Rogation Days: Praying the Bounds of a Warming World

The traditional English celebration of Rogation Days, the three days preceding Ascension Day, included a procession around the boundaries of the parish (often coextensive with the boundaries of a village). At stops along the boundaries, the congregation prayed for the welfare of the village and especially for a good growing season, and the priest blessed the fields. The procession stopped several times for these prayers and blessings, often at important landmarks along the boundaries of the parish. Along with an occasion for prayer and blessings, walking the bounds or beating the bounds also ensured a public memory and a clear public proclamation of exactly where boundaries lay. Ensuring clarity of the boundaries eliminated disputes and gave everyone a common understanding of the bounds of the parish.

The Book of Common Prayer for the Episcopal Church adapts the tradition to our time and place by focusing on traditional rural concerns for the growing season the first day, commerce and industry the second day, and stewardship of creation the third day. In this way, the custom of offering prayers and blessings on the Rogation Days has been preserved in a meaningful way for our context. But since we aren’t living in old English villages, the traditions of creating awareness of boundaries and blessing the bounds has been lost along the way. Some Episcopal parishes process around a neighborhood, community garden, or large church property or drive out into the country to bless a parishioner’s fields, allowing the tradition of praying these prayers outdoors with a festive procession to continue, but any “bounds” that are walked lack the importance of the boundaries that were both declared and blessed in earlier times.

In this era of accelerated global warming, however, we might begin a new Rogation custom of observing and praying the bounds or limits of our biosphere. Through our lack of awareness of the limits of the amounts of greenhouse gases that can be released into our atmosphere without jeopardizing life on Earth, we have made our bounds smaller. Each year the world fails to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions and acknowledge the laws of chemistry and physics that determine the limits of our biosphere for human life, we leave ourselves less room for solutions that allow us to continue to live and live well. Our inaction is pulling the bounds tighter, leaving us less and less wiggle room. 

During the Rogation Days, we might prayerfully study the current state of global warming and pray about the bounds or limits we discover. Here is a place to start, a post by Kiley Kroh on Climate Progress last week: Global Temperatures In April Tied For The Hottest On Record.

April may have brought mild temperatures to much of North America, but that wasn’t the case for the planet as a whole. Last month officially tied for the warmest April globally since recordkeeping began in 1880, according to data released by NOAA’s National Climactic Data Center on Tuesday.

This makes it the 38th consecutive April and 350th consecutive month with a global temperature at or above the 20th century average. The last time the planet experienced an April with below-average temperatures was 1976.

The post goes on to discuss the parallel rise in carbon emissions and expectations for future temperature rises. 

We need to put significant limits emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases around the world to mitigate global warming. We might acknowledge the need for those limits and pray about them. As temperatures rise we will experience all sorts of big changes that will place limits on human activity. Agriculture will be impacted, marine ecosystems will suffer, and people will need to leave places that become uninhabitable because of rising seas, extreme temperatures, or lack of water. These are our new bounds, the limits within which we will try to live and continue to love one another and love God. Prayer and mindful meditation about those limits is one of the great gifts people of faith can offer now.

If we pray about those bounds and find mindful acceptance of them, we may be able to find blessing there as well. A clear public proclamation of these limits coupled with a blessing of all living things inside these new bounds brings Rogation Days out of the realm of quaint Anglican history and into the heart of what Christ calls us to do today.

For stewardship of creation

O merciful Creator, your hand is open wide to satisfy the needs of every living creature: Make us always thankful for your loving providence; and grant that we, remembering the account that we must one day give, may be faithful stewards of your good gifts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit live and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 259, Collects for Rogation Days)    

Salt, light, and the point of no return

 ‘You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. (Matthew 5:13)

This report is a tale of two futures - one of inaction and degradation of our environment, our economies, and our social fabric. The other, to seize the moment and the opportunities for managing climate change risks and making transformational change that catalyzes more adaptive and resilient societies where new technologies and ways of living open the door to a myriad of health, prosperity and job-generating benefits. The path of tomorrow is undoubtedly determined by our choices today. We must decide which path to follow. (Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, discussing the IPCC impacts report)

A convergence of reports, increased news coverage, and severe weather events in the past few weeks have helped more and more people realize that climate change is real, it is now, and it is a topic that will be gaining more and more of our attention for the rest of our lives.

