaria and dengue fever have increased. So much of the suffering is invisible to most people in the United States, as it gets little news coverage and all seems so far away.  But that’s the way it has always been when poor people suffer because of the self-centeredness of others: they are all but invisible to those whose way of life produces the suffering. As Christians, though, we are called to see them and to have compassion for them.

Like the people of Amos’s time, we are caught in a system not of our own making. We can be gentle with ourselves even as we step back from it all and resolve to work for changes that make life more sustainable for all of us. God’s word can help us see the way; immersing ourselves in the Gospel can keep our eyes clear and our hearts focused. If we have compassion for ourselves, we can allow ourselves to step back from a destructive system and ground ourselves in Christ.

Sunday’s Gospel lesson (Luke 10:38-42) is the story about Jesus’s visit to the home of Martha and Mary. Mary is focused on listening to Jesus’s words, while Martha is busy with her household tasks. There will need to be a meal for the entire household and its guests, so at least some amount of work is necessary. But evidently Martha’s tasks have distracted her to the point where she isn’t listening to Jesus’s words, as he says: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

Our distractions have skewed our priorities, making it difficult to hear God’s word and making it difficult to see the very people in the world that Jesus always managed to see and feed and heal. Compassion for others calls us away from our system of selfish distractions to a willingness to see and serve those who are suffering in today’s world. Compassion for ourselves and our children and for all of our sisters and brothers on this planet calls us to ground ourselves in the Gospel so we have the strength and faith to do whatever we must to make life more sustainable for all of us and to rediscover the joy of following Christ.

The World Is Too Much With Us

(William Wordsworth)

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Who has been healed?

Proper 10C (Post 2)

Today’s Gospel lesson (Luke 10:25-37), the Good Samaritan story, asks the question “Who is my neighbor?”  The answer to that question gives us reason to pay attention to the interconnections between ourselves and our sisters and brothers all over the world, and being intentional about tending to those interconnections so that we are good neighbors gives us reason to pay attention to the interconnections between human beings and everything else in God’s creation. (See yesterday’s post, Who are our neighbors?)

Awareness of these interconnections brings us to another question, though: If I am interconnected with everyone and everything, then healing of any person or any part of creation brings some degree of healing to me, too. If the Good Samaritan and the injured man are interconnected, then the Good Samaritan’s efforts to help the other man heal also brought some degree of healing to him. People who care for others in need know this; oftentimes a hospital room prayer for healing affects the person praying and others in the room as profoundly as the person for whom they are praying. Who, then, has been healed?

On July 5 and 6, people gathered near the tar sands mining area in Alberta, for a healing walk. (See healingwalk.org for information about the walk and pictures and stories from the event.) The walk was focused on healing the environment in this area of tar sands extraction and on healing the people who are suffering from the destruction and poisoning of the land, air, and water around the tar sands extraction area.

This week Caitlyn Vernon, the Coastal Campaigner from Sierra Club BC, wrote a post Heartbreak at the Edge of Canada’s Tar Sands, about her experience of the healing walk. After describing the environmental destruction she witnessed as she walked, she writes this:

Here's what I realized as the healing walk brought heart and hope to this bleak landscape: it's not just about offering our solidarity and support to the First Nation communities most impacted by the tar sands. The healing required goes much deeper than that.

Trees can grow back. Nature is amazingly resilient, given thousands of years. But the real question is, how do we heal ourselves, and our relationship to the world around us, so that we stop inflicting such devastation in the first place? We are all in this together.

Working to heal ourselves and our relationship to the world around us is a necessary piece of bringing healing to other people and the earth that sustains us all. One of the gifts people of faith can offer as we work to heal our planet is the gift of spiritual healing. We know something about this on a deep level. That knowledge is a necessary tool to bring true healing to the people and places nearest to the poison and destruction that endanger life on this planet, and in the end to all of us.

Yesterday evening brought news of the verdict in the Florida trial of George Zimmerman for killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The trial has shown us again how far we have to go in this country to heal ourselves of fear, of racism, of hatred. Something we know from ecological work – that we are all in this together – speaks to this situation as well. We don’t have to be residents of Florida or African-Americans or members of any other discrete group of people to feel a connection to this situation and to be in need of healing. We all recognize familiar elements in this tragic killing. If we are honest, we recognize ourselves someplace in the fear on all sides, in the racial and class divisions, or in the discomfort with people different from ourselves. As Caitlyn Vernon asked about the healing walk in Canada, we can ask ourselves after yesterday’s verdict: How do we heal ourselves, and our relationship to the world around us, so that we stop inflicting such devastation in the first place?

