Ash Wednesday

For our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us,

Accept our repentance, Lord.

Recently a relatively new acquaintance in the diocese told me that when he first met me and heard me talk about my ministry, he didn’t understand why anyone would do environmental ministry; for him it didn’t seem to fit the model of other ministries of the church. But he then said that after hearing me talk about creation care, he had begun to notice how often we pray for the earth and its resources, for God’s creation, and realized that concern for creation is found throughout our liturgy. I thought about this conversation after our midday Ash Wednesday service because repentance for our poor stewardship of the environment and for our lack of concern about that poor stewardship is spelled out clearly in these lines from the Litany of Penitence.

In fact, many of the sins we confess in the Litany of Penitence are directly related to issues of environmental stewardship: self-indulgence, exploitation of other people, an intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, and our blindness to human needs and suffering (including the suffering of people whose health is affected by air and water pollution or climate change). As we pray this litany on Ash Wednesday, it’s easy to read the words and move on to the next part of the litany without connecting what we are saying to any particular actions or situations; it’s easy to be sincere about our penitence on an abstract level without connecting that penitence to areas where we could and should make changes in our own lives. It might be good to find some quiet time early on during Lent to pray through the Litany of Penitence (pp. 267-269 in the Book of Common Prayer) slowly, taking the time to think more specifically about where we have fallen short so that we can truly repent and turn toward better ways of living our lives.

Today’s lectionary text from Isaiah (Isaiah 58:1-12) says that a true fast, a day truly acceptable to the Lord, consists of acts of mercy and justice. When we do these things, says Isaiah, we will find ourselves strengthened and guided by God. The passage ends with the statement that those who meet the needs of others and relieve suffering will “be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in”. Pollution and climate change are leaving many places where people live in need of restoration. God has work for us to do when we get up off our knees.

Lenten Alternatives

Spring is coming, and Lent begins tomorrow. Anticipating Lent, I've been paying attention to incoming messages about Lenten disciplines that are intended to help us become more faithful stewards of the environment. These are pre-packaged Lenten disciplines; participants commit to the general idea of carbon reduction or environmental stewardship, and then follow daily suggestions for carrying out that commitment. They are especially useful for folks who want to do something to become better stewards but who don’t know where to begin.

Along with looking at these creative approaches to Lenten fasting, I’ve been thinking about my own Lenten discipline, trying to get a feel for whether one of these programs or some other discipline feels like something that might best deepen my own discipleship during Lent. For this post, I’m offering links to a couple of the growing number of environmentally-related “pre-packaged” Lenten disciplines, then describing another alternative coming from a slightly different direction.

The United Church of Christ has developed an Ecumenical Lenten Carbon Fast. Participants will receive a daily e-mail message with a suggestion for reducing carbon. A nice feature of this program is the promise that, where possible, a quantitative measure of the carbon reduction from the activity will be provided – an important feature for people who want to get some sense of how much difference such activities can make. Since this program will come as daily e-mails, I haven’t seen an overview of the activities, but it sounds as if it will be very focused on actual carbon reduction. As an alternative to signing up for the e-mails, the Ecumenical Lenten Carbon Fast has a Facebook page where the daily activities will be posted.

Several other carbon fast programs combine true carbon-fasting activities with activities that develop good stewardship in other areas. Earth Ministries and Washington Interfaith Power & Light offers a carbon fast calendar that suggests a carbon-reducing activity on most days with an occasional activity focused on other areas, such as water conservation. Having this program as a calendar to view on the computer or to print makes it especially attractive for families taking on the discipline together. Children can anticipate the activities for coming days, and parents can think ahead about how to carry out the activity in their particular household.

The Tearfund in the UK has designed a carbon fast that includes activities that address overconsumption and nudge us closer to simpler living. The Tearfund is dedicated to reducing poverty, so their program is very intentional about setting carbon-reduction and the other activities within the context of global justice.

As an alternative to carbon fasts that mirror the traditional fasts of Lent, we might do something that shifts the focus just a bit to the sort of self-renewal that leads to renewal not only to an ongoing commitment to environmental stewardship but also to the sort of deep connection with the non-human world that deepens our relationship with God the Creator and God’s Son through whom, as we confess in the Nicene Creed, all things were made.