In the past month and a half, a convergence of reports, increased news coverage, and severe weather events have increased public awareness of climate change. The IPCC reports on the impacts of climate change and mitigation of climate change were followed in the United States by the National Climate Assessment. The National Climate Assessment includes regional summaries (see the Great Plains here), allowing us not only to think globally about climate change but also to begin seeing what to expect closer to home. Meanwhile, a combination of severe storm and tornado outbreaks, exceptionally heavy rainfall in some parts of the United States, ongoing drought conditions, and early heat waves and fires in some parts of the southwest have reminded us of what we can expect now that, in the words of Don Wuebbles, coordinating lead author of the National Climate Assessment report, “the old normal is broken”.

Yesterday’s reports of the irreversible collapse of West Antarctica’s ice sheet and what that means for sea level rise beginning this century underlined the urgency and importance of what these recent reports have said. Here is NASA scientist Tom Wagner on the PBS NewsHour telling about the research and what it means:

 The impact of this is huge. As Tom Wagner noted, 1.5 feet of sea level rise displaces 11 million people in Bangladesh alone. Most of the world’s large cities are built around ports.

Does this mean anything for the church? What might people who follow Christ do with this new information and this new normal?

The Daily Office Gospel lesson for today (Matthew 5: 11-16) tells us that we are the salt of the earth; it also tells us that if we have lost our “saltiness”, if we are instead bland and of no consequence to those around us, we may as well be thrown out. In other words, if the church fails to respond to these huge changes taking place in our world this century, we may as well close our doors. Jesus goes on to remind us that lights are meant to shine, not to be hidden. Christians are about letting our light shine.

UN climate secretary Christiana Figueres says the world in general is at a point where we can choose either inaction and the consequences of further degradation of our environment, economies, and social fabric, or transformational change. The church’s response needs to begin with an acknowledgement of the crisis and with bringing it into our conversations and preaching and prayers. What we need to be about, though, if we are to remain the salt of the earth and let our light shine is the business of transformational change. All the business of reimagining the church and sorting out our core values and beliefs from traditions that may keep us from going where Christ would lead us this century is essential business now.

What does the church have to offer that can serve as a beacon in this century? What does the church continue to keep that prevents us from responding to climate change and its impacts the way Christ would have us respond? How do we let our little light shine?

Easter Hope and Joy

 Alleluia! Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

I’m writing this after participating in the joyful celebration of the Great Vigil of Easter at Church of the Resurrection in Omaha this evening. Earlier today, I spent a couple of hours helping to staff Nebraska Interfaith Power and Light’s table at the Omaha Earth Day celebration. Meanwhile, along with posts about Easter celebrations and reflections on the end of Holy Week and the beginning of Easter, my Facebook feed has been full of the news that the State Department announced a delay in a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline permit. The delay is at least in part due to a case Nebraska landowners brought against the pipeline that is now going to the Nebraska Supreme Court.

Last April, Easter was on March 31. The post I wrote on the blog that week talked about hope in the face of despair. Along with the celebration of Easter, the occasion for this reflection about hope was a planning meeting is to help pipeline opponents be well-prepared to testify at the State Department hearings later in the month. That was a year ago; the pipeline permit has still not been approved, and now we know there will be another delay in a decision. This is good news that brings hope with it. With that in mind, I hope you enjoy reading the post below from a year ago expressing hope in our ability to stop the pipeline despite incredible odds being against us.

Easter Week: Mistaken Identity, Keystone XL Pipeline, and Alleluias

In the Gospel lesson for the Tuesday in Easter Week (John 20:11-18), Mary Magdalene is so caught up in her grief over Jesus’ death and her despair over the disappearance of his body that when she turns around and sees Jesus, she doesn’t recognize him. Instead, she mistakes him for the gardener. She comes out of her grief and despair enough to see what is right before her eyes when she responds to hearing the risen Jesus call her by name.

We can get so deeply into grief and despair that we miss signs of hope that are right in front of us. Just as the mismatch between the sorts of hopes and expectations Mary Magdalene had imagined and the reality of Jesus’ resurrection led her initially to fail to recognize the wonderful reality standing before her, the mismatch between our imagined expectations and a wonderful reality can keep us from recognizing that reality even when it is unfolding. Those of us who pay attention to the degradation of the earth and particularly to the discouraging math of global warming find ourselves at times grieving the plants, animals, eco-systems, and way of life we know and love that are beginning to disappear or change, and we can feel despair when we see the enormity of the challenges we face compared to the lack of political will to do enough soon enough to make much of a difference to a our future.

