Wind of Pentecost

Feeling the Spirit outdoors

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.” (Acts 2:1-2)

According to Acts, Jesus’ followers were inside on the day of Pentecost. The congregation of St. Stephen’s, however, gathered outdoors this year at L.E. Ray Park in Grand Island. We baptized a teen-ager and three babies in the lake, celebrated the Eucharist using a picnic table as the altar, and had a picnic afterwards instead of the usual coffee hour. The weather forecast when we went to bed Saturday night was terrible for the next morning – an 80% chance of thunderstorms, possibly severe – but by Sunday morning a good breeze (as opposed to a violent wind) pushed the clouds to the south and east, the sun came out, and it was a lovely morning for an outdoor worship service.

The people who came said we should do this more often; there was something very special about our worship that morning. As I’ve shared our experience with others this week, it’s obvious that lots of people find something in worshiping together outdoors that is missing when we worship inside a building. People remarked on how peaceful it was; the sounds of the birds and lapping of the water, and the sights of the water sparkling in the sunlight and the trees moving in the wind contributed to that feeling of peace. People also seemed more joyful (not that we are lacking in joy when we are indoors); being outdoors and trying some new things was simply fun!

There are advantages, of course, to our usual space: we are sheltered from extremes in temperatures and from precipitation, the acoustics are better, and we don’t have to hold down the fair linen and the pages of the altar book with rocks to keep them from blowing around. But indoors we also can’t feel the sun beginning to warm the morning air, we don’t hear the birds sing, and, most notably on a day like Pentecost, we can’t feel the wind blow.

The Greek word for the wind (not a violent wind, but the sort of breeze we felt on Sunday) is pneuma; like the Hebrew word ruah this means wind and spirit and breath. As Jesus explained to Nicodemus (John 3: 7-8), the Spirit/wind is a moving thing. We experience it, but we don’t control it. We feel it, but we don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. We Nebraskans know about the untamed nature of the wind perhaps better than some other people would!

When the wind blows strongly, and especially when the wind turns very cold or very hot, it’s almost instinctive to shelter ourselves from it, but if we always avoid being out in the wind, we miss an opportunity to more fully understand the meaning of what Scripture tells us about the Spirit. Remembering the connections between wind and Spirit might help us see whether we are also trying to shelter or hide from the Spirit. We know that’s ultimately impossible to do – the Spirit rushed right into the house where Jesus’ followers were gathered – so on one level our attempts to hide don’t matter, but an openness to the Spirit can give us peace that evades us when we are trying to evade the Spirit.

A well-designed indoor space can provide sights and sounds that enhance our worship, but it’s good to occasionally leave those spaces and experience sights and sounds that we don’t control. During the homily Sunday morning, I watched a goose walk through the lawn chairs where the congregation was seated and on into the lake, where it swam out into the lake and then came back closer to the shore behind our temporary altar. It was so good not to have a wall separating us from that sight! It was a reminder that as much as we try to do everything in what we consider to be “good order”, God’s ideas of good order might be different from ours.

In The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis makes it clear that while Aslan is good, Aslan is not a tame lion. God is not a tame god and doesn’t always fit into the spaces – physical, intellectual, and spiritual – that we design. The wind blows where it will; the Spirit blows where it will. I’m thankful for our outdoor worship reminding us that the Spirit that brings us peace is also an untamed Spirit, a Spirit that blows where it will, leads us where it will, and fills us with the sort of power we experience when we pay attention to God’s creation.

A New Thing for a New World

While sitting and waiting for my turn to vote in the election of our new bishop last Saturday, the idea came to me of writing an open letter to whomever we elected that day, a letter that would talk about the importance of our diocese putting and keeping environmental issues before us in a more intentional way. Like most everyone who was at the election, once we elected The Rev. J. Scott Barker , turned in our credentials, and got home (though my getting home, unlike that of others, was an easy and happily eco-friendly matter since I live near the Pro-Cathedral), I was exhausted. The idea of an open letter was forgotten.