It’s fairly simple: Find a way each day to honor God through some action that tends to the connection we have to God through creation, and include a prayer of gratitude for God’s creation as part of that action. Some days this may look similar to the carbon fast activities, being intentional about caring for some aspect of God’s creation while giving thanks for that aspect of creation. Other days it might be something that doesn’t look at all like a fast -- spending some time really looking at the spring flowers that will begin blooming during Lent, going out to see the Sandhill cranes, planning or planting an early spring garden. It may simply be sitting in the sun and listening to the birds.

The point is to find something that works to renew our connection to the earth in a way that we experience as a deepening of our connection to God and to be intentional about thanking God for some specific part of creation. The hope is that the renewal of that connection and our gratitude for creation will bring us closer to God, to a place where care for God’s creation flows naturally from our relationship to God.

Eco-Palms

With Palm Sunday two months away, reminders to order palms for the Palm Sunday liturgy are starting to arrive at parish offices.

Last year St. Stephen’s ordered palms through the Eco-Palms project through The University of Minnesota Center for Integrated Natural Resources and Agricultural Management (CINRAM). These branches of the chamaedorea palm were lovely, and worked very well for arrangements in vases and for us to wave in procession. New to the Eco-Palms website this year is a link to The Episcopal Church as one of its partners.

The primary reason to consider ordering eco-palms is that the way they are harvested, emphasizing quality of the branches over the quantity harvested, is environmentally sustainable and also results in better pay for the workers. Consideration of the effects of our purchase of palms on both the people who harvest them and on God’s creation is important given that we use them to hail Jesus as our King.

In last year’s post about eco-palms, it was noted that the rubrics for Palm Sunday in the Book of Common Prayer (p. 270) talk about distributing “branches of palm or of other trees or shrubs” to people to be carried in the procession. In his Commentary on the American Prayer Book, Marion Hatchett wrote (p. 225) that these rubrics encourage the use of branches rather than fronds or small crosses “which can hardly be waved and certainly fail to signify a parade”. Our parish found that the change palms last year from a thin reedlike frond to full chamaedorea palms helped to change the tone of the procession. The more celebratory tone of the procession called attention to the contrast between the festive procession and the reading of the Passion Gospel later on in the service, creating a more profound liturgical experience.

I hear that there was enough of a touch of springlike weather in Nebraska last week to be anticipating Lent. I’ve been away on the Hawaiian islands of Kaua’i and Maui, reminded once again of the goodness and richness of God’s creation – seabirds, whales, flowers, and an incredible variety of palms. And back home, the Sandhill cranes, our own striking sign of the goodness and richness of creation, are beginning to arrive back in the Platte River valley. As we rejoice in the early promises of spring and anticipate the holy season of Lent, being good stewards of creation can deepen our connection with God.

Good News for St. Stephen's!

GreenFaith Certification Program

Last October, the Episcopal Church and GreenFaith announced a collaboration to enroll Episcopal parishes in the GreenFaith Certification Program. For parishes successfully completing the application process, GreenFaith provides a two-year program to help the parish become greener and become a leader for other Episcopal parishes across the country and other congregations of any faith locally, while the Episcopal Church provides half of the tuition cost for the parish.

At St. Stephen’s, we brought the proposal to the vestry, formed a Green Team, and completed the application process with a February 1 deadline. Yesterday we learned that our application was accepted! We are the first congregation of any denomination or faith tradition in Nebraska to join the Green Certification program.

We are delighted with this opportunity to learn how to be better stewards of the environment (and better stewards of our finances as utility costs go down), deepen our connection to God through remembering God’s creation in our worship and our study, and to learn how to provide religious environmental leadership in our community. The program strengthens intergenerational relationships within the parish, and this was a big part of our decision to apply for the Certification Program. It’s an opportunity to show our children that we do care about the world in which they will live as adults, to learn and work with them to do the best we can to protect their future and the future of our parish, and to say to them through our actions as a parish that God cares about them and about the world.