One of the many joys of Easter in our tradition is the restoration of the alleluias that disappear during the somber Lenten season. Some parishes do a sort of ceremony of burying the alleluias on Ash Wednesday to help children grasp something of our Lenten practices. When Lent ends, our alleluias at the fraction and at the dismissal bring notes of joy and hope and renewed energy that can remain with us as we go into the week to love and serve Christ.

Most of us experience the return of the alleluias as a welcome return to a spiritual norm of joy, while others, especially in times when we have faced a great loss or difficult challenges, when we are grieving or in despair, may find ourselves more in tune with the quieter but no less faithful wilderness walk of Lent. But Easter comes along whether or not we are ready for it, even when we are so deeply into grief or despair that we can’t imagine finding hope or joy again.

Yesterday evening I attended one of the planning meetings for people opposed to TransCanada being given a permit to build the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to transport Alberta tar sands through the central United States, including Nebraska, to Gulf Coast refineries. The purpose of these planning meetings is to help pipeline opponents be well-prepared to testify at the State Department hearings scheduled to be held at the Heartland Event Center in Grand Island on April 18.  The pipeline fighters face huge odds given the money and political power of the oil industry. It’s one of those daunting challenges that could make the alleluias ring hollow.

And yet when I listened to leaders from the Sierra Club and Bold Nebraska , and when I heard the discussion by those who plan to be at the hearings either to testify against the permit or to support those testifying against it, it felt like an alleluia response. We know that grassroots opposition to the pipeline has delayed its construction so far. We know that landowners, environmental activists, people of faith, and others will keep fighting the construction of this pipeline and the expanded mining of the Alberta tar sands. There is something very good and life-giving here.

Even if President Obama denies the permit to build this pipeline, the challenge of keeping greenhouse gas emissions to a level that gives us a chance of a sustainable future is a huge challenge. If our expectations and hopes are of a future that resembles today’s business as usual, we may not recognize whatever signs of a realistic hope we might encounter. That doesn’t mean that hope isn’t there; it doesn’t mean that grief and despair are the only valid responses to our situation.

When Bill McKibben’s Do the Math tour visited Omaha, he said that he became discouraged at first when people pointed out that he was involved in a David and Goliath situation, but then he remembered how that story ends. Easter tells us the end of the story, and it calls for an alleluia response.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

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For another dose of hope, come to Nebraska Interfaith Power and Light's conference on religious environmental work next Saturday at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln. The theme is Creation Care for Congregations. More information and online registration is available on the Nebraska IPL website.

Good Friday: Grief, Compassion, and Hope

Our Good Friday liturgy helps us bear and work through the weight of grief that we experience as we listen to the story of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion. It is one point in the church year when profound grief is acknowledged and expected, even as we live in the knowledge of the Easter story and anticipation of a joyful celebration of the resurrection.

The grief we experience when we think of Christ, God Incarnate, on the cross is an elemental grief that contains all our other particular forms of grief. What we say and do on Good Friday in response to the Passion Gospel can help us find our way through our grief for the living things on our warming planet and can help us form and sustain a holy, healthy response to climate change.

For people paying attention to what is happening, the beauty of springtime can be bittersweet as we stand to lose 25-50% of species this century from habitat destruction, pollution, and global warming and ocean acidification. (See the book The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert for a good overview of the situation; a short and clear discussion is in this post from Dr. Jeff Masters.) Not knowing how much longer the flowers, trees, and birds that we love will be found where we live or anywhere on earth for that matter brings some heartbreak along with the delight in seeing them again after a long winter. And of course we have grief for people who have already suffered from drought, fire, floods, sea-level rise, and other effects of climate change.

The third of the Solemn Collects asks for the cry of those in misery and need to come to God; it also prays for God to “give us…the strength to serve them for the sake of him who suffered for us.” Gathering our strength and doing whatever we can to prevent and relieve the human misery that results from environmental degradation is the only choice we have as followers of Christ. Choosing to acknowledge the problems we face and working to address them with so little evidence that we can succeed is where we draw on our faith and our hope.

