Golden Oldies: "Sin Boldly"

I shared this as a Facebook note last summer while the Gulf oil spill was still occupying a lot of attention. The good news is that the Gulf of Mexico seems to be doing better than anybody expected back then. The President's recent EPA ruling on increasing automobile gas mileage is also encouraging. That's the kind of thing we're going to have to do a lot more of if we're going to get this crisis under control.

The bad news is that the petro-chemical industry is now attempting to do something so brazenly awful that, should they succeed, it will be, in the words of scientist James Hanson, "essentially game over for the climate."

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta to refineries in Texas, is the environmentalist's ultimate nightmare. Simply extracting the oil from the sands requires so much energy that the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere will be triple that produced by burning oil that is drilled. The pipeline itself could create a huge spill right in the middle of America's heartland, and has the potential to contaminate the vast natural reserve of water known as the Ogalalla Aquifer. This project could be so disastrous that huge protests are planned in Washington later this month, and leading environmentalists like Bill McKibben are preparing to engage in civil disobedience to stop it.

Is this phenomenal man-made disaster really going to happen? Once again, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that whether to build it is entirely President Obama's decision. He doesn't have to compromise with anybody. The bad news is that he's under enormous pressure from the same people who brought us the recent near-default and credit downgrade. You can guess what they want this time.

If you care about the future of the planet—or even if you're just mad about their callous disregard for everybody else's financial well-being—please call the president and tell him he doesn't have to give in this time. 202-456-1111. Otherwise, you may be looking back nostalgically some day at the early 21st century, when the climate was still relatively normal.

Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo

"Sin boldly, but trust and rejoice even more boldly in Christ." This famous advice from Martin Luther is often wildly misunderstood, especially when the second part of the quote is omitted. What Brother Martin meant, as I understand it, is that there comes a point when you know you are doing all you can, but your efforts are still insufficient. That's when you have to cut yourself some slack and discover the saving power of grace.

I have been thinking a lot about this in the context of our increasingly obvious environmental crisis, which this summer's gulf oil spill and record-shattering temperatures have dramatized for those with eyes to see. The environment has long been my number one moral issue. Notice that I said moral and not political, because I don't see it as a political cause—although if it were it would of course be a conservative one. During this long, hot summer, though, I have been tempted to despair about the world in which my children and students will be living out the rest of their lives. Where, I wonder, is the will to take this challenge seriously? Where is the grace to redeem the inadequacies of what we are currently doing or, mostly, not doing?

Here are some of the things I myself am doing to fight the carbon addiction that threatens my children's future:

• Buying my electricity from Green Mountain Energy, which uses only renewable sources like wind, solar, geothermal and hydroelectric.

• Mowing my lawn with a rechargeable electric mower.

• Driving a hybrid car that averages well over 40 mpg.

• Using the most energy-efficient appliances I can find.

• Recycling extensively.

• Using canvas grocery bags whenever possible.

• Eating no beef whatsoever, and less and less meat of any kind.

• Buying local produce when it's available.

Now here are some of the things I wish I could do, and the reasons why, for the time being, I have decided to "sin boldly" instead:

• Walk to work. (I can't afford to send my kids to a private school.)

• Take public transportation. (It's almost nonexistent in Texas.)

• Install solar panels on my house. (I can't afford it.)

• Grow all my own food. (I don't have sufficient space, and my gardening skills are dismal.)

• Travel less. (No single close relative outside of my immediate family lives less than a thousand miles from me.)

• Go vegan. (Maybe someday—yeah, I know how wimpy that sounds.)

And here are some things I've come to realize this summer:

• The government isn't going to do anything about this problem. Honest, good-faith efforts have been made, and they've been crushed by the behemoth of petro-chemical self-interest.

• Therefore, it is up to us, working together, to be the body of Christ in protecting the sacredness of Creation, against which our sins rise like an abomination in the nostrils of God. (If that metaphor doesn't work for you, supply your own.)