GreenFaith and the Episcopal Church have announced a new opportunity for other parishes to join the program with a May 1 deadline. For parishes that might be interesting in joining, there is an informational webinar available tomorrow, February 16, at 2:00. Click here to find out more about the webinar; click here to read the October Green Sprouts post New Green Opportunity for Parishes about the program. If you want to talk about how this might work for your parish or how St. Stephen’s handled the application process, please contact me. I would be delighted to have more parishes in our diocese working toward Green Certification!

More For the Children

(In which we adult camels approach the eye of the needle)

Back in October, 2009, I posted a piece called Hackberry Tree Parable about today’s Daily Office reading from Mark (Mark 10:17-31), which was the Gospel lesson for the coming Sunday lectionary. This was a story about some sort of big bird of prey crashing down through the branches of our hackberry tree holding onto a struggling squirrel. Finally, by letting go of the squirrel, the bird was able to right itself and soar away. Seeing that little drama while thinking about the rich man who went away grieving when Jesus told him the way to inherit eternal life was for him to sell everything he had, give the money to the poor, and follow Jesus, I wrote this:

Birds of prey most often succeed in hunting the weakest animals, the most vulnerable. The squirrel this one chose wasn’t as weak as it appeared evidently, and gave the bird a great deal of trouble. What’s interesting in light of the Gospel story is that it wasn’t just in letting go of something that the bird was able to fly freely again, but in letting go of the smaller, weaker creature on which it was preying. This little drama as it relates to the Gospel lesson wasn’t only about the raptor and its need to let go of a difficult weight, but about the squirrel and its desire to survive. The Gospel story isn’t only about us and our need to be detached from things that get in the way of discipleship; it’s also about those who have less power, wealth, and strength but about whom Christ cares very much. We aren’t truly free of the things that weigh us down until we join Christ in caring for and about the poor and vulnerable. It isn’t enough to go off and take a vow of poverty and simplify our lives; true discipleship involves noticing and caring for people who have to worry more about not having enough than about having too much.

Yesterday’s Gospel reading, the passage immediately before this in Mark, was about Jesus blessing the children. No matter where they live, young children are among the vulnerable because of their lack of power. Given the facts about global warming and climate change, we know we need to let go of some of our habits and comforts to make any sort of decent life for the children being born today.

I’ve often wondered about the man in today’s Gospel lesson. What happened after he recovered from the shock of what Jesus had said to him; what did he do after he went away grieving? Did he continue to live as he had, knowing at least somewhere in the back of his mind that he wasn’t living the way God called him to live, or did he indeed sell his possessions, give the money to the poor, and go follow Jesus?

And, not so much out of curiosity as out of existential angst, I wonder about us. What do we do after the shock of realizing what science tells us about the future of our planet if we don’t dramatically and immediately cut back on our emissions of greenhouse gases? What do we do after grieving for the world we have known and asking God to forgive us for what we have done to God’s creation? Does our generation continue living as we have, vaguely knowing we aren’t doing what God would have us do, but unwilling or unable to let go of our privilege and comfort so that today’s children and their children might live? Or do we change our habits and public policies, gladly letting go of some of those privileges and comforts so that we can follow the example of Jesus and recognize that the decisions we make now are having an impact on children, those vulnerable ones who don’t get to make the decisions that are determining their future?

For the Children

The Daily Office Gospel reading for Wednesday (Mark 10:1-16) includes the story of Jesus blessing the children. Jesus made it plain that even if the children didn’t have much importance to others, they were important to him. By his example of not allowing the disciples to keep the children at arm’s length from him, Jesus teaches us the importance of seeing children as individuals in need of love and protection, not as abstractions.

I’ve just begun reading a new book by Mark Hertsgaard, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. While many books have been written about dealing with climate change, this one has a depth to it that is helpful to those of us looking at the environment through a spiritual lens. I’ve been thinking the past year about our culture’s denial of the realities of climate change and our seeming inability to begin looking at what is happening and how we might best deal with it. This book articulates very well some of the issues involved in all of this.

Hot brings home the reality of our warming climate through a father’s passion for his own daughter’s future. Mark Hertsgaard had reported on the plight of children in other countries before his own daughter’s birth, but realized after she was born that he had been able to keep an emotional distance from the stories of these children that parents don’t have.

