Climate and energy

Kansas Interfaith Power and Light is working with congregations from Great Bend to Kansas City – to help congregations put their faith into action to address climate change.  Congregations pursue energy audits, retrofit their buildings to become more energy efficient, and purchase renewable energy – all in the name of being better stewards.

Sometimes though, faith leaders take it one step further:  They do sermon series, hold conferences, etc. to talk to their congregants about these critical issues.

One such visionary leader is Rev. Lynn Schlosser of Bergthal Mennonite church in Pawnee Rock, KS.

In the following sermon she delivered in November, Rev. Schlosser makes a powerful plea to listen to today’s modern prophets- the scientists and leaders working to address climate change:

Sermon by Lynn Schlosser, pastor of the Bergthal Mennonite Church,
Pawnee Rock, Kansas

(based on Psalm 43; Jonah 3; Micah 3; Matthew 23:1-24:2)

“Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.” This verse seems a very apt description for American Christians in this present age. The word, “disquiet,” evokes an uneasy feeling of impending catastrophe or doom. We sense something is there, lurking around the corner, but we haven’t yet laid eyes on that which is mysteriously making our heart tremble. We feel disquieted.

On a very small scale, Todd and I have felt disquieted with our van for some time. Both of us knew we were on the verge of a major breakdown. We’ve spent a ridiculous amount of money on the van this last year for small repairs and we both firmly sensed something major was around the corner. We talked about it and agreed to no longer take the van too far from home with the exception of our weekly drive to church. Two weeks ago, on the way home from church, the van’s motor started making some alarming noises. We stopped by home just long enough for me to pick up our car and then drove straight to our mechanic. The next day he confirmed our disquiet. Our transmission was shot.

Now this is quite minor in comparison to where I want to take our thoughts this morning. We live in interesting times, don’t we? I think the economic crisis is only giving tangible shape to a disquiet that’s been hovering over us for some time now. I haven’t heard the political pundits discuss this aspect of the election. Perhaps it’s too indefinable. But I think it’s also palpable. I believe, on some quiet level within the American psyche, we are feeling disquieted and while we can’t exactly explain why, we believe more is riding on this presidential election than at any other time in our recent past, maybe even in our lifetimes.

Our scripture texts for today offer good insight. I would like to highlight three prophetic voices from the Bible: Micah, Jesus, and Jonah. There is a fairly common thematic vein in prophetic literature of the Bible, with a few notable exceptions. Prophets prophesy a whole lot of doom and gloom. By and large, people do not listen and inevitably in time, bring about their own destruction.

Micah is not one of the afore mentioned exceptions. Micah doesn’t mince words. He gives it to the ruling class, the privileged elite, the respected religious leaders and foretells their destruction, and not only their destruction, but also the ruin of the temple and the overthrow of the city of Jerusalem. Now Micah is right. History proves him correct. But here’s his problem. He’s looking into the future 100+ years and no one he’s talking to is feeling disquieted just yet. Judah is flying high in Micah‘s time. They are squarely in the midst of economic prosperity. And while prosperity always seems to bring with it a disproportionate amount of social injustice, still, life is really, really good for the ruling class. The only pinch they’re feeling is from the new shoes on their feet, so to speak. Therefore, Micah is extraordinarily easy to ignore and/or make fun of. And had they known that in 100+ years everything Micah told them would come true, I rather suspect they still wouldn’t have listened. This seems to be an innate human weakness. We don’t seem capable of caring about or taking steps to protect or preserve life beyond our own lifetime, let alone beyond our children’s lifetime. It wasn’t Micah’s words that derailed his message. It was his timing.

Fast forward over 500 years to our second scripture passage for today and we find Jesus laying into the Pharisees and the Scribes. He starts out mildly enough, revealing ways in which their words do not match their actions. But soon he is calling them hypocrites and cheaters and cursing them to hell. Over and over he exclaims, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees.” But it isn’t until later in the chapter that the reader realizes Jesus has also been prophesying when he says in verse 36, “Truly I tell you, all this will come upon this generation.” And then a few verses later, chapter 24 begins with this prophecy, “As Jesus came out of the temple and was going away, his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. Then he asked them, ‘You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’” And less than 40 years after Jesus foretells the destruction of the temple, the Roman general, Titus, with an army of 60,000 men, invades the city of Jerusalem and lays it bare. The temple is leveled in the violent conquest.