Each note I've written recently has been targeted to a specific audience, and this one is written expressly for my former students, who will be living in this world an average of 20 to 30 years longer than I will, and will be sharing the experience with my children. I can't possibly tag all of you, but you know who you are. As I've said before, I try not to write about politics on Facebook (although I've sinned boldly in that regard a couple of times too recently). So I repeat: this has nothing to do with politics, as we normally understand it. I am simply telling you that lone individuals, working on their own, will not be able to head off what is shaping up to be the greatest man-made disaster in history. As Bill McKibben, a self-described mild-mannered Methodist Sunday School teacher, recently wrote, we must act together with the moral courage of the brave people who began the Civil Rights movement in the hostile ground of the 50's south, and we must build the momentum to shame our leaders into doing what we cannot do ourselves. Only then will I be able to pecca fortiter with the fide and gaude that there exists the grace to make up for all of our manifest failures, past, present and future.

That's my sermon for the beginning of the school year. It's also the most important lesson I will ever teach, and I'm giving it to you for free. Go therefore, and make a world in which boldness shames sin into submission.

Innocents at home

"The earth doesn't care if you drive a hybrid." So proclaimed Nobel Prize winning physicist Robert Laughlin recently, in a line that was promptly picked up by George Will and has resonated widely among those who prefer to ignore environmental issues and inconvenient truths like what I recently dubbed "global weirding."

Interestingly, I agree. The earth really doesn't care what happens to it, and it will do perfectly well if most (or all) of the species currently living die out. The point that Will and others seem to miss (I won't presume to speak for Laughlin) is that our children and grandchildren will care. That's just one of the many reasons I drive a hybrid and buy electricity generated exclusively by the abundant Texas wind.

Let me dig deeper, though, because this really is an existential and even theological issue, and I want to make it clear where I stand, and where I believe others stand.

Human beings are unique. That is one of the central claims of most religions, even if they find very different ways of expressing it. Our place in the world - our uniquely fragmented, contentious relationship with the rest of creation - is, in a real sense, the issue on which everything else depends. That's why, as I've said several times before, our relationship to the environment is my number one moral issue.

The fact is, human beings are the only things in the universe capable of caring about what happens to the environment in which we live. Other species may reproduce at will and die out when the food supply is exhausted, or when predators grow too abundant. That's more or less how natural selection works. The earth, indeed, doesn't care. It also doesn't care if beautiful mountain vistas are distorted by earthquakes or worn down by erosion. It doesn't care if beautiful seacoast scenes are devastated by hurricanes. This is all in a day's work. Only people have a sense of beauty, and will mourn the loss of these things - if we survive to do so. This is our blessing and our curse. It is the seed of the divine that we bear within us. It is the shame we also bear for not being able to carry the burden.

Those who - correctly - point out that the earth doesn't care what happens to the environment just don't get this. They are the innocents among us: those who have not known sin. They cannot possibly share the horror that J. Robert Oppenheimer felt in quoting the Bhagavad Gita: "We are become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."

So here is my response. Indeed the earth doesn't care. Whatever we do to the precious ecological balance that has allowed us to thrive and enjoy our brief lives of pain and beauty will be but a small blip - an unnoticed deviation - in the grand geological history of the world. It truly won't matter to anybody but us. However, since we are the ones whose glory and fragility are both exposed and challenged by the current environmental crisis, we should indeed care very much. We stand at one of the great dividing points in human history, in which both our limitations and the divine spark we bear within us are being exposed and tested as never before. Our response will have moral, theological, ethical, economic and cultural ramifications that will dwarf anything we have previously faced in our history. On all of these fronts, driving a hybrid is the very, very least that we can do.

Global "weirding"

The weather in Waco, Texas, has been strange. Last weekend it was sunny and balmy, with highs in the 70s. This week we've had four days in a row when the temperature never rose above freezing. Last night, dry powdery snow began to fall, and quickly coated the frozen ground. Today everything slowed to a halt as we enjoyed a "snow day."

