Life or Death (Climate Change Preach-in; Epiphany 6A)

Life or Death

16 February 2014

International Climate-Change Preach-In and Teach-In

Sixth Sunday After Epiphany Year A

Homily preached at 8 a.m. Said, and 10:00 a.m. Sung Holy Eucharist

Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)

The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Sirach 15:15-20; 1 Corinthians 3:1-9; Psalm 119:1-8; Matthew 5:21-37

God, give us hearts to feel and love. Take away our hearts of stone,

and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

Several years ago, Elena and went on a multi-day hike in the Olympic National Park in Washington state.  We were walking in early June, just as the snow and the ice began to clear from the higher elevations of the trail.  It was beautiful, and the walking was hard—multiple highpoints in the trail followed by lowpoints.  We occasionally saw mountain goats impossibly pasted to opposite cliffs and hills.  Just shy of Bogachiel Peak, we came up over a rise in the trail.  Elena was a minute or so ahead of me, and stopped at the small trail summit.  I heard her gasp, and then start weeping.  I thought she had injured herself on the sharp rocks that protruded on the sides of the trail.  When I caught up, I came up over the rise and realized what had happened.   

There, laid out before us was our first full view of the entire Seven Lakes Basin, shocking and overwhelming in its exquisite beauty and suddenness.  I took my breath in sharply as well and smiled as I realized her sobs were those of joy.  The rocky terrain of the large bowl-like basin spread out below us but still above the tree line was covered with brilliantly shining fields and blocks of ice and snow.  The sky was a light blue at the horizon, reflecting the glowing snow, gradually washing into to a deep indigo, almost violet, directly over our heads.  All seven lakes were still frozen, a sharp unnatural and brilliant turquoise that neither of us had ever seen before or have seen since, a color that seemed to lie behind and beneath all the other colors in this glorious scene.  We both stood in silence, weeping for the stark beauty of this place, and of joy of being alive, part of this landscape. 

To this day, when I need to use a meditative technique to calm and center myself, I go in my mind to that place and time, my “safe place,” standing there with Elena, being caressed by the brisk breeze tinged with turquoise and ice, looking out over silence and beauty.    

Today is a National Interfaith Teach-in and Preach-in on the subject of climate change, organized in part by one of the deans of Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco. Our 9:00 am forum gave an overview of the issue in its technical details.   

Some people question whether human activity has caused climate change and argue that reducing greenhouse gas emissions would cause a needless drag on the economy.  They want to protect certain businesses or activities that might be harmed by effective action against climate change, or read the Bible in such a way that they cannot accept that true planet-wide catastrophe might result from human activity.  They might see this preach-in as a partisan act that reduces the Church to a political action committee.

Not so! Almost all scientists in the field agree that climate change is real, that our energy use over the last 200 years have freed enough carbon into the atmosphere to substantially raise the overall temperature of the planet.  A melting of the polar ice caps, of large areas of permafrost, and glaciers worldwide has begun, accelerating the problem.  It is not just the problem that our local ski resort, Mount Ashland, has yet to open this year and will probably not open, perhaps ever.  It is not just the problem of the catastrophic drought in California and the harm this will wreak on agricultural production.   Human-induced climate change on a global scale appears to be here, and unless controlled and rolled back, threatens the planet with major extinctions and human society with overwhelming dislocations and disasters.  Given the stakes, erring on the side of protecting the planet trumps almost any other considerations. 

This is an issue where God calls us to account. Our role in God’s creation is a central theme of Holy Scripture.    Genesis says we have stewardship over the whole of creation (1:28).  St. Paul (Rom 1:19-20) says that the natural world, including us, reveals God, and visibly reflects his invisible power and divinity.  That is what I think Elena and I were feeling that day in the Olympics.   Paul also calls us “partners with God” (2 Cor 6:1) whose task it is, among others, to “repair” or “heal” creation (Rom 8:18-28).     

The biblical story of Noah gives us a mythical example where human activity causes the destruction of the natural creation with only a few surviving because of God’s love (Gen 6:5-8; 7:16).  Such destruction so troubles the storyteller that he ends with a somewhat fanciful explanation of where rainbows come from:  God promises that never again will all creatures be destroyed because of human activity (Gen 8:21-22).  Some take this as an ace in the hole—God promised with the rainbow that we won’t go extinct because of climate change or because of nuclear holocaust.  I wouldn’t be so sure.  I think it foolish to court catastrophe because we think we have some divine promise against harm, especially one given in an etiological myth.  There are too many cases right in the Bible of the supposedly “divinely protected” meeting their doom.