A country or a civilization’s demise is most often preceded by warning signs which increase in pitch and tenor as the day of catastrophe draws nearer. It’s hard to tune into those very faint tremors when calamity is still over 100 years away. However, when doom is only 40 years down the line, when it falls within the anticipated lifetime of people actually living, it becomes a little easier to pick up on an intangible but very real sense of unease, of disquiet. Jesus lived and ministered during a politically turbulent time. The power balances were shifting. The leaders sat restlessly on their thrones. The Pharisees and Sadducees were contending with some major cracks in their authority. The disparity between the rich minority and the poor majority was stark and the people were jumpy.

This is the context for Jesus’ ministry and helps explain both why his teaching was so powerful and also why he was silenced so quickly. As we know, a lot of people put a great deal of stock in what Jesus had to say and this frightened the religious leaders of the time. But when Jesus went so far as to predict the destruction of the temple, not even his most faithful followers were sure whether or not to believe him. And certainly, the Pharisees were doing all they could to hold an antiquated system together. They couldn’t begin to contemplate their temple destroyed, the end of life as they had always known it. Jesus’ words made everyone very uncomfortable. Yet in the end, the power brokers of Judaism wouldn’t and maybe couldn’t make the leap of faith Jesus’ words required, because to do so would have been to believe in a reality they simply couldn’t conceive of. And while warning tremors were in the air, they still had the luxury of time. The Pharisees could still stick their heads in the sand and pretend all was well for a little bit longer.

Let’s backtrack now to Jonah. We all know the story of Jonah. I’d like to jump into this narrative as Jonah walks the streets of Ninevah, calling for the peoples’ repentance. Jonah gets right to the point. He doesn’t embellish with a whole lot of descriptive adjectives. He doesn’t paint any grisly word pictures. He just puts it out there. Ninevah is going to be overthrown. And the people hear his words, and this is just amazing, they listen. A complete stranger, whom they have no reason to believe, comes and tells them, completely out of the blue, that Ninevah will be overthrown. Despite this, they believe God is speaking through Jonah and immediately proclaim a fast. Everyone, great and small, puts on sackcloth. Even the king puts on sackcloth and goes to sit on a pile of ashes. And they all cry out to God to save them.

What is the difference here? Why do the people of Ninevah believe the prophet Jonah, when the vast majority of people in the Bible turn a deaf ear to the prophets? Again, I believe, it’s a matter of timing. Jonah cries out that Ninevah will be destroyed in 40 days. This isn’t some vague prediction about something that may or may not happen some unknown time in the future. This is concrete and immediate and the people listen. And because the people listen, “God sees what they do and God changes his mind about the calamity he had said he would bring and he doesn’t do it.”

As I said when I began speaking this morning. I think there has been a sense of uneasiness, there has been disquiet across our country for the last several years. When I read that verse in Psalm 43, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?” The words resonate.

I went to hear a speaker at a local college a couple of weeks ago. Because I am working to keep relatively current with the topic of the environment and climate change, much of what he talked about I was already aware of. Nonetheless, as I listened I thought, “You are a prophet. Are we listening?” His speech was entitled, “7 Steps to End War and Save the Planet.” His basic message was that as a nation, in order to save ourselves, we will need to very quickly divert a large proportion of our defense budget into environmental programs and initiatives to dramatically reduce our nation’s carbon emissions and thus set an example for the rest of the world to follow.

He talked about the rate at which the Arctic is melting. I did some of my own research to see if his claims held up, and they did. A few years ago scientists predicted the Arctic would be ice free in the summer in 100 years. Then some time ago that was revised to the year 2070, a little over 60 years from today. More recently, based on newer and more accurate modeling exercises, they pushed that date forward to 2050, then to 2040 and then to 2030, because the Arctic ice kept melting at a much faster rate than any of their models could predict. This last June, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Texas, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski presented his latest findings which indicate the Arctic might be completely ice free in the summer in just 5 years. He goes on to say this might still be a conservative estimate because his figures don’t include the last several years and in the summer of 2007 the science world was again shocked at how much the Arctic shrank. There is still controversy over these numbers, but from what I was able to read, most scientists agree the Arctic will be ice free in the summer sometime in the next 5 to 20 years. The result will be even greater disturbances to weather patterns as this influx of fresh water impacts ocean currents and temperatures.