Choosing to act out of compassion allows us to get out from under the weight of our grief. Drawing on our faith for strength, we find energy for the work ahead. A response rooted in compassion is a holy and healthy response to our grief.

Maundy Thursday: Lamentations and Love

In Holy Week this year, our Daily Office lessons include readings from Lamentations. These laments were written in response to the destruction and desolation of Jerusalem. We include them during Holy Week because lamentation is a sort of universal language – the words written to grieve one tragedy can help us express our feelings of grief as we remember Jesus’ suffering and crucifixion.

In light of the recent IPCC report on the impacts of climate change [see the National Geographic article New Climate Change Report Warns of Dire Consequences for a short summary of some of the key points and explanation of the report], sections of Lamentations can help us understand and articulate some of the grief most of us feel when we allow ourselves to hear what climate scientists are telling us.

The Book of Lamentations begins with the words “How lonely sits the city that once was full of people!”, a lament that might very well apply by mid-century to some now populous cities along coasts or in hot, arid regions. We might even expand that lamen: How lonely sits the city that once was full of people and trees and birds! How lonely sits the ocean that was once full of living things!

Perhaps more heart-breaking, when read with the knowledge that the IPCC report predicts a future in which food production decreases to the point where there is not enough food produced to feed everyone on the earth, are these words from today’s lesson describing children dying of hunger:

My eyes are spent with weeping; my stomach churns; my bile is poured out on the ground because of the destruction of my people, because infants and babes faint in the streets of the city. They cry to their mothers, “Where is bread and wine?” as they faint like the wounded in the streets of the city, as their life is poured out on their mothers’ bosom. (Lamentations 2:11-12)

This evening as we observe Maundy Thursday, we will read the account from John 13 of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. When he has finished washing their feet, he asks, “Do you know what I have done to you?” He explains that even though he is indeed their Teacher and Lord, he has done the servant’s work of washing their feet. Jesus has not so much turned the hierarchy on its head as he has destroyed our ideas of privilege that we attaching to hierarchy, and he makes it clear when Peter protests having Jesus wash his feet that unless the disciples can accept this new paradigm, they have “no share” with him. Along with all of this, Jesus gives a new commandment that reflects this way of life: “Love one another.”

It’s clear that Christ would have those of us who now enjoy economic privileges make some hard choices about our way of life. What needs to change in our economy, in our ways of producing and consuming energy and food, and in the way we organize our communities, transportation, and all the other pieces that make up our daily lives so that we can serve others?  Are we prepared to deal with loss of species in our ecosystems and loss of agricultural productivity? How do we need to change so that all of God’s beloved children have a chance at life?

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 The song “Before My Time” and the stark images accompanying it during the closing credits of the film Chasing Ice provide a sort of lament for what is happening already; the break-up of the Arctic Ice is a huge loss. Our witness to photographer James Balog’s courage in gathering and sharing evidence of what is happening gives some hope and human meaning amid the desolation.  

Is it any wonder
All this empty air
I'm drowning in the laughter
Way before my time has come

Crucifying Life

In the church during Holy Week we retell the Passion Gospel, reflecting on Christ’s arrest, trial, and crucifixion. We sing hymns and say prayers and hear sermons that call us to examine our own times of denial and betrayal of Christ, the times when our words or actions – or sometimes our failure to speak or act – have served to mock Christ or to drive another nail into him. In many churches, we will hear good reminders that when we join in acceptance of violence of any kind or fail to see and serve those in need we betray Christ himself and essentially deny our relationship to him.

What we will not hear in very many churches this week is the connection between our acceptance of the ongoing degradation of the earth and our apathy as witnesses to Christ’s Passion. We are witnesses removed by time but not necessarily by temperament from the events of Holy Week, and our Scripture readings and liturgies this week are meant to help us bear witness to Jesus’ crucifixion and the events leading up to it. How well we allow ourselves to see and speak of and act in response to what is happening fairly rapidly to our deteriorating biosphere, how well we witness to climate change and pollution, is connected to how well we serve as witnesses to the events of Holy Week.

