St. Francis Day: “What did you do once you knew?”

Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Wind,
and through the air, cloudy and serene,
and every kind of weather through which
You give sustenance to Your creatures.

As we remember St. Francis today in Nebraska, Brother Wind is very much in evidence, from the winter storm winds in the northwest to the aftermath of last night’s tornadoes in the southeast and everywhere in between. Meteorologists tell us that we have had an unusual weather pattern for early October, and as I sit on my porch in south central Nebraska writing this, it feels more like early September than early October. I know this warmth will be short-lived, though, as those cold winds out of the northwest will get here soon. I also know that unusual weather patterns with more severe storms dumping heavy precipitation are what climate scientists have predicted as global temperatures warm, the Arctic ice melts, and the Earth changes in very significant ways. Yesterday our area got a record amount of rainfall for a day in October. The Platte River was already bank full with water from the September rains in Colorado, resulting in the countryside looked in many ways more like it does during a spring thaw than in a more typical October.

Skiers are excited about the early and plentiful snows in parts of the Rockies. Farmers always welcome moisture for the soil, but would prefer dry conditions as the harvest season progresses. Some football fans will welcome cooler temperatures in Lincoln tomorrow, while others will be unhappy if the wind makes tailgating difficult or a cold wind brings discomfort. From what we know of St. Francis, I suspect he would rejoice in the snow, the storms, the wind, the rain, and whatever else he experienced in God’s creation. We celebrate his compassion for animals, bringing pets and farm animals to churches for a blessing on this day, but of course his compassion extended much farther than the animal kingdom.

Most notably, Francis had compassion for poor people. Born into comfortable circumstances, he left all of that to live as poor people lived. Today we might say he stood in solidarity with the poor. His compassion extended to all living things: people, plants, water, the wind, the sun, moon, and stars. His compassion even extended to death itself, part of the great web and cycles of life.

His compassion which flowed out of his love for Christ was evident in his loving restoration of ruined churches and in his creation of the first crèche to make the story of the Nativity more accessible to people. He did not neglect worship, and his attention to the words of Christ in the Gospel guided his heart and his mind. But he also did not neglect action in the world.

Francis was never ordained as a priest, but served the Church as a deacon. Our understanding of deacons today is that our attention to the Gospel and our love of Christ result at least as much in service in the wider world as in service within the institution of the Church. As Francis understood, when the Gospel works long enough on someone’s heart and mind, the natural result is compassion that extends in an ever-widening circle.

The great work for Christians today is to extend that circle of compassion not only in wider and wider circles in our present world, and also to extend that circle to future generations. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Fifth Assessment Report , released at the end of September, is clear about the significant negative consequences of unmitigated global warming on today's children and those who come after them, and it is also clear that we can indeed mitigate the consequences if we care enough to make the necessary changes now. Compassion says that if we see a big problem for future generations and can do something ourselves right now to prevent suffering 20, 50, 100, or 200 years from now, we should do it.

Poet Drew Dellinger recites an excerpt from his poem Hieroglyphic Stairway that is a good place to begin prayerful reflection on this St. Francis Day:

If people fifty years from now asked, how would we answer the question "What did you do once you knew?"

Magnitude: God, Wonders of the World, and Hearts to Care

The discovery of three big geographical features – a canyon, a volcano, and a cave – have been in the news in the past month, opening more of the wonder of the world to us.

We care for the Earth because of our love of God and because of our love for God’s creation. The more grounded we are in wonder at the world around us, the deeper our commitment to caring for creation. There is plenty of recent bad news about climate change and its effects, but there has also been recent news about the wonder in the world.

In addition, the size of all three of these wonders helps us better think about the magnitude of God and helps us imagine the scale of the ecological crisis we face this century. Most importantly, such wonders can open our minds and hearts to care about our world.

The canyon, which lies under a mile of ice in Greenland, is at least 460 miles long and as deep as 2,600 feet, making it longer than the Grand Canyon and similar in depth to it. A news release from NASA explains that data from NASA’s Operation IceBridge helped scientists discover the canyon. 

Nature reported the discovery of the largest single volcano on Earth, a “650-kilometre-wide beast the size of the British Isles lurking beneath the waters of the northwest Pacific Ocean.” The existence of a large structure in this location has been known for quite awhile, but geophysicists only recently discovered that it is a single volcano with a single vent. It rivals the size of the Olympus Mons in Mars, which was formerly thought to be the biggest volcano in our solar system. William Sager, a marine geologist at the University of Houston, suggests that further wonders might be discovered as scientists are able to do more research:

Because ship time is at a premium, the study is one of the first to peer at the internal geometry of these massive underwater mountains. It is possible that other megavolcanoes are waiting to be discovered. “There may be bigger ones out there,” says Sager.

Perhaps the most beautiful of these three recent discoveries, the Son Doong cave in Vietnam was first explored in 2009. An entrance to the cave was discovered in 1991, but the steep drop into the cave discouraged exploration. A recent Huffington Post article announcing the opening of the cave for tours says that the cave is “over 5.5 miles long, has a jungle and river, and could fit a 40-story skyscraper within its walls.” The jungle that grew inside the cave when part of the roof collapsed and let in sunlight makes this cave as wondrous as does its size. Click on the article link to see photos from inside the cave, and take a look at this clip from the BBC’s “How to Grow a Planet” filmed in the jungle: 

No matter how many photos or videos we see of canyons or oceans or any other large geographical wonder, and no matter how many comparisons we are given (e.g. fitting a 40-story skyscraper inside the cave), nothing quite prepares us for the felt reality of the size of these things when we stand on the rim of a canyon or the edge of an ocean. Words and two-dimensional images can’t convey their magnitude.