This speaker also gave another alarming figure, which I also checked out. According to Dr. James Hansen, a physicist and one of the directors of NASA, he estimates based on what would be a sustainable carbon emission level and what the worldwide increase of carbon emissions is each year (and we are now quite a bit over his and other‘s estimated sustainable level), we have a ten year window of opportunity to make radical changes around the world to cut worldwide carbon emissions. After that 10 year period, the world as we know it will not end, but we may have passed that point in time when we are able to do anything about the situation. At some indefinable point in time, we will cross a line and we will go from having some control over the changes to our natural environment to being at nature’s mercy, as systems and processes set up long ago and reinforced over time take their natural course. Maybe I should also just mention that Dr. Hansen gave this “10-year speech” in 2006.

I checked this week on the history of the environmental movement and found it went back far further in time than I would have imagined. The earliest known writings which expressed concern about environmental pollution date to the Arab Industrial Revolution in the Middle East which took place from the 8th to the 13th century. In 1272, King Edward I of England banned the burning of sea coal in and around London because of the smoke problems it caused in the city. More recently and in this country we can thank Benjamin Franklin, John Muir and Henry David Thoreau for their early prophetic voices raising concerns about our relationship with our physical world.

But truly, these early figures were just blips on the screen of our national consciousness. Not until the 1960’s and the publication of the book, Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, did the modern environmental movement begin to gain traction and find its voice. Over the last number of decades this voice has only grown louder. I believe most of us agree changes need to be made. And some of us, such as myself, are feeling an alarming sense of urgency.

However, what is so very frustrating is humanity’s resistance to change. Even those of us who believe the environmental situation is critical and who are fearful of the future we are passing on to our children, even we are having a hard time actually doing anything about it, at least so far as doing means making a substantive change in our lifestyle. This was something else the speaker mentioned, almost in passing. That in order to change things around, the middle and upper classes will need to be willing to adopt a simpler lifestyle. But I’ve come to the sad conclusion that we haven’t changed a whole lot since the Bible. When it comes right down to it, we’d rather ignore the prophetic voices in our midst than sacrifice any of our privileges.

For me, the silver lining in the high gas prices of a few months ago is that it forced a small change in America’s driving habits – we started driving a little bit less, a change we wouldn’t have made unless forced to. Unfortunately, in order to produce the change really required, the gas prices will need to shoot through a roof we haven‘t yet imagined. In a similar way, my hope for this economic crisis we are sinking into is that it will also produce a silver lining and force many of us to make lifestyle sacrifices we have been unable or unwilling to make on our own.

Despite what I consider to be a very gloomy and bleak outlook, I do have hope. Micah prophesied about something that would happen over 100 years in the future and the people didn‘t listen. Jesus prophesied about something that would happen 40 years in the future and the people didn‘t listen. Jonah prophesied about something that would happen 40 days in the future and the people listened. And this is where I find my hope. God keeps right on knocking on our door up to the last moment, giving us the opportunity to listen and to respond. I don’t know if Dr. Hansen is right. Certainly his predictions are controversial. Maybe we do have less than 10 years to get a handle on things, maybe we have 50 years. But there’s not any controversy, at least in the scientific community, about the fact that a lot of scary stuff is coming down the pike and it’s coming a lot faster than anyone expected. I pray we would have the will to make the changes, to make the sacrifices we need to make. And if we do not have the will, then I pray God finds another way to get us in sackcloth and on our knees. May we say with the Psalmist, “Our soul is cast down and it is disquieted within us. But our hope is in God.” And we shall praise God, our help and our strength.

Sources:
BBC News World Edition
, December 12, 2007
Environmentalism
entry from Wikipedia
7 Steps to End War and Save the Planet
by Steve Ratzlaff, 2008. (College lecture based on newly released book)
United Nations Panel on Climate Change website: www.ipcc.ch
Worldwatch Institute website: www.worldwatch.org