Sunday morning, I woke up eager to get up to Grand Island and share the news of the election with folks at St. Stephen’s. It was exciting to think about the new possibilities for ministry in several areas that might emerge in our diocese under Scott’s leadership. As I do most Sundays, I got up early enough to have a leisurely breakfast and check the weather report and news headlines before heading to church. The news of the day quickly reminded me that there are things about which we – all of us, in the church and out of the church – need to be talking much more than we are. There are things we need to be thinking through and doing that we are instead putting out of our minds and neglecting doing. I remembered my idea about writing to our bishop-elect about these issues.

From Sunday on the news stories brought the issue of climate change both closer to home and closer to a place where ignoring the issue was becoming more difficult for many people. When I picked up the Sunday papers from our porch, the Omaha World Herald featured a story about the Missouri River flooding: Even tamed, river a threat. When I checked the weather forecast on The Weather Channel website, there were links to articles such as Expert says Tornadoes 106% Above Average and California’s June Oddity about the highly unusual amount of rain in California in early June. The New York Times online ran an article with the headline Food Supply Under Strain on a Warming Planet.

As the week went on, records for high temperatures were broken in many American cities, fires burned in Arizona (the maps and photos on Wildfire Today give some idea of the size of the affected area), people along the Platte River as well as the Missouri were warned of flooding, and temperatures continued to be high in the eastern part of the country.

It seemed this week that more people were making a connection between all of these “extreme weather” events and climate change. There was news of a timely Stanford University study predicting that “large areas of the globe are likely to warm up so quickly by the middle of this century even the coolest summers will be hotter than the hottest summers of the past 50 years.” The study talks about an “irreversible rise” – yes, irreversible – for the tropics and much of the Northern Hemisphere if – and our hope is tied to negating this antecedent ‘if’ clause – greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase. On Wednesday, Plomomedia put this illustrated and narrated version of Bill McKibben’s essay A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never! on YouTube:

And today Richard Black of the BBC reports that the observed climate warming since 1995 – the warming that seemed to match the predictions of climate scientists – has now, with the accumulation of one more year of data, reached the point of statistical significance.

With that sample of the kinds of things we know about and are thinking about with regard to the climate, we come to the idea of an open letter to our bishop-elect, Scott Barker. While I hope to see the sort of leadership from Scott that would be helpful as we work with this issue, it hardly seems right to address a letter to a bishop-elect asking him to take on the task of leading us into the coming years with our eyes wide open to the realities of the world around us as if the bishop is the only one with any responsibility for this work. Rather, it seems better to have people already in the Diocese of Nebraska ready to talk with our new bishop about the impact of these issues in this place and to present creative ideas for him to consider as he gets his feet on the ground. Instead of an open letter to our new bishop, then, consider this an open plea to the diocese as a whole to be ever mindful of climate change and other environmental issues as we do ministry in our diocese and in our parishes. Given the lack of questions during the walkabout about either the effects of climate change on our programs or the church’s response to this pressing need in our world, we have some work to do to get to that level of awareness.

I don’t know off the top of my head the particulars of what these radical changes in our world might mean to our planning, to our living out our mission. That’s something we have to tackle as a diocese. What is clear to me is this: we can discern where we go with our knowledge about these changes only if we truly know and accept the reality of where climate change leaves us. Climate change is no longer a separate issue. It isn’t something that a handful of people in the diocese think we should address because it relates to the Millennium Development Goals or because it shows that the Episcopal Church cares about the world. All of those are still among the reasons to do this work, but the failure of our institutions – governmental, religious, civic – as a whole to have done this work early enough and well enough leaves us with something much more urgent and much bigger, something we can’t continue to leave unacknowledged most of the time.

We must do some triage; we must ask which elements of our current life as a diocese are essential and which things might be, while good and worthwhile in themselves, expendable or open to revision in this time of rapid change. We need to ask what new elements of ministry might help us better minister to the world and to our own faith community in this century. The whole of what we are doing now is at best unsustainable. Insofar as it lulls us into assuming that the way we are living is spiritually sound it is worse than unsustainable; insofar as it leads us to think that the way we have lived and the way we have done church in the past is still the way to follow Christ today, we are leading people into sin.

