Births, Rebirths and Creations
by Rev. Colin Bossen, December 20, 2009
The world is coming to an end. This is not a statement I make lightly or hyperbolically. I mean it literally. The world is coming to an end. The deal brokered in Copenhagen this past week to curb global warming will not keep carbon emissions and temperature increases within a safe range. Instead it puts the planet on the path to see a net temperature increase of 3.9 degrees celsius, seven degrees fahrenheit, by 2100. That is more than double the range agreed upon by most climatologists as safe.
This unsafe level of temperature increase will cause the polar ice caps to melt. Weather will become ever more erratic and drought widespread. Lakes will dry up. The Ganges River, which provides water for more than 400 million people, will run dry--the glaciers that feed it are slated to disappear in twenty years. Rising oceans will obliterate island nations like the Maldives and Micronesia. Many people, perhaps as much as half the world's populace, will face food shortages and the prospect of starvation. Millions from developing countries will be rendered climate refugees--uprooted from their homes and livelihoods because of climate instability. Reflecting on the inadequacies of the Copenhagen deal Johann Hari wrote in the London Independent, "[Negotiators] didn't seal the deal; they sealed the coffin for the world's low-lying islands, its glaciers, its North Pole, and millions of lives."
The price paid by animal and plant life will be, if anything, greater than that paid by humans. A seven degree fahrenheit rise in global temperatures will mean the extinction of about 70% of species currently extant. No more polar bears, orangoutangs or hawksbill turtles, at least not in the wild. Gone too will be many coral reefs and innumerable kinds of rare flowers. The world will become, as scientist James Hansen describes it, unlike "the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted."
This prognosis of global apocalypse sounds, to put it mildly, a sour note for the Christmas season. Christmas is supposed to be about hope. A star rises in the East. A child is born. Humanity's salvation is assured. All is destined to be right with the world.
In face of ecological catastrophe it can hardly be said that all is or will be right with the world. Indeed, it appears that little is or soon will be right at all. But perhaps the spirit and the hope of Christmas is closer to our current situation than it first appears. The Christian New Testament and much of the Hebrew Bible are products of cultures in crisis.
Jesus lived during a time when the Jewish peasantry groaned under the yoke of Roman oppression. Many longed for independence from Roman overlords who forced upon them foreign gods and high taxes. Freedom's prospects were bleak. Imperial punishment for rebellion or transgression was swift and brutal. Attempts at armed resistance met with failure. The situation led much of the Jewish populace to long for Messiah, a great figure who would arrive to balance the scales of justice and return Palestine to independence.
Some thought Jesus to be that Messiah. As the Gospel of Matthew proclaims, "The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David, and he will be king over Israel for ever; his reign will never end."
There is a hope for the impossible behind these lines. It is the hope that somehow a marginal Jew can be more powerful than all the assembled might of Caesar; that in death--the humiliation and torture of the cross--there can be victory; that despite all evidence to the contrary a new world is coming; that the empire will crumble; and that Jesus as Christ will reign supreme.
This hope for the impossible is part of the Christmas season. Every year we speak of peace on Earth, good will to all. But each year the prospect of peace on Earth seems bleak. War, violence, economic stratification and global ecological catastrophe make just imagining peace a foolhardy exercise. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow describes in his poem "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day: "in despair I hung my head: 'There is no peace on earth,' I said, 'for hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to all.'" Yet every year--whether on Christmas or at some other time--there seems to be some moment of grace, some unexpected gift, that justifies hope in the impossible.
Such moments of grace may be large or small. They may be witnessed by thousands or held in private. The scale of these unexpected gifts does not matter. What matters is that they happen. And sometimes they happen in the darkest times and places in human history.
Primo Levi shared the story of one such moment of grace in his memoirs about his time in Auschwitz. There were two friends in the camp together. One fell ill. This meant almost certain death. The other went out for his forced work detail, laboring along a barbed wire fence. As he worked he spied a small bramble of raspberries on just the other side of the barbed wire. When the guards were not looking he reached his hands through the fence. He could only pluck two berries. Carefully he folded them in a leaf. And just as carefully he kept them all day. At last he was able to carry them back to his sick friend and offer him a balm for his spirit. That such kindness could exist amidst such horror offers hope for the human.