Reviewing Hot in the New York Times, Wen Stephenson writes that this book “raises the emotional stakes while keeping a clear head.” Stephenson then says: “This was the first book on climate change that not only frightened me — plenty have done that — but also broke my heart.” Perhaps our hearts need to be broken before we can bring ourselves out of denial and get to the place where we can help one another cope with this changing world.

In the Prologue to the book (which is available here through Google books), Mark Hertsgaard talks about the moment when his view of the world changed, when the issues of climate change became so real to him that he knew he had to find out all he could and work on figuring out how people can live through the period of climate change we have now entered. The shift came in 2005 when Hertsgaard was a new father of a baby girl. He interviewed David King, a prominent British climate scientist, who talked about climate change not as something in the future that we might possibly yet avoid, but as something that had already begun unfolding. Even if our greenhouse gas emissions were cut drastically and immediately, there would still be global warming for many years as a result of the processes that had already begun. After the interview, Hertsgaard realized that the time period they had been discussing was his daughter’s lifetime, that this warmer, more difficult world was the world in which his little girl would grow up and live her life.

Hot not only takes a realistic look at where we are now, but looks with hope at things we can do – and that some people and governments are already doing – to make the best of the future. Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth is not a religious environmental book, but its compassion for our children and its elements of hope speak to people of faith.

Candlemas Light

In seven weeks spring will officially be here. This is hard to imagine right now as we emerge from another winter storm, this one with especially cold temperatures and wind chills. Despite the biting cold and recent snow, though, on sunny days the sunshine feels warmer than it did in early January. The days are getting longer, and once we pass Candlemas, which is today, the increasing light will become more obvious.

In the Church, February 2 is the Presentation of our Lord, when we remember Mary and Joseph presenting the baby Jesus at the temple forty days after his birth. Luke’s account of this event tells about Simeon and Anna recognizing the baby as the Savior, the Messiah. Simeon says this child is “a light for revelation to the Gentiles”. This day is also known as Candlemas and as the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin. Some churches still bless new candles on this day or have a special candlelight procession.

This point forty days after the Nativity is nearly midway between the dates we use now for the beginning of winter and the beginning of spring. Some old calendars considered this to be the beginning of spring, and in places with milder winters, early February in a normal year can seem like the beginning of spring. Sometimes even here in Nebraska we can sense spring coming on this date.

Luke tells us that Simeon looked forward to “the consolation of Israel”. Despite the darkness of many things in his world, Simeon had faith that he would see the Messiah before he died. When he saw the infant Jesus, he knew that this was the light for which he had waited. Until the Holy Spirit guided him to the temple that day, Simeon didn’t know where or when or how he would see the Messiah, only that this would happen before he died.

In this week of extreme weather here in the United States and in other places, most notably Queensland, where a huge cyclone named Yasi threatens an area already devastated by floods, it’s sometimes hard to find faith that we will see the light. There is some expectation that Cyclone Yasi may be the biggest cyclone ever to hit Australia. Given that these sorts of mega-storms are exactly what climate scientists predicted would happen as global temperatures rise, what we are experiencing in our northern hemisphere winter and in the southern summer may well be the new normal. It’s sometimes very hard to find hope that we will find our way out of the dark future we would face if global warming is generally ignored and allowed to continue to accelerate.

For people of faith, though, there is always a light of hope even if we can’t imagine how or when we will see the changes for which we are waiting and for which many of us are working. Just as most of the people in the temple that day didn’t recognize that Mary’s baby was different from any other baby brought to the temple forty days after being born, it may be that most of us won’t recognize it when things begin to change for the better. But we continue to pray that there will some shift in political will or in the consciousness of enough of the world’s people that we can learn to live together on this planet with clean air and water, oceans that can support living things, and a global climate that is stable enough to sustain civilized human life.

Meanwhile, while we wait and pray and work this month in the northern hemisphere, we will see more light with longer days and the sun a bit higher in the sky. May this be a sign of hope for us and give us faith to do the joyful work of caring for our world!