We may hear this week that we are not very far removed from the frightened disciples and the fickle crowds, that to distinguish between them and us is an error. It’s not a surprising error since we tend to see ourselves – 21^st century Christians or Americans or whatever our primary identity – as a unique and exceptional group of people, as did so many groups of people before us. One of the lessons of Holy Week is that we all sin in ways that are at their heart neither unique nor exceptional, just an old, sad story.

We make similar errors in supposing ourselves to be outside the category of people who will be affected profoundly by climate change and in supposing ourselves and all of humanity to be separate from the other living things in Earth’s biosphere. If we continue to ignore the grim facts of climate change and act as if our duties to God and neighbor do not obligate us to address global warming, we mock Christ and drive the nails deeper into Christ on the cross because we crucify all living things – humankind and the web of other living things on which our lives depend.

I invite us to expand our view this year and consider all living things, ourselves and all the others who share our biosphere, as we experience Holy Week. Watch for posts here for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday to help in that reflection.

This verse from "My Song is Love Unknown" (sung in this video by the King's College Choir, Cambridge) expresses our tendency to be inconsistent in loving and following Christ:

Sometimes they strew His way,

  And His sweet praises sing;

Resounding all the day

  Hosannas to their King:

    Then “Crucify!“

    Is all their breath,

    And for His death

    They thirst and cry

(Source: http://www.hymnal.net/en/hymn/nt/96#ixzz2ytSPSv00)

Grief

Lent 5A

When Jesus saw [Mary] weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. (John 11:33-35)

Thinking about the Sunday Gospel in the light of recent news about climate change suggests that one big gift the church could provide at this time is to lead us and support us in grieving.

The Gospel in this week’s lectionary is the story about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Even though Jesus delayed his travel to Bethany two days after receiving the news of his friend’s illness so that “the Son of God may be glorified through it”, and even though he knows when he arrives in Bethany that Lazarus is dead and he will bring him back to life, he weeps at his friend’s death and at the shared grief of Lazarus’s family and friends. The way John includes this detail of Jesus’ grief indicates that it is an essential part of the story. Can we appreciate the joy of resurrection without fully experiencing grief over a death? Jesus’ delay in arriving allows everyone, including himself, to truly acknowledge the death of someone they loved and to experience grief.

On Monday of this week, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) released their most recent report on the impacts of climate change. Because their work involves a consensus process, the IPCC reports are fairly conservative; the most dire predictions of climate scientists do not make it into these reports. But the report was disturbing enough to be spotlighted by news organizations that have up to now given little emphasis to the impacts of climate change.

Given a continuation of our failure to make necessary changes and adaptations, the world as we have known it will be ending. There is a lot of anticipated loss to grieve in this, including the loss of arts and institutions that began and thrived in the civilizations that sprang up from successful agricultural societies and the loss of plants and animals with which we have shared our world.

Along with that big report this week, we had disturbing news from the daily reports of atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements from the Mauna Loa observatory. Daily averages the past week have been above 400 ppm, a level we first reached last May. (Carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gases; CO2 levels need to be at or below 350 ppm to continue to sustain life as we have known it.)

While there did seem to be some fresh concern about climate change after release of the IPCC report this week, it doesn’t seem to be a major concern for most people and certainly isn’t a cause of grief for most. Even among people who accept the scientific evidence and express some degree of concern, there is a sort of existential denial of the situation. We continue to plan and live as if nothing will happen in our lifetimes or even in our children’s lifetimes. We continue to give priority to the same personal and political issues we would give priority if we could plan on climate stability. And we certainly aren’t grieving the great losses we know (or that we at least know on some level) we face.

In his new book Reality, Grief, Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks, Walter Brueggemann writes (p. 79): The prophetic task, amid a culture of denial, is to embrace, model, and practice grief, in order that the real losses in our lives can be acknowledged.

Was Lazarus really dead? Jesus’ grief cuts through any denial of the death; it was real. The resurrection of Lazarus is meaningful – and possible -- because he was really dead. Brueggemann says (p. 83) that grief “turns loss to energy for newness”.

Might grief for the losses we face and the losses people in other places are already experiencing allow us to see something new that our denial keeps us from seeing? If the only hope we have is hope that nothing will change, our hope is empty. We can’t see whatever new and unfamiliar sort of hope we might find until we do the work of grieving. In a time and place where denial of death and loss is widespread, the church can lead us in grieving what we are losing so we can see our new reality more clearly.