The story of the Tower of Babel gives us another mythical case where human activity distorting the world as God intended, leads to the complete overthrow of the most advanced world society (Gen 11).

At the far other end of the Bible, in the Revelation of John, there is another myth of destruction, this one set in the coming end time where God will set all things right in the world.  There, because of human wickedness, seven angels blow trumpets, and with each blast, a third of the earth is burnt up, a third of the sea is turned to blood and its living creatures killed, a third of all fresh waters become bitter and deadly, and so forth.  Again, here human activity upsets the order of nature as God created, and disaster on a global scale occurs. 

I am not saying that these passages predict or prophesy our current environmental problems.  All I am saying is that the Bible teaches us that conformity to the intention of God in creating us and the world about us is essential if we are to avoid disaster. 

Today’s scriptures are all about responsibility and moral agency:  Paul wants us to avoid faction and the conceit that our way to God is the only way. Matthew’s Jesus teaches that obedience to Law is only the first step in conforming to God’s intentions.  The reading from Sirach emphasizes moral agency and responsibility in stark terms: 

“[God] has placed before you fire and water;
stretch out your hand for whichever you choose.
Before each person are life and death,
and whichever one chooses will be given. (Sirach  15:16-17)

The Book of Deuteronomy puts it this way: 

“See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity” (Deut 30:15). 

Respecting creation and protecting nature is not mere sentimentality or romanticism.   It cannot be reduced to a naïve fundamentalism that would argue “if God wanted us to fly, he would have given us wings!” 

 

Rather, it is profound Christian doctrine, expressed well in the Middle Ages, when theologians like Thomas Aquinas and mystics like Meister Eckhart talked about a great chain of being. Contemporary Franciscan monk and contemplative Richard Rohr writes:

“The Great Chain of Being was the medieval metaphor for ecology before we spoke of ecosystems! This was [an] attempt to speak of the circle of life, the interconnectedness of all things on the level of pure “Being.” If God is Being Itself … then the “Great Chain” became a way of teaching and preserving the inherent dignity of all things that participate in that Divine Being in various ways. It was not intended to teach hierarchy, as much as inherent sacrality, continuity, and communality.  …

[A]ll things [held] together in an enchanted universe.

“To stop recognizing the [reflection of God] in any one link of the chain was to allow the entire coherence to fall apart! It would soon become a disenchanted universe. If we could not see the sacred in nature and creatures, we soon would not see it in ourselves, and finally we would not be able to see it at all.  …

“This is the way they saw it:

Link 1 – The firmament/Earth/minerals within the Earth

Link 2 – The waters upon the Earth (snow, ice, water, steam, mist)

Link 3 – The plants, trees, flowers, and foods that grow upon the Earth

Link 4 – The living animals on the Earth, in the skies, and in the waters

Link 5 – The human species, capable of reflecting on all the other links

Link 6 – The world of angels, and the perfect communion of those who have passed over

Link 7 – The Divine Mystery Itself.” 

I cannot tell you how we can fix human-induced climate change.  Others with much more knowledge than I are hard pressed to come up with solutions, and of those proposed, few appear wholly satisfactory.  Global ecology suffers from the tragedy of the commons, where what is everyone’s responsibility in principle ends up being no one’s business in practice.  The ethics are complicated: intergenerationally, where our abuse of nature to our benefit harms those who come after us, and internationally, where we want  other nations to eschew the abusive path of development we took, yet are not willing to give up even a little of the wealth and ease we gained thereby.  But the fact remains that if we have benefited from the industrial revolution and modern economy, which has released millions of tons of carbon into the air over the last centuries, we have some moral responsibility here.   

At the very least, we need to notify our elected leaders that we are deeply concerned about this and consider it a key matter needing immediate and effective attention.  We need to act corporately as well as individually.  Limiting our own individual carbon footprint might not seem to be much of a solution, but many small acts will make some dent in the problem:  giving up the second family car if possible, contributing the cost of an airfare we give up to carbon sequestration efforts.  This looks like a problem that can only be corrected by making many dents, some small, some large. 

Sisters and brothers, we are part of the Great Chain of Being.  God is reflected in the world about us, including us, and we have a responsibility for it all.  And it is a matter of fire or water, of life or death. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.