We will change in this century, while many of us are still living on this earth. Staying the same is not a long-term option. We can choose to make significant changes (and some of these will be difficult changes) now in order to mitigate the effects of climate change on our lives in the future, or we can choose to continue to do business as usual, church as usual, for a few more years until change of a graver nature is ours with no more choice in the matter. The first choice gives us opportunity to do a new thing with joy; the latter choice might give us some short-term comfort. As we sang at the Election Council Eucharist, "Grant us wisdom, grant us courage for the living of these days."

ACEN: Anglican Communion Environmental Network

Ascension Sunday

The Anglican Cycle of Prayer listed today as Ascension Sunday and also as World Environmental Day, and bade prayers for the Anglican Communion Environmental Network (ACEN) : “Pray for the Anglican Communion Environmental Network (ACEN) as it promotes local initiatives to protect the environment, and encourages the education of Anglicans, as individuals and as communities, to become better stewards of God’s creation.”

The home page of the ACEN website contains the mission statement for the network along with links to current news items about environmentalism in the Anglican Communion. The most recent link is to an article about the Anglican Church in South Africa preparing for the 17^th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP17) to be held in Durban late this year. The article explains that “With provincial and diocesan programmes around the Communion, particularly in the southern hemisphere, increasingly having to integrate a response to the impacts of climate change within local mission, it is hoped that governments will make firm and urgent commitments to decrease national carbon emissions.”

Anglicans in South Africa invite people from other parts of the communion to join them in Durban for COP17. The Rev. Dr. Andrew Warmback from the Diocese of Natal explains:

We will be part of civil society's watching brief to show our governments that the world is eagerly waiting for an outcome from the COP17 deliberations that will bring justice to the world and enable sustainable, ecologically-sound development for all people, especially those most in need and the poorest of the poor. This is our opportunity to witness to our faith, and publicly to put our faith into action, calling for an ethical and moral outcome to COP17.

Some of us observing today as Ascension Sunday read Psalm 47 this morning. Robert Alter’s translation from the Hebrew (in Alter’s The Book of Psalms) of the last four verses of Psalm 47 are:

For king of all earth is God, hymn joyous song.

God reigns over the nations, and sits on His holy throne.

The princes of peoples have gathered, the people of Abraham’s God.

For God’s are the land’s defenders. Much exalted is He.

Certainly these verses suggest a reason for God’s people throughout the Anglican Communion to care about the earth and to put our faith into action in defense of the earth.

Innate Optimism, Bad News, and Hope

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 15:13)

Over the long weekend, I came across two Scripture lessons from Romans, a Time magazine article, an editorial from The Guardian, and a press release from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) that all stuck in my mind as a group. All five were worthy of some attention on their own, but what really intrigued me was the way these five disparate things seemed to be related. I’m still unraveling the relationships among them, but am sharing them along with my initial thoughts about them because they seem to point toward some of the questions which all of us, and the church in particular, should perhaps be asking ourselves in the second half of 2011.

It all started with Saturday’s Daily Office lessons, including the verse quoted above about hope. God is the God of hope, it says, and Paul is praying that the Romans might “abound in hope” – have abundant hope – that flows out of the joy and peace of belief, a belief that seems itself to be grounded in hope.

Optimism

The June 6 issue of Time magazine arrived with a cover story about “the science of optimism”. The article, The Optimism Bias, is adapted from a book by the same name by Tali Sharot. The next biggest headline on the cover of the magazine is “In the Twister’s Path: What’s behind the worst tornado season in 50 years?” While that article does ask the question, “Is this the ‘climate chaos’ that scientists of global warming have been warning about?”, no answer is given, and most of the article simply reports on the tornado’s damage.

The Optimism Bias argues that we have an innate bias towards believing “that the future will be much better than the past and present.” The article gives examples of optimistic expectations even when those expectations are not reasonable. Yet this bias helps us to imagine a better future and then work towards it:

Even if that better future is often an illusion, optimism has clear benefits in the present. Hope keeps our minds at ease, lowers stress and improves physical health. Researchers studying heart-disease patients found that optimists were more likely than nonoptimistic patients to take vitamins, eat low-fat diets and exercise, thereby reducing their overall coronary risk.

