Anne Lynch
Who here has seen the movie Independence Day? For those of you who
haven’t (and you should), it’s about how aliens come to Earth with designs to
take over the planet, and how humanity comes together to fight them off using
Morse code and Will Smith. Anyway, there’s this great part when Jeff Goldblum’s
character—the smart one—facing the absolute desperation of the situation,
starts knocking over trash cans and throwing garbage around. His father says to
him, “What the hell are you doing?”
Goldblum’s character replies, “Making a mess!”
“I can see that,” his father says.
He tries to explain his reasoning: that if we
trash the planet enough, maybe the aliens won’t want it anymore. Thankfully,
they come up with a better strategy for removing the extraterrestrial threat.
---
Do we
want this planet anymore?
For all I know, Earth could be the only place
in the universe with this confounded thing called Life crawling all over it,
yet we live like—I live like—we have another planet to go to. Like Life is not
so special or unique. Like there’s not much here worth protecting. I mean, look
around: There’s concrete, cars, water faucets, stained carpet. It’s not exactly
the stuff of legends.
So why not let it burn?
Well that’s pretty pessimistic. Why would
someone say that?
The unfortunate truth is that this is exactly
what we are doing. Humanity is on the highway to oblivion and we are taking the
planet with us. The science surrounding climate change is overwhelming. Some
even say it’s too late. Continued patterns of drought will bring back the
Midwestern “Dustbowl” (and I’m from Missouri, I’ve seen the drought, it’s bad).
Precious animal and plant species will go extinct under the intensified pressure
of a rapidly changing environment. Ocean acidification—that is, the ocean
absorbing CO2—will result in more bleached coral reefs, and it will only be a
matter of time until we see mass die-outs in our seas.
Those same seas will rise, and they will take
people with them. And I’m not just talking about Sandy and Katrina, but also
storms like Nargis, which devastated a nation far less equipped than the US to
handle the effects (not to mention a regime far less likely to let in
humanitarian aid). Whole nations, thousands of years old and hardly understood
by the likes of us, will disappear, and their peoples will become stateless
refugees. And I’ll tell you what, having spent time at a relatively nice
refugee camp, having met people considered “stateless,” they will not be welcomed with open arms. Other
nations and peoples will not rise to
the occasion. These refugees will be too expensive on top of all the other
expenses of the inevitable consequences. This isn’t pessimistic; it’s
realistic. It is already happening.
And we aren’t changing. It’s too much trouble
to do the little things consistently, like turning off the lights when leaving a
room, taking out the recyclable cans, driving my car less, or giving up meat
once a week. I’m too insignificant to change things by going to a rally or
joining a club, and I’ve got too much to do anyway. The government won’t listen
to little me if I call my representative, and the companies with the money to
encourage change sure as hell won’t either. So why bother? I mean, I’ll be dead
in another 50 years give or take, let someone else worry about this stuff!
---
Last semester, I quoted the Holocaust survivor
and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, who wrote, “The opposite of life is not death,
it’s indifference.” Apathy. I hate it. (I know that’s a strong word, I’m
sorry.)
Why? Because it chokes us, wrapping around us
like a vise and squeezing. It constrains us and hides our true potential from
others and ourselves. It makes us beat ourselves up. We become convinced that
we have our own shit to deal with, that we’re too exhausted to care anymore.
And in that strange state of “comfort,” if that’s what we’ll call it, we forget
what living is.
---
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus feeds the five
thousand (y’all should know that story), then later asks the disciples who “the
crowds” think he is—to which they respond Elijah or John the Baptist—and also
who they think he is. Peter says “You are the messiah.” Jesus responds that it
is the destiny of the messiah to die persecuted and “rise again,” (whatever
that means) and any who follow him will surely experience the same destiny.
Let me emphasize this: Peter has identified
Jesus as the messiah, the anointed one, the Christ. This man who is homeless, who
is rather eccentric and provocative, and who is saying that his destiny is to
be executed.
Well that can’t be right. The messiah should be
powerful, mighty like King David from Israel’s better days. That’s what messiah
means, “anointed one,” that means king. Not a carpenter. That’s kind of lame,
kind of boring, kind of gritty, kind of ordinary. Carpentry doesn’t really
inspire. To be honest, I’m rather apathetic about carpentry.