The dots between the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida and the destruction in Alberta aren’t hard to connect when we think about fear, greed, power, and the importance of loving our neighbors as ourselves. The Gospel’s power is that Christ’s healing love is as live-giving and important in Alberta and Florida in 2013 as it was in Jesus’ time and place.

Working for a sustainable and healthy world for ourselves and our neighbors now and in generations to come requires us to work to heal ourselves and to build healthier and stronger relationships with other people and the rest of creation. It requires us to do the joyful work of living into God’s kingdom, the realm of Christ’s love. That joyful work is what makes the yoke easy and the burden light even in the midst of death and destruction.

Good Samaritan window at St. Mark's Pro-Cathedral, Hastings, NE

Who are our neighbors?

Proper 10C (Post 1)

This week’s Sunday lectionary Gospel reading (Luke 10:25-37), the Good Samaritan story, ends with these words:

Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Jesus teaches that anyone whose life touches ours, anyone with whom we might share compassion in some way, is our neighbor. We are directly and consciously connected with people all over the globe in ways that would have been unimaginable to people in Jesus’ time.

What we do in our corner of the world affects people in other places. If we pollute a stream or river, it affects our neighbors downstream. If a corporation filters the emissions from a factory so that less mercury is released into the air, it helps the people in the neighborhood of the factory, the people who breathe that air. The fertilizers and pesticides we use on our lawns, the emissions from our cars and trucks, the plastics and remnants of household chemicals that find their way into our trash all have the potential to affect our neighbors in a negative way. When we reduce or eliminate these things out of consideration for others, we are better neighbors, true neighbors.

A new report from the World Bank released last month, Turn down the heat: climate extremes, regional impacts, and the case for resilience, looks at the effects of climate change on Sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia and South Asia. Some of the poorest people in the world will be hit first and worst by increasing warming. In many cases, the people who stand to suffer the most from global warming are the people who have done the least to cause it. Those of us with big carbon footprints have more resources at our disposal to cope with climate change, at least in the short-term; we also bear more responsibility for it. Expectations for Africa are summarize in this short video from the World Bank:

Because of our relationship with our companion Diocese of Twic East, we know some of the people expected to bear the brunt of climate change in Africa. We act as neighbors when we help with development in areas such as agriculture and education and when we remember them in our prayers; they act as neighbors to us when they help us understand what is happening in their part of the world and keep us in their prayers. Since we have done much more to cause climate change than they have, acting as neighbors entails working hard to mitigate climate change.

Jesus chose the illustration of the Samaritan as the good neighbor to help us understand that our neighbors are not only the people who live nearby and whose way of life, language, and religious practices are the same as ours. Our neighbor is anyone with whom we can share compassion, anyone whose lives touch ours.

The Samaritan went out of his way to help. He stopped his own journey long enough to tend to the beaten man’s wounds, he found a safe place for him to heal, and he paid out of his own pocket for someone to continue caring for him. It wasn’t convenient, and like the priest and the Levite, he could have found an acceptable reason to do nothing. Because he went out of his way to help, he was a neighbor to the man in need.

Our greenhouse gas emissions have created a change in climate for the entire planet. By working to cut those emissions significantly and quickly, we can be neighbors to others affected by our actions. We know we could find all sorts of acceptable reasons not to act, because most of us have done that for years. By setting aside our own short-term convenience, we can be the ones who show mercy, the neighbors in the story of 2013.

(Post 2 on Sunday will look at the question of who is healed when we share compassion.)

Discipleship and Abandoning Business as Usual

Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9: 61-62)

As we prepare for our Sunday Gospel reading of Luke 9:51-62, we are hearing about record high temperatures and dangerous heat in the southwestern United States, the most recent widely publicized effect of global warming in the news in our part of the world. In India this week, there were mass cremations of hundreds of people who were killed in floods and landslides two weeks ago. Officials there predict that the final death toll will be more than 1000 people. In Canada, the city of Calgary is beginning what promises to be a long clean-up from flooding. According to this report from the CBC, “the province faces a potentially decade-long cleanup effort that could cost $5 billion by BMO Nesbitt Burns estimates.” President Obama gave a long-awaited major speech about climate change this week.

