The King of All Creation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catastrophe and Faith

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

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

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

November tree

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

November daisies in Nebraska

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

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

Rich in Soul

Annual Council ended today, and from where I sat it looked like an energizing and renewing event for most of us in attendance. The focus on mission “From every family, language, people and nation” was centered on the establishment of a global companion relationship among our diocese and the Dioceses of the Dominican Republic and of Twic East in Southern Sudan.  The theme of mission showed up throughout our meeting, though.

At the Council Eucharist, the processional hymn was “God of grace and God of glory” (Hymn 594). The words “shame our wanton, selfish gladness, rich in things and poor in soul” summarize a large part of the importance of connecting our spiritual lives with a concern for the environment. Habits of over-consumption that harm our planet also harm our souls. “Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, lest we miss thy kingdom’s goal” is a good prayer for us as we consider the church’s role in addressing the environmental challenges of our time.

Thank you to everyone who spoke with me about environmental stewardship during Annual Council! It was exciting to hear about what is happening in some of our parishes and to find others who are enthusiastic about taking care of the Earth. Because of the timing of the environmental stewardship presentation, some folks who were interested in certain resources weren’t able to pick them up at the display before leaving for home, so here are some links:

The brochure about eco-palms is available here from the Center for Integrated Natural Resources and Agricultural Management at the University of Minnesota.

Click here for information about the GreenFaith Certification Program for congregations. Click on this link to Episcopal Life Online for more information about grants available to Episcopal parishes who want to apply for the program. New Green Opportunity for Parishes was an earlier post on this blog about the program.


Someone asked for a list of the books on display; please send me a message if you want that list! I'm also happy to send the page of suggested first steps toward a greener parish to anyone who wants a copy.


And for those who liked the story about the treasures we discovered during our October 10 clean-up, the post about that, Grace, is here. 

"Save us from weak resignation to the evils we deplore...Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, serving thee whom we adore."

The Joy of Composting Redux

…and Double Digging, Too!

November petunia

“No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds, November!” ends a poem by Thomas Hood. I remember reading this to my children on some gray November days that must have been much like the days that inspired Hood to write those words. That’s not an accurate description of our part of Nebraska this year, though, and especially not on a warm, sunny day like today. There is still fruit; today before pulling the mostly frozen tomato plants from my garden, I picked a handful of ripe cherry tomatoes. There are flowers, not only the unexceptional chrysanthemums and marigolds in sheltered places, but a few of the more tender annuals, like petunias, continue to bloom here and there. The trees have remarkably more leaves than usual in November, and birds are out and about.

My very small garden beds yielded a constant supply of tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers through October. Despite generally warmer than normal temperatures, though, a freeze last week nipped enough plants to make this a good day to clean up the vegetable patches. After pulling the plants, my husband and I dug compost into the soil. The space this freed up in the compost bin was soon filled with layers of dry leaves and the plants we had pulled. The remains of this summer’s tomatoes and peppers and leaves will renew the soil and nourish next summer’s garden.

A post last April about composting said:

Composting is a literally down-to-earth project, something that helps us connect to the Earth and to the basic functions and patterns of living things. The reminder of this connection several times a day as I set aside scraps and garden clippings for the compost pile ends up being a sort of prayer woven through the day, a sense of connectedness to God’s creation, a reminder of our role in caring for creation.  Through these things, it’s a reminder of humility in its true sense: who we are and whose we are.

Compost ready to use

Seven months later, those scraps and clippings and spent flowers have been transformed into a constant source of nourishment for other plants. If setting these things aside was a sort of prayer, the resulting compost is an allegory of how God receives our humble daily prayers and transforms them into something greater that becomes a constant source of nourishment for us and those for whom we pray.

This week brought more reports of record warm temperatures this year and of a pattern of new record highs outpacing record lows by a significant ratio. The preliminary data for October from the Mauna Loa observatory  shows 387.18 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (with 350 ppm being considered the upper safe limit).

A deep connection to the Earth, a love of creation, makes us grieve when we become aware of what is happening, but the joy in this same connection can serve as an antidote to despair. Both our spiritual practices, like prayer for humankind and our planet, and our practices of stewardship, like composting, give us a way of coping spiritually and emotionally with climate change while doing what we can to improve the situation.

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Last month, while most of the garden was still producing fruit, I used a couple of empty rows of one bed to try double digging. This is an old garden practice that I had never tried, but which had intrigued me ever since I saw a Victory Garden podcast about it four years ago. (You can see it here.) It’s a great way of amending soil. I used regular compost instead of composted manure. Double digging involves turning the topsoil along with loosening the subsoil and adding compost down deep. For me, double digging was very satisfying. With several small, orderly steps, a fairly large area of soil gets altered in a way that makes it more productive for several years. Now that other areas of the garden are bare and the ground hasn’t frozen, I plan to do more of this.