Like the Christian New Testament many of the texts of the Hebrew Bible seem to speak of hope for the impossible. As with the Christian New Testament much of the Hebrew Bible was written during periods of intense conflict and instability. Consider the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah. Isaiah was active during the collapse of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. He saw the Assyrian empire's conquest of the Northern Kingdom as a result of God's divine will. Assyria was sent down roaring "like the great beasts" because the people had failed to follow God's laws. Jeremiah lived when the Southern Kingdom of Judah was invaded by Babylon, when Jerusalem was sacked and when most of the leadership of the tribes of Israel were either put to the sword or carted off to exile. Both hoped that after calamity God would restore the people to their promised land.
Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah balanced their prognostications of doom with a modicum of hope for the future. After the fall of Jerusalem Jeremiah could be heard proclaiming, "See, days are coming--declares the Lord--when I will fulfill my promise that I made concerning the House of Israel and the House of Judah. In those days and at that time, I will raise up a true branch of David's line, and he shall do what is just and right in the land."
Like Isaiah, in Jeremiah's worldview the doom at hand had been brought about because the tribes of Israel, in particular the people of Jerusalem, had strayed from God. God was casting the people aside because as Jeremiah heard it "you have broken faith with Me, as a woman breaks faith with a paramour..." But even in the the casting aside there was hope for redemption. After the tribes of Israel had learned their hard lessons in exile they would finally turn back to God. And because God was generous and forgiving, God would take them back and return to them the promised land. As Leviticus records, "at last shall their obdurate heart humble itself, and they shall atone for their iniquity. Then will I remember My covenant with Jacob;...and I will remember the land." In the face of the collapse of everything that he had known Jeremiah hoped for the impossible, a new beginning for his people.
Both the Christian New Testament and the Hebrew Bible are concerned with beginnings and endings. They each contain within them the knowledge that one period of human history is ending and another beginning. And in those the new beginnings there lies a common theme: the hope that God will restore humanity. Salvation, the realization of hope for the impossible, will come from an outside source.
This exactly the wrong kind of hope for the crisis we face today. Instead of hope from the outside we need to look to the human to find the inspiration and strength necessary to address climate change.
This is where our Unitarian ancestors departed radically from other Christians of their era. Instead of seeing Jesus as an outside savior who came to transform the world they understood him as a model for what people could become. Almost two hundred years ago William Ellery Channing wrote, "Look up to the illustrious Son of God with the conviction that you may become one with him in thought, in feeling, in power, in holiness. His character will become a blessing just as far as it shall awaken in you this consciousness, this hope. The most lamentable skepticism on earth, and incomparably the most common, is a skepticism of the greatness, powers, and high destinies of human nature."
Recast Channing in contemporary language and you find that he is arguing that we humans can reach towards perfection if we choose. Embedded within human nature is the possibility of obtaining the same state of consciousness that Jesus had. And those who are skeptical of this fact are simply blind to the reality of the human condition. To be sure there is also the capacity for much wickedness. This capacity does not obliterate the possibility of reaching for something higher.
It is in this faith in at least the possibility of human goodness that we religious liberals are most widely criticized. To many the faith of our Unitarian ancestors seems misplaced. If war, violence and climate change are human creations then how can we imagine that we have the power to correct them? To which, one might reply, if they are creations then who but us to rectify the situation? I see little evidence that God will send a Messiah to set the world to rights.
"An authentic prophet," wrote James Luther Adams, "is one who prophesies in a fashion that does not comfort the people, but actually calls them to make some new sacrifices." These days authentic prophets abound. And they are calling us to make new sacrifices.
One such prophet, the writer George Monbiot, calls upon us to face what we are doing and both acknowledge the severity of the situation and our human ability to change it. Writing in the Guardian about the Copenhagen process he said, "This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change. This is about us."
It is about us recognizing that there are limits to the planet and that if we are to survive we must honor them. We cannot continue to burn fossil fuels. We must shift to a green economy. We must give up our America dream of ever expanding suburbs, limitless meat and individual cars. We must recognize that sacrifice is necessary. In order to do so we must find hope for the impossible and then use that hope to act.
"Faith," wrote Paul, "gives substances to our hopes and convinces us of realities we do not see." And in facing the climate crisis we must have faith that each of our small sacrifices--driving less, eating less meat or using less energy to heat our homes--will make a difference in the aggregate. We must have faith that collectively our voices and our actions can spur politicians to action and instigate the massive structural changes our world needs. It is hope for the impossible. But what better time for such hope than now, during the Christmas season? For the Christmas season is about hope for the impossible and new beginnings. A star rises in the East. A child is born. Humanity's salvation is assured. All is destined to be right with the world.
This Christmas season let us not look to the child but to the spark of the divine stirred within. Let that spark shine. In doing so may we find the strength to make the impossible possible and give substance to our dreams.
Merry Christmas and Amen.