We Need a Miracle

Kathleen E. Moore

March 21, 2021

A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl4WCxq604M

It always seems to me to be unfair to the disciples, to rebuke them for lack of faith. Who hasn’t cried out for help, who hasn’t felt all alone when the worst appears to be happening? Who hasn’t felt that sense of abandonment when you have no control over something frightful that is happening? Fear, sure. Panic, well that’s not the best thing in an emergency, I agree. But it’s understandable. When we are confronted by a threat that is a lot bigger than we are, and if we are not actually panicking, we try to reach out for something bigger than ourselves, something more powerful than ourselves, to save us. And that’s what happens in this story. The disciples’ complaints may sound whiny, but I hear them as that first Anne Lamott prayer : “HELP !”.

What is revealed to them in the miracle is a power of cosmic proportions, which surprises even them.

In the past year we have been confronted by the storm of a pandemic whose immediate cause of course is a virus around 100 nm in size. The size, the proportion of the pandemic-- in effect its causes-- are large and small; a globally-connected humanity, probable (inappropriate) dealings with animals, including loss of natural habitat for many species, people not taking basic precautionary measures, and above all inadequate care for those who are most vulnerable.

All over the planet people cried, “help !” And an amazing —to me, miraculous— thing happened. Human ingenuity —God-given ingenuity and cosmic force of will —brought us vaccines in an unimaginably short period of time.

So too for climate change: “We need a miracle” – in the way the calming of the sea was a miracle. But how do we summon a miracle ? We have to prepare ourselves, call upon our best selves—not the ego-driven, over-achieving, profit-centered selves we can be, but the best we can be. Maybe we need to repent of the practices and prejudices that have created some of the storms we are facing.

Maybe it means working together with what we have to make things better, to work on restoring balance in creation, all of it. Koala bears and hummingbirds and pollinators of all kinds. It involves a fundamental shift in how we view Creation : As the theologian Thomas Berry said, we must move from seeing nature as “a collection of objects, to a communion of subjects”, or seeing Creation as composed of our “kin”, as Robin Wall Kimmerer likes to say.

The storm of climate change is one of extraordinary proportions too. Of course it has its origin in human causes…

Here is an apple – if you could shrink the Earth and its atmosphere (the troposphere, the layer closest to the Earth, and the part of it we live i) to the size of an apple, the atmosphere would be thinner than the skin on the apple. Eight billion people are using this apple-skin-thin layer to discharge our waste.

[Slides here]

1. [Earth as “blue marble”]. Barbara Brown Taylor recently wrote: “If I could change one word in the New Testament, the one I would change is “world,” because somehow or another that word has come to mean the world of people. When I hear Christians use it, some use it as shorthand for the fallen creation, while others use it as the opposite of the church. The world is something we are in but not of, a doomed way station on our way to somewhere else. If I could change it, I would leave it untranslated, since the Greek word kosmos works fine—better than fine, really, since it sets the word free from human bondage. Listen and see what you think:

2. [Hubble telescope photo of stars] “For God so loved the kosmos that he gave his only Son…” (John 3:16)

“I am the light of the kosmos” (John 9:5)

“You are the light of the kosmos” (Mt 5:14)

“Go into all the kosmos and proclaim the good news to the whole creation”. (Mk 16:15)” [1]

3. [photo of California wildfire] We are aware of one consequence of climate change: increased drought and more intense and large wildfires in areas that were already prone to such fires. As you know, we are already seeing this. We see it in the news: each year there are records set for size and intensity of wildfires in certain areas.

4. [photo of woman carrying child in flooded street] In other areas, flooding is more extreme and more common than it was, threatening lives, livelihoods, and whole nations. This photo of a woman and her child is from East Jakarta, in flooding of the Sunter River.

5. [ photosof Avon, NC] Closer to home, here is a town on the outer banks of North Carolina—Avon--, which rising sea levels threaten to wipe out altogether. This caught my eye this week, because we used to visit family in this town, when they had a vacation home there. Many times, we fished from that fishing pier in the photo on the right. [2]

6. [Flooding in Berne, NY] Closer still to home, this is the flooding that occurred with Hurricane Irene—a storm made more intense by climate change, when it came to Berne. The floods destroyed the bridge, the Agway in the photo on the lower left, and took away a friend’s garage, pictured on the right.