And there the story might end except for some oddities. I've lived here for seven and a half years. My first year, it snowed about half an inch on Valentine's Day. The Texans went crazy; our next-door neighbor's teenage son made a snow angel in the lawn - shirtless! A friend of my son, who was nine years old that year, said it was the first time he had ever seen snow. Since then, we have had many snowfalls here, including a freak one in early April a few years ago and a mini-blizzard last year that dumped nearly 7 inches. The fact that literally every single last sign of that snow was gone by the next day is an indication of what's really happening. The weather is getting weird. Overall, this has been a warm winter, even for Texas. Now we're in the deep freeze while people in Anchorage, Alaska, are baking - at least by Alaska standards.

A lot of people have been deeply inspired this week by the courage of the protesters in Egypt, and I am among them. The most inspiring moment of my week, though, came last night during a concert at Baylor by the St. Olaf's College choir. Anton Armstrong, the director of the choir, is well known here. A few years ago, he won Baylor's Cherry Award for distinguished teaching, so he spent an entire semester on our campus. He is acknowledged both for his consummate musicianship and for his deep religious faith. He is a Lutheran (and showed up unannounced for a service at our little Lutheran church here, much to the consternation of our choir director), but he seems to relate well to the Baptists at Baylor. He includes a hymn at every concert, and invites the audience to sing along. He knows how to talk religion to Texans.

That's why his speech in the middle of last night's concert was so stunning. The choir was about to sing a piece whose text, in the African Sahel dialect, means "the earth is tired." Dr. Armstrong stepped up to the microphone and told the audience that the music they were hearing spoke of the immensity of God's creation, and of the truly humbling gift we have received in being entrusted to care for it. He then told us, with no holds barred, that the strange weather that had followed the choir down from Minnesota to Waco means that we are failing. "You know it's not supposed to be like this here," he said. It's up to us, for the sake of the young people in the choir and others like them, to do a better job of preserving the world that we all have to live in.

The audience was perhaps a bit flummoxed, and might not have applauded as loudly as they could have at the end of the piece, which included groaning noises to reflect the earth's suffering. Nevertheless, they clearly heard him, and the message was reinforced by having to drive home in the snow - which was coming not down from the north, but up from the Gulf of Mexico, as the general heating of the earth's atmosphere continues to add more moisture than has been there for many thousands of years.

I've written about this before on Facebook, but I'm going to say it again. Some people in our government appear to be taking this problem seriously, but they are being blocked in every conceivable way by the vast money resources of the big oil companies. The government will not do enough, and will not do what little it can in a timely enough manner. That's why I'm not calling for a government solution. I'm calling on us. If you agree with me that we are gearing up for the largest man-made catastrophe in recorded history, and have barely any time to start taking drastic measures, please join me in doing the following:

• Refuse to buy a car that gets less than 35 miles per gallon. Better yet, demand one that gets 50 or more.

• Cut down on meat, especially red meat. Clear-cutting of rain forests for grazing cattle, and for growing grain to feed them, is one of the leading contributors to rising CO2 levels. I eat no red meat at all, and have many vegetarian meals.

• Buy your electricity from a company that uses only renewable energy sources. If you live in Texas, I recommend Green Mountain Energy. If you don't have this option in your state, demand it.

• Buy an electric lawn-mower. Two-cycle internal combustion engines, which are used on most power mowers, are grossly inefficient. Mowing the average lawn adds as much CO2 to the air as driving nearly 200 miles.

• Recycle everything you can. Bring canvas bags to the grocery store. Refuse to use wasteful packaging.

I could go on, but studies show that people change most readily when they aren't confronted with an overwhelming array of choices and action points. Just bear in mind that even if we all do everything we possibly can - and we're nowhere even close - 100 years from now what we're seeing at present will look like only the beginning of a growing, world-wide disaster of unimaginable proportions. And that's if we *do* act now.