Scripture tells us repeatedly that we cannot grasp the magnitude and majesty of God, but because experiences of God and fleeting moments of the felt reality of God compel people to try to describe the indescribable, Scripture also offers descriptions and comparisons to what we do know. (See Psalm 92, for example.) Even though we cannot begin to comprehend God's greatness, we need such passages to remind us of that fact and to help us remember who it is that we worship. When we get absorbed in a comfortable routine of worship and church activities, the familiarity and attention to minutiae can lead us to think of God as something much smaller than God is, as someone closer to our own size and abilities.

It’s good for our souls to stretch our imaginations and concepts from time to time and intentionally focus on the size and wonder of the universe and on the size and wonder of the Creator. Paying attention to some of the wonders in God’s creation on earth, like these recent discoveries, can help us with that exercise.

In turn, gaining perspective on the magnitude of God and the universe and some of the wonders right here on earth gives us the imaginative capacity to begin to understand what climate scientists are telling us about the future and how different it will be because of global warming. It gives us some idea of the scale of what is at stake.

In the end, time and energy spent enjoying the wonders of God’s creation are inseparable from time and energy spent on actively caring for the Earth. Exercising our capacity to wonder and to contemplate the magnitude of creation and the Creator helps us better grasp the magnitude of what we face this century if we continue on the course we are on now. It also keeps us deeply connected to the rest of creation and fills us with enough love to care about our world.

Elijah's Question and Floods in Colorado

Our Daily Office lectionary today included I Kings 18:20-40. This is the story of Elijah and the 450 prophets of Baal, with both Elijah and the prophets of Baal preparing a sacrifice and asking their respective deities to send down the fire to burn the sacrifice. Elijah sets up the reason for the test this way:

 Elijah then came near to all the people, and said, ‘How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.’ 

In other words, Elijah tells them to decide. It’s not possible to worship the Lord and to worship Baal. Elijah is calling for the people to be of one mind instead of two; he is calling them to wholeness, to integrity of word, thought, and action.

Even before I began this morning’s Daily Office reading the terrible flooding along the Front Range in our neighboring state of Colorado was on my mind, and it remained in my thoughts and prayers all day. Throughout the day, I followed stories of rescues and read information about where the flooding was the worst and which roads were closed. The more I heard and read, the more I realized how exceptional this event has been. (See Colorado Flash Flooding: How It Happened, How Unusual? from The Weather Channel for a report of some of its exceptional characteristics.) Not only was there an extraordinary amount of rain produced from an extraordinary amount of moisture in the atmosphere, but the scope of the flooding, the area covered and the number of places affected, distinguishes this from other major floods that have occurred in the region.

Climate scientists had predicted just this sort of scenario as global warming increases:

prolonged periods of heat and drought alternating with heavy precipitation events. Warmer winters have allowed bark beetles to thrive and kill pine trees. With large areas of dead trees coupled with drought and high temperatures, wildfires have left mountainsides bare in several places. Then when record-breaking rainfalls come along, the flooding and its damage are exacerbated by the lack of vegetation.

A post from Subhankar Banerjee (author of Arctic Voices) recalls an outdoor art installation in Boulder six years ago called "Connect the Dots: Mapping the Highwater Hazards and History of Boulder Creek." The installation used blue discs to mark the level of a 500-year flood, and it was part of an art exhibition called “Weather Report: Art and Climate Change”. The intention of the blue dots was to make the warning about future floods less abstract, to take the warning of future levels of flooding outside of people’s previous experience and make the warning more real.

People reading along with the Diocese of Nebraska’s 2013 Bible Challenge are reading Jeremiah right now. The idea of the Connect the Dots exhibit is similar to the sorts of concrete – and often dramatic – actions that God asked Jeremiah and other prophets to do in order to make their prophetic words more concrete and less abstract. (In Jeremiah 19, for example, God has Jeremiah break an earthenware jug to illustrate how God would break the people and the city.)

When the predicted effects of continuing climate change are too abstract, many people find it easy to be of two minds. It’s easy to recognize on a purely intellectual, abstract level what scientists predict as the Earth continues to warm and yet to live our daily lives as if nothing at all has changed. The more real those effects get, though, the more easily we should be able to respond in ways consistent with what we already know. Right now, it seems that most Americans know that global warming is happening, and yet we don’t seem to know this in a way that makes any difference. In most of our personal and political conversations, in our planning for the future, and in the ways we choose to live, we act and talk as if we live on a planet with a stable climate. We know and yet we don’t know.

Along with Elijah’s question, “How long will you go limping with two different opinions?” our Daily Office lectionary brought us John the Baptist (Matthew 3:1-12) exhorting the people to “Bear fruit worthy of repentance”, to act in ways that reflect who they say they are and what they say they believe. Like Elijah, John the Baptist is concerned with what we say we believe and who we say we are being consistent with who we show ourselves to be in our choices and actions.

At the end of his post, Subhankar Banerjee writes:

The Weather Report: Art and Climate Change exhibition, which happened in 2007, visually gave warnings about a deadly flood in the Boulder Creek. Six years have passed. America is yet to take any meaningful action on climate change. Will the death and devastation from this week's flood in Colorado simply pass us by as a mere spectacle?

How long will we go limping with two different opinions?

We pray for all those dealing with the flooding in Colorado. We pray for those who mourn loved ones who have died and for those who have suffered losses of property. We pray for protection and strength for those who are risking their own safety to help others, and for those who are most vulnerable.

Almighty God, in giving us dominion over things on earth you made us fellow workers in your creation: Give us wisdom and reverence so to use the resources of nature, that no one may suffer from our abuse of them, and that generations yet to come may continue to praise you for your bounty; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Collect For the Conservation of Natural Resources (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 827)

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.)