And yet…
Jesus leads Peter, James, and John up the
mountain to pray. Before their eyes Jesus is transformed into an unearthly
figure, a glowing vision, standing there conversing with the great, ancient
prophets, Moses and Elijah. How can this be?
The short moment of Jesus’s transfiguration is
one in which we can see who he truly is: God’s chosen one, whose life, death,
and resurrection will transform the world. Peter sees this. Perhaps he doesn’t
fully grasp what he’s seeing, but he does
recognize that this is a significant moment, something special. As though he has
put on a pair of glasses for the first time after living decades with
astigmatism, the grit and grind of everyday reality is cleared. For a moment
these disciples can experience God’s vision of the world—what we call the
“kingdom of God”—merged with the world we know, where something’s potential is
as visible as its form. Where the very Earth’s potential is as visible as its
form. Where our potential is as visible as our form.
But only for an instant. Then, all too quickly,
our vision returns to normal, the glasses come off, and all we see is Jesus,
Son of God. And he looks like a very ordinary man.
So why? What was the point?
---
In the writings of the prophet Isaiah comes a
vision of a “peaceful kingdom.” Christian theologians have long interpreted the
passage we heard earlier tonight as referring to Jesus, the messiah. “A shoot
shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his
roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him…” [NRSV] The image is of a
tree, cut down, dead for all intents and purposes. (Take a look at the front of
your bulletins, you’ll get the idea.) Jesse was the father of King David; his
name refers to the line of King David, royal lineage, bringer of Israel’s
so-called Golden Age. By the time of the Roman occupation, Jesse’s tree is
indeed in sorry shape. Occupations are rarely kind to the occupied.
Yet new life arises, a branch grows from the
old stump. As we heard from Job—which is arguably the most pessimistic book in
the Bible—“[T]here is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout
again, and that its shoots will not cease. Though its root grows old in the
earth, and its stump dies in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud
and put forth branches like a young plant.”
This idea of new life—even from death—is
attached to the vision of true living: living with righteousness, compassion,
faithfulness, and peace. These qualities are not passive things sought out with
indifference. They take immense dedication and hard work. Especially that last
one: let no one ever fool you into thinking peace is passive or that
nonviolence is passive. Peace is not apathetic. It’s hard. But in the Spirit of
the Lord, all things are possible.
If we liken Jesus to a tree (work with me here),
he seems at first glance like a sprout rising from a stump: Small, ordinary,
unremarkable. Worthy of apathy. But his transfiguration is a moment of clarity,
where we see not just a sprout but an immense root system that will one day
support a leviathan creature, a souring tower of a tree so immense and powerful
that it can transform the whole of humanity and the whole of the earth and the
whole of Creation! Rooted in God, all efforts are possible, our spirits are
fed, and the suffocating weed called Apathy dies.
But it still needs water…
Most everyone I’ve ever met has that story. The
details change, yet it’s always the same: You’re outside, away from the
concrete for the first time or the five-hundredth time, and an overwhelming
love and peace fills you up. Mine, I was horseback riding on a trail with my
older sister. I think I was 14. Spring blossoms were falling from the trees,
sunlight was dancing across the wild-grass, and in that moment I felt
surrounded by God if for just a moment.
There is the kingdom of the empire, the world
we encounter most often, built of carbon emissions, super-power governments, corrupt
systems, and brokenness. Then there is the world of God—“the kingdom of God”—that
we get glimpses of when a person is kind, when a child of the inner city has
clean water to drink, when creatures great and small are tenderly cared for, when
the beauty of the Earth and universe is seen for what it is and not how it can
be exploited.
The transfiguration of Jesus reminds us of the
transformation of the world and all of creation: The transformation of
ourselves into a Christ-like people, full of love and kindness and justice and
mercy and humility. All Creation is restored with the coming of the kingdom of
God—a reality just below the surface of what we experience, like roots below
the soil, just waiting for water.
Tend to it. Water the kingdom of God. Care for
that creation, I beg of you. Because I am not little, we are not small, and it
is not too late to save ourselves.
A climate of apathy plagues society today,
infecting us with the thought that we are little and incapable and tired. But
that vise is not so tight as we think. And it is time for that climate to
change.
*Special
thanks to Emily Kossila, a student at UMN and Sustainability Education
Coordinator, who offered resources regarding climate change.
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