Blessings, Woes, and Footprints

The All Saints Day Gospel reading this year is Luke 6:20-31, the Sermon on the Plain. In contrast to Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount that names groups of people who are “blessed” (makarios -- happy or fortunate), Luke’s parallel passage names both categories of people who are blessed and categories of people who are not so blessed, the ones who hear Jesus saying “Woe to you”. The striking thing about Luke's passage, of course, is that the people we would normally consider to be afflicted with some sort of hardship end up being the ones Jesus labels as blessed, and the ones we would normally consider to have advantages in life are the ones Jesus labels as afflicted. Things are not always what they seem to be on the surface!

Yesterday’s Daily Office reading from Luke (Luke 12:13-21) was the parable about the rich man who planned to build bigger barns to hold all his stuff, but who neglected the important things so that he was “not rich toward God”. Jesus told this parable as a warning against greed. The man in the parable thought he had it all, but discovered instead that he had completely missed the most important things in life. Perhaps he was the sort of person Jesus had in mind when he said, “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation”

Becoming more intentional about creation care can help us shift our focus away from the accumulation of more and more stuff and towards the sort of life that brings us true blessings.

When we learn about environmental degradation and its effect on the most vulnerable people (and other living things) on the planet, we bring ourselves to a place where we can open our hearts to selflessness instead of selfishness, to giving instead of greed. Learning to make the connection between our own accumulation of things and the effect of those things -- including their transportation and packaging, and their eventual disposal -- on the environment helps us to put the acquisition of more things in perspective.

Calculating an individual ecological footprint can help make us aware of the resources we use and where we might make changes to reduce our footprint. One of many footprint calculators can be found here from The Footprint Network.

Creation care keeps us in touch with the beauty and wonder that are ours for the noticing. Rediscovering the natural world can help us open our hearts as we respond in gratitude to God’s gift of creation. We find that the beauty of the sky, the plants, the waters, the animals, and the rocks and earth itself is more beautiful than anything money can buy. Experiencing the beauty and wonder of creation helps us strengthen our relationship with God, the Creator.

When the pursuit of riches, the accumulation of more stuff, is no longer a priority for us, we are blessed. When we rejoice in the beauty and wonder of creation, we discover that we are already makarios, already happy and fortunate, and that the happiness we’ve found is deeper and more lasting than our excitement over the acquisition of another shiny thing. Today’s Daily Office lesson (Luke 12: 32-48) teaches us to “make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no moth destroys and no thief comes near”. In what on the surface looks like a sort of spiritual paradox, when we are good stewards of what we have on earth, we end up letting go of our attachment to the things that don’t last. 

Disappearing Homes

“Abandonment and Retreat”

Yesterday’s Washington Post told about the collapse of the last remaining house on a disappearing island in Chesapeake Bay.  The article explains that sea levels in Chesapeake Bay are rising more quickly than in most other coastal regions because the fairly recent phenomenon of overall rising oceans is combined there with an ancient geological phenomenon that is causing an overall sinking of the area. The two factors working together have produced some dramatic results on islands where villages were home to people in the 20th century.

Toward the end of the article is mention that the disappearance of this one house isn’t an isolated event; the entire Chesapeake Bay is expected to be affected by this. “And Maryland is contemplating how to, in one official's words, ‘facilitate abandonment and retreat’ when faster-rising waters eventually threaten towns on the Eastern Shore's mainland.”

I came across this article after reading something with less immediate human interest but of great significance, pointing to the greatest melting in Greenland since records were first kept in the 19^th century. Meltdown in Greenland: inland ice drips away at record speed is an article posted on www.denmark.dk, the official website of Denmark. “New calculations show that the amount of melted inland ice in Greenland is 25-50% higher in 2010 than normally,” says the report from a Danish research scientist, Sebastian Mernild, working at the Los Alamos lab. The accelerated melting in Greenland this summer is further evidence that Arctic melting is proceeding faster than expected. This is the same summer in which the notoriously big – four times the size of Manhattan -- piece of the Petermann glacier break off.

As oceans rise, huge numbers of people all around the world will be displaced. Homes have already disappeared some places. This article from Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald tells about the work of photographer Rodney Dekker who traveled to Bangladesh to show others the human cost of climate change. The article notes that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the rising sea will cover 17% of Bangladesh by 2050, which would displace 20 million people. An unimaginable number of homes will disappear in that country alone! Given the acceleration in Arctic melting, the IPCC report is now generally considered to be conservative in its predictions.

