Listen or watch this service here.
Scripture: Jeremiah 18:1-11; Luke 14:25-33
began with reading the same named book by Gretta Thunburg for the Learning for All Ages time (children’s message)
“Our House Is On Fire”
My house is on fire. Okay, not literally. You’re not going to Sheguiandah and see firetrucks at my house (Inshallah! God willing!) But yet, my house is on fire. My world is getting so hot it is burning. And the emergency is now.
Jesus tells us to hate our families. Okay, not literally. He doesn’t want you to feel an emotional dislike of them. But yet, he does want us to be aware that being Christian costs a whole lot. And among those costs is the very structure of society. A new society, a new life, is made in Christianity. And it isn’t based on your blood relatives, and on the life you once lived. So it is dying. And it is valuing the new way over the old way. It is loving the way of Jesus so much that in comparison, the love you have for your family looks like hate. That much more. Don’t actually hate your family.
Jesus warns us not to commit half-way. Half-way is not going to cut it. Half a tower is a farse. A joke. Half-Christian is people who espouse scripture and hate simultaneously. People who take Jesus’ words here literally – hate your family – and go and hate. People who claim God is the potter and can remake anything… and also refuse to see the potential for goodness in all life.
Gretta Thunburg warns us not to commit to half-way actions for the climate. The half-way commitments are not good enough. Right now, if we ended all carbon emissions tonight, the ocean is still going to rise 10 inches in the next 100 years. If we ended all – now – didn’t produce another. This is from the melting polar ice and the expansion of the warming ocean water. But we know we’re not overnight going to stop our dependency on fossil fuels.
Yet we stopped the world for covid. We stopped. We changed. Very, very quickly. We saw the emergency. And our governments responded.
That’s the response we need for our world. Quickly. As quick as possible – funding to replace all gasoline cars, all coal powered plants, all leaded airplane fuels – all over the world.
With covid we saw how ignoring the plight of the global south harms the global north. We’re seeing that with monkeypox now. What happens in Africa and South America affects what happens in Europe and North America. Not caring for all people endangers all people. Not sharing technology and resources leads to future catastrophes.
And here we are.
The Amazonian Rainforest holds 123 billion tons of carbon. Between hotter, drier summers, and the pressure in the global market to produce cheap palm oil for the global north, the rain forest has been cleared to the point it is set to collapse. And it will – if nothing changes. All of that extra carbon will be released and is beginning to be released now from deforestation, droughts, and the collapsing ecosystem in the Amazon. That carbon then adds to ours – heating us all up even more.
We affect the south. The south affects the north. We are interconnected.
Jesus tells us the way of Christianity demands our very lives. For some, this may mean dying for their faith. But for most of us? It means our whole lives given to the Way of Christ. A way of life – not something we give lip service to. Not something we mark on our census questionaries. A way of life – a way of being in the world.
The same is demanded for our climate. How we are in the world, how we exist, will bring forth the flourishing of our descendants and the plants, animals, and life after us. Or it will bring evil and ruin and death. This is how we live daily – how we vote, how we act, how we invest our money. It is what we protest and what we teach. It is what we believe. What we live.
The average person in Canada produces an equivalent of 14.2 tonnes of CO2 as of 2019. By far, most of that is due to transportation. It takes a lot of fossil fuel to get anywhere. Next is heating. We live in a cold area. Next is meat consumption. “If Canada is going to play its part” , lead author of a recent non-profit study on lifestyle choices, Lewis Akenji, said, “the country will need to cut per-capita carbon emissions by 82 per cent in the next decade, and by 95 per cent by 2050. Eating meat, using fossil fuel cars, flying, and living in large houses with high energy consumption are all highlighted in the report as lifestyle choices that contribute to larger carbon footprints. “There is no universal sustainable lifestyle,” the report states. “If one must use a car, then an electric car in Iceland might make sense, where 100 per cent of electricity comes from renewables, but not in India where electricity is primarily generated from coal.””