I wondered whether this view of optimism might help explain our widespread denial about the reality of climate change caused by human activity – both whether it is occurring at all and how urgent a problem it is. On the one hand, the example of the optimistic heart-disease patients suggests that optimism might make us more willing to do the things we need to do – like drastically reducing the amount of CO2 we send into the atmosphere – because we believe we can succeed in creating a better future if we do these things. On the other hand, unrealistic optimism might keep us from understanding the severity of our global predicament.

“The worst news”

Then came the editorial from The Guardian, Global warming: Bleaker and bleaker, which begins with these words:

Sometimes a quotation really does say it all. As chief economist of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol is not given to overstatement – so his comment in our paper today that the latest figures on greenhouse gas emissions are "the worst news" should be taken seriously.

The editorial argues that the diplomatic, economic, and industrial strategies that were supposed to adequately address climate change have failed, and there are no strategies to take their place. It ends by saying this:

Today's figures, then, show a world still hurtling towards dangerous climate change – at a time when policymakers are out of solutions for slowing this process. "A nice utopia" is how Mr Birol describes the hope of keeping a rise in global temperatures below 2C. And if he thinks that, we should all be alarmed.

Hope

But then there was the Epistle Reading for our celebration of Rogation Sunday Romans 8:18-25: “…But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Paul talks not only about humankind waiting in hope, but about “the whole of creation” waiting. This passage reminds us that hope is truly hope only if we don’t know it as a present or certain reality.

A “stark warning”

Finally, I came across the press release from the UN FCCC, “UN Climate Chief says IEA estimate of record 2010 emissions is stark warning to governments to make rapid climate progress this year” (IEA = International Energy Agency) that gives some background for the bleak editorial from The Guardian. In it, though, UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres is quoted as saying, “I won’t hear that this is impossible. Governments must make it possible for society, business and science to get this job done.”

Questions

Reflection on this mixed bag of readings raises some questions. Given our present circumstances with regard to the environment, how do we “abound in hope”? It can be hard to find a glimmer of hope, let alone abound in it! Yes, we might answer that Paul is talking about “spiritual hope”, not hope for our world, but we know from the Romans 8 passage that Paul is talking about hope for the world, all of us and all of creation. If we have hope anchored in the joy and peace of belief and if it is plentiful, it needs to be hope with some substance!

We may have a bias towards optimism, but facts can adjust our expectations, especially if we are aware of our tendency to believe the best even when it is unrealistic. Where does that leave us?

One of the questions the church might be asking is what form our hope should take: What are our specific hopes in relationship to the realities of climate change? That we won’t face hardship? That our leaders will get it together at the last possible moment to avert the worst of the disasters that await us if we continue doing little or nothing? That we will simply find a way to live with dignity and meaning in the midst of all of this?

Other institutions are or will be working on other aspects -- economic, engineering, agricultural, military, political, etc. -- of adaptation to a warming world. Along with our traditional roles of disaster relief, perhaps the church should be thinking and praying about the deeper adaptation, the spiritual adaptation, to a world of increasing challenges and hardships. Christian love, our values of charity and kindness and care for our neighbors, will be an essential part of humankind’s adaptation to these new challenges. The sort of deep resilience that is rooted in faith is something else that might allow us to face our future with dignity and real hope.

For right now, that hope or optimism that helps us see that there is good reason to change our habits is one of our greatest gifts. The hope that gives Christiana Figueres the resolve to say, “I won’t hear that this is impossible” just might get us where we need to go. If we think that we can choose to do things that create a better future, then we just might do them. And we just might think there’s some point in letting our leaders in government, industry, and the church know that we expect the same from them. And if none of that happens, if it’s all too little too late, may we find some sort of hope to help us bear the realities we will have created.