For Nebraskans, this can all seem very far away. But if huge numbers of homes disappear in coastal areas, there will be huge numbers of climate refugees. Immigration reform is already a major political issue in Nebraska; when millions of people’s homes have disappeared, moving somewhere else will be their only option. Add to that people forced to move from our own nation’s low-lying coastal areas – think about the people fleeing New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, for example – and it’s easy to imagine that we will feel the effects even if we were to try to isolate ourselves from them. And as Christians, we are called away from selfish isolation to serve those in need. We are called to welcome the stranger, to love others whose homes have disappeared the way we would want to loved if we were the climate refugees.

We are good at helping our neighbors in Nebraska after a tornado or fire destroys a home. When Jesus was asked, “Who is my neighbor?” he told the parable of the Good Samaritan. Our neighbors might be strangers, people on the road who need our help. When we see our global neighbors, Jesus calls us away from abandonment of their needs and retreat into isolation.

Given all of this, we are called to be good stewards, to promote a sustainable environment. It seems that another good role for the church now – as always – is truth telling. Jesus told the truth about the cross even though the disciples didn’t want to hear it, and he also told the truth about the resurrection. Thinking about the possibilities of climate change and what that means in terms of human needs takes most of us outside of our comfort zone; we would rather not hear it.

Along with rising sea levels are the unknown effects of climate change on agriculture, on food supply chains, on our economy as a whole. The security of our metaphorical home, that mental place where we assume a certain level of stability in the essentials of life in the middle of the United States, may also disappear. Finding our true home, our true security, in God – always a sound spiritual practice – will be more essential than ever. Flexibility and adaptability as people and as a church will be essential if we are to continue serving as the Body of Christ. Openness to the truth and to abandonment of our false securities points to the hope in all of this, that at home in Christ we will continue to find nourishment and meaning.

**

For more about climate refugees, see this recent National Catholic Reporter review of the book Climate Refugees.

The documentary Climate Refugees is described on the Sundance Festival website here.  This is a trailer of the film:

The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

(Luke 18:9-14)

How intentional would we be about environmental stewardship if we considered the needs of others as much as we consider our own comparatively short-term self interest? This question came to me as I thought about yesterday’s reflection in Forward Day By Day.

The reflection was on the story of the Good Samaritan, but the author of the reflection (written in 1967 and republished as part of Forward’s 75^th anniversary retrospective) brought in the parable of the Pharisee and tax collector to make a point. This latter parable (Luke 18:9-14) is the Gospel lesson for this Sunday. The author’s point in the comparison was this: in both parables, Jesus says that someone who was scrupulously observant of the Law is not acting rightly because he is either ignoring or despising others. The Pharisee in Sunday’s parable actually stands in the temple giving thanks to God that he isn’t like other people, those less pure people like the tax collector standing near him.

The author of this 1967 reflection wrote: “[W]hat wonders would take place if we demanded of our elected representatives that human need, rather than self-interest, be the only criterion in politics, in social welfare, and in international relations!”  We can ask the same question of ourselves as we look at pollution and climate change and consider – all too slowly – how and whether to make changes that would give us a chance at long-term sustainability.  

Coal train in Nebraska

Does it matter whether we switch to a greener economy because we become convinced that it’s in our own short-term best interest, that’s there’s money to be made in wind or solar energy; or because we look ahead and realize our current economy isn’t sustainable and so it’s in our long-term best interest to make some changes; or because we love the Creator, and so love the creation and the connection to God we experience through it; or because we hear the cries of God’s children in other places who are already suffering the effects of climate change and pollution?  Does it matter whether we do it for our own self-interest or out of love? Secular environmentalists and some religious environmentalists think that the reason doesn’t matter; what matters is that we make the change before it’s too late. That’s tempting, but Jesus taught that what’s in our hearts matters.

Knowing the benefits to ourselves of being greener helps make the changes easier, but if self-interest is our only reason for action, it’s not what Christ asks of his followers. Moreover, at any point where the going gets tough, I might decide that my self-interest lies elsewhere and decide to go back to the old ways.

But maybe the distinction between selfishness and love collapses with the last sentence of this Sunday’s lesson: “[A]ll who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” From Christ’s perspective, choosing to put ourselves first is always a short-term choice. Healthy love for ourselves is intertwined with love for God and love our neighbor. Self-love that is divorced from love for others eventually shows itself to be something else, something other than love.

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Take time to smell the mums!