The reality of climate change is becoming clearer as both the increase in extreme weather events and the necessity of preparing for and mitigating its effects become more visible. “Business as usual” is not a realistic option any more.

In our Sunday Gospel lesson from Luke, Jesus talks about the difficulty of discipleship. When we follow Jesus, we may find ourselves in a place that doesn't feel like home: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”  Good and holy obligations, like burying the dead and saying a proper farewell to family members, are abandoned if they get in the way of discipleship. Following Jesus entails knowing that there are times when conventionally good things get in the way of the best things, the things toward which Jesus points us.

Our way of life as middle class Americans is in many ways the conventionally “good life”. We have secured many of the necessities of life in a way only dreamed of by most people in other times and places. We aren't bad people for living the way we live and enjoying our abundance, especially when we do so with thankful hearts. But knowing what we know now about the consequences of this way of life, especially our use of fossil fuels, helps us see that our conventionally good way of life is getting in the way of the greater good of caring for God’s creation and caring for the people in the world who are being affected first and worst by climate change.

Other Scripture lessons this past week have reminded us that clinging to customs and conventions, holding onto “business as usual”, is usually not the way to live in accordance with God’s will. The Eucharistic reading from Luke (Luke 1:57-80) for The Nativity of Saint John the Baptist on June 24 tells the story of John’s father, Zechariah, breaking the conventions for naming a baby. When the temporarily mute Zechariah writes “His name is John”, everyone is “amazed” at his straying from the convention of naming a baby after a family member. When Zechariah then regains his speech, fear comes over the neighbors. Readings from Acts 6 and 7 later in the week, St. Stephen’s speech to the council, remind us of other times when people later counted among the most faithful followers of God’s will were persecuted for challenging customs and conventions.

Throughout Scripture, we find a willingness to challenge business as usual when necessary part of living faithfully. Being willing to question the ways we use our resources in our homes, businesses, and churches places us in the tradition of faithful disciples. We may very well need to choose between some traditions and customs that are dear to us in order to be faithful followers of Jesus. Our church buildings may need to be different in size and structure, or existing space may need to be used differently. The ways we prepare and serve food, the materials and activities we offer our children and youth, the ways in which we meet or communicate to do the work of the church are all areas that may require a change. And it’s time for the church to look prayerfully at our investments in the fossil fuel industry and consider whether those investments reflect faithful stewardship of our resources. Deciding to divest from fossil fuel companies and re-invest in companies creating new and less harmful ways of producing energy may necessitate some difficult conversations, but may well be one of the ways Christ is calling the church to lead in the 21^st century.

Excuses

Daily Office Reflection

Some days when I've read about the impacts climate change already has on the web of life on our planet, or when I've experienced the extreme or unseasonable weather events of “global weirding”, or when I've heard about what our political leaders and the media deem important and then compare it to the reality of what is unfolding as a result of greenhouse gas pollution, I wonder about our huge capacity for denial and inaction. Most Americans know on some level that climate change is happening and that humankind is responsible for most of the changes in global climate, but that knowledge isn't deep enough to make a difference in our lives. We continue to make long-range plans as if everything will stay the same, we continue to produce and use energy in ways we know are harmful, and we continue to accept the priorities of leaders who bury climate change way down the list of things needing our attention. The disparity between what we know and how we live is so great that it sometimes seems surreal.

Today’s Daily Office lessons bring together two themes that can speak to us in this new world of global warming and also remind us that while this new situation is on a scale we have never before known – truly global and truly life-threatening to all living things -- our often indifferent response to it and the reasons for that indifference are deeply rooted in the human spiritual condition.

The passage from Paul’s First Letter to Timothy (I Timothy 6:6-21) advises being content to have the basics like food and clothing. When we are not content and focus on getting more money to get more than the necessities, we wander away from a focus on the faith and the way of life Christ taught us. “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil,” says Paul. For those of us who already are among the wealthy in this world, people who like most Americans have much more than the basic necessities, we are “to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share.”