3+ Gardens

Rogation Days

Gusty winds kept some of us in Nebraska from big home garden projects today, while others were out there somehow keeping everything anchored down and hoping for the best (e.g. no hail storms this evening) for plants being set out. All things being equal, today would be a big gardening day. Most obviously, it's Memorial Day, the third day of a long weekend at the beginning of the summer. Less known, but in some ways more relevant, because of the date for Easter this year – which determines the date of Ascension Day (June 2 this year) and all the other days from Easter through Pentecost – today is also the first of the three Rogation Days. Traditionally, Rogation Days are a time for prayers of petition, and particularly for prayers for the land and its newly planted crops and for special blessings for fields. Today, with our understanding of the way care for the environment affects our ability to grow crops, the Rogation Days invite our prayers not only for the fields closest to home, but for the entire planet.

At St. Stephen’s this Sunday we used the Rogation Day propers and observed Rogation Sunday. We talked about stewardship of creation in the homily and at a program afterwards launching our GreenFaith green certification work. We remembered the way this work is rooted in Scripture and in Anglican tradition, and also recognized the way our parish has always cared for the parish grounds.

St. Stephen’s is downtown, right on Route 30, in Grand Island. Surrounded by blocks where the only trees are fairly young, recent additions, our corner has mature trees that have been cared for through years when other downtown trees were neglected or removed. While we lack the spacious grounds of some of our suburban churches, we have managed over the years to find space for three small gardens: a prayer garden in the courtyard between the main church building and the St. Stephen’s Community Center; a memorial garden created by the Webb family near our red doors; and a new (two weeks old!) community garden – with vegetables and flowers for whoever wants them -- behind our youth center across the street from the main building. Despite a steady drizzle Sunday morning, we processed outside for the prayers of the people, remembering the needs of the world at the community garden and blessing this newest of our three gardens. Then we walked back across the street and remembered the departed (including those who died in service to our country) at the memorial garden. Finally, we processed down the alley and through the back gate of the prayer garden to pray for our own needs and those of others dear to us.

Processing from one area to another for different categories of prayers helped us remember that our Sunday prayers and petitions aren’t just for ourselves and our ten closest friends and relations, but for the whole church and the world. Simply being outdoors in the three gardens gave us a spirit of thanksgiving that can be lacking in our standard prayers. The simplicity of our Rogation liturgy made it possible for us to be at once prayerful and refreshed.

Being in a garden, digging in the dirt, helps keep us connected to the Creator; it gives us true spiritual grounding, sometimes in a profound way. Parish gardens, whether designed for prayer and contemplation or to provide food for people, help the members of the parish remember that our lives as Christians aren’t contained within the walls of our church buildings, and they can remind people passing by of God’s gifts to us, especially the gift of new growth. Our community garden is a gift for the parish and for the wider community, a sign of the open doors and open hearts that bring new growth of all sorts to our parish.

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As noted in a July 6, 2008 post , gardens are designed for a variety of purposes in a variety of settings, but all have some spiritual benefits in common.

The rain (and perhaps the prayerfulness of the liturgy) kept cameras tucked away Sunday morning. Here is a before picture of the community garden area, a place in obvious need of some beautification! (We were relieved that a soil test showed lead levels well within the acceptable range.)

And here (click here) are some lovely slides of the prayer garden at St. Augustine of Canterbury in Elkhorn, a parish in a suburban setting where there is plenty of room for gardens. This prayer garden is listed with The Quiet Garden Trust, a network of gardens set aside for prayer and reflection.

Tornadoes: Deeper Compassion

The midsection of the United States has been hit by violent storms, tornadoes, and floods, and more is forecast for today and tonight. Earlier this spring, violent tornadoes tore through the southeastern United States. All sorts of records have been broken.

A spare article from the Associated Press, 2011 Tornadoes By the Numbers, tells part of the story. It’s not only the number of tornadoes or the fact that they have hit populated areas that has caused so much damage; it’s also the intensity of the tornadoes.