The small choices we make, the lifestyle choices we make, the government policies we support, affect the whole world. Choosing to combine trips, choosing to buy local, choosing to live in smaller homes, or with more people in your home, keeping your house colder in the winter, and eating less meat or even going vegetarian are all ways to reduce your impact. So, too, investing your retirement in green energy, and voting for and supporting policies to assist reducing Canada’s impact.
In 2020, CO2 emissions per capita for Pakistan was 1.04 tons of CO2 per capita. So each Pakistani person produces 1/14 as many tons of pollution as we do per person in Canada. As is usual, the global north person is producing way more pollution than the global south. And this is tied to how our economies, our governments, and our way of lives are organized. But… the impact of climate change is disproportionally felt by those who contribute the least.
In Pakistan, 1/3 of the country is currently flooded. That means 1 in every 7 people are currently homeless. Millions. Millions. Most of the thousands who have died have been children – for they are shorter than adults, weaker, and so floods take them. Now there is no food because the crops are underwater. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Pakistan’s flooding, caused by weeks of unprecedented monsoon rains, was a signal to the world to step up action against climate change. “Let’s stop sleepwalking toward the destruction of our planet by climate change… Today, it’s Pakistan. Tomorrow, it could be your country.”
And it’s true. Today there is no clean water in Jackson Mississippi in the USA. Today there is no clean water in 19 First Nations communities in Ontario, alone. Will we face a day where we have no clean water here on Manitoulin? Will we have a time where the sea level rises to the point brackish salt water mixes into our Great Lakes? More likely we will face hotter and hotter summers, drier and drier, and face wildfires. The death of trees and plants not used to the heat. And then… more fire.
And we’ll face more and more climate refugees. I consider myself a climate immigrant. I didn’t flee fires, floods, and water or food scarcity. But I did actively consider where to move to avoid those future things. I did choose an area where I thought there was more of a chance of future human survival than say – Arizona with its lack of water or Florida with its lack of land above future sea level. But we will see more and more refugees coming North – from all over the globe – for 3 BILLION people live in areas threatened by climate change.
We’re also going to see more tensions, conflicts, and nationalism. People are getting scared. People are getting defensive.
And grief. Already pastors and psychologists are being trained to handle climate grief. For we are grieving. We may live to see the end of many keystone species, named big species, and we will and are grieving the human, animal, and plant life loss around the world.
It will get worse. There’s no ifs about this. It will.
How much worse is up to us.
God is our potter. We have set down a path that is evil. But God can and does remake things. The Earth can recover from our climate crises. God can restore. But it is not God alone – we are the clay. We must turn from our evil and be aimed towards the good for God to remake the world into Eden.
During this time of Creation we are going to look at the evil happening. And we are going to seek the good. We are going to face our sins, name our grief, and steel ourselves to not commit half-way to the new way of living in harmony, in shalom, with all of God’s creations. We are going to find the points of light, the hope, and marvel in the moment now.
The Way of Christ demands changing our lives to be in harmony with God’s good will. It is hard, but it is worth it. Perhaps, if we love our children, butterflies, trees and fish, fresh waters and peace, it is the only way.
Amen.
(Sources)
Boulton, C.A., Lenton, T.M. & Boers, N. Pronounced loss of Amazon rainforest resilience since the early 2000s. Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 271–278 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01287-8 Received 31 March 2021 Accepted 13 January 2022 Published 07 March 2022 Issue Date March 2022 DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01287-8
CBC https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/how-canadians-can-cut-carbon-footprints-1.6202194
Knoema https://knoema.com/atlas/Pakistan/CO2-emissions-per-capita
CBC https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/un-pakistan-emergency-funding-1.6566594
Government of Canada https://www.sac-isc.gc.ca/eng/1614387410146/1614387435325
PRB https://www.prb.org/resources/climate-change-impacts-emerging-population-trends-disaster/
Pastor Whitney Bruno Sermons 