It’s easy to see how the love of money from the fossil fuel industry influences our political leaders and keeps us from changing our energy policies as fast and completely as we need to change them to avert the worst of global warming; it’s easy to see how certain politicians and business leaders place the love of money above the love for caring for God’s creation. It’s perhaps not so easy for some of us to see how the love of money lies at many of the excuses the rest of us make for accepting the status quo. That’s where today’s Gospel reading (Luke 14:12-24) can help.

In response to someone at a dinner party exclaiming, “Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!” Jesus tells the story about the guests invited to a great banquet making excuses for not going. They are all good excuses; for each, there is something they consider more important that needs their attention. After inviting instead the people who would usually not be invited to such a gathering, and then anyone who could be compelled to go, the host says “none of those who were invited will taste my dinner.” Good things, things we all consider important, provide excuses for not tending to the best thing, ultimately resulting in a great loss for us.

We don’t do the things we might do to advocate for meaningful action on climate change because our busy lives are full of good things to do that seem more important at the moment. We don’t practice environmental stewardship as well as we might in our homes and parishes because there are other things, many of them good and important things, that take priority for us. Surely part of answering an invitation to a banquet in God’s kingdom is living now as if the essential gifts God has given us for life on this planet are worth conserving. Concern for our neighbors near and far who are already suffering from the impacts of climate change and concern for future generations (and for our own future) require us to set aside those good but nonessential things that lull us into existential denial and create the great gap between what we know and how we live. Being content with what we have and listening with honest and open hearts for our own excuses can help our willingness to act be more consistent with the knowledge we have. 

Hope at Pentecost

This Pentecost morning I preached at Grace Episcopal Church in Columbus, Nebraska, and included some thoughts about what hope might look like in the face of global warming. Here’s an excerpt:

Jesus said, “[God] will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth…Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” (John 14: 16,17, 27)

In this morning’s lesson from Romans (Romans 8:12-25), St. Paul says that “hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?” In other words, if we know that something we desire will happen, we don’t call that knowledge hope. Hope is being mindful of the possibility of something good; it's not the knowledge that something that is definitely going to happen is going to happen. If I know that today is Pentecost, if I see it right there on the church calendar, then it would seem odd to say that I hope that today is Pentecost. I might hope that the weather will be nice on Pentecost or hope that people come to church on Pentecost, but I don’t hope that it’s Pentecost because I know that no matter what the weather or the attendance, today simply is Pentecost.

We might wonder what hope looks like in this century, especially in light of the environmental challenges before us. Last week, the level of carbon dioxide measured in the atmosphere at the Mauna Loa observatory hit 400 parts per million for the first time in human history. Scientists tell us that to prevent catastrophic warming, that level needs to be no higher than 350 parts per million. We are already seeing an increase in extreme weather – drought, storms, floods, extreme temperatures, already seeing a dramatic decrease in the volume of Arctic ice, and already seeing the effects of these things on humans and other living things. I read this week (Geoffrey Lean, The Telegraph) about two villages in Fiji that are moving uphill and inland to escape rising sea levels, leaving behind, as one official put it, the place where “they have stored their history, their genealogy and their very being”.   On the other side of the Pacific from Fiji, the villagers of Newtok, Alaska, are also preparing to move. Newtok is built on permafrost which is no longer permanent; the melting ground is now too unstable to support buildings and roads. There will in future years be fewer and fewer livable places to which we can move. We know that the changes we are already seeing will be with us long-term no matter what we do now; the challenge is to avoid the worst.

We don’t think about all of this much; we at least don’t hear as much about this in the news as we do lesser things, even trivial things.  We aren’t used to having to think about such things, and we don’t know how to think about them. Christians, though, know how to think about hope, and that makes it possible for us to hold all of this and look at it and think about it. What does hope look like now?

Hope is indeed as Paul describes it, even as the whole creation groans in suffering. Hope is what helps us have the will and the energy to do what we can; and we in turn find new hope when we work with others to turn this around, to advocate for cleaner energy sources, to break the silence from our leaders and the media that keeps us from doing what needs to be done. Hope is in the end trust in God’s goodness; it is believing that even if we cannot imagine or envision a good end to the story, God is good. We are Easter people who know that God brings life where we can see only death; we are also Pentecost people who at our best are open to receiving the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, and to acting faithfully in response to the Spirit.

Today is the birthday of the church and a day we gather in joy in the name of God: the Source of All Being, Incarnate Word, and Holy Spirit. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. Amen.

On the road to Columbus this morning