The Joplin tornado has been rated EF-5, the highest possible rating. No amount of warning or preparedness can keep this sort of tornado from causing a disaster if it hits a populated area. Holly Yan of CNN asks why with all the advancements in storm technology, we have seen so far this year 8.5 times the average number of tornado fatalities in an entire year. She quotes CNN meteorologist Chad Myers saying that some tornadoes are just too big to survive.

Our response to so much destruction as human beings and as Christians is a desire to help ease the pain of the survivors. We respond by offering whatever aid we can and by offering prayers. Episcopal Relief and Development offers assistance through its USA Disaster Relief Fund. A note about their efforts after the Joplin tornado is found here, and donations can be made through this page.

We wonder why we are seeing so much severe weather, so much suffering, in one season. Asking that question can lead us to a deeper level of compassion, a deeper commitment to alleviating suffering.

If we expand our vision to the rest of the world, we see that our season of severe weather is part of a global phenomenon. Alice Thomas, Climate Displacement Program Manager for Refugees International, writes in a post called Colombia: Water, Water Everywhere about the situation in Colombia over the past year, where three million people have been affected by record rainfall and flooding that has left “hundreds of thousands” of people homeless, and then goes on to talk about the number of people displaced by extreme weather events in 2010. She ends this article – one that is best read prayerfully – with these words:

I am left questioning the wisdom of continuing to view today’s extreme events as unforeseen occurrences for which no one is responsible, as acts of God or nature, as risks that cannot be managed. It is starkly evident that neither national governments nor the humanitarian community is prepared to respond to the increasing pressure that climate variability is bringing to bear not only on some of the world’s poorest and most crisis-prone countries but also on a humanitarian system that is already over-stressed and woefully underfunded.

This blog has said before that no single weather event can be linked to climate change. However, several extreme weather events in several places begin to suggest a pattern. We know that warmer air holds more moisture and that very humid air is one of the ingredients for tornadoes, violent thunderstorms, and, of course, for heavy rains. Climate scientists predict periods of drought punctuated by periods of extreme rain, a sort of watery feast or famine, and they have predicted just the sort of extreme weather we are seeing this spring. If extreme weather events are indeed risks that can be managed by addressing the problem of global warming and climate change, it would seem to be our moral duty to address these issues.

Bill McKibben yesterday wrote a tongue-in-cheek opinion piece for The Washington Post, A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never! in which he parodies our reluctance to connect the dots and recognize an emerging pattern.

In a different tone, today’s meditation in Forward Day by Day ends with this from classic Christian author Oswald Chambers: “Only by refusing to think about things as they are can we remain indifferent.” If we truly have compassion for the victims of extreme weather events, we will want to know the truth about the cause of these events and, if changes in the way we live can help reverse the trend, will find a way to do so.

On my way home from the walkabout on Saturday, my husband and I dodged severe storms in eastern Nebraska. About ten miles from home, we saw a rainbow, a sign of hope. I’ve seen pictures of a double rainbow after the Joplin tornado. The hope symbolized by those rainbows can be realized if we find the will to give environmental concerns the priority they deserve.

Nebraska Walkabout

For all the beasts of the forest are mine,*

the herds in their thousands upon the hills.

I know every bird in the sky, *

and the creatures of the fields are in my sight.

(Psalm 50)

These images from this morning’s psalm were especially rich for me today because I’ve been traveling through Nebraska this week as part of the support team for our bishop candidates who are on their walkabout around the diocese. Our itinerary has allowed us to see several areas of the state and experience the beauty of springtime in Nebraska. We’ve seen and heard a variety of birds; we’ve seen calves and colts in pastures, deer in the countryside, and prairie dog towns in the sandhills. We’ve seen spring green grass, wildflowers along the road, lilacs in bloom. Tonight in Lincoln we are experiencing the energy of a thunderstorm.

The scale of the landscape in much of Nebraska reminds us of how small we are; we are unimaginably smaller and less powerful compared with God. The reminder of our relative size and strength leaves us in awe of God’s greatness; this psalm suggests that an awareness of God’s greatness impels us to obedience and right relationship with God. Surely if awe at God’s creation can inspire us to want to live rightly with God, part of that right relationship is consciously caring for creation itself.