7. [photos of solar installations] Solutions to the climate crisis include mitigation of the causes, by transitioning to renewable energy, and getting away from fossil fuels. all over the planet people are making a transition to more sustainable energy from renewable sources. There is also a move to regenerative agriculture, which protects or restores soil fertility with careful management of animal herds and crops, and more sustainable living generally. Renewables are now the lowest-cost form of electricity in many places and the amount of added wind and solar generation capacity has been outstripping other forms ofnew electric generation for a few years now .

8. [photo of Indonesian family taking tea in flooded living room] Everywhere, some form of adaptation to climate change must occur. In some cases, adaptation to climate change means just putting up with regular flooding, as this family does, while they take their afternoon tea break.

9. [photo of blue whale tail in the Indian Ocean] Even amidst accelerated species extinctions globally there is good news; some new species are being discovered, and some new groups of existing species are showing up-–like this clan of blue whales that was just found in the Indian Ocean. These whales have unique songs, of which people were unaware, previously.[3]

What do we do when we are confronted with problems of such a grand scale ? It is tempting to give up hope. As climate scientist and evangelical Christian Katharine Hayhoe said in a recently published essay:

“As humans, our emotional bandwidth is limited. That’s why, long term, we need hope, not fear, if we are to solve this problem…

Without hope, there is no reason to continue. So where do I look for this hope? Not to my science, but to my faith. “For God has not given us a spirit of fear,” the apostle Paul tells Timothy, “but of power,” to act; “of love,” to have compassion—for those who are different from us, those whom we perceive as standing in our way, and most of all, those who are already suffering today; and “of a sound mind,” which enables us to make decisions informed by the reality of what is happening in the world around us (2 Tim. 1: 7). “[4]

What I’m trying to convey here is that there is both URGENCY to deal with the climate crisis, and our collective CAPABILITY, if we call upon God so we use our highest and best gifts.

I don’t mean to pose science and engineering as an idol—far from it. Those things are going to help but we need more than that.

I used to say, “it’s an engineering problem—there is an engineering solution” But for the disciples in the boat, as for us, when the storm strikes, we need Jesus. Maybe We need Jesus in order to use our best aptitude to come up with solutions. Or maybe we need Jesus-thinking, Jesus-power to understand how not to create certain problems in the first place. If we really loved our neighbor, how many of our environmental problems--whether water or air pollution, objectifying and exploiting nature instead of honoring the Creation God loves, thinking of Earth as human property instead of understanding Earth as part of the cosmos God loves--how much of that would be avoided by that change in understanding?

Solutions: There is hope.

There are three categories for the solutions to the climate crisis:

Mitigation: renewable sources of energy, regenerative agriculture, God-given human intelligence.

Adaptation: people are learning to live more sustainably, finding ways to cope with rising sea levels, and rising temperatures.

Activism: more and more indigenous people in particular are using their voices to oppose the exploitation of Creation for profit and with consequent damage to their water supplies and to the climate. Their voices are increasingly being heard; for example, Deb Haaland, the new Secretary of the Interior is a Native American.

These are signs of hope for me.

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times this week, environmental writer Margaret Renki said,

“Much about this issue can still be contentious, but nobody, neither Republican nor Democrat wants to breathe polluted air or drink polluted water. Nobody wants to lose the insects that pollinate their crops or the birds that sing in their trees. Nobody wants to watch their forests go up in flames or their beaches wash away or their fellow human beings lose their homes and their livelihoods. We are a big-brained, big-hearted species, and we are finally waking up. And that’s what gives me the most hope of all. “[5]

Friends, our boat is swamping. We need a miracle. Let us remember to turn to the One whose cosmos it is, turn from our wasteful ways and use our God-given abilities to heal this.

[1] Taylor, Barbara Brown, 2020. “Always a Guest: Speaking of Faith Far from Home” Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville.

[2] Flavelle, C. 2021. “Tiny town, Big Decision: What Are We Willing to Pay to Fight the Rising Sea?” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/14/climate/outer-banks-tax-climate-change.html?searchResultPosition=1

[3] Wu, J. K. 2020. “A New Population of Blue Whales Was Discovered Hiding in the Indian Ocean”. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/science/blue-whales-indian-ocean.html?searchResultPosition=2

[4] Hayhoe, Katharine, 2019. The Imperative of Hope. in “Rooted and Rising: Voices of Courage in a Time of Climate Crisis” , L.D. Shade and M. Bullitt-Jonas, eds. Rowman and Littlefield, NY

[5] Renki, Margaret, 2021. “Yes, America there is (some) hope for the environment”. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/opinion/environment-climate-technology.